Remember Tron?

Depending on your age you’ll say, “Yes” and still maybe mean a different movie. It doesn’t matter, whichever Tron you remember opened on a lovely visualization of data moving through an integrated circuit. Abstracted pulses of light running along circuit traces which then gracefully morphed into, wait for it… cars driving on city streets.

With self-driving cars, we suddenly jump from a crude, object-oriented environment where every car is controlled independent of all the others in haphazard chaos, to a perfect, centrally controlled paradigm where every car is issued instructions in graceful coordination with all the others. Suddenly, this act of controlling the flow of traffic on our streets is not just “like” controlling the flow of data in a computer or across the internet, it will be controlled exactly the same way — just a lot slower.

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