Culture
What Intersections Would Look Like in a World of Driverless Cars
Imagining a future without lights and stop signs.
OK, so first you have to accept the idea that we will one day all be in driverless cars. But the people who think about such things for a living are seriously convinced this will happen.
“The technology is pretty much already there,” says Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. And this was also the jarring promise of Tom Vanderbilt’s recent profile of the autonomous car in Wired. “But the question is when will it be cost-effective? When will the legal industry wrap its head around it, and the insurance industry, and when will people buy into it? I don’t know when it will actually happen. But the potential advantages are so huge that it has to happen eventually.”