Could "Swarm Intelligence" Control Future Highways?

Flocks of birds and schools of fish organize with only local information. Presumable, autonomous cars could operate the same way.

They probably could but there's no fun/profit/ unnecessary hierarchical control in making things simple and reliable when we can make them unnecessarily complex and overly dependant on information transferred to and from other vehicles/data centers/politics/proprietary information collection points that have no real relevance to anything going on in the immediate area and actions relating to the vehicles actual operation and travel.

I agree 100 percent.

1) Overly complicated designs are prone to unanticipated failures. Rube Goldberg cartoons are funny for a reason.

2) I think autonomous vehicles are a bad idea. It's my personal bias. I like to drive and they will have to wrench my steering wheel from my dead hands.

My 2 cents.

Wow, and when the cloud burst happens and the system goes down there will be one hell of a traffic jam.

I can see hackers rubbing their hands together in glee right now, "Yeah! Bring it on!"

Well then the ol' 1952 L110 International becomes my daily driver again. Refit it with a magneto off one of my tractors put a crank handle through the front bumper and it won't even need a battery!

You still have to contend with the rest of the stalled vehicles abandoned on the road.

I don't live in the big city so that wont be much of a problem but if I need to go there then I will drive this, My 1962 IH firetruck. , and put a 'mad max road warrior' bumper on the front and use some of Hardox 450 sheeting to armor plate the body!

And the only people in the western hemisphere still driving will be the Cubans with their vintage pre-embargo cars!

With "swarm intelligence and the cloud" hackers can cause thousands of cars to crash all at once, instead of one Jeep at a time.

Hackers Show They Can Take Control of Moving Jeep ...

Have we reached the level of intelligence that the car manufacturers are telling us we don't know how to drive or have we as an 'intelligent being' become so useless we cann no longer use our brain.

Just how many people really want this technology as a recent post showed that most car owners do not use 30% of the items manufacturers install in cars because people don't bother to use the applications when they have a more intelligent gadget called a cell phone. Braun has a tooth brush which links to your phone to inform one, which tooth is cleaned the most!!!! Really! Do we actually need these 'toys'?

Makes one really wonder what we are doing here.

Think laundry detergent, or cell phones.

Every new vehicle has to be "up to 40% more" complex than its predecessor or it will fall behind the competition.

Remember this?

Now our smart phones have more computing power than the first IBM computers.

That's marketing for you.

20% of the car buying public, "can't live without" the latest electronic gizmo, so the rest of us will be paying for it even if we never use it.

We don't need the technology, but some of the drivers now are not up to driving.

People who are drunk, drugged, over tired or medically incapable. Some people just think the road belongs only to them. Others think that speed limits are only a suggestion........... (add multiple idioms) .

See this thread and my immensely witty reply

Del