You're more subtle than most trolls, I'll grant you that. But this is where it ends. Sorry, I'm done feeding the troll.

No, there's two real problems, and that's not it. Problem number one is simply too many cars on the roads. This could be alleviated by better public/mass transportation, but that's expensive. It could also be alleviated by building bigger and better roads but that's also expensive. Problem number two is that most police departments are a lot more concerned about revenue than safety.

Wow, what an irrelevant and aggressively incorrect post.

It's really very, very simple.

Fact 1: When the amount of traffic sufficiently exceeds what the road infrastructure is designed to handle, you're going to have slowdowns and gridlock.
Fact 2: You can, to a point, reduce or eliminate the slowdowns by having drivers pack in tighter than the letter of the law dictates.

That's really all there is to it.

Then you should have made your context clear in your post rather than making a blanket statement. But that aside, there's plenty of situations in big cities where it's simply not possible to maintain such a following distance that you'd be able to avoid rear-ending someone who suddenly mashed the breaks to the floor. Well, not without causing other worse traffic hazards anyway. Often, the safest course is in fact to use your best judgement and maintain a following distance that's only safe enough with typical driving behavior. With so much traffic on the road, it's simply not possible to account for everything, no matter how good a driver you are.

Prove it or state that it's your opinion. Randomly making up bullshit does not, in fact, make you correct. It does, however, make you a troll.

And that's exactly why roundabouts are so much better at any busy intersection. The only reason they still somewhat suck in the US is because of old or stupid drivers who aren't used to them and/or can't figure them out.

I didn't misread anything. I just demonstrated how your statement is either incomplete or false.

In my scenario, you were behind the other car. You kept the advised separation. You did not have sufficient time to react to the harshest emergency. Thus, your statement is incorrect.

It's a lot easier to demonstrate than you think. Of course, if you want actual proof you'll have to go find another universe because such a thing doesn't exist in this one.

Let's say there are 10 cars per minute driving through a stretch of highway containing an on-ramp. Now let's say 10 cars are trying to merge into in from that on-ramp every minute. Not a problem. They find spaces in the traffic and merge, and the flow of traffic continues. Now let's double that, and we have 20 cars driving by per minute, and 20 merging per minute. Probably still not too bad. Double it again. And again. Before long, we've hit a point where a merging driver has no choice but to squeeze in where there's not adequate following distance. Now he has to keep speed down so he stays far enough behind the car he merged in behind, and the car he merged in front of has to immediately slow down to maintain safe following distance. But because it's a busy highway, the flow of merging traffic continues, and the only way to keep maintaining safe following distance is for cars already on the highway to keep slowing down, and keep slowing down, and keep slowing down. Now all of a sudden everyone is driving at 5mph because that's the only way to maintain a safe following distance. I could do a quick graphical simulation for you, but I really can't be arsed to spend that much time on something this obvious.

Clearly you've never lived in a big city, or you'd realize that driving at a safe following distance is often simply not possible.

I hate typos.

You're on a street with two lanes going in your direction. Traffic light ahead of you is read with cars waiting. You're slowing down as you're closing in on the stopped traffic in your lane. Suddenly a car in the other lane cuts over into your lane because the traffic in his lane is stopped farther back, and he can't see the stopped traffic in your lane. Now he has to slam on the breaks. You slam into his rear end. Obviously you are at fault, because you just rear-ended him. You should have been anticipating him to cut you off at the last second.

Wrong. The reason it doesn't work that way is because there's just simply too much traffic for the size and number of streets. If you could actually force people to drive that way in a big city like NYC or Chicago you'd have traffic at a crawl ALL THE TIME rather than just rush hour.

This needs to be modded up. Even in a fairly non-congested city like Columbus, OH where I live, it still gets congested enough that you just can't simply follow the letter of the law because traffic would go nowhere. Safe following distance is always the first thing to go, and it's not just out of stupidity, it's also out of necessity - and that's when it's not rush hour.

And there's about a dozen of those active at most, at any given time. So the handful that are active encounter a bug, we shoot them down and ground the rest until we figure it out. Maybe a few hundred people die, maybe a few thousand, but probably no one at all. Yep, that's almost as devastating as nuclear war.

No, I glossed over that because everyone on /. already realizes that, although you in your arrogance assume you're the only one and that eveyone else is just ignorant and wrong. And also because it doesn't matter in this discussion, because this is not a discussion on exactly what all AI could possibly include, but rather a discussion about things that can threaten the very existence of humanity as a species (and potentially all life as we know it on planet earth).

The rest of your tripe is strictly about AI in the financial world, which, while damaging to our wallets and potentially modern civilization, has no way to actually threaten our species. Sure, having the economy tank overnight would be bad, but it's not even remotely comparable to a nuclear holocaust, or a planet turned to desert or ice through climate change, or the drastic global impacts that current rogue biotech could have if released in the wild. And as I said in my previous post, any AI we presently have isn't remotely capable of anything like that.

And yes, the distinction is important here. AI can easily control something like finances that is confined completely to the digital world - but the digital world can't physically harm us or threaten our existence as a species. That requires interfacing with the physical world, and that's where AI as a threat falls apart. Worst-case scenario, we bomb the power source the AI depends on, game over. Maybe a few thousand people die as collateral damage. But even something on that scale is a long ways off yet, if it will ever exist at all.

No, I don't think climate change or rogue biotech are as much of a current threat as nuclear war, but I think they have a lot more potential to be real threats than AI does any time soon, if ever.