Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar · 18 Jan 2018
That Understands Us — David Birch The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere — Christian Wolmar Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere Christian Wolmar London Publishing Partnership Copyright © 2018 Christian Wolmar Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.
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in the concept? What were the employment consequences? Then there were questions about the projects and events that were being mentioned in the media. Were driverless cars really being used in Greenwich? Was it actually possible to have six lorries ‘platooning’ on the M6 without causing problems for other traffic? Why
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when the vehicle was in ‘autopilot’ mode? Would it really be possible, as Google claimed, to reclaim thousands of square miles of parking lots when driverless cars were introduced? Would public transport be irredeemably wrecked by their introduction? Would the technology be affordable? You get the gist, reader, and you can
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While this scandal demonstrated the extent to which vehicle manufacturers will resist attempts to reduce the environmental damage caused by their products, it also 9 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere marked a turning point as the industry recognized that it would have to change. It strengthened the hand of those
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because there is time, of course, for the industry to try to postpone their implementation) is spurring manufacturers to look at different business models. 11 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere This is the context for the drive towards electric and autonomous cars: the need for the manufacturers to keep making
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freed of driving obligations, was reviewing his scores, and a pregnant mother was being rushed to hospital just in time by an autonomous ambulance 15 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere (we will return to the question of emergency vehicles later). After watching the film, the spectators were treated to
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in his statement: ‘The technology also has the potential to reduce current Federal spending pressures for roadways, parking, and public transit’ (my emphasis). 19 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere The more one digs into the future envisaged by this new world of autonomy, the more it becomes clear that
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investment company Frost & Sullivan, made the point more explicitly in April 2017 when commenting on the government’s decision to invest £38 million in driverless car technology: Considering recent reports suggesting the average driver in London loses over 100 hours a year in traffic, 25 percent more than any other city
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from consultants and advisers – is creating an autonomous car bubble, not unlike the dotcom bubble of a decade ago. This optimistic presentation of the driverless car revolution in the media is vital in creating the climate that the tech and auto companies hope will ensure that the regulatory and legislative changes
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the misleading media coverage potentially very influential. There is a widespread perception that autonomous cars are already operating and that the technology is virtually 27 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere ready. I have personally had to explain countless times to friends and acquaintances that there are no autonomous vehicles
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vehicles’.18 Autonomy There is much confusion, which is often reflected in media coverage – or even originated in it – on the definition of a ‘driverless’ car. In this book I have used the more accurate expression ‘autonomous’ as this is less binary, offering a range of possible levels of technology. The
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Tesla cars who had produced several clips for YouTube about his ‘Tessie’ – had put his car on Autopilot when the sensors failed to pick 37 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere L0 Driver only L1 Assisted (‘hands on’) L2 Semi-automation (‘hands off’) Conditional L3 automation (‘eyes off’) automation L4
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mess.’ 24 Paul Jennings, Professor of Energy and Electrical Systems at WMG, University of Warwick, who is heading a team developing a simulator for driverless cars, is a great advocate of the technology, but he is particularly concerned about the implications of Level 3: I don’t like Level 3.
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negative implications for drivers’ competence, making drivers complacent and overly reliant on technology. This is of particular concern in emergency situations, where a 43 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere driver may react slowly to taking back control of a vehicle. It may be the case that for Level 3
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are just the incidents that have been reported. There is much confusion about the use of the terms ‘driverless’ and ‘autonomous’, which motor 47 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere manufacturers and tech companies are wont to bandy about without a proper explanation of their meaning. They rarely refer to
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these levels, and this results in ill-informed journalists simply parroting the sort of claims made about the imminent arrival of driverless cars mentioned in the previous chapter. Shared use There is undoubtedly a trend, particularly among millennials, of being less interested in owning – or even driving –
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to the fact that conventional cars are increasingly connected, and able to receive information externally. However, carto-car communication technology is far more complex 51 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere and, as yet, undeveloped. To be useful and effective, the connectivity would need to be instant, with delays measured
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autonomous technology are professional optimists. In an avalanche of speeches, press releases and blogs, they are forever assuring us that the brave new world of driverless cars is just around the corner. In announcements at motor shows and conferences, the tech and car companies, who are increasingly forming joint ventures to
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announced that it was aiming to have a ‘fully autonomous vehicle’ by 2021. Meanwhile, Renault–Nissan is working with Microsoft to develop the 57 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere company’s autonomous car efforts and plans to release ten different self-driving models by 2020. CEO Carlos Ghosn told
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legal and technological frameworks. These will not only be complex to develop, particularly over liability issues, but they may also be hugely controversial. 63 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere The nirvana of a world consisting solely of autonomous pods will require restrictions on other road users and personal car
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Humans might, in any case, make the same wrong decision in the split second available to them, which makes imposing the requirement for a driverless car to be able to negotiate this conundrum superfluous. More importantly, if that were the only issue facing autonomous cars, they would be ready to be
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relevant issues that need to be considered before we get into that rather too frequently posited conundrum, which is best left to latenight drunken discussions. Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere First, there is the haziness of the vision, especially given that any future method of transportation will have such
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disengaged the autopilot to prevent an accident. The RAND Corporation calculated that to show that self-driving cars were as safe as human drivers 69 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere would require 275 million fatality-free miles, and even that might be an underestimate. Contrary to the arguments set
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Cummings expressing concerns that autonomous vehicles, albeit still with test drivers at the wheel, were being let loose in many US cities without sufficient 71 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere consideration for the safety implications. There was, she suggested, a lack of accountability that could put people at risk.
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that before self-driving taxis can become a reality, the vehicles’ architects will need to consider everything from the vast array of automation in driverless cars that can be remotely hijacked to the possibility that passengers themselves could use their physical access to sabotage an unmanned vehicle being used as a
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experiments, and he warned that before self-driving taxis could be introduced, the manufacturers would need to consider everything from the various parts of driverless car automation that could be remotely hijacked to the risks posed by malevolent passengers: Autonomous vehicles are at the apex of all the terrible things that
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a long period during which driverless and driven vehicles will share the roads, posing many challenges for those driverless vehicles. Even the most optimistic of driverless car advocates accept that this period will last many years, if not decades, and some accept that it is likely to be permanent. The notion
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on – will eventually choose to have a driverless shared car is unrealistic. As well as the example cited above about VIP travel, there 81 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere are numerous other problems to get round. Ambulances, police cars and fire engines are unlikely to be transferred to autonomous
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potential difficulties, such as coping with complex areas of private- access roads guarded by automatic gates. My favourite example is: who will allow a driverless car to take them into a safari park? The platooning of lorries – an experiment that is scheduled to be tested on British motorways in 2018 after
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, worse still if the fencing were not there. (Photo by Editor5807.) The other issue highlighted during the early days of Google testing remain problematic. ‘Driverless cars’ are all heavily dependent on mapping, and consequently they can only be used where their software has been loaded with details of the local road
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even before, to continue quoting Donald Rumsfeld, we have come to the unknown unknowns. In that respect it is fascinating to contrast the development of driverless cars with railway technology. In the mid 1990s, when the railways were being privatized, Railtrack, the predecessor of Network Rail that had responsibility for the
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proved insuperable, despite the encouragement of the European Union (it is called the European Railway Traffic Management System). Similarly, there will be niche uses for driverless cars – like the bus that is speeding around London’s Olympic Park at 5 miles per hour as I write – but the step to widespread
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framework. In the United States, much of this has been delivered at the state level, causing widespread confusion and difficulties for the prototypes 87 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere being tested on the roads. It is likely that in Europe legislation will be developed at the pan-European level
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save energy, we can potentially improve air quality, we could improve congestion, though there is a debate about that, and [additionally] people like their Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere independence: having these vehicles will enable some people to be mobile who do not have licences’. He added that it
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Technology Committee cited above that was published in February 2017. Quite rightly, it highlights the fact that the government has been suckered into 101 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere concentrating far too much on the ultimate utopia rather than on the far more basic realities of the introduction of
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to bring about societal benefit rather than profit for the auto and tech industries. The Indian government has taken the most extreme step by banning driverless cars, and while few other countries are likely to take a similarly draconian approach, many will examine more carefully the precise benefits and costs of
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improving bus information systems might therefore be more useful than trying to force us into autonomous pods. There may even be a limited role 105 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere for shared driverless pods, such as shuttles between airport parking and terminals: indeed, there are already pods on a
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with now, with the right transport planning and regulatory policies, potentially saving lives. Despite all the hype, despite the millions of words written about driverless cars, despite the billions of dollars being invested by the auto manufacturers and tech companies, and despite all the tests and trials across the world, nothing
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is really known about how this will pan out. Driverless cars could remain as purely theoretical 109 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere as teleportation or personal jetpacks. The wise Lords on the Science and Technology Committee summed it up
