Here’s How Self-Driving Cars Need To Be Prepared To Deal With All Kinds Of Traffic Clogs

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

When my children were young, we had a toy that they assembled consisting of seventy-five plastic interconnecting tunnel pieces, including having numerous tall ramps and winding paths, and when a marble was dropped into the topmost funnel it would be of great delight to all as we watched the marble roll throughout the structure.

The kids decided that if one marble is fun, certainly an entire bucket filled with marbles would create even greater joy, so they poured a bucket of marbles into the contraption.

At first, marbles began to flow into the tubes, but suddenly, the marbles at the top came to a halt.

Did something jam the funnel?

Upon inspection, the children discovered that with so many marbles sitting in the funnel, the marbles had collided with each other and did so in a manner that none of them was able to flow out of the funnel.

The kids had invented a clog.