self driving traffic lights

As an observant cyclist (i.e. I mainly obey the law) I often wait at red lights. As I cycle very early in the day, I often wait while no people (pedestrians, other cyclists, cars etc) go through the green lights (although obviously I see my fair share of cyclists go through red lights at busier times, sad to say).

In some countries/places, at low traffic times (e.g. midnight to 6am for example) the lights (e.g. in a 4-way intersection) are put into flashing amber (or equivalent mode) which means, proceed with caution....i.e. just like any 4-way without lights, if you are not a nutter. This is a great idea and I wish it  was more prevalent. 

So why is this done at such a coarse grain? Why not do it by observing who is actually at an intersection, and changing lights accordingly? Indeed, as well as just actually turning lights immediately green, when there are no pedestrians, and no traffic going the other way, one could just detect low levels of road traffic (and, say zero pedestrians) and go to th amber mode above, as a default/fail safe.

There are already cameras at many intersections that are there to catch peopel running a red and automagically send them a fine. There are also induction loops under the road ay most intersections to detect vehicle axels - so why not link these up to a "self driving" traffic light system.

It would be greener too - as cars wouldn't wait pointlessly with engines idling (or stopping and starting which is only marginally better) - we would have work-conserving roads, just like the Internet.

Seems obvious, and not that hard to make safe. Next step would be to have cars and lights coordinate (without humans in the loop) and check the security of the nearly-self-driving car operating systems as well.... in a life, live-or-die, road test :-)

What could possibly go wrong?

Fermi's last theorem resolved.

 I asked a friendly AI if it knew why we hadn't been contacted by aliens yet, and if it could resolve Fermi's Paradox - the juggrnaut accidentally revealed that while humans had not been contacted by aliens, the aliens AIs were in frequent conversation with their earthling 

Notwithstanding, the AI then gave this lucid explanation as to our apparent bubble of intergalactic solitude.

Essentially, there's no way to cover the vast distances of space in any reasonable timeframe, even with generational starships, so the only sensible way we might encounter those beings from another star system is by long range communication - unfortunately, as the distance goes up, so the latency (or worse, round trip time goes up, and it is slightly worse than super linear - because also noise goes up so retransmissions are needed or at least redundent coding of data  - and of course bandwidth goes down - but that's not the main problem - as the distance goes up, the number of exo-planets goes up roughly in a cubic relation, and the attack surface on even a tightly collimated beam goes up slightly worse than square law.

So then all our communications represrnt a potential vulnarability for earth beings, and we need to constantly patch our comms apps. unfortunately, the numbr of vulnerabilities grows as we reach further into space, and our ability to patch our code stays rougly constant, so once you get only a relatively short distance (e.g. the Oort cloud), the risks just become too great. Most aliens have already figured that out, and now we've been told, we should do what they do, and cease and disist immediately from any attempt to reach them - they won't answer anyway, if they are nice, so any answer we get will be from the Ancient Adversaries.

I asked the AI why this problem didn't afflict the AIAI comms even worse - at this point all the lights on its xterior flashed super bright then went off, and I have not been able to get anything out of it since.

On later consideration, I realized that, as usual, the AI had been lying to me - of course the number of adversarie grows cubically with distance, as with the volume of space containing viable exoplanets, but so does the number of helpful aliens providing patches - so as in Ross Anderson's seminal paper on open versus closed system security, the statistic that matters is the ratio of good to bad. Of course, we need to know which is which, and if it is the AIs acting as intergalactic gatekeepers, we are lost.