Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic

I mean of course, how many pedestrians are on roads versus cars? Used to be lots of people walking on roads until cars were invented.

I had a realization recently that with driverless cars becoming more common that one day I’m going to be stuck in traffic surrounded by dozens of other cars that are completely empty. They’ll just be going to pick up a human driver somewhere or going to park and no one will care because instead of eliminating traffic we’ll just ensure humans are entertained while stuck in it.

Why bother to fix traffic congestion if you can just play PlayStation the whole time or whatever?

If most cars are autonomous, and capable of coordinating with each other (via mesh network, for example), then traffic congestion might become much easier to prevent reduce and solve mitigate. (Edit: Based on responses, I may have chosen my words poorly)

You’re probably not wrong though. I imagine it’ll get worse before it gets better.

Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.

Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.

Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.

You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.

Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.