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of our evidence has suggested that CAV could have huge economic benefits, we are not convinced that the statistics provided have been properly substantiated’. Driverless cars are pitched as an exciting technological solution to social problems. There are lots of ways in which we can reduce congestion and make the roads
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only because transport policy has been geared towards catering for individual car use that our cities are so congested and polluted. It is unclear how driverless cars will help address any of the fundamental problems created by our car culture. Even their most fervent supporters admit they may not necessarily reduce
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.ly/2hGUG7s). 16. S. Hill. 2017. What Dara Khosrowshahi must do to save Uber. New York Times, 30 August (http://nyti.ms/2wMsA0j). 17. Driverless Car Market Watch website (http://bit.ly/1eQzhBL). 18. H. Sanderson. 2017. Electric car demand sparks lithium supply fears. Financial Times, 9 June (http://on.ft
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. Effective road markings are key to an auto- mated vehicle future. Top Marks (the magazine of the Road Safety Markings Association), Edition 19. 32. Forecasts. Driverless Car Market Watch website (http://bit. ly/1eQzhBL). 33. D. Fagella. 2017. Self-driving car timeline for 11 top automakers. VentureBeat website, 4 June (http
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://bit.ly/2rDv4ZK). 34. D. DeGasperi. 2017. Hyundai planning driverless car by 2020. Drive website, 20 February (http://bit.ly/2AWsHWj). 35. E. Behrmann. 2016. Volvo cars plans a self-driving auto by 2021. Bloomberg Technology
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Garfinkel. 2017. Hackers are the real obstacle for self-driving vehicles. MIT Technology Review, 22 August (http://bit.ly/2vU2Cqe). 43. A. Greenberg. 2017. Securing driverless cars from hackers is hard. Ask the ex-Uber guy who protects them. Wired, 12 April (http:// bit.ly/2p5bUwY). 44. Dingess (2017). 45. Top misconceptions
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Series Editor ‘This is just what the robot evangelists don’t want you to read: a rational, levelheaded, compelling yet cheerful analysis of why the driverless car‘s route to success is so uncertain. Wolmar has simmered the hype to reveal real-world motorindustry paranoia and tech-sector hubris, and he explains
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Giles Chapman, commentator on car culture and award-winning author ‘Christian Wolmar applies his forensic skills to devastating effect in this exposé of the unfolding driverless car fraud. This is a book to be read twice: first today, and then again in 2021, when the promises made by government and industry
Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words
Ghost Road BEYOND THE DRIVERLESS CAR ANTHONY M. TOWNSEND IN MEMORY OF THE UNCLE I NEVER MET William Patrick Herrschaft, Petty Officer Second Class, US Navy, killed in an automobile accident,
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a century later, this time hawking the engineering marvels of the self-driving age with a similar enthusiasm. “On my fourth day in a semi-driverless car,” wrote columnist David Leonhardt in 2018, “I was ready to make a leap into the future.” The paper of record isn’t alone. Much like
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with asphalt or covered in gravel. But, ironically, your AV also uses this firm new grip on reality to delude itself. That’s because a driverless car doesn’t so much drive itself through the real world as drive itself through a video game based on the real world. Like any good
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away from computers and cars and back to us. Much as with other quickly abandoned terms for new technologies—like horseless carriage and cellular telephone—driverless car and autonomous vehicle are engineers’ terms that define the new in opposition to the old. They obscure the practical nature of the invention in the
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interests too. Defending Transit The degree of contempt autonomists hold for public transit is shocking. Google cofounder Larry Page dreamed of replacing campus buses with driverless cars as far back as his college years at the University of Michigan. In the 2018 book Autonomy, a sweeping history of the development of AVs
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come, it is humans who have paid the price for deep learning’s shortcomings. But the collateral damage to AI development could be substantial. “If . . . driverless cars should also disappoint, relative to their early hype, by proving unsafe when rolled out at scale, or simply not achieving full autonomy after many promises
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others at risk on public roads. So it isn’t yet clear how companies will open up AVs to tinkerers, or how hackers might jailbreak driverless cars’ code to do so themselves—or whether such hacking would even be legal. An array of tools, from the infamous end-user license agreements (EULAs
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into Reality—and Are Further Away Than You Think,” Investors Business Daily, May 24, 2019, https://www.investors.com/news/self-driving-cars-hit-delays-driverless-cars-timeline/. xvperfecting the technology will be trickier: Jeffrey Rothfeder, “For Years, Automakers Wildly Overpromised on Self-Driving Cars and Electric Vehicles—What Now?” Fast Company
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.csuchico.edu/DOCS/darpa2005/DARPA%20 2005%20Stanley.pdf. 7Silicon Valley moved forward: Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How It Will Reshape Our World (New York: Ecco, 2018), 137–57. 7Larry Page’s lifelong interest in AVs: Burns and Shulgan, Autonomy, 3
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, 1903, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmach ine/1903/01/12/101965824.pdf. 9“I was ready to make a leap into the future”: David Leonhardt, “Driverless Cars Made Me Nervous. Then I Tried One,” Opinion, New York Times, October 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/opinion
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/driverless-cars-test-drive.html. 960 million people were killed: Death: A Self-Portrait, 2012, Richard Harris Collection, London, UK: Wellcome Collection, exhibition. 9time wasted in traffic: “
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/newsroom/campaign-sustainable-mobility/. 180Five-cent nickel fares: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 174–75. 180cities . . . grant a ride-hail monopoly: “Free Exchange: The Market for Driverless Cars Will Head towards Monopoly,” The Economist, June 7, 2018, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/07/the-market-for
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-driverless-cars-will-head-towards-monopoly. 180“corrupt and contented”: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 177. 180Jay Gould’s Manhattan Railway Company: Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall
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27, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/11/parking-lots-near-me-shopping-plazas-vacant-spaces/576646/. 191public off-street parking spaces: Matthew Flamm, “Driverless Cars Could Let City Reclaim Parking Spots for Other Uses,” Crain’s New York Business, July 12, 2017, http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170712/TECHNOLOGY/170719954
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(Citigroup, 2017), 83. 202synergy of software trains and compact neighborhoods: John Markoff, “Urban Planning Guru Says Driverless Cars Won’t Fix Congestion,” New York Times, October 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/technology/driverless-cars-congestion.html. 202Switzerland’s Les Vergers Ecoquartier: “Venir aux Verges,” Les Vergers Ecoquartier, accessed May 23
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-automated-vehicle-tactical-plan-2019-2021/. 214“Those who don’t have automobiles”: Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How It Will Reshape Our World (New York: Ecco, 2018), 5. 215“I think public transport is painful”: Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His
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on challenges”: Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” New York University, accessed January 22, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.00631.pdf. 236“If . . . driverless cars should also disappoint”: Marcus, “Deep Learning.” 236Frey tallied his predictions of the jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How
Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan · 18 Jun 2017 · 472pp · 80,835 words
Kerrigan. First Published, 2017. All rights reserved. Trademarks mentioned and images reproduced are copyright their respective owners. Contents Introduction The Machine that Changed the World Driverless Cars - Really? Safety All Change Challenges Regulation & Acceptance The Driverless Dividend References & Further Reading Glossary of Terms AAA - American Automobile Association ABS - Anti-Lock Brakes AEB
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the buzzwords like transformative and disruptive that are used with such scant restraint by commentators and journalists when typically reviewing incremental advances. The emergence of driverless cars deserves massive amounts of genuine debate, analysis and planning. This book is intended to help that debate, whether you are new to the topic or
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in evolution where technology challenges fundamental social norms in ways that may at first seem deeply threatening to our established and familiar way of life. Driverless cars have the potential to fundamentally alter transportation systems by averting deadly crashes, providing unprecedented mobility to the elderly and disabled, increasing road capacity, saving fuel
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without overtly blaming speed - the winning suggestion was “flivverboob”[22]. Thankfully, that word never made it into common usage. It would not be surprising if driverless cars are met in some quarters with the same hostility towards early automobiles referenced here. They promise to interfere with long established norms, and force changes
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movement, and dimensionality of objects. Camera technology will continue to advance as it has rapidly in recent years. The additional investment and demand generated by driverless cars is already creating breakthroughs: Panasonic recently demonstrated a camera sensor technology in development that can see in virtual darkness[88], while Sony has announced a
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a harsh environment for electronics, with vibrations and changes in temperature that are a far cry from the calm environment electronics normally find themselves in. Driverless cars researchers must design for safety, starting with practical measures such as strengthening the most basic components — things like connectors and wiring harnesses that enable the
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it broke cover, the team (which included several veterans of the DARPA challenges) have iterated, updated, tested and even crashed. In November 2016, the Google driverless cars project was unveiled as a standalone company within the Alphabet[103] umbrella, named Waymo. A Waymo FCA Pacifica Minivan. Image courtesy Waymo. Becoming Human Google
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up a business unit to oversee all its efforts related to automobiles.[119] In a surprise follow up announcement, Baidu revealed it would make its driverless cars technology, including its vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, freely available to others, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.[120
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undifferentiated ‘boxes’ largely assembled from other peoples’ technologies. As discussed above, Google, Tesla and more recently Uber, have been grabbing the tech headlines with their driverless cars efforts but the incumbents are urgently trying to join the fray. Although wary of eating their own lunch, that’s more attractive than the thoughts
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or explained - campaigners frequently justify tickets as being down to “quotas for cops” or efforts to raise revenue. Any efforts to impose or even encourage driverless cars must be considered in that context. Seatbelts As mentioned earlier regarding the seat belt interlock device in 1973, previous attempts to regulate for increased road
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were over the legal blood alcohol limit. Further investigation of the types of human error that cause crashes shows the potential for improvement due to driverless cars: Image courtesy Autonomous Technology to the Rescue? The focus of manufacturers’ car safety efforts to date has largely and by necessity been on improving survivability
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driven cars are removed from the roads - the outcome of a collision between a human-driven 2-ton car and a lightweight driverless car would not be positive for the driverless car occupants. Why Wait? The average U.S. vehicle is now 11.6 years old, according to the consulting firm IHS Markit.[166
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difficulty lies in the unanticipated changes, those that happen less visibly or those for which there is no obvious or immediate solution. And of course, driverless cars are not happening in isolation from myriad other technologically-driven changes that in unpredictable combinations will alter our society at an unprecedented rate. 100 years
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distractions, such as intersections, slow moving vehicles and pedestrians. But human reaction times waste a significant amount of the potential carrying capacity of these thoroughfares. Driverless cars could drive more efficiently in the same road space, and save fuel doing it. Autonomous cars can “flock” or form a “platoon”, driving close behind
