Cutting Edge Computing

Getting to an Era of Self-Driving Cars Will Be Messy November 30, 2018

In the 1970s, science fiction writer Larry Niven created a near future world where instantaneous matter transport had been invented.  People would use a “phone booth” to dial in their desired destination, and automatically appear at a vacant phone booth nearest that destination.  Cargo used specially designed phone booths to transfer large or hazardous loads.

Of course, the changes in momentum attendant upon changing positions on the planet slowed the Earth’s rotation, as do jet aircraft today, and that momentum had to be dumped somewhere.  Niven used this invention as a way of exploring social phenomena, such as flash crowds (today we call them flash mobs) and ingenious ways of committing crimes.

Michael Crichton used both space and time travel in his novel Timeline (the movie was quite good too).  His technology actually copied the body at the cellular level, destroyed it at the source, then recreated it from the copy at the desired time and place.  Crichton described it by analogy, saying that it was similar to sending a fax.

The problem with this was that replication was, well, slightly less than perfect.  Cells became misaligned, which meant that cell structure was slightly off.  If you used Timeline’s time and space traveling gadget more than about half a dozen times, your body was misaligned enough so that you went crazy and/or died.

Today, we see self-driving cars as a panacea to much that ails society.  Self-driving cars are extremely safe, and they can be coordinated en masse to relieve traffic congestion.  They will obviously be electric, and not spewing combustion gasses into the atmosphere.  What could go wrong?

But none of this is remotely true, at least today and in the foreseeable future.  Although driverless cars claim an enviable safety record for miles driven, all of these miles have been on carefully mapped streets under ideal conditions.  The fact of the matter is that GPS, even with triangulation, does not give these vehicles the needed accuracy to actually travel through traffic.

Coordinated en masse?  Just what does that mean?  Even if we had cars communicating with each other on the highway, it will be 40 years before every car can do so.  And even if they were communicating, can we trust our communications systems enough to coordinate thousands of cars on a highway, feet from each other.  Can’t wait to try that one?

Electric cars.  Yes, the industry is moving in that way.  I just bought my combustion engine car; my last one was still going strong at 19 years.  Will the government force me to buy an electric car in under 20 years?  I don’t think so.

Still, this is the end game, but the end game is a lot farther out than you think.  I’m going to say a hundred years, certainly after all of us have left the mortal plane.  Car companies are saying they will be fully electric in three years.  Um, no.  Electric car advocates are even more deluded.  Car companies are saying all cars will be autonomous by 2025.  Um, no again.  These pronouncements are stupid PR statements, not worth the bytes they take up.

Yet we lap it up.  I really don’t understand that.