Transportation is expected to transform from vehicles controlled almost entirely by human driver into “self-driving” cars controlled wholly by onboard and remote servers.

However, an interim period will occur when roads will be shared by both autonomous and human drivers.

Autonomous vehicles will drive very intelligently thanks to input from onboard sensors, other autonomous vehicles, and remote servers. In comparison, human drivers will appear dumb, limited by their mere “organic” faculties.

IBM has patented a system that will guide the behavior of autonomous cars during this interim period while humans are still on the road.

The system will monitor the driving patterns of humans and generate data models to represent them. So autonomous vehicles, while on the road, will be able to detect human drivers in the vicinity. Then, they will inform other self-driving cars about the “dumb” human driver nearby. These autonomous vehicles will obtain the data model of the detected human driver from a remote server, and change their behavior based on the model. For example, the data model may indicate that the detected driver drives sluggishly. In response, the autonomous cars will increase the standard distance from the human-driven vehicle.

In a way, autonomous cars will be discriminating against the dumb human drivers.

That is kind of…speciesist 🙂

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