They will be the future. Not today, not tomorrow but some day. When they have less accidents, especially deadly ones, you have a hard time to argue why human drivers shouldn’t be banned. Of course there are still a lot of things to handle and to figuring out. One of the biggest causes of accidents are humans. If nobody can drive, you eliminate a big part but there is still humans on the road, being it pedestrians or bikes. If you separate them from the road, this is a huge step. We would need to do a lot of work, making the streets good for AI cars. We also need a lot of discipline, to keep the streets safe for AI. Being it to maintain public available maps and directly update them or discipline with temporary markings. I’ve seen quite a few examples, where the signage was wrong and if I would have followed it, as the law said, I would have driven wrong and especially bad, other cars around me, would have had other signs. This wouldn’t work with AI cars, as they can and should follow strict rules and allowing them too much rule breaking, would be bad.

I think what we would see first is a hybrid system, where certain routes can only be driven by AI, like highways, where its easier to maintain them for AI. Cities would highly benefit from it, but I think its quite a challenge to optimize it.

Next thing where AI cars would be better would be easier flow of traffic, no traffic jams and less need for an own car and parking spaces. If all cars communicate with each other, they can accelerate all at the same time, which massively boosts the throughput of a street. Also just for cars, there is no need of traffic lights. They communicate between each other and coordinate how they drive across a crossroad. As for the other thing, cars could just drive around like taxis. Without a human driver, they can drive around all day, are way cheaper and don’t need a parking spot everywhere. You wouldn’t need parking spots in cities at all. You would only need spaces for cars to stop, to pick up and let out guests and somewhere a charging spot, if we don’t come up with a system that charges them, while driving. But this charging spot could be anywhere and they need way less space, as they don’t need to open the doors.

You may say, this is in the far future, but let’s remember human inventions. 1902 the Wright Glider took it’s first flight. Just 67 later in 1969, we send the first man to the moon. Today we wear watches, on our wrists, that are 50,000 times more powerful, in some specs even more than that, than the Apollo 11 computer. 100 years ago we didn’t had televisions. In 1935 we had the first TV station. It would be bald to assume, that it would take ages, until self driving cars would be ready to fully drive alone 24/7. I would assume that I would still see the beginning during my lifetime, where on certain routes, no human driver is allowed. Just look how far AI video gen has come. Take the “Will Smith eating spaghetti” gen Video. It’s wild how far it had come in just a few years.

Of course today they aren’t ready and I would be pretty scared, behind the wheel. I didn’t had the “joy” to test this, but I absolutely will, when I get the chance, just to see how the tech is. the whole testing in a real environment is needed, to see the weakpoints, but I think they went too fast, especially when I see videos of cars, deadlocking themselves. This way we do get the data quicker but sometimes at a high price.