OT but I had too
I just don't get the need for self-driving, RIGHT NOW.
I see self driving as the first step to traffic management. People are notoriously bad at cooperative driving and it only takes a few to really screw up traffic. Some people are too cautious. Some are too aggressive. I hate driving in the city because there are so many idiots slowing down traffic. Even those that go fast slow down traffic because they expect others to make way for them thus slowing them down.
Imagine having a super computer that coordinates traffic on the main highways in cities. The easiest way to do this is to assign cars to a line of cars, each following the other at the optimal distance. Not too close or far behind the car in front. The car's computer could give the optimizing computer specs on how well the car can stop.
The goal of the optimizing computer is to optimize car flux. That is maximizing the flow over key sections of road. Take any section of road. If more cars enter a section of road than leave then it becomes congested. With today's technology it is easy to keep track of this. The optimizing computer would need to monitor the cars entering and leaving a section of road trying to maintain optimal flux/flow. I don't mean speed exactly but you want cars to exit at optimal rates. This can be measured at cars per minute. So for every section of road the optimizing computer would keep track of how many cars are entering and leaving a section of road per minute then integrate that to get the number of cars then divide by the length of road to get the density.
Obviously the optimizing computer would need to know where the car is going so it car predict a bit. The optimizing computer would also need to know how to control the cars to optimize traffic.
I can't see where this is so hard when Alpha Star can play very complicated games such as StarCraft II. I have a computer with a GTX 1080 graphics card. I didn't get it for graphics but for the 2560 CUDA cores that allow massively parallel computing for playing chess.
I hate human drivers. They are so stupid. How many times do you see cars race up to a red light only to stop. I try to coast up to red lights and estimate when they turn green so I have the maximum kinetic energy while going through the green light while the other dummies must accelerate from a stop. If I get stuck behind these dummies, I must stop too and accelerate from a stop. I could do a better job of maximizing my speed through green lights if I knew when the light was going to turn green.
Another problem I see is that cars accelerate much more slowly than they decelerate. That means if there is a delay, cars will accumulate at the back of the jam faster than the cars in front will leave the congested area. The car in front thinks it is saving money by not accelerating too fast but the car in front is essentially wasting the fuel of everyone behind them. I think we spend more time behind other cars than in front.
I think the means of optimizing traffic flow is just waiting for the ability to control the cars.