Autonomous cars: do you feel lucky?
'Signing your life away' for a car is about to take on a whole new meaning
Probably not. And yet this is exactly the Hobson's choice that travellers will be facing sooner rather than later as artificially intelligent (AI) cars come on stream and start mixing it with the dumb stuff we're currently driving.
The choice that an autonomous pod will make in such a scenario may well be based on a simple mathematical calculation. It could be goodbye Vienna for you - and there'll be no comeback either because not only will passengers in fully-autonomous vehicles have to face up to the possibility of murder by car, they will probably have had to sign a disclaimer absolving the manufacturer or the insurer of all blame for that before being allowed into the vehicle in the first place.
This is pure science fiction, surely? Well, no, it isn't. It might have been in the 1950s, when visionary sci-fi author Isaac Asimov first set out the Three Laws of Robotics in his 'I Robot' collection, and artificial intelligence was being put forward as something we should perhaps be studying. But sixty years on, we're racing headlong into an artificially intelligent world, and the implications are properly gobsmacking.
The thing is, AI development is happening at lightning speed. The faster it goes, the faster it goes. In the same week that Waymo (the self-driving car division of Google) announced that its fully self-driving vehicles were rolling in Chandler, Arizona without human backup drivers, a self-driving shuttle bus in Las Vegas was involved in a crash on its very first day of service with a lorry whose (all too human) driver didn't see the bus. When the shuttle perceived the oncoming danger, it correctly stopped in its tracks. The lorry didn't.
Some transport experts who have taken the time to look at the implications of AI in cars are saying that it poses all manner of issues, not just legal and regulatory, but moral. It's easy enough to see the upside of genuinely sorted motoring autonomy. Apart from the obvious decoupling of all motoring stress, the arrival of AI on our roads could also see an end to the use of vehicles as weapons. Driverless vehicles cannot try to kill someone. They have to stop, just like that Vegas shuttle bus did. That's based on one of those three Asimov rules that have gradually morphed from science fiction into science fact. But what's to prevent pedestrians from stopping cars either for a laugh or with more sinister motives in mind, like robbery, or worse? And what if hackers compromise them?
Many believe that politicians have been using artificial intelligence for years. Certainly, they don't appear to have been using the genuine stuff recently. Governments aren't looking at the AI apocalypse very hard, not because they don't want to look at it but because it's a bit too hard to look at.
Thing is, engineers and programmers will be only too happy to keep equipping us with cool stuff like AI cars as long as there's money in it, but at some point in the game someone needs to think about the implications. These vehicles won't be driving robotically by following a series of individual instructions. They will actually be learning how to drive, just as we humans do.
Accountability to users should be key, but machine-learning at this sort of level brings a different and potentially quite uncomfortable new set of parameters into play. As it stands we're all kind of relying on the hope that the AI geeks will live up to their calming reassurances that everything is going to be just fine.
But the march of AI is going to impact right across society. Cyclists may well be legislated off the roads on the grounds of them being AI-confusing pests. You can probably come up with a few end-game possibilities of your own.
And when you add in another fact - that AI cars could actually be given rights, just like animals or human beings - it does give you pause. Or it should do at least.
When AI finally does exist it will be a gigantic development for the human race.
There is gigantic exaggeration of current autonomous car capability. Yes it will come, but expect limited performance for the next decade at least.
Is it clear to continue, or not?
No?
Is there time to stop?
No?
Is there space to SAFELY avoid the obstacle?
No?
Then the impact is inevitable so slam on the anchors in a straight line, the most efficient way to scrub as much speed as possible, and take the hit front-on, the direction that cars are safest taking hits.
The end. At no point does the car need to decide the relative worth of a kleptomaniac elderly nun vs a reformed tax fraud with a potato carving hobby.
Humans are crap at this as our self preservation instincts often lead us to swerves and other last ditch snap reaction manoeuvres which end up doing more harm than good.
Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas
The trolley problem is posed as if it fell out of the sky, but the idea is that you build systems so that the outcome is one in which you cannot be held negligent. So the five people on the railway track are trespassing and have bypassed your reasonable precautions to keep them out - and the one person on the alternate track you could divert the train onto is a worker not doing anything wrong. And what determines what you do is not a moral question, it's a matter of legal liability.
I would hope most drivers would choose the later option.
I would hope most drivers would choose the later option.
Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas
The trolley problem is posed as if it fell out of the sky, but the idea is that you build systems so that the outcome is one in which you cannot be held negligent. So the five people on the railway track are trespassing and have bypassed your reasonable precautions to keep them out - and the one person on the alternate track you could divert the train onto is a worker not doing anything wrong. And what determines what you do is not a moral question, it's a matter of legal liability.
more of an issue is the knock on impacts of self driving vehicles on employment, no more drivers means no more taxis (or rather every vehicle is an autonomous taxi), no trucks, no trains (don't need them), no road furniture manufacture (replaced with digital alternatives), no personal vehicle ownership (why bother? and why dedicate the space outside my home to storing something that is only used for 250 hours a year), no corner garages, no traffic police, no motor insurance (I don't own it - and who is the insured party anyway?), no driver awareness training, no parking (sent the car away until I needed it), no parking attendants (hooray!), no revenue stream for councils..........
so - why are we still building HS2?? by the time it's in use - it will be irrelevant
From the people who brought the world socialising without needing to go outside and think having slogans like 'don't do evil' absolve them from doing wrong all day long, the new world of personal transport is clearly going to be so much fun. Just so long as you follow orders. Non compliance is unlikely to be an option.
But, autonomous cars will be of benefit to the pensioner demographic who need to remain mobile but are an army of road killers in waiting as declining faculties and increasing medications make it harder and harder for them to drive safely. They will be of benefit to large numbers of suburban and urban dwellers in their day to day potterings and as mobile toilets and rutting cabins you can call up late at night they will be of great use to the Saturday Night Specials.
What will be interesting is the massive enterprise changes and opportunities driverless cars will present us.
It's all very exciting but at the same time worrying to consider the people behind the programming and the decisions they have to make on behalf of normal people.
I would hope most drivers would choose the later option.
Many years ago, when i worked for a company that did advanced driver training we would do the "Box A, Box B, Box C" stopping test. Here, the driver under assessment accelerates into 3rd gear at 40mph down between a lane of cones. As they pass the last cone, the instructor shouts "A", "B" or "C" and the driver must get the car, stopped, into the matching coned off box that is ahead of them (A being to the left, B being straight ahead, and C being to the right)
The catch is two fold:
1) the driver doesn't know until the last minute if they will need to steer left, right or not at all
and
2) The back of the boxes to stop in are only the same distance from the approach lane as required by the car to perform a full emergency stop
here, with just 3 options, all of which you know are a possibility and all of which are expected (you know you have to get the car into one of the boxes, you know you have to do a full emergency stop as soon as you pass the last approach lane cone) the vast majority of drivers would get completely target fixated, either failing to stop, or failing to steer. Do it on a low grip surface with the ABS and DSC disabled and most would exit backwards and plough down about 50 cones (rule 1: you knock 'em down, you get out and put em back up again.....)
In even this very simple exercise, even very skillful highly trained drivers struggled. Joe Average, popping down to the shops with their Nan for some teabags, stands no chance........
so - why are we still building HS2?? by the time it's in use - it will be irrelevant
To question some of your points:
Why no personal vehicle ownership? I could use a taxi for all my journeys right now. It would be expensive and still less convenient than using my own vehicle. Ok, you wouldn't have to pay a driver, but since a miserable ride on a large capacity bus currently costs a lot, I can't foresee any savings. Also, without a taxi driver's watchful eye, I suspect a lot of these autonomous taxis would be full of garbage and bodily fluids. No thanks.
No corner garages - Autonomous vehicles will still need servicing/tyres/brakes etc.
No traffic police - The network will probably be covered in so many cameras that they only traffic police will be managing them in an office
No motor insurance - The cynic in me says we'd still get shafted on that somehow
No parking (sent the car away until I needed it) - So as well as people making their journeys as they do today, we also have a large number of empty vehicles heading to the next job? Like an all day rush hour.
And lets not even mention my adaptive lights that love to get it wrong and blind the poor buggers coming towards me....
I think the systems will get so good they wont need to make moral choices, not very often anyway. Imagine the level of control when things like ESP doesnt have a dopey human involved, systems taking in vast data and calculating possible hazards, not getting tired, bored, drunk, old or showing off.
Many people will buy their autonomous vehicle personally and continue to use it as you describe but for the majority it will simply be a driverless minicab. Cheaper than a minicab but ultimately more expensive than owning a car but charged as PAYG so that higher cost is broken down into easily consumed little bites.
I guess it will also make it easier to ban people from driving and for the army of elderly to stop self driving. But it will probably seal the fate of normal cars in cities.
Drivers with actual experience of sharing the road with AVs said: "As far as their driving behavior, they pretty much blend in... When the light turns green, they're not sitting there texting, so they actually go."
( https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/11/why-phoenix-i... )
But we dont need full AI to have self driving cars which will start to get common in the next ~5 years.
We already have them operating on real roads in the real world (waymo/us), and so long as they are safer overall than humans (not hard) they will be good.
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