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“Help or hindrance? The travel, energy and carbon impacts of highly automated vehicles”, Wadud et al[208] examined the energy consumption and emissions aspects of driverless cars. They concluded that automation can substantially reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions but that these benefits could be nullified by greater travel due to autonomous
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Autopilot driver assistance technologies concluded[231] that crash rates involving Tesla cars have dropped by almost 40 percent since the wide introduction of Autopilot. If driverless cars deliver on their promise of virtually eliminating collisions, mandatory driver insurance may be dropped as all liability switches to the car’s creator? The UK
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personal vehicles—could substantially quicken attempts in those cities to prioritise daily commutes and errands by other modes such as walking, bicycling, and ridesharing. Will driverless cars cherry-pick off public transport - with low income bus users suffering the consequences of even lower municipal investment in shared services? Self-Driving Buses Although
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providing audible notifications, etc. Without augmenting or replacing the social cues and nonverbal communication of driving with clear visual signs, it will be hard for driverless cars to gain public trust. Again, there are precedents where we’ve already adapted to specific challenges - such as the addition of audible warnings when trucks
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. Just as we insist that learner drivers are accompanied by an experienced driver, companies are working to create similar backup advisors for driverless cars. In the event that a driverless car encounters a situation it cannot safely navigate, it will be able to call on the services of a remote contact centre for support
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with NASA to use the remote guidance software adapted from the Mars Rover. Obstacles - Literal and Imagined While researching the topic of driverless cars, I've seen countless articles on why driverless cars “simply won't work”. The better-written articles provide scenarios and justifications for their conclusions, but many seem more intent on
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and the risk cost may then be used to determine whether to switch lanes. Other philosophical questions also need consideration - like to what degree should driverless cars in these impossible positions prioritize minimizing injuries to their occupants, versus other crash-involved parties? And should owners be allowed to adjust such settings? Or
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this is one of the more likely scenarios to play out - with a gradual shift in favour of driverless cars - first fleets of driverless cars operated in contained areas, then contained lanes, then zones dedicated to driverless cars (to the exclusion of human drivers), with human drivers eventually being marginalised to devoted lanes. Image Courtesy McKinsey
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will do so against a backdrop of increasing regulation and public scrutiny. Although not currently a major concern for most people, the regulatory environment for driverless cars should be of interest - the decisions made at Federal and State levels will impact safety and economic investments. Normally invisible regulators will have the power
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the needs of the time.” In an unusual move for a sitting President, then President Barack Obama released an op-ed about driverless cars.[324] Regardless of your views on driverless cars, they seem to have had attention at the highest levels of Government: “Of course, American innovation is driving bigger changes, too: In
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most countries in the world and drive (temporarily at least) as your driver's license will be recognized. The cross-border implications of driverless cars remain to be seen. Driverless cars software will need to be “aware” of local regulations and practices. Certain jurisdictions may opt to enforce laws in different ways, or rules
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for autonomous platooning. From a regulatory and lobbying point of view, it’s instructive to see who responded to the UK Government consultations[338] on driverless cars: Type of Organisation Number of Responses Insurance Bodies 16 Law Firms 14 Road Safety Groups 7 Transport Groups 7 Manufacturers 5 Automotive Membership Groups 5
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local economy in the form of disposable income. New Areas of Regulation Aside from the crucial regulatory decisions required for the operational roll-out of driverless cars, there are numerous other legal and administrative frameworks that will be important, some far removed from traditional motoring. Chapter 6 highlighted the challenging areas of
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ones pouring billions into the development of the technology. The public sector stands to gain from improved safety and rejuvenated urban planning opportunities. And the driverless cars are travelling on roads created and paid for from the public purse that will likely require consequential additional investments. With the increasing complexity of ventures
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outside of technology circles. While most love their smartphones, others’ perceptions are soured by crashed computers, unintelligible error messages or unresponsive machines. The acceptance of driverless cars will be largely a matter of trust - do people trust robocars to be on the roads? Ironically, despite the demonstrable and consistent behaviour of robots
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, the companies pushing the driverless agenda will continue to seek the path of least regulatory resistance. In the absence of progressive regulation, the companies developing driverless cars may choose to relocate to more permissive jurisdictions, wherever in the world that may be. Just as countries already compete to make themselves attractive destinations
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familiar terms of the past, using the only frame of reference with which they were comfortable. Similarly, most people think of autonomous vehicles simply as driverless cars, when in fact they potentially represent a revolutionary new form of transportation. But no matter how innovative, transformative or disruptive a technology is, the reality
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the London School of Economics, explored the characteristics of each revolution[358] which seem like an excellent framework to assess the promise and perils of driverless cars: “The full deployment of the enormous wealth-creating potential brought forward by each technological revolution requires, each time, the establishment of an adequate socio-institutional
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%20-%20%20Automation4ITS-CA.pdf Steven E. Shladover, University of California, Berkeley October 2, 2013 [286] http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2016/09/15/driverless-cars-unsafe-at-any-speed/ [287] https://newsroom.statefarm.com/download/234883/allstates2015-16deerstats-finalpdf.pdf [288] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9176500B1/ [289] http://www
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.info/rule/160 [337] http://www.highwaycode.info/rule/126 [338] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/581577/pathway-to-driverless-cars-consultation-response.pdf [339] http://www.statisticbrain.com/driving-citation-statistics/ [340] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/11566026/How
The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever · 2 Apr 2017 · 181pp · 52,147 words
WADHWA WITH ALEX SALKEVER THE DRIVER IN THE DRIVERLESS CAR HOW OUR TECHNOLOGY CHOICES WILL CREATE THE FUTURE The Driver in the Driverless Car Copyright © 2017 by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form
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unsettled. I have heard from friends and colleagues that my reaction is not uncommon. A driverless car can challenge many assumptions about human superiority to machines. Though I live in Silicon Valley, the reality of a driverless car is one of the most startling manifestations of the future unknowns we all face in this
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food we need as well as our electronics and household amenities. When we need to go anywhere, we click on a phone application, and a driverless car shows up to take us to our destination. I am talking about an era of almost unlimited energy, food, education, and health care in which
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future. In this future there will be many new risks. Privacy will be a thing of the past—as it is already becoming—because the driverless cars will keep track of everywhere we go and everything we do just as our smartphones already do. Our entire lives will be recorded in databases
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swimming pool, and flying cars remain a couple of decades away. But our robot drivers are here. There are debates in mainstream media over whether driverless cars will ever be adopted and whether we can trust our lives to a machine. A survey by the American Automobile Association in March 2016 revealed
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be an amazing transition, and we won’t want to look back. Few people seem to fully grasp the profound improvements in our lives that driverless cars will bring. Their adoption will slash accident and fatality rates, saving millions of lives. As well, it will remove one-third to one-half of
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will stop worrying about getting hit by cars in intersections. Let me paint a picture of what streets will look like in an age of driverless cars. We will no longer need traffic lights: robot cars will synchronize wirelessly to time mass movements across city intersections and entries onto freeways or balletic
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around four-way stop signs. Having no human eyes behind the wheel will obviate much of the need for signaling and signage. When all the driverless cars are talking to each other, there will be no need for them to ever come to a complete halt and waste all their kinetic energy
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distributed. Reinventing the Car to Forgo a Human Driver Eliminating human drivers will also allow automobile designers to build cars from a completely different mindset. Driverless cars will not need steering columns, brake pedals, accelerator pedals, or any of the other components drivers use for slowing or accelerating. They will not need
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state of Nevada, the truck will handle driving duties on highways, ceding city driving to a human driver, who remains on board at all times. Driverless cars also provide safe options for getting home at night. Instead of having to pay for a taxi or Uber when getting home late, women (especially
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for the drivers because we will ultimately have to take this away—they are too moody and dangerous. They will become the drivers in the driverless car. 13 When Your Scale Talks to Your Refrigerator: The Internet of Things Your refrigerator will talk to your toothbrush, your gym shoes, your car, and
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Artificial intelligence (A.I.) killing machines, 93 Asimov, Isaac, 173 Atala, Anthony, 172 Automated online assistant. See Artificial intelligence (A.I.) assistants Autonomous cars. See Driverless cars Autopilot, 96, 114, 142, 150, 154 Autosteer, 142–143 Bansal, Preeta, 29 Big Data, 69, 125 Bio-ink, 171, 172. See also 3-D bio
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for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks), 85–86 Brown, Micah, 95 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 96 209 Cancer, 40–41, 124–127 Car accidents, 148. See also Driverless cars Cell phones, 14–15 Cheney, Dick, 101–102 China, 150, 188 Clearwell (software), 42 Clinton, Hillary, 3 Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. See CRISPR
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altering, 30–31. See also Synthetic biology medical privacy and, 80–81 DNA sequencing, 123–125, 127. See also Genomic testing Doudna, Jennifer, 133–135 Driverless cars, ix–x, 19–20, 31, 141–145. See also Google cars; Tesla cars fostering autonomy vs. dependence, 153–155 a massive disruption caused by giving
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, 150–153 moral argument for, 148–149 reinventing the car to forgo a human driver, 145–147 in various countries, 149–150 “Drivers in the driverless car,” 155 “Drone Age,” 115 Drones, 113–117 benefits vs. risks of, 119–121 the darker side to, 117–119 fostering autonomy vs. dependence, 121–122
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testing for, 74 Prenatal testing for preeclampsia, 74 Presidential campaign of 2016, 3, 6–7 Privacy, 108–112, 157, 162, 164, 165. See also Cybersecurity driverless cars and, 19–20, 162 Internet and, 161 I.o.T. and, 157 medical, 80–81, 108 vs. vanity, 112 Pulmonary-artery pressure, wireless sensor reader
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from Her), 46 Sanders, Bernie, 3, 7 Schools. See Education Science fiction, vii, xiv Security. See Cybersecurity Security breaches. See Hacking Self-driving cars. See Driverless cars Singapore, 150 Siri, 37–39, 89 Six-Million Dollar Man, The (TV series), 171 Skype, 56 Sloan Kettering Hospital, 124–125, 127 Smartphones, 14–15
The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here
by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words
by Madeleine Orr Into the Groove by Jonathan Scott To Michael, for everything, and to Eliza, because it’s her future Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Driverless Cars Chapter 2: Artificial Intelligence Chapter 3: Robots Chapter 4: Augmented Reality Chapter 5: Cyborgs and Brain–Computer Interfaces Chapter 6: Flying Cars Chapter 7:
