[ExI] Will robot cars be TOO good?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Jeff Davis
Subject: Re: [ExI] Will robot cars be TOO good?

>...Friends, I've been thinking about this for quite some time now.  As a
consequence I have had a series of epiphanies...Smart house, smart car,
smart world, smart life, all of it arising from the organizational
capabilities of the collective distributed applications and database of
global, shared, non-private data...That was fun!  Boy do I ever love
technology...Best, Jeff Davis

Ja, me too Jeff.  Among the epiphanies, I realized that to make smart
intersections work right, we need to completely hand over all control of the
vehicle to the street-based processor.  We would merely tell the device our
destination, and let it drive.  We cannot do as we humans do now, wander
around downtown looking for a good lunch spot for instance.  We would need
to know where we want to go, then the control system would take us there,
but only if there is a parking space to fit our own ape-hauler.  We may see
a great parking space open, but we would not have the option to grab it,
because some other ape-hauler four minutes out already has dibs on that
space.  

In return, we could imagine traversing downtown Boston or New York City in a
quarter of an hour while our speed varied from a trot to half of freeway
speeds, seldom or never stopping.  This will really sound cool to anyone who
has tried to do business down by JFK Airport, for instance.

To do that, we must have no pedestrians:  all foot traffic would need to be
elevated two human-heights above the street level.  There can be no
non-automated ape-haulers, nothing that cannot play the scary unforgiving
game, nothing that cannot take directions and act on them via completely
automated control.  

spike