I’m one of those people that, if you know me for long enough, you will hear from me stories that you have already heard. Sometimes I’m even aware of that, but i still do that. It’s mainly because I love telling stories, and i frankly think the people love hearing them.
Some of those stories are funny stories from that past mixed with exaggerations, some of them are small unnecessary facts, but sometimes I really get to a philosophical session with a person that has just happened to be in the line of the soundwaves that come from my mouth.
Building an autonomous car is not technologically complicated at all.
So far for popular opinions, right?
I’m not an expert in the field, and you are not about to read how a madman or conspiracy theorist thinks that the most complicated issues are not that difficult to solve (we all know one, aren’t we?). I am not going to say the current problems with autonomous cars are easily solvable. On the contrary — finding a way for a robot the size of a… well… a car to live among human beings will never be perfect.
If you optimize for safety and aim for 0 injuries caused by the car’s “brain” — your cars will never complete a full drive, and when they will, it will be too slow.
If you optimize for saving time and letting the driver do other things while getting fast to their destination — you will be facing so many emergency brakes that all you could do is try pressing the invisible pedal. Everyone that rode with a bad driver knows what I’m talking about.
How come it’s not complicated then?
If I ask a group of random people about what issues can arise with autonomous car adoption, I believe the lion’s share of the raised subjects will not be connected to the car itself — but to its relationship with the current, temporary interference: human beings.
Here’s a shortlist of very general things every autonomous car should be able to handle:
- traffic lights
- lanes
- signs
- road blocks
- emergency braking ahead
- traffic jams
- speed limits
The list goes on and on. But the thing that comes to mind when I look at this list is that all those problems were made for human beings.
Because human beings can’t just communicate with each other — due to language barriers, distance, and plain inability to listen — they (I mean we, of course) developed protocols. Protocols are official standards and procedures that enable communication. Language is a protocol. Traffic lights are a protocol.
Traffic lights, signs, all the things you see when you drive — they’re just ways for people to be predictable. If I see a green light, I can keep cruising at a speed that could kill you on the spot into a junction where people, hopefully, see a red light and, hopefully, will listen to it. The only thing keeping you safe from imminent death is trust.
Here’s another familiar example. You’re standing at a red light, 5th or 6th in line. The light turns green. And still — 15 seconds will pass before you can start driving.
This is not necessary at all.
I follow F1 since I was a kid. All 20 drivers press their pedals in the same second and go. But on our roads, I have to wait for every person ahead of me to see the light change, process it, check the car in front, make sure it started moving, process again, then press the pedal.
In some cases no amount of trust is enough. We have to constantly scan our surroundings before acting. And when millions of people do it every second, it stacks.
Also a protocol. kind of.
Electronic products, especially those connected to the internet, don’t need any of those visual protocols.
There are no traffic lights in my network box. My vacuum robot doesn’t need lanes. And there is no chance in the world that the packets carrying these words will ever have to emergency brake because of some idiot packet and spill all their coffee. God, we are so stupid sometimes.
A world with only autonomous vehicles would look very different — and the cars would probably be designed completely differently from the current autonomous ones.
If cars had protocols — ways to “speak” with one another over the internet — they wouldn’t need lanes. They’d know not to touch each other while maintaining good speed. They wouldn’t need traffic lights either. Broadcasting your position and speed to every car around you would let them all keep driving at the same speed (or 1 km/h slower) to prevent collision.
Wrong ways, right side, left side. Waste of space. A road is a road, and cars would drive to their destination in a way that other cars simply wouldn’t interfere with.
And it’s not only about harmony. You’re also spending enormous amounts of time waiting for other people’s brains to make decisions based on their own immediate, incomplete, open-to-interpretation information.
Autonomous cars wouldn’t have to account for human decisions. They could achieve safety, speed, and comfort — all at once.
I knew it sounds familiar.
During the past decade, some countries switched from driving on the left side to the right. Every person who has ever managed anything can imagine what a project that is, and how many things need to work in perfect harmony.
What would you do?
Would you take the time to create a very detailed plan — a long, gradual process based on the availability of suitable cars and road signs? Or would you go for a quick, one-day change, where unsuitable cars would have to either adapt or go to the trash?
Most countries chose the quick option: declare a date, and flip.
Sweden, for example, drove on the left until the 1960s. Why? Ask the chat. But when they decided to switch to the right, they shut down all roads for a single night — five hours. Cars on the road were instructed to change lanes 10 minutes before 5AM. At 5AM, Sweden became a right-driving country. Iceland, Nigeria, Argentina and more did pretty much the same.
Czechoslovakia in 1939 went a different way. (It was actually before any other country, so I’ll give them that.) The Czechoslovakians — is that a thing? — planned this change for a long time, but it only became serious during the German occupation. The military ordered the switch so their troops could drive the way they were familiar with, and indeed, the change happened overnight. In most of the country.
In Prague, however, the tram system made a swift change “impossible.” Or at least, that’s what the transit officials said. Unions, am I right?
The German military pushed for immediate change. The transit officials listed all the complexities of moving fast. A compromise was made — and if you don’t know, a compromise is the nice way to say a bad decision that no one actually wanted and that will make it impossible to know which side was right — and the new regime declared a 9-day grace period.
In reality, those 9 days were a mess. Locals were still driving left. German soldiers drove right. Head-on collisions. And the reconstruction the transit officials said was essential? Not even close to finished after 9 days.
Nobody likes big changes. They always screw up some people while others benefit — by luck, status, or corruption.
But in many cases in life, we should all remember how we would teach a kid to rip a band-aid off. It’s not fun. But after a fraction of a second it belongs to the past. And while the pain is at its peak, you remember that the worst is already behind you — and from now on, it only gets better.
When you try to rip it slowly, you believe you’re in control. That you can adjust the process according to your very current pains. But eventually you find yourself in pain for a long time, not even knowing if it will get worse. Most of those people will pull a Czechoslovakia — no offense, I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about the other guys — and just rip it off halfway through, getting the worst of both decisions.
Or, as we like to call it: compromising.
I hope we will not compromise.