Smart Vehicles and Degamifying Transportation
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/smart-transportation_final.pdf
This report from the Brookings Institution discusses how autonomous driving may pose a solution to a number of traffic concerns. As a number of sizeable rural and suburban populations move into cities, urban streets grow increasingly congested. Much of this is due to the lack of coordination between vehicles, resulting in large stoppages on small roads. The paper theorizes that in the future, vehicles linked through a system ubiquitous connectivity may be able to better traverse urban roads by communicating with other cars to optimize routes. For example, in the future, a combination of industry shifts and government actions could urge the phaseout of non-autonomous cars. Moreover, the introduction of new 5G internet technology would allow for cars to communicate with each other and with infrastructure quickly and to swiftly respond to received information.
The shift to ubiquitous connectivity in vehicles could be highly significant in that it could partially “degamify” driving, meaning that it could whittle away at the game-like qualities of driving. For example, consider the network of roads that we discussed in lecture on September 17th:
Each of these 100 drivers has to consider the potential distribution of drivers on A-C and D-B when making their decision as to which road to follow. They are forced to make this decision under ignorance, as they cannot know the amount of traffic on A-C and D-B. The drivers play a game, as each of their times is dependent on the choices of all other cars. However, they are unable to communicate or coordinate. Since this is the case, they can never make a fully informed decision about which path is the most efficient. However, consider the same graph, except that it is being traversed by ubiquitously connected autonomous vehicles. If all cars started at A at the same time, they could communicate and strategize so that half of them took each path. However, consider a more realistic variant of this scenario in which 99 cars are already on the way from A to B. A 100th car is at A and is deciding whether to travel to B through C or D. In this case, the car could communicate with the cars on A-C and D-B and decide which of the two paths would be faster. In this sense, driving in a world of fully autonomous and ubiquitously connected cars grants each car full awareness of the strategies of all other cars, allowing cars to travel most efficiently and destrategizing driving.