I just hope that problem is the same as when someone asked them, 15 years ago, how their crawler could handle websites with “tens of thousands of pages” fearing libraries would put their ressources on-line, overburden and halt their effort.
In my experience driving is much more interactive and not so much rule based in those cities. You have to judge other drivers - there aggression and willingness to drive into your lane, there willingness to let you sneak in in front of them.
Taking traffic from all sides into account might be something that works better for self-driving cars. Knowing when its ok to force someone else to slow down might be harder. I don't expect this to be just a question of scaling up. It will require new concepts and models. You might have to choose the country like you can now choose the language for predictive typing on your phone.
Indeed. I actually believe — or rather, sense, because that tends to be a fairly instinctive appreciation for me, after modeling things for so 15 years — that aggressivity is a fairly straightforward parameter in driving style: basically, it’s the margin you allow yourself to touch, or the acceptable risk you‘d take. Choosing “the country”, on a vehicle with more GPS captors that anyone could remember is probably not something difficult, but there are major and new ethical issues around that point, precisely: what do we let the user control?
Can, should, will Google include a ‘Don’t abide to local driving laws’ mode? How explicit should it be? Modern ethics tend to surround several though exercices, most of which are centered around transportation accidents, namely one involving throwing, or letting fall, or pushing a button to release a lever… to have one obese man fall and prevent a car or a train from hurting three other people; those may or may not be relatives, have been careful in their behaviour, etc. What used to be theoretical questions, used to classify philosophers in their principles might become soon electronic options. Should your car, detecting a swerving vehicle is about to hit a child running after his ball, run that car into the nearby wall (after checking in 10 ms that it has working airbags) and stop the accident? Whose insurance pays the damages?
I'm sure there will be problems, but self-driving cars might be the only way to archieve orderly traffic in cultures where it's assumed that you "make" as many lanes as the width of the pavement will support.
Consider that only a minority of cars have to behave rationally w.r.t speeds in heavy traffic to prevent stop-and-go waves.