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said that the best way to predict the future is to create it.1 That may be true, but have you ever tried building anything? Driverless cars, flying ones, superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI), humanoid robots, cyborgs – clever scientists, genius engineers and self-taught polymaths have been trying to build these visions
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others could follow: faster and cheaper computers enabled everything, while neural networks took off thanks to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), wearable computers required lithium batteries, driverless cars were lost without satnav, smart cities needed connected sensors and so on. * * * Computing began in the 1820s with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who managed
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ARPA. The latter famously funded ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, and some of the projects we will explore shortly, including the Shakey robot, the driverless car challenge and Boston Dynamics’ robots. In the 1960s and 70s, the pushback against the Vietnam War sparked a backlash against military funds in academia, though
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These places act like magnets, attracting talent, ideas, money and media coverage. But we’ve also got projects running through the marshes outside Cambridge, England, driverless cars crisscrossing Europe and a whole generation of humanoid robotics in Japan. It doesn’t matter who or where you are, you can try to build
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the decades. Until recently, such automation was intended for motorway use only, taking the wheel at higher speeds but in more controlled road situations. Now, driverless cars are also being designed to work on side roads, meaning they must contend with pedestrians, pets and other confusing conditions. To differentiate, the American Society
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to drill tunnels beneath cities for congestion-free in-city driving. Like Musk, Bel Geddes had another idea, one which dovetailed neatly with bespoke motorways: driverless cars. He predicted that ‘cars that are automatically controlled, which can be driven safely even with the driver’s hands off the wheel’ would arrive by
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he was right. Though interrupted by the war, the daydreaming ideas on show at Futurama were put into practical development, and in 1957 the first driverless car was tested just outside Lincoln, Nebraska. After the war ended, Bel Geddes’ idea of removing human mistakes from motorways via automotive automation was revived by
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reason we don’t have automated motorways. In 1969, Robert Fenton and Karl Olson of Ohio State University published a paper on solutions to create driverless cars. Though they identified a whopping 1,296 different ways to make this happen, their proposals also relied on embedding electric circuits directly into motorways, with
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and powerful enough to drive one – if only just. * * * Here, we turn to Ernst Dickmanns, a German aerospace engineer considered to be the father of driverless cars. His mid-1990s system will sound like the definition of success to modern driverless developers: his Mercedes van ‘saw’ using cameras and sensors, with artificial
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build a miniature server farm. By the 1990s, those were dropped for newer microprocessors, as computing technology had leapt forward enough to be useful to driverless cars. But the available processing power still wasn’t quick enough to enable the cars’ computers to churn through and understand the images pulled in by
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.13 Others beyond Dickmanns were also trying to make driverless work. In 1977, engineers at the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab north of Tokyo sent their driverless car crawling towards a stop sign in the hope it would stop. It did, using dual cameras interpreted by onboard computers; however, processing speeds were
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same time on a major highway. And in 1995, two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) drove from Pittsburgh to San Diego using a partially driverless car; they called the nine-day trip ‘no hands across America’. The NavLab 5 system used RALPH (Rapidly Adapting Lateral Position Handler) to analyse video imagery
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, an experimental division set up in 2009 to explore ‘moonshot’ technologies – Google’s name for projects that seem impossible but could have disruptive results. Seven driverless cars – again, Priuses – were road-tested around the Bay Area, with a massive bit of kit plonked on the top, not unlike Street View cameras. ‘
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trials, not so much of technology but of everything else that surrounds the idea of automobile automation, including how pedestrians and other drivers interact with driverless cars. In one trial in London, its GATEway slow-moving autonomous pod linked North Greenwich tube and bus station with the O2 concert venue. These TRL
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homicide and significant potential jail time, but pleaded guilty to endangerment and was sentenced to three years’ probation. Uber has since ended its research into driverless cars, selling its technology to driverless trucking startup Aurora, led by ex-Waymo engineer Chris Urmson – though Uber also kept its fingers in the pie with
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its driverless division for $550 million to Toyota rather than burning through more cash. Chris Urmson has predicted it’ll be another three decades before driverless cars are widely available. There’s another issue with continuing the development of this driverless technology in this way: it might never work, ever. Or
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have safer cars. Everybody wins. Well, except the people living in the cities used as labs, of course. However, there are challenges beyond the technical. Driverless cars are inherently surveillance machines, recording everything in their path, raising concerns about privacy amid reports that policing authorities have already requested captured footage. Waymo and
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to be flooded with driverless ones wandering the streets while they await a passenger. Given all these questions, why are we (well, they) even building driverless cars? It’s an exciting engineering challenge that could pay off big if ever successful, and even if not via convenience and safety features. Those honest
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companies generally list three motivations: to increase safety, to reduce traffic and to optimise driving for fuel efficiency. Let’s look at those in reverse. Driverless cars can drive more precisely than us feeble humans, potentially slashing fuel use. Plus, the taxi model means people need not own a vehicle, requiring fewer
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investment in public transport could address both of those issues. That’s also true of our second motivation, to reduce traffic. The argument is that driverless cars will communicate with each other to avoid traffic jams – surely the reduction in rubbernecking at accidents and other incidents alone will be significant. But that
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in funding, and the other is being largely ignored. Not only are bus budgets being slashed, but buses themselves are being physically blocked by these driverless cars. Talk about a double blow. And perhaps that’s easy to understand given Waymo is headquartered in Alphabet’s network of Silicon Valley campuses.
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latter for AI that can solve any problem rather than being limited to specific tasks – it’s the difference between a human driving and a driverless car with distinct vision, analysis and actuation systems, for example. Either way, when tech CEOs natter about existential risk, they are referring to the possibility
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we’re used to technologies formed around ‘ShakeyTech’, be it natural language processing as seen in Siri or Alexa, computer vision for driverless cars or navigation systems for your non-driverless car. The ‘A*’ algorithm developed by Rosen’s team to help Shakey plan its route between stub-walled rooms is at the core
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Manhattan skyline. Another company aimed to build a personal, roadable VTOL for anyone to use: Kitty Hawk. Founded by Sebastian Thrun, whom we met making driverless cars, with funding from Google co-founder Larry Page, this secretive startup built more than 100 different aircraft. They included the Flyer, a single-person eVTOL
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film Tron. Driverless and electric, these cars were to find their way using tiny magnets hidden in the road – this will sound familiar from the driverless cars chapter; it’s an idea that finds new fans every decade – supposedly negating the need for traditional cars within Masdar. However, as one journalist
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elsewhere in the province), underground tunnels for autonomous mail delivery carts (a delightful mashup of Masdar’s PRT and London’s 100-year-old LPDR), driverless cars (whenever they’re developed) and heated paving slabs. Other ideas included robot trash collectors, automated meters to track waste and incentivise recycling, and dynamic
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academic. Google already has tremendous reach into our lives; that is unlikely with Dickmanns. Google (and the rest) make huge (and incorrect) claims about when driverless cars arrive, breaking promises to remove steering wheels and brakes; Dickmanns’ work is, if anything, grossly undervalued. Deciding what projects to ditch is part of systemising
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in being the first in anything, despite so many companies and inventors racing for that designation. Apple has long been rumoured to be building a driverless car, but refuses to admit any details about products in development, including their existence. (Whether that holds true for the foreseeable future remains to be
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racism and discrimination when trained. Multiple AI vision systems struggle to see black skin, for example. Imagine what happens when that algorithm is applied to driverless cars. White men working on these projects should spot these flaws, but given that these systems are released to the world without checking for such biases
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to succeed. Would hiring women, people of different ethnicities, or from varied economic backgrounds make flying cars viable or solve the challenges facing driverless cars? Maybe the idea that makes driverless cars truly smart is sitting in a young woman’s brain in Nigeria or Argentina or Malaysia. Perhaps not – physics is the same
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Michelle, Melanie, Anna, Maresa, Shannon, Ivy, and Harriet, thanks for checking in on me; Davina, Jen and Dean, thanks for listening to my rants about driverless cars – and esports. Tina, this book is better because of our conversations. Mustafa, thank you for the photo and the chats. And because seeing your name
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for fun facts. Bibliography Intro Crevier, Daniel. AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Kobie, Nicole. ‘No, driverless cars will not be racing around UK roads this year.’ WIRED, February 7, 2019. https://biturl.top/raaqU3 ‘Arthur Rock: Silicon Valley’s Unmoved Mover.’ The
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://biturl.top/6F36ny UK Government press release. ‘Government moves forward on advanced trials for self-driving vehicles.’ Published February 6, 2019. https://biturl.top/ErEbAr Driverless Cars Ackerman, Evan. ‘Carnegie Mellon Solves 12-Year-Old DARPA Grand Challenge Mystery.’ IEEE Spectrum, October 19, 2017. https://biturl.top/jEvUBz Ackerman, Evan. ‘The
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experimental system fitted to a Citroen DS 19 Car.’ Road Research Laboratory (Department of Transport), 1970. (From Science Museum archives.) Dave, Paresh. ‘Dashcam Footage Shows Driverless Cars Clogging San Francisco.’ WIRED, April 10, 2023. https://biturl.top/QnMFVf Davies, Alex. Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. New York: Simon &
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charging: is EV charging without cables the future?’ Auto Express, January 17, 2020. https://biturl.top/Zba22e Harris, Mark. ‘How a robot lover pioneered the driverless car, and why he’s selling his latest to Uber.’ Guardian, August 19, 2016. https://biturl.top/UNbUJ3 Harris, Mark. ‘How Otto Defied Nevada and Scored
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sentenced to 18 months in prison as new $4B lawsuit against Uber is filed.’ TechCrunch, August 4, 2020. https://biturl.top/BbyABb Lockton, Georgina. ‘The driverless car in 1960s Britain.’ Institute of Historical Research Seminar Series: Transport & Mobility History, January 15, 2021. https://biturl.top/AFvAFr Markoff, John. ‘Google Cars Drive
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23, 1972. (Via Science Museum archives) ‘Preliminary Report: Highway, HWY18MH010.’ National Transport Safety Board, November 7, 2019. https://biturl.top/BNveme Quigg, Doc. ‘Reporter Rides Driverless Car.’ Press-Courier, June 7, 1960. Accessed via https://biturl.top/iiQBB3 ‘Highway of the Future.’ RCA Electronic Age, January 1958. Accessed via https://biturl.top
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Verge, April 12, 2022. https://biturl.top/Un2Qrm Shaban, Bigad; Horn, Michael; Carroll, Jeremy. ‘San Francisco city attorney files motion to pump the brakes on driverless cars.’ NBC Bay Area, August 17, 2023. Shepardson, David. ‘Fatal Tesla Autopilot crash driver had hands off wheel: U.S. agency.’ Reuters, June 7, 2018.
