My solution to the self-driving problem

I figured out a way to solve self-driving technology! The good news is, it’s all intuitive, and requires no special knowledge of mathematics or programming. Hear me out.

Ultimately, the problem stems from us forcing an inherently rules-based agent (AI) to adapt to a very complex system like a highway containing tens to thousands of independently moving agents. The rules in such a system are so complex and so minute that they might as well not exist.

The solution, therefore, is to make the system – the highway infrastructure – more amenable to rules-based analysis. So what if, imagine, we made the highway more straightforward: cars are not allowed to move freely along multiple lanes. Instead, each route takes a single lane. A car going a specific direction only has to choose from one of few predetermined lanes and stay to it until the end. We can even name the lanes based on where they go – for instance, there’s a “City Hall line” going to and from the urban center, and a “Suburban Express line” connecting different subdivisions or neighborhoods. We can even be cutesy and give them colors. There will be a “blue” line, a “red” line, etc. The kids are going to love it.

Now, to prevent collisions, we don’t allow the cars to move freely at all. Instead, cars on the same lane have to move in perfect synchronicity with each other. You follow the car in front of you. In order to enforce this, the cars can be chained together in one very long line. We can even make the cars themselves longer, to accommodate more people. Sitting alone in a four-seater sedan can be lonely!

But that leads to a different problem: different people are going to want to get on and off at different places. So, we solve this by having determined stops, or “stations”, where the long chain of cars are allowed to stop. We can even make a time table, where the long chain of cars running on each lane are expected to arrive and depart on fixed, predetermined hours of the day. This is convenient, because you no longer have to wonder whether there will be a cab waiting for you on the road when you leave the house. You simply check the timetable from some website or app, see what time the next long chain of cars will arrive on your chosen line, and then be there on time.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t like looking at long chains of cars moving on highways that are dangerous to pedestrians and children. So, I propose, after doing all these modifications, we move the highways underground…