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Google Cars Drive Themselves, In Traffic
An anonymous reader noted that "At the TED 2011 conference this week, Google has been giving extremely rare demos of its self-driving cars. TED attendees have even been allowed to travel inside them, on a closed course. The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver."
Because of the giant, corrupt scam which are the traffic laws, the cars will have to be set to "obey the speed limit", making self-driving cars arrive 20 minutes later than one you drive yourself. Around the Chicago area they've gone to 45 mph speed limits on some their interstates where everyone flies along at 70, just to get around the 4th Amendment and be able to stop anyone they want to any time they want to. Can you imangine traveling 45 mph and getting hit by a truck doing 70? The only way this will work is to have _all_ self-driving cars on the road, and prohibit the human-driven kind. Otherwise, the self-driving cars are just going to be a huge, mobile roadblock that will slow down traffic to make rush hour last 'til 10 PM, and get you stopped by the cops for "tailgating" when there's no reason to be following much farther than 10 - 15 ft from the car ahead 'cuz the computers can react instantly, and don't need that distance.
If the gov't could get over using the highways for every purpose except getting people where they need to go, rather than generating traffic ticket money and violating people's constitutional rights to be left alone, it might work. But, probably not in our lifetimes.