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biturl.top/JJfe6z ‘How much does a mile of road actually cost?’ Strong Towns. https://biturl.top/qE7Fze Accessed October 12, 2023. Stumpf, Rob. ‘Early driverless cars used underground magnets to test in California 25 years ago.’ The Drive, July 18, 2023. https://biturl.top/nMJvUn ‘Full self-driving capability subscriptions.’ Tesla
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work as advertised, and they shouldn’t be on the road.’ Twitter, March 24, 2023. 4.53pm. https://biturl.top/J7J3uu Valinsky, Jordan. ‘“Complete meltdown”: Driverless cars in San Francisco stall causing a traffic jam.’ CNN, August 14, 2023. https://biturl.top/IjQrii Vance, Ashlee. ‘DARPA’s Grand Challenge proves to be
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too grand.’ The Register, March 13, 2004. https://biturl.top/MzYV3m Wakabayashi, Daisuke. ‘Uber and Waymo Settle Trade Secrets Suit Over Driverless Cars.’ New York Times, February 9, 2018. https://biturl.top/BRjUf2 Artificial Intelligence Angwin, Julia; Larson, Jeff; Mattu, Surya; Kirchner, Lauren. ‘Machine Bias.’ ProPublica, May
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here diversity, lack of tech industry here Djourno, Dr André here DNNresearch here, here Doctoroff, Dan here, here, here Dolgov, Dmitri here Dreyfuss, Henry here driverless cars/technology here, here, here, here 4D system here Anthony Levandowski here, here, here Anthony’s Robots pizza delivery here Argo AI here artificial intelligence (AI
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here, here Fei-Fei Li here, here Feigenbaum, Edward here Fenton, Robert here, here Ferrer, Josep-Ramon here Fifth Generation Computer Project, Japan here Firefly driverless car here, here, here Fisher, Scott here, here Flood, Joe here Flow, Sidewalk Labs here flying cars here, here, here, here air-traffic control here Alef
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Ian here Google here, here, here artificial intelligence (AI) here, here, here, here, here, here, here augmented reality and Glass smart spectacles here, here, here driverless cars here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here robots/robotics here, here, here X Labs here, here Gow, David here Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) here
The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge · 2 Nov 2018 · 346pp · 97,890 words
-time spoken-word language translation, and augmented reality tools that will change the way we perceive, understand and relate to the world we live in. Driverless cars are a realistic prospect, and AI looks set to have transformative applications in healthcare, from which we will all stand to benefit: AI systems have
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solved by a technique called machine learning, about which we will hear a lot more later on in this book. Next we move on to driverless cars. This problem is fascinating because it is something that seems so straightforward for people to do. We don’t associate the ability to drive a
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to drive cars. The main problem is that a car needs to understand where it is, and what is going on around it. Imagine a driverless car at a busy road intersection in New York City. There will probably be many vehicles in continual movement, with pedestrians, cyclists, road works, traffic signs
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have all that information, then deciding what you need to do is usually going to be pretty easy. (We will discuss the specific challenges of driverless cars later in the book.) Then we move on to problems that we really have little idea how to solve. How can a computer understand a
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that of dealing with uncertainty. Any realistic AI system has to deal with uncertainty, and sometimes a lot of it. To pick an example, a driverless car obtains streams of data from its sensors, but sensors are not perfect. For example, there is always a chance that a range-finder will simply
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in his honour. It is concerned with how we should rationally adjust our beliefs in the presence of new information. In the case of our driverless car example, the beliefs relate to whether there is an obstacle in front of us; the new information is the sensor data. Apart from anything else
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be altered in such a way that, while a human has no difficulty interpreting them, they are completely misunderstood by the neural nets in a driverless car. Before we can use deep learning in sensitive applications, we need to understand these problems in much more detail. DeepMind The story of DeepMind, which
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two of the most prominent opportunities for AI: the first is the use of AI in healthcare; the second is the long-held dream of driverless cars. AI-Powered Healthcare People should stop training radiologists now. It is just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better
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a truly thrilling prospect; and of all the opportunities that AI presents us with, this is the one that may have the greatest social impact. Driverless Cars Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. –– Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895 At the time of writing, more than a million people
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accept the risk as an occupational hazard of living in the modern world. But AI holds out the real prospect of dramatically reducing those risks: driverless cars are a real possibility in the medium term, and, ultimately, they have the potential to save lives on a massive scale. There are, of course
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them to have expensive and heavy protective chassis will be reduced, again leading to cheaper, more fuel-efficient vehicles. There is even an argument that driverless cars will make car ownership unnecessary: driverless taxis will be so cheap, goes the argument, that it won’t make economic sense to own your own
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car. For all these reasons, and more, driverless cars are an obvious and compelling idea, and it will therefore be no surprise to you that there has been a long history of research in
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the 1940s, it is only since the emergence of microprocessor technologies in the 1970s that they really began to be feasible. But the challenge of driverless cars is immense: and the fundamental problem is perception. If you could find a way for a car to know precisely where it was and what
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be possible. The PROMETHEUS project, funded by the pan-governmental EUREKA research funding organization in Europe, is widely seen as a forerunner of today’s driverless car technology. PROMETHEUS, which ran from 1987 to 1995, led to a demonstration in 1995, in which a car drove itself from Munich in Germany to
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getting stuck on an embankment. My recollection of events at the time is that most AI researchers took the 2004 Grand Challenge as proof that driverless car technology was still some way from being practical. I was a little surprised to hear that DARPA had immediately announced a follow-on competition for
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GPS, laser range-finders, radar and video feed. The 2005 Grand Challenge was one of the great technological achievements in human history. On that day, driverless cars became a solved problem, in the same way that heavier-than-air powered flight became a solved problem at Kitty Hawk just over a century
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Flyer I flew only 120 feet. But after that 12-second journey, powered heavier-than-air flight was a reality – and so it was with driverless cars after the 2005 Grand Challenge. The 2005 Grand Challenge was followed by a series of other challenges, of which probably the most important was the
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2007 Urban Challenge. While the 2005 competition tested vehicles on rural roads, the 2007 challenge aimed to test them in built-up urban environments. Driverless cars were required to complete a course, while obeying Californian road traffic laws, and coping with everyday situations like parking, intersections and traffic jams. Thirty-six
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challenge, with the winner, from Carnegie Mellon University, averaging approximately 14 m.p.h. throughout the four-hour challenge. We have seen massive investment in driverless car technology since then, both from established automobile companies, who are desperate not to be left behind, and from newer companies who perceive an opportunity to
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: High automation Here, the car takes control under normal circumstances, although the driver can still intervene. Level 5: Full automation This is the dream of driverless cars: you get in a car, state your destination, and the car does everything from there. There is no steering wheel. At the time of writing
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, the state of the art system for commercially available driverless car technology is probably Tesla’s Autopilot, initially available on the Tesla Model S car. Released in 2012, the Model S was the flagship vehicle in
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software for the car that enabled its ‘Autopilot’ feature – a limited automatic driving capability. The media were quick to start hailing Autopilot as the first driverless car, although Tesla was at pains to point out the limitations of the technology. In particular, Tesla insisted that drivers should keep their hands on the
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and drove directly into the truck at high speed, instantly killing the driver. Other incidents highlight what seems to be a key problem with current driverless car technology. At Level 0 autonomy, it is completely clear what is expected of the driver: everything. And at Level 5 autonomy, it is similarly obvious
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the failure was human, not technological. It seems depressingly inevitable that there will be many more tragedies like these before we see practical, mass-market driverless cars. We need to do everything we reasonably can to anticipate and avoid such tragedies. But they will occur in any case; and when they do
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,000 miles; the worst performance was by automobile giant Mercedes, who reported no fewer than 774 disengagements per 1,000 miles. Waymo are Google’s driverless car company. Originally, it was an internal Google project, run by 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge winner Sebastian Thrun, and it became a subsidiary company of Google
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in 2016. In 2018, Waymo reported travelling 11,000 miles between disengagements. So, what does this data tell us? And, in particular, how soon will driverless cars be an everyday reality? Well, the first conclusion we can draw, from the relatively poor performance of automobile giants like BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen, is
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that a historical track record in the automotive industry is not the key requirement for success in driverless car technology. On reflection, this should come as no surprise: the key to driverless cars is not the internal combustion engine, but software – AI software. No surprise, then, that the US automobile giant General
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invested one billion dollars in self-driving start-up company Argo AI. Both companies made public, very ambitious claims about the roll-out of commercial driverless cars: Ford predicted they would have a ‘fully autonomous vehicle in commercial operation’ by 2021.10 Of course, we don’t know the precise criteria that
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the comparison is hardly scientific, but at least it gives some indication of the scale of the challenges still faced by driverless car companies. Anecdotally, speaking to engineers who work with driverless cars, it seems the key difficulty for the technology is dealing with unexpected events. We can train cars to deal with most
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back on. They could think about how to handle it, and if they don’t have time to think, they can call upon their instincts. Driverless cars do not have this luxury – and won’t, not for the foreseeable future. Another major challenge is how to make the transition from the current
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letter, making it hard for AI software to understand their behaviour and interact with them safely. Given my upbeat assessment of the progress made in driverless car technology, this may sound surprisingly pessimistic. So, let me do my best to explain how I think events might unfold in the decades ahead. First
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, I genuinely believe driverless car technology in some form will be in everyday use soon – certainly within the next decade. However, this doesn’t mean that Level 5 autonomy is
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you pull the lever or not? The Trolley Problem has risen rapidly in prominence recently because of the imminent arrival of driverless cars. Pundits were quick to point out that driverless cars might well find themselves in a situation like the Trolley Problem, and AI software would then be called upon to make an
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choice that would be made by this sort of person in this setting. Of course, in AI, the decision-maker would be an agent – a driverless car, which must choose between driving straight ahead and killing five people, or swerving and killing one. So, what would and what should an AI agent
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my driving licence. This has not been a problem for me so far. Driving a car does not require deep ethical reasoning – so requiring that driverless cars can resolve the Trolley Problem before we put them on the roads therefore seems to me a little absurd. Thirdly, the truth is that however
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. They established a website called Moral Machines, through which users were presented with a whole series of trolley-type problems, and were asked what a driverless car should do if faced with the issue.9 The possible innocent victims included males, females, overweight people, children, criminals, homeless people, doctors, athletes and elderly
