No passengers. No drivers. Just cars living in the moment.

I saw a news story about this sort of thing years ago. When these driverless car experiments were first getting approved, there were some neighborhoods where the cars would basically just go to die. They'd enter a neighborhood and just stop in the middle of an intersection or slow down to a crawl and go in circles til they ran out of fuel. They have never fixed this problem, and people living in the same neighborhoods from 5 years ago are still having to go outside and shoo the cars away like some strange form of lost megafauna.

I never felt this understood by a car before
It's like what animals do to keep from slowing down the herd.
https://youtu.be/GIO7BvibNXw
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

You can tell the people living in those condos are housebroken middle management types because if this shit was happening outside normal people's apartments those cars would all have been vandalized so badly they'd be totaled by the insurance company

I for one welcome the new petite bourgeoisie class of middle managers controlled by the whims of AI.
Seriously I do, honestly easier to tell real living breathing humans apart from people that live in pods and have R2D2 as their girlfriend.
That was my first thought: how are people not pelting them with bricks from their balconies?
- These middle manager types are probably all calling the corporate offices to file complaints without understanding that if they were in the Waymo corporate offices they wouldn't put any resources into solving the problem until the problem starts costing them money. Meanwhile the normal person just throws bricks and fucks up the gates until Waymo decides it's worth the resources to geofence the fucking parking lot and disable honking within that area.

I can't remember for the life of me where I read it, but I remember reading a kinda sci-fi/fantasyish novel in my teens that had universal ai controlled cars, and the main character asked how they didn't get into accidents sometimes and the other characters were like "are you stupid? It's one centralised ai controlling them all" and that stuck with me as an obvious requirement for driverless cars.

Anyway I don't think any current driverless car creators read that book.

driverless cars coordinated and controlled from a single central source to ensure smooth operation and maximum efficiency
each car individually controlled by competing ai each trying to reduce their transit time at the expense of the other AI operated cars
- I remember during the initial hype for driverless cars there was a plan for cars to have ad hoc/ mesh networks with each other so they could perfectly optimize traffic and weave lane changes and left turns in between much smaller gaps than humans can. Somehow it seems just as far away as when it was first proposed.
- The invisible crankshaft of the free market.
- Game theory but for AI cars
One central AI controlling all of them is just the first step into reinventing trains, again.
- Trains are to transit evolution as crabs are to biological evolution. If you actually try to improve efficiency in any transit system you'll inevitably reinvent trains.
  It's still funny that these car-brained tech bros can't go beyond individual cars controlled independently even when faced with both the obvious downsides and inefficiencies as well as clear ways to improve car based transit.
one centralised ai controlling them all"
Too close to commie trains, their minds just can't conceive
If by "ai" you mean pathfinding and routing algorithms, that makes total sense. If by "ai" you mean the actual driving part and crash avoidance, ping will start killing pedestrians.
- Some sort if hybrid system would be great. Knowing that there are no cars on the intersection you plan to cross would save a lot of time with slowing down to check. Equally, having on board systems to slam on the anchors because someone is in the road or whatever would be a requirement.
In Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer there are people artificially enhanced into supercomputers that control the world's network of flying cars.

lmao, driverless cars that can't even coordinate parking, do a zipper merge, honking and flashing each other, etc

these cars have learned how to drive just like humans alright

not one person went down there with a crowbar and started going ham? Americans have no dignity

I imagine each one of those cars has 10 different cameras on it surveilling every angle around it 24/7

"Ok, here's my pitch: Furbies! but louder, more repetitive, more obnoxious, and capable of killing people."

"All powered by AI"

If a driverless car starts honking unnecessarily it should be conoletely legal to set it on fire.

C'mon how hard is to safely molotov that place

Do Waymos do this when they're distressed? What's going on?

Wifi is expensive, so they implemented honkfi.
- Back in the age of dialup, horrid noises would erupt from the telephone should one lift it from its cradle while using the internet. After decades of peace, we return to this time of disruptive sound, as driverless cars communicate bits and bytes purely through honks.

imagine this but with bazingamobiles

I got really into ants for a while, and sometimes I think that capitalism is our species' equivalent.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
yewtu.be
inv.nadeko.net
yt.artemislena.eu
piped.video

I'd be tossing fists full of ninja rocks off my balcony every night

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Seems like those apartments are positioned just right to toss a couple of bricks out the window into the parking lot below. Sure would be a shame if they did that.

Writing a Black Mirror episode where terminally ill patients were harvested for their brains and transplanted under the hood of a fleet of “driverless” cars to operate them.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh etcetc.

This is some dystopian comedy material

I think it was in a movie recently but it was teslas all going full speed to one spot and crashing. The movie was about the end of the world and it was boring. I think it was trying to be a bit postmodern but it was just flat