Tales are told of a civilization called dath ilan. Dath ilan is less technologically advanced than Earth, especially regarding computers, but has successfully rolled out electric self-driving cars as the standard in transportation.
Why is it that Earth mostly doesn’t have electric cars? Or didn’t until recently? Answer: Because someone might need to make a 200-mile trip and the batteries for a 200-mile range are expensive. You could solve that problem by using automatically piloted cars as a public transit network, with long-range cars only summoned for long-range journeys. So it is already understood, that robotic cars are the key to electric cars.
So why is it that Earth mostly doesn’t have autopiloted cars? Or didn’t until recently? Earth only recently started to reach the AI level required to deal with other humans on the road, pedestrians randomly walking into the middle of the street, deer bounding across the avenues, whatever. But, and this I have not yet heard suggested here, you could solve that problem by having tunnels underground, instead of streets above, and all the cars auto-piloted. Then the AI problem would become vastly easier and could have been solved in the early 2000s of this Earth, if not earlier.
Current cars do not already travel through underground tunnels. Because your cars run on gasoline and would have filled the tunnels with choking fumes – at least without a big expensive ventilation system.
So there is a circular dependency between electric cars that require autopilots, autopiloted cars that require closed predictable tunnels, and tunnels that require electric cars.
This Earth cannot resolve circular dependencies and almost always gets stuck in Nash equilibria.
In the world of dath ilan, everyone learns at age 9 about Nash equilibria, and there is a concept of a making a collective and virtuous effort to get past them. Each individual cultivates a sense of I Can Correctly Analyze Coordination Problems And Do My Part In Solving Them.
So as soon as computers and batteries were good enough to autopilot electric cars in a system of tunnels, the thing was done. First in a test city (of course dath ilan has test cities) and then in general.
There’s no single dramatic point of divergence that made dath ilan. Just a world that stumbled a bit farther than Earth on the path of co-ordination, and then co-ordinated on traveling further down that path.
Earth could follow. Earth could be dath ilan.
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