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of law, then both of these societal qualities have a clear role in predicting preferences. The MIT researchers compared their findings – how people say a driverless car should behave in a Trolley Problem situation – to some actual guidelines on ethical decision-making in cars produced by the German federal government in 2017
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characteristics is in sharp contrast to an internationally held preference revealed by the Moral Machine for saving young people. Imagine the outrage, then, if a driverless car followed the German guidelines and chose not to make a distinction, and as a result a child was killed rather than an elderly terminal cancer
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the Trolley Problem upon which it is based do not, I think, have much of value to tell us about AI software for driverless cars. I don’t believe that the driverless cars we are likely to encounter in the coming decades will do ethical reasoning of this type. So, what would a real
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other ingredients are, still less what the recipe for General AI might look like. All the impressive capabilities we have developed – image recognition, language translation, driverless cars – don’t add up to general intelligence. In this sense, we are still facing the problem that Rod Brooks highlighted back in the 1980s: we
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tasks such as solving problems, understanding stories and so on. So we naturally tend to imagine that the brain is like the computer controlling a driverless car, receiving and interpreting sensory information from our eyes and ears and other senses, and telling our hands, arms and legs what to do. But that
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, in the hope they can later be integrated. gradient descent A technique used when training neural nets. See also backpropagation. Grand Challenge A competition for driverless cars, organized by US military funding agency DARPA, which led to the triumph of the robot named STANLEY in October 2005, and which heralded the age
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of driverless cars. hard problem of consciousness The problem of understanding how and why physical processes lead to subjective conscious experiences. See also qualia. Harm Assessment Risk Tool
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A programming language based on first-order logic, which was particularly popular in the era of logic-based AI. PROMETHEUS A seminal European experiment in driverless car technology from the 1980s and 1990s. qualia Personal mental experiences. An example might be smelling coffee, or drinking a cold drink on a hot day
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is said to be sound if the conclusions derived are warranted from the premises. STANLEY The robot that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge for driverless cars, autonomously driving approximately 140 miles, averaging about 19 miles per hour. Developed at Stanford University. STRIPS A seminal planning system, developed as part of the
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do nothing, five people will die, while if you act, then only one person will die; should you act? Often discussed in the context of driverless cars, although mostly dismissed as irrelevant by the AI community. Turing machine A mathematical problem-solving machine – one which embodies a particular recipe for solving a
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–7 automated diagnosis 220–1 automated translation 204–8 automation 265, 267–72 autonomous drones 282–4 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports 231 autonomous vehicles see driverless cars autonomous weapons 281–7 autonomy levels 227–8 Autopilot 228–9 B backprop/backpropagation 182–3 backward chaining 94 Bayes nets 158 Bayes’ Theorem 155
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diversity 290–3 ‘divide and conquer’ assumption 53–6, 128 Do-Much-More 35–6 dot-com bubble 148–9 Dreyfus, Hubert 85–6, 311 driverless cars 27–8, 155, 223–35 drones 282–4 Dunbar, Robin 317–19 Dunbar’s number 318 E ECAI (European Conference on AI) 209–10 electronic
Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman · 22 Sep 2016
the great realities of tomorrow.” New York World’s Fair, “Futurama: Highways & Horizons,” 1939. Source: General Motors Figure 6.2 “Electricity may be the driver.” Driverless Car of the Future, advertisement for “America’s Electric Light and Power Companies,” Saturday Evening Post, 1950s. Source: The Everett Collection Figure 6.3 The electronic
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the team at MIT Press, particularly Marie Lufkin Lee, Michael Sims, and Kathleen Hensley, for their enthusiastic support of the book. Finally, no book on driverless cars would be possible without the inspiration and genius of the creative and bold innovators out there, the engineers, developers, inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs, both past
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unfamiliar setting. Since the ability to correctly identify nearby objects is key to safe driving, underperforming machine vision software has held back the development of driverless cars for decades. A recent breakthrough in artificial intelligence, however, promises to change everything. After years of languishing in the fringes of academic artificial-intelligence research
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reef—that the sea throws into their path. In an ideal future, our streets and highways will glisten with schools of tightly packed driverless cars. Like fish, swarms of driverless cars will demonstrate extraordinary anti-collision abilities, navigating intelligently and instinctively through urban streets full of pedestrians and falling gracefully into fuel-efficient formations
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an organization’s successful adoption of a new technology that would otherwise save the organization time and money and improve productivity. In the adoption of driverless cars, one aspect of the people problem might be resistance from consumers, but we predict otherwise. Although the executives of automotive companies gamely insist that people
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oversight and regulation, in particular, state and federal traffic regulations, liability laws, and insurance coverage. Thus far, the most significant force behind the development of driverless cars has come from industry. Federal oversight of autonomous driving has gotten off to a slow start. In 2016, however, the U.S. Department of Transportation
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the availability of too-convenient transportation creates a rebound effect on traffic and dramatically increases the number of road miles that people travel each year, driverless cars could have a devastating environmental impact. Today the transportation sector is already one of the largest contributors to air pollution. In the United States alone
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backyards with decommissioned auto bodies and worn-out engines. History has taught us, however, that new technologies do not merely extend a former status quo. Driverless cars have several characteristics that could change their potentially gloomy and environmentally devastating trajectory. If the internet of the 1990s were suddenly forced to absorb today
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apart while driving would reduce fuel consumption by 15 to 20 percent per truck.13 Another potential environmental benefit lies in rethinking car design. If driverless cars become substantially safer than those driven by humans, automotive designers could dramatically improve upon a mechanical body whose shape and size is the compounded result
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and lucrative pedestrian foot traffic on downtown sidewalks. Parking spaces are intimately interwoven into the geography of the modern urban downtown. In the coming decades, driverless cars will render parking lots obsolete, rearranging the shape of modern cities. Another side-effect of convenient personal mobility will be that people will go in
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in Massachusetts, near MIT. Four trends are forcing car companies to rethink their business models: electric cars, ubiquitous wireless, car-sharing, and autonomous vehicles. As driverless-car technology matures, these four trends will be folded into one: autonomy. To survive, car companies will have to reenvision their product as an autonomous transportation
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about their company’s research into autonomous parking software or machine-vision technology capable of … identifying street signs. Despite a healthy dose of hype about driverless cars, the so-called “autonomous vehicle” projects presented by the big car companies were essentially driver-assist systems on steroids. Ironically, car companies are experts in
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competing robots (including CHIMP), were able to complete all of the assigned tasks. Thanks to the same technological advances that are accelerating the maturation of driverless cars—faster, smaller, hardware sensors and computers and better artificial-intelligence software—by the 2015 DARPA competition CHIMP and two other robots completed the course in
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their talents to the problems of regulating gasoline powered engines, this rich intellectual heritage might become irrelevant should electric engines become the gold standard for driverless cars. Route planning and road navigation While low-level controls require only a split second to do their work, high-level controls are engaged over an
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, the fact that seemingly straightforward acts of mobility and perception have proven to be difficult to automate. To drive safely on public streets and roads, driverless cars require more than just automotive controls. They also need an intelligent operating system that can visually understand the environment and know how to react appropriately
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of the carnage caused by distracted, drunk, or emotional human drivers might be comfortable accepting less than perfect reliability for a driverless car. This pragmatic group of people might agree that driverless cars should become legal once the operating system can drive better than a human driver. Rationally, such a reliability benchmark makes a
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. An MDBF, however, is a bit of a clumsy term. We propose a term that’s easier to say. The MDBF of driverless cars should be measured as a driverless car’s humansafe level. After all, 100 years ago early car-makers quantified the power of their engines in a metric that people of
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the number and types of hardware sensors. A federally regulated system of humansafe levels would be a boon for nearly everyone involved in the driverless-car industry. A driverless car’s humansafe rating would be a core part of its market appeal. Car companies could build special “super safe” cars with high humansafe ratings
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one paper on operating system security explained it, “Current operating systems are like ships before compartmentalization was invented: every leak can sink the ship.”8 Driverless cars need an operating system that’s highly modular and redundant, similar to those that guide airplanes. Airplanes are famous for their redundant architectural design, much
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battle of technology. As it waged on, massive government investment in research accelerated the development of several important military technologies that today guide the modern driverless car, including computers, lasers, and radar. After World War II ended, these wartime technologies would play a key role in the development of electronic highways in
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. The problem was that forward-thinking USDOT personnel ran into the same problem as did visionary GM engineers a few decades earlier: their vision for driverless cars preceded the necessary technology to successfully drive them. The history of intelligent transportation systems During the 1980s, information technology was reshaping industries. In 1986, to
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technology-intensive initiative inside a gigantic federal agency responsible for every form of transportation, including airplanes, highways, public transit, and automobiles, introduced the risk that driverless-car technology would die a slow death at the hands of well-intended bureaucrats. In the beginning of the Automated Highway System Program, optimism reigned. In
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plans of federal transportation officials is … V2X research. Rethinking connected cars Federal transportation officials have the resources and legislative muscle to throw their support behind driverless cars and save tens of thousands of lives each year. In 2013, the NHTSA took its first wobbly steps toward thinking about full autonomy, releasing a
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development of backward-looking V2X technologies despite the fact that in the past decade, rapid improvements in artificial-intelligence software and hardware sensors have made driverless cars an increasingly mature and viable solution. In fact, as recently as 2014, the NHTSA seriously considered using a precious political silver bullet on mandating that
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.15 It is tempting to suggest improvements to highway infrastructure. Even advanced programmers wistfully daydream about how much easier it would be to program a driverless car if only there were barcodes embedded into the road or radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags placed at every intersection. Investing in intelligent highway infrastructure is
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faster rate than the hardware that supports it. The best place to invest precious research dollars would be in developing intelligent robotic operating systems for driverless cars whose abilities will improve continuously, maybe even exponentially. The best infrastructure is “dumb infrastructure.” Autonomous driving expert Brad Templeton from Singularity University believes that the
