This piece strikes me as too Utopian. While most people, including me, will likely adopt driverless cars, a substantial minority of the population will never adopt them.
Should driverless cars become mainstream, criminals of all kinds will quickly find ways to game the system to make vehicles driver-controlled, and (more ominously) will figure out how to hack into other people's cars and use them for nefarious purposes -- vehicle botnets that can cause major economic and physical damage. The police will need ways to override driverless vehicles to keep up with criminals.
Moreover, many individuals who love driving their sports cars don't want driverless vehicles; many law-abiding car hackers and tinkerers don't want to relinquish full control over their vehicles; and civil-rights organizations will likely end up fighting driverless vehicles in the courts.
Instead of an Utopian, smoothly-working, accident-free system that doesn't need police, seat belts, or insurance, I would expect our road-traffic system to evolve into a more complex mix of driverless and driver-controlled vehicles. The unintended consequences of the transition to this system, and its ultimate legal and technological requirements, are really unknowable at this point.
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PS. In response to paulsutter below, this is not "dystopian terrorist hacker paranoia!" All I'm saying is that the transition will be a lot less simple and smooth, and will have more unintended complex consequences, than suggested by this piece. That's usually how it goes when society makes fundamental changes to the architecture of a large, widely used, complex system!
They won't have a choice, actually. Emerging economies like China will eat this up to solve their traffic congestion problems in big cities, and are totalitarian enough to mandate it. Once it becomes a huge economic advantage, the other economies will have to follow just to keep up. Governments are lazy, they will want to push more traffic into their road systems at less cost because you hate traffic and taxes!
Hybrid solutions are also possible: there will be certain roads (controlled access interstates) where driverless is mandatory while certain streets where driver intervention is required. You still get most of the traffic optimization benefits if the driverless roads are congestion bottlenecks. However, the real benefit doesn't come until we have driverless cities, where people don't need to own cars and a roaming fleet of autonomous vehicles serve as pervasive taxis. You could even get rid of parking lots!
The system can easily trace what cars are bad actors and adapt accordingly (shut down traffic in a region with a bad actor until police arrive).
First step, convert carpool lanes to driverless lanes (which will exceed the capacity of the rest of the roadway). Next, require driverless cars for all controlled access highways. It will happen more slowly in the US, faster in China where they are more willing to mandate progress.
People who want to drive would do so on regular roadways. Within 20 years, virtually all cars would be driverless-capable, and society would have a clear idea of the advantages and whether to allow old school driving anywhere.
I dont buy the dystopian terrorist hacker paranoia. More and more of the physical world will be controlled by software. We will either make that secure or go back to living in caves.
You just have to watch a few minutes of the Youtube compilations to wonder why on earth we let any humans drive cars now. I can see it quickly becoming economically infeasible to share public roads with other cars with a human driver, but that of course doesn't prevent private race tracks and driving parks.
On seeing those you have to wonder what a computer driver would do in some of the circumstances. There are some where there will definitely be a crash (kinetic energy has to go somewhere). Should the computer minimize the number of human casualties/injuries amongst all the vehicles involved even if that means harming the (fewer) occupants of the vehicle more?
Should driverless cars become mainstream, criminals of all kinds will quickly find ways to game the system to make vehicles driver-controlled, and (more ominously) will figure out how to hack into other people's cars and use them for nefarious purposes -- vehicle botnets that can cause major economic and physical damage. The police will need ways to override driverless vehicles to keep up with criminals.
Moreover, many individuals who love driving their sports cars don't want driverless vehicles; many law-abiding car hackers and tinkerers don't want to relinquish full control over their vehicles; and civil-rights organizations will likely end up fighting driverless vehicles in the courts.
Instead of an Utopian, smoothly-working, accident-free system that doesn't need police, seat belts, or insurance, I would expect our road-traffic system to evolve into a more complex mix of driverless and driver-controlled vehicles. The unintended consequences of the transition to this system, and its ultimate legal and technological requirements, are really unknowable at this point.
--
PS. In response to paulsutter below, this is not "dystopian terrorist hacker paranoia!" All I'm saying is that the transition will be a lot less simple and smooth, and will have more unintended complex consequences, than suggested by this piece. That's usually how it goes when society makes fundamental changes to the architecture of a large, widely used, complex system!