This will be used as a special sign to indicate to drivers that autonomous vehicles are controlling the road at that moment. Today, traffic lights tell us when to stop or go on, but autonomous cars can communicate among themselves and with these traffic lights to organize the traffic flow in a faster and more precise way than humans.

in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.

Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=_RPIAzkW9LGBJmmA&t=1683

What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?

What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?

Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?

Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.

NC State University: “Researchers Propose a Fourth Light on Traffic Signals – For Self-Driving Cars“ (2023) [1]

> The researchers acknowledge that AVs are not ready to adopt the new distributed computing approach tomorrow, nor are governments going to install brand new traffic lights at every intersection in the immediate future.

[1] https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...

If we just take it as a given that we should allow autonomous cars to self-coordinate traffic intersections (a big if), this proposal still makes no sense. The traffic light is actively yielding control to the autonomous cars. In that case, just let the autonomous cars set the traffic signal appropriately.

You don’t need a “warning” light to tell drivers that autonomous cars are in charge. You need to set the traffic light to the right states. If you can’t do that safely, 100% you’re saying that you can’t let autonomous cars control the flow of traffic through the intersection.

This whole “just follow the car in front of you” directive is a poor attempt to handwave away human drivers. “Look, if we can just make the humans drive as if they are autonomous, there won’t be any issues at all.” It’s absurd and shipping a system like this would be criminally negligent. “Just follow the car in front of you” is not just a lazy answer. It’s nonsense guidance when you need to make a left and the autonomous car in front of you is going straight. “Oops. We forgot drivers sometimes need to turn.”

- LLM generated slop text: check

- AI generated ads: check

Into the trash it goes

If lights are out on a normal intersection, then it becomes like a four way stop, so I guess a confused driver might treat it as such, except there would be a lot of people following autonomous cars— in fact no non-confused human driver would even pause before crossing through the intersection. This would make people using the four-way stop protocol very mad.

All in all this sounds like a very dumb idea, even if the tech works perfectly, which it won’t.

Originally reported in Feb 2023 from the source [1].

And a link to the original paper titled: "White Phase Intersection Control Through Distributed Coordination: A Mobile Controller Paradigm in a Mixed Traffic Stream", also from Feb 2023 (may be paywalled) [2].

And previously discussed in Feb 2023 (1 comment) [3].

1: https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...

2: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10038635

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730399