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more for prioritized routing. The very simplicity of internet infrastructure reduces its potential management headaches and minimizes potential political controversy. Similarly, in the case of driverless cars, the simpler the transportation infrastructure, the more bureaucracy-free, flexible, and adaptive it will be. Brad Templeton draws another useful analogy between intelligent cars and
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notoriously difficult. When the technology involves cars and safety, striking the right balance between encouragement and prudence becomes even more challenging. Recent, updated regulations for driverless cars passed by the state of California are a good example of the regulatory landmines that lie ahead, highlighting the need for strong and well-defined
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to flourish. The regions and nations with the most forward-thinking policy will reap future economic benefits associated with being the epicenter of driverless-car technology. If the development of driverless cars had stopped dead after Demo 97, this book wouldn’t exist. Our brief tour through history has revealed that for most of
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Spectrum Online, November 19, 2014, http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car 9 Anatomy of a Driverless Car Driverless cars “see” and “hear” by taking in real-time data that flows in from several different types of on-board sensors. Cars recognize their current location
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potentially fatal shortcoming when placed on speeding vehicles. Because of these limitations, the best application for structured-light cameras is in indoor settings, perhaps guiding driverless cars through parking garages, or inside the car’s cabin, sensing the physical whereabouts and movements of the car’s passengers. Digital cameras continue to improve
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5. Dash, https://dash.by/ 10 Deep Learning: The Final Piece of the Puzzle Deep-learning software is a key catalyst behind recent advances in driverless-car performance and safety. Remember the challenges of object recognition and scene understanding? Deep-learning software is breaking down decades-old barriers in artificial intelligence research
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, as roboticists and computer scientists find creative new ways to apply deep learning to automate artificial perception and response. Since 2012, deep learning has given driverless cars the ability to “see,” and has improved the language comprehension of speech-recognition software. In a high-profile demonstration of its power and versatility, in
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phone with a simple app that guides us to a particular destination. Some more sophisticated versions of these apps factor traffic information into their calculation. Driverless cars will contain sophisticated predictive traffic analytics software that uses machine-learning software to learn from real-time and historic traffic data. By studying traffic patterns
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more rational and obedient manner. Their advanced route-planning software will quickly model several different future traffic situations by playing out “what if” scenarios. As driverless cars inform one another of their chosen route-plan, overseeing software will distribute cars along several different routes, making the journey more efficient for everybody. As
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unresolved issue for policymakers and car manufacturers of the future will be defining how accurate the software that makes traffic predictions will need to be. Driverless cars carrying human passengers will not be the only vehicles to benefit from powerful route-planning and traffic-prediction software. Autonomous commercial freight and delivery vehicles
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same regulation and consumer watchdog groups that strive to protect people against government surveillance and corporate data brokers will extend their future efforts to driverless cars as well. Driverless cars will have unique privacy problems. Cars are mobile, and once they’re equipped with several high-definition video cameras plus super-human perception and
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recognition ability, they could morph into ubiquitous robotic spies. The potential for abuse is high. Driverless cars could photograph their passengers or pedestrians walking by the side of the road and run those photos through face-recognition software. Their face-recognition software
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United States, since car insurance is regulated at the state level, consumers could pressure their state governments to eventually eliminate mandatory car insurance requirements altogether. Driverless cars will force the law and insurance companies to reconsider how fault is assigned in car accidents. Insurance legal scholar Robert Peterson writes that insurance and
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renaissance, a new golden age of automobiles. In the 1950s and 1960s, car designers created cars with showy large fins, painted in unapologetically cheerful colors. Driverless car designers will specialize in shamelessly luxurious or cleverly designed multipurpose flexible interiors that enable people to sleep, eat, and work inside their cars. As safety
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decades, the consumption of pornography has been an accelerating force in the development of technologies like the VHS video player, streaming video, and the internet. Driverless cars could offer a comfortable new viewing environment for fans of pornography to immerse themselves in, particularly as virtual-reality goggles like the Oculus Rift make
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controls; Moravec’s paradox; Object recognition; SuperVision Automation bias, 56 Automotive control software. See Controls engineering Automotive industry Competition with software companies, 46–55, 63 Driverless car impact on, 47, 52–55 Future of car design, 266–268 Incremental approach, 45 Industry insularity, 49–51 Possible strategies, 52–55 Automotive operating system
Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
by Hannah Fry · 17 Sep 2018 · 296pp · 78,631 words
us to decide what our justice system should look like. We’ll find algorithms used by doctors to over-rule their own diagnoses; algorithms within driverless cars that insist we define our morality; algorithms that are weighing in on our expressions of emotion; and algorithms with the power to undermine our democracies
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packed with crazy engineers, excited spectators and foolhardy petrolheads who all shared a similar dream. To be the first people on earth to witness a driverless car win a race. The race had been organized by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA (nicknamed the Pentagon’s ‘mad science’ division).3
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then they had an ingenious idea: why not create a competition? They would openly invite any interested people across the country to design their own driverless cars and race them against each other on a long-distance track, with a prize of $1 million for the winner.6 It would be the
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miles, and DARPA hadn’t made it easy. There were steep climbs, boulders, dips, gullies, rough terrain and the odd cactus to contend with. The driverless cars would have to navigate dirt tracks that were sometimes only a few feet wide. Two hours before the start, the organizers gave each team a
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late 2017, Philip Hammond, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the government’s intention to have fully driverless cars – without a safety attendant on board – on British roads by 2021. Daimler has promised driverless cars by 2020,15 Ford by 2021,16 and other manufacturers have made their own, similar forecasts. Talk in
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the press has moved on from questioning whether driverless cars will happen to addressing the challenges we’ll face when they do
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. ‘Should your driverless car hit a pedestrian to save your life?’ asked the New York Times in June 2016;17 and, in
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EU’s $1 billion Eureka Prometheus Project in the 1990s.24 With every new project, the dream of the driverless car seemed, tantalizingly, only just around the corner. On the surface, building a driverless car sounds as if it should be relatively easy. Most humans manage to master the requisite skills to drive. Plus
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neural networks that are used to great effect to detect tumours in breast tissue; you’d think they should be perfectly suited to help a driverless car technology ‘see’ its surroundings. By 2004, neural networks (albeit in slightly more rudimentary form than today’s state-of-the-art versions) were already whirring
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filmed using a model no more than a few feet long. It’s a trick that works well on the big screen. But in a driverless car, when two thin parallel lines could either be a road ahead on the horizon or the trunk of a nearby tree, accurately judging distance becomes
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sources – the camera, the LiDAR, the radar – can do enough to understand what’s going on around a vehicle. The trick to successfully building a driverless car is combining them. Which would be a relatively easy task if they all agreed about what they were actually seeing, but is a great deal
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more difficult when they don’t. Consider the tumbleweed that stumped one of the cars in the first DARPA Grand Challenge and imagine your driverless car finds itself in the same position. The LiDAR is telling you there is an obstacle ahead. The camera agrees. The radar, which can pass through
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entirely the wrong place. Most of the time, it doesn’t much matter. We know where we are and can dismiss incorrect information. But a driverless car doesn’t have a ground truth of its position. When it’s driving down a single lane of a highway, less than 4 metres wide
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simultaneously – for example, in attempting to diagnose what’s wrong with a patient on the basis of their symptoms,* or finding the position of a driverless car on the basis of sensor readings. In theory, any disease, any point on the map, could represent the underlying truth. All you need to do
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is weigh up the evidence to decide which is most likely to be right. And on that point, finding the location of a driverless car turns out to be rather similar to a problem that puzzled Thomas Bayes, the British Presbyterian minister and talented mathematician after whom the theorem is
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updating your belief about its position until you end up with an answer you’re confident in. In some sense, the true position of the driverless car is analogous to that of the red ball. Instead of a person sitting with their back to the table, there’s an algorithm trying to
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of the millennium, engineers had had enough practice with cruise missiles, rocket ships and aircraft to know how to tackle the position problem. Getting a driverless car to answer the question ‘Where am I?’ still wasn’t trivial, but with a bit of Bayesian thinking it was at least achievable. Between the
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Bayesian ideas that helped solve the other questions the car needed to answer: ‘What’s around me?’ and ‘What should I do?’† So, should your driverless car hit a pedestrian to save your life? Let’s pause for a moment to consider the second of those questions. Because, on this very topic
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two evils. It’s known as the trolley problem, after the runaway tram that was the subject of the original formulation. In the case of driverless cars, it goes something like this. Imagine, some years into the future, you’re a passenger in an autonomous vehicle, happily driving along a city street
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what people think the answer should be. As a thought experiment, it remains a firm favourite of technology reporters and other journalists, but all the driverless car experts I interviewed rolled their eyes as soon as the trolley problem was mentioned. Personally, I still have a soft spot for it. Its simplicity
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forces us to recognize something important about driverless cars, to challenge how we feel about an algorithm making a value judgement on our own, and others’, lives. At the heart of this new technology
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technology to fit in with us, rather than the other way around. But I’m also sympathetic to the aloof reaction it receives in the driverless car community. They, more than anyone, know how far away we are from having to worry about the trolley problem as a reality. Breaking the rules
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ever since the DARPA challenge. I asked Paul Newman, professor of robotics at the University of Oxford and founder of Oxbotica, a company that builds driverless cars and tests them on the streets of Britain, how his latest autonomous vehicles worked, and he explained as follows: ‘It’s many, many millions of
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code, but I could frame the entire thing as probabilistic inference. All of it.’36 But while Bayesian inference goes some way towards explaining how driverless cars are possible, it also explains how full autonomy, free from any input by a human driver, is a very, very difficult nut to crack. Imagine
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the side. ‘But for the longest time,’ Newman explains, ‘it does look like you’re going to hit each other.’ How do you teach a driverless car not to panic in that situation? You don’t want the vehicle to drive off the side of the road, trying to avoid a collision
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’s another layer of difficulty to contend with when trying to build that sci-fi fantasy of a go-anywhere, do-anything, steering-wheel-free driverless car, and it’s one that goes well beyond the technical challenge. A fully autonomous car will also have to deal with the tricky problem of
