Mostly Harmless

A logical progression, IMHO, of cars that drive themselves: no more traffic lights or traffic jams.

I yearn for the happy days in the not to distant future of really smart cars that drive by themselves; with people in them, I presume. But I’m not talking about that wimpy"caravaning down the highway, inches apart."I want the good stuff.

I want smart cars in the city that never need to stop for traffic lights because the opposing streams of traffic will automatically create gaps between the cars *just* big enough to let the other cars through. If you could get it to work at about 60 mph that’d really make it scary!

There are, of course, some significant issues preventing this from happening anytime soon. Like the small problem that you need to wait until everyone has a computer driven car, otherwise some old guy will break formation and ruin the whole damn thing. Let’s not forget the fiendish amount of programming necessary to coordinate near misses between thousands of cars charging towards each other at ramming speed. And then there’s the whole communication between the cars problem. I don’t see the amount of data being the problem, per se, but how does a car in the middle of the pack know that it’s in the middle of the pack with all those damn network packets flinging through the air. There’s gotta be a whole lot of really accurate position tracking going on, really quickly; but that’s what makes it interesting!

The biggest obstacle, however, could be the tremendous potential for lawsuits. One little programming glitch and you could create a vehicle pile up of epic proportions. (But I’d like to think that the independent collision avoidance systems would create an even more spectacular show as dozens of cars automatically dodge and weave without hitting anything at all.)