relying on networked cars is monstrously fragile. One critical error in the system is going to tank everyone, disconnecting from the system is going to drastically reduce the safety of both the individual and the system, as it now has to deal with rogue elements, and the potential for malicious attacks, like terrorism or simply some sort of natural freak event is huge problematic.
I think the direction of the thought is reasonable though, you should just take it a few steps farther. If networked infrastructure is a good idea, then maybe cars are not a good idea. We already have driverless, well defined, organised modes of transportation, they're called trains.
modern subway systems already pretty much drive themselves, they also come with the added bonus of not having everyone carry two tons of steel around.
Those concerns are legitimate. My proposal is not a purely centralized hub-and-spoke network topology where one data center drives a million cars. Yes, you can have the central brain too, but I'm thinking more of a mesh network among nearby cars on the road. The network can be fully connected so that one nefarious car cannot take down the whole mesh. There are a lot of cryptographic safeguards to prevent bad actors too. Each car is able to drive on its own, or pull over, only relying on networking for a stream of sensor output from nearby cars. The upstream servers can go down without doing anything worse than making all its client cars pull over and stop. All the steering is done on the client side.
What if terrorists spoof phantom cars or rewrite maps to send people off cliffs? Assume they stole the master signing keys, have root on the central servers, exploited 0-days on the client car software, etc. One car misbehaves somewhere, triggering sensors of nearby cars which tell every other car in an N kilometer radius to pull over en masse. If anything, it is more robust to hacking/terrorism than the independently-self-driving Tesla or Waymo approach because those do not have the benefit of the herd. One gazelle in a herd who gets tackled can yell out to save the rest of the herd.
> I think the direction of the thought is reasonable though, you should just take it a few steps farther. If networked infrastructure is a good idea, then maybe cars are not a good idea. We already have driverless, well defined, organised modes of transportation, they're called trains.
How do I take a train/subway from my apartment to the front door of a McDonald's? People go from building to building. It's not practical to do this without cars or buses outside of maybe 5 cities in the world like HK or NYC.
Also there is an ungodly amount of cars in the world. It's a lot cheaper and efficient to retrofit cars with self-driving modules than to recycle all that metal into trains/subways.
>How do I take a train/subway from my apartment to the front door of a McDonald's? People go from building to building. It's not practical to do this without cars or buses outside of maybe 5 cities in the world like HK or NYC.
Mostly by taking the subway to the nearest station of the mcdonalds and walking. I've lived in more than 5 cities without ever owning a car. Walkable cities on the planet are the norm, not the exception, the US is very skewed in that regard because it built most of its cities around the car, but that is only a fraction of the world population.
Much more important for the future is to ask what all the places do that still have the decision to make if they want to expand their usage of cars, like the African continent and much of Asia, or if they want to invest into mass transit and built their cities around alternative modes of transport.
I think the direction of the thought is reasonable though, you should just take it a few steps farther. If networked infrastructure is a good idea, then maybe cars are not a good idea. We already have driverless, well defined, organised modes of transportation, they're called trains.
modern subway systems already pretty much drive themselves, they also come with the added bonus of not having everyone carry two tons of steel around.