> Self driving works.
No it doesn't. Only in San Francisco maybe.
Rather sad though that instead of implementing what empirically is already known to work in so many cities there's a quest for a solution to a problem that's completely self-inflicted.
Self-driving might help a bit with transportation in NA cities but it definitely won't be the solution, there's just not enough physical space on the roads to be a game changer, at worst it will create even more issues with road usage. And my fear is that instead of realising it was the wrong bet (just like the car-centric approach) it will be doubled down into some ever-more-complex maze of solutions to make cars transporting 1-2 passengers to get to their destinations quicker by interconnecting them, and doing traffic management on a network of cars.
Those are fun problems to think about and try to solve but completely missing the mark about what actually works for a city and why. Someone will call that "innovation" and sell it to some suckers, just like car-centric urbanism.
Why not just build trains? They don't need technological breakthroughs, there's existing expertise all around the world on how to build; are much more easily automated (even more underground); can transport lots more people than busses; scheduling is much easier, etc.
I don't know what about the American culture creates this magical thinking, if it's the short-term thinking, the culture of looking for business opportunities everywhere, the inability to approach complex systems in a more holistically way, and/or the hyper-individualistic view of society.
No single technology will be the silver bullet, transportation (as any complex system) requires layers of solutions, maybe automated vehicles are part of it but there's already technology to solve 80% of the issues, it's unfortunate the USA doesn't have the will to change its ways to proven solutions and keeps chasing its tail.
The world unfortunately is lot more diverse than that.
It is, but only at the surface level.
99% of the actual problem of driving in urban areas is the same everywhere on the planet, because all human cities are pretty much the same, because all humans are pretty much the same - once you start comparing with the rest of the universe, and not just with other people. San Francisco, Moscow, Cape Town and Prague are almost entirely unlike each other, yet they're all obviously the same when you compare them against ant hills or forests or coral reefs.
Self-driving is a physical reality problem, not social diversity perception problem.
But, there are a lot of places that are quite similar to San Francisco! Can we scale it to a thousand cities it'll still be revolutionary. And we then haven't even started talking automating transports! It's just taken longer than what people thought. The usual Gartner Hype Cycle.
My favorite example is a major intersection with no traffic lights. Everyone just drives onto it and then you get a sticky sauce of cars that move at a fraction of the allowed max speed until they leave the intersection again.
Horns and eye contact are used to negotiate progress by all paricipants. I would love to see a "self driving" car on such an intersection.
My guess is a video of this car's encounter would go absultely viral. But not for the reasons proponents of this tech hope for. ;)
Just like the newbie it will learn, and get as good or better than everyone else.
You'll see it and then either regret it, or join the cohort of people saying it's not true eye contact because there is no soul behind the window of machine eyes; mimicking the current talk that LLMs are just stochastic parrots without a mind behind them.
At that point we're basically talking autonomous cars with big external-facing emoji screens. "That Fiat is looking red in the face, it's about to cut in".
That's more communication and emotional bandwidth than 99% of driver-to-driver interactions. Someone cuts in and you flip them the finger, how often to they even see it?
Contrary to your assertions, operating a vehicle in an environment with humans is a social problem.
Only if you assume driving is solved as a baseline. For self-serving, "driving" is the 99% of the problem; "driving in $specificCity" is just the cherry on the cake, a small part of the problem that doesn't even need to be solved.
Keep in mind that humans are the most flexible parts of any system they're in. When human and machine negotiate, human always yields, simply because the machine cannot. With increased popularity of self-driving cars, infrastructure and social norms will adjust to eliminate technical problems and cultural idiosynchrasies that the tech can't handle. This is how it always was.
(1.75 centuries, to be exact)