Blog post 4: Infrastructure

Another obstacle is that our infrastructure will not be ready for this type of car. Part of the genius behind autonomous driving is that all the vehicles will be able to communicate with one another, which will make driving way more efficient because the cars will know when the other has to make a lane change or the exact distance that it has to begin braking before a red light. If autonomous cars are on the road with our standard ones, they will not be able to communicate and that could potentially cause more accidents since everything would not be connected in one day. There would have to be a transition in our infrastructure that would require lanes to be created for only autonomous vehicles. Then, eventually, all of the manually driven vehicles would phase out and the roads would be for the new standard of automated cars. Something to consider regarding the current state of our infrastructure is that many major roads and bridges are already obsolete, meaning they are out of date for the number of cars society uses right now. The government puts virtually no money into fixing this crucial system of the country so this leads to the question: How are we to expect the government to provide enough money to completely alter the road system to accommodate for the phase in of autonomous vehicles when it has not attempted to fix the state of roads right now? This becomes an even bigger issue when residual formations are considered. A residual formation is a place that is a holdover from how the average person is able to live or what they have access to. In other words, residual formations are towns that are very behind in technology and even regarded as underdeveloped in that aspect. These are the places in the middle of the countryside or up in the mountains that people have limited access to so new technology takes longer to be incorporated into their societies. Big cities are eventually are going to be the first to have a road system perfected for autonomous vehicles because they will have the technology and enough government backing to make it happen. There will be little reason to provide this same change for the residual formations since the logic will probably be that not enough people travel there so why would a lot of money be spent in a small town just to make it uniform with the rest of the country. Another possible outcome would be that the government decides that everywhere should be in sync so the residual formations will be required to change as well. The issue that arises in this situation would be that the people living in those towns would not want their worlds turned upside-down from this fancy new technology. As a quick side note here, this possible rebellion of accepting what is necessary for autonomous driving from the residual formations would be similar to what Mercer was trying to do in The Circle. He did not want to be a part of the companies ludicrous ways because he still believed in privacy and so in this case, these people would still want to have manually driven vehicles. Anyways, redoing the infrastructure to make autonomous vehicles function as produced will be a very complicated task that will take time and is just another aspect of society that is not ready for this technology.