I saw my first self-drive car the other day. It was waiting at a junction as heavy traffic rumbled past. Then, a break, and it soundlessly and slowly googled its way out across to the opposite lane to join in.
But, oh no: A motorcycle was approaching, fast. It was a “sorry mate, I didn’t see you” moment. Except it was a self-drive motorcycle. Each vehicle immediately and automatically took the appropriate avoiding action. No harm done.
I was asleep at the time and it was a dream. But it triggered an immediate thought. If drivers and riders will in the foreseeable future no longer be considered necessary on the road, are they necessary in racing? Or is it just really last-century and old-fashioned?
You can imagine the grid: 25-odd riderless 1000cc MotoGP bikes, balanced by gyros, awaiting the wireless start signal to trigger their “full race” programs. And they’re off!
How well they start would depend not only on the grip on their particular part of the track but also on how their engineers had fiddled with the algorithms (electronics, of course, being standardized), the gearing chosen and the courage of the ECU.
No, wait. They’d all be equal on that point. Machines are neither brave nor cowardly.
But they do have self-preservation at their very core.
This would kick in as they arrived at the first corner. And since they would all arrive at more or less the same time, you can anticipate what would happen. They would slot into line politely. And hold their positions until the end of the race.
Much like MotoGP, you might think, at least before Marquez arrived with his own sense of self-preservation programmed differently from the others.
But there are more possibilities here.
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