Self-driving cars will be the future, as long as they're all rock-solid on cooperation. Imagine normal intersections, with inefficient stop lights where half th

Self-driving cars will be the future, as long as they're all rock-solid on cooperation. Imagine normal intersections, with inefficient stop lights where half the cycle is idle (all the cars on the green side went through already) due to a change in traffic patterns from when they were programmed. Instead, cars that all cooperate can move through the intersection pretty well by taking turns. About thirty percent of traffic in SF is due to people cruising around the block, looking for parking. [1]. Imagine if you could just tell your car, "go park somewhere, I don't care where", and have it come back when you need it. Heck, someone else could use it to get from A to B instead of letting it idle parked. There's a lot of potential awesome here, but it all springs from rock-solid cooperation routines. If people manage to write aggressive / betraying self-driving algorithms, a lot of those traffic light scenarios could easily get a lot worse. Trust issues are a thing: should the car's driving routines be black-boxed? If there were FOSS car brains, would we trust people to not mod their cars to do illegal stuff? I guess traditional traffic cops could handle a lot of the same things they do now, we'd just need the standard autodrive package to account for and expect other cars to be driven in poor, uncooperative fashions. [1]: http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf