Dmitri Dolgov: belief

Transcript context

…Relatedly, what will the second-order effects of, say, majority autonomous traffic be? It feels like a lot of things will work better where, as you say, when someone merges into a lane very poorly and everyone all the way back has to slam on the brakes, that's an antisocial behavior. It feels like higher quality and more prosocial driving will just basically reduce traffic a little bit, even for the same number of cars on the road. But presumably, there'll be other second-order effects. We'll want higher throughput traffic lights and, yeah. How else will things change? The first thing I think that you mentioned is that's a huge deal. I just need to think about traffic jams. What's that saying with the Navy SEALs? "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." That's what you're like, traffic jams are like, you accelerate abruptly, then you come to a stop, and sometimes you have a traffic jam, like what happened? Well, an old lady crossed the road three hours ago, and we still have the standing wave there. If everybody was a smooth, predictable driver and a consistent driver, and you would still have those traffic jams at the time of, but then the time constant should clean it out, I think, would be very different. But longer term, things like parking lots. Right now, if you look at what is our most interesting pieces of land allocated to, it's parking lots, it's garages. Why is that? Well, because, again, your car is just sitting there 90% of the time. If more cars become fully autonomous, then there's no need of that. Then imagine, just imagine what you can do with your favorite city in the world if you don't have to spend that money, that huge fraction of it on just keeping these chunks of metal sitting around. I don't think people often realize how big a deal parking minimums are for the layout of the urban landscape. The coffee shop near where I am would like to have outdoor seating but can't because it would reclaim parking spots.…

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