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on-board algorithms will be to avoid collisions wherever possible. And that changes the dynamics of the road. If you stand in front of a driverless car – it has to stop. If you pull out in front of one at a junction – it has to behave submissively. In the words of one
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of writing, Waymo cars aren’t allowed to go just anywhere: they’re ‘geo-fenced’ into a small, pre-defined area. So too are the driverless cars Daimler and Ford propose to have on the roads by 2020 and 2021 respectively. They’re ride-hailing cars confined to a pre-decided go
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-zone. And that does make the problem of autonomy quite a lot simpler. Paul Newman thinks this is the future of driverless cars we can expect: ‘They’ll come out working in an area that’s very well known, where their owners are extremely confident that they’ll
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meantime, they hope to sell lots of vehicles with the latest sophisticated driver-assistance technology.39 So how about that driver-assistance technology? After all, driverless cars are not an all-or-nothing proposition. Driverless technology is categorized using six different levels: from level 0 – no automation whatsoever – up to to level
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wheel will stop the car setting off those pesky alarms reminding you of your responsibilities. Other programmes are finding the same issues. Although Uber’s driverless cars need human intervention every 13 miles,56 getting drivers to pay attention remains a struggle. On 18 March 2018, an Uber self-driving vehicle fatally
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be to deal with the situations demanding the highest level of skill. It’s a fact that has also been borne out in experiments with driverless car simulations. One study, which let people read a book or play on their phones while the car drove itself, found that it took up to
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car because I think its full autonomy will keep me safe. Marketing strategies aside, I can’t help but wonder if we’re thinking about driverless cars in the wrong way altogether. By now, we know that humans are really good at understanding subtleties, at analysing context, applying experience and distinguishing patterns
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. So, knowing that errors are inevitable, knowing that if we proceed we have no choice but to embrace uncertainty, the conundrums within the world of driverless cars will force us to decide how good something needs to be before we’re willing to let it loose on our streets. That’s an
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Further: Ford Will Have a Fully Autonomous Vehicle in Operation by 2021, https://corporate.ford.com/innovation/autonomous-2021.html. 17. John Markoff, ‘Should your driverless car hit a pedestrian to save your life?’, New York Times, 23 June 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/technology/should-your
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-driverless-car-hit-a-pedestrian-to-save-your-life.html. 18. Clive Thompson, Anna Wiener, Ferris Jabr, Rahawa Haile, Geoff Manaugh, Jamie Lauren Keiles, Jennifer Kahn and
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are from private conversation. 39. Jeff Sabatini, ‘The one simple reason nobody is talking realistically about driverless cars’, Car and Driver, Oct. 2017, https://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-one-reason-nobody-is-talking-realistically-about-driverless-cars-feature. 40. William Langewiesche, ‘The human factor’, Vanity Fair, 17 Sept. 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com
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–3 hidden dangers 133–4 ironies of 133–7 reduction in human ability 134, 137 see also driverless cars Autonomous Emergency Braking system 139 autonomy 129, 130 full 127, 130, 134, 138 autopilot systems A330 132 driverless cars 134 pilot training 134 sloppy 137 Tesla 134, 135, 138 bail comparing algorithms to human judges
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, 135, 138 balance 112 Banksy 147, 185 Baril, David 171–2 Barstow 113 Bartlett, Jamie 44 Barwell, Clive 145–7 Bayes’ theorem 121–4, 225n30 driverless cars 124 red ball experiment 123–4 simultaneous hypotheses 122–3 Bayes, Thomas 123–4 Bayesian inference 99 beauty 184–5 Beck, Andy 82, 95 Bell
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also breast cancer cancer diagnoses study 79–80 Car and Driver magazine 130–1 Carnegie 117 Carnegie Mellon University 115 cars 113–40 driverless see driverless cars see also DARPA (US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) categories of algorithms association 9 classification 9 filtering 9–10 prioritization 8 Centaur Chess 202 Charts
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shopping habits 28, 29, 31 supermarket data 26–8 superstore data 28–31 cyclists 129 Daimler 115, 130 DARPA (US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) driverless cars 113–16 investment in 113 Grand Challenge (2004) 113–14, 117 course 114 diversity of vehicles 114 GPS coordinates 114 problems 114–15 top-scoring
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–5 doctors 81 unique skills of 81–2 Dodds, Peter 176–7 doppelgängers 161–3, 164, 169 Douglas, Neil 162–3 driver-assistance technology 131 driverless cars 113–40 advantages 137 algorithms and 117 Bayes’ red ball analogy 123–4 ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) 118–19 autonomy 129
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project 110 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 135 Navlab 117 Netflix 8, 188 random forests 59 neural networks 85–6, 95, 119, 201, 219–20n11 driverless cars 117–18 in facial recognition 166–7 predicting performances of films 183 New England Journal of Medicine 94 New York City subway crime 147–50
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true positives 67 Trump election campaign 41, 44 trust 17–18 tumours 90, 93–4 Twain, Mark 193 Twitter 36, 37, 40 filtering 10 Uber driverless cars 135 human intervention 135 uberPOOL 10 United Kingdom (UK) database of facial images 168 facial recognition algorithms 161 genetic tests for Huntington’s disease 110
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and Twitter 40 University of Oregon 188–90 University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center 99–100 University of Washington 168 unmanned vehicles see driverless cars URLs 37, 38 US National Academy of Sciences 171 Valenti, Jack 181 Vanilla (band) 178–9 The Verge 138 Volvo 128 Autonomous Emergency Braking system
Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler · 25 Mar 2018
control and power over a machine and the feeling of freedom, movement, pride and pleasure the desire for autonomous vehicles is not something new [116]. Driverless cars have been described in some detail for several decades now: at first as science fiction and later in scientific publications. In some fictional cases, the
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calculations of the number of miles self-driving cars have to be tested before they can be assessed as roadworthy because the algorithms required for driverless cars undergo self-learning in multiple road traffic situations. The more traffic situations these algorithms are exposed to, the better prepared they are to master a
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but that it might give birth to a new industry, thus initiating international competition [7]. Wanting to be at the forefront in the development of driverless cars, South Korea is building the world’s biggest test arena near Hwaseong. K-City, as it is called, is the size of a small town
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in the idea of autonomous driving, as shown by an analysis of more than 100,000 posts on various social networks. Since Google presented its driverless car in 2010, the number of posts on this subject has doubled from year to year. The analysis shows that people have twice as many positive
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habits have to be discarded. The bastion of certain knowledge must be left behind in order to find a new perspective. The essence of the driverless car consists of the processing unit and the technologies required to recognise and interpret the environment, such as cameras, lidar, radar and ultrasound. While in motion
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organisation of production processes. Autonomous driving helps to reduce emissions in many ways, irrespective of the powertrain (combustion engine or electric drive). As already stated, driverless cars have a particularly efficient driving style because they can Autonomous Driving 28 brake and accelerate in a smooth and anticipatory manner due to the information
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requires the collaboration of companies with various skills. The Urban Challenge marked the transition from academic research to industrial development. Google started to work on driverless cars in 2008 and two years later officially announced its self-driving-car programme. Many carmakers such as Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, GM, Nissan, Honda, Toyota
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60 per cent more vehicles and can be located in an unattractive location on the city periphery. ENERGY It is also to be expected that driverless cars will reduce environmental pollution irrespective of their drive systems (combustion engines or electric drive). In the United States, current fuel economy for cars is about
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road transport. But even if one substantially reduces the figures explained in Box 8.1, there is still considerable economic potential to be realised from driverless cars. An opposing argument might state that self-driving cars are so convenient that far more mileage will be driven. We will also have new user
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result from reduced fuel consumption, improved productivity (working in vehicles will be possible), fewer accidents and lower labour costs (with trucks). In the United States, driverless cars could lead to savings of $1.3 trillion per annum. The main saving will result from the lower number of accidents. Self-driving trucks could
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autonomous vehicles and certain roads may later be prohibited for manually controlled vehicles. It would be best, however, if at some point the transition to driverless cars is accelerated by means of legislation. TYPES OF VEHICLES Unsurprisingly, there are also various ideas about the types of vehicle that will be on the
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. Even among car manufacturers, suppliers and technology companies, there is still great uncertainty about when and with what intensity the existing concepts and prototypes of driverless cars should go into series production and where the best sales markets are. The answer to the following question could create more clarity: What is Google
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strong competitor for public transport. This means that politicians’ and journalists’ opinions and convictions will have a key role to play in the spread of driverless cars [42]. Politicians and legislation will determine the rules and regulations under which automated and autonomous vehicles will go into operation. Not only will national law
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SHOPS AND INSURANCE COMPANIES Car dealerships and repair shops are also affected by autonomous driving, as they have to convince customers of the advantages of driverless cars and address their concerns and fears regarding the technology. Even more important is the development of the required expertise to service and repair vehicles equipped
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to put its self-driving vehicles on the roads. Bosch is also Autonomous Driving 182 cooperating with GPS maker TomTom to generate mapping data for driverless cars. Bosch is also involved in the further development of driverassistance systems as well as V-to-V and V-to-I communication. Mobileye provides many
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of the artificial intelligence. This technology could be provided in products from other industries to car manufacturers, who do not develop their own software for driverless cars. So far, Apple has tested its software and sensors with three Lexus vehicles in the streets around San Francisco. It has recently recruited numerous engineers
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, Japan and Australia show that consumers are fundamentally interested in autonomous driving [32, 28, 74]. They eagerly anticipate new driver-assistance systems and, by extension, driverless cars. This technology is regarded as a change in mobility which will affect many other aspects of people’s lives. Those who are highly technology oriented
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traffic and reduce the number and duration of traffic jams. In the eyes of commuters around the world, this is a particularly critical argument for driverless cars, especially in megacities [64]. It is also linked to the hope of reducing fuel consumption and emissions of carbon dioxide and particulate matter. Amidst all
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of the euphoria about driverless cars, study respondents repeatedly asked about an issue touched upon in Chapter 7: What will autonomous cars do to the pleasure of driving? All over the
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to control one’s own mobility is more than just driving: it has to do with joie de vivre, with self-determination, status and satisfaction. Driverless cars pose the threat of forfeiting the driving experience to the car’s software, inter-vehicle optimisation algorithms and the infrastructure. Many clients see this as
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rule, these clients welcome technological progress and are early adopters who are very willing to embrace new features and functions. For the phase in which driverless cars become more widespread, it is vital that there are no major accidents, and the legal framework for using such cars must first be resolved. There
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are in use, passengers will learn to find other ways to fill their time and gain confidence in the performance and dependability of these technologies. Driverless cars will change mobility, and people will need time to adapting to these changes; above all, their behaviour will need to gradually shift. (2) Autonomous driving
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rapidly, an innovation must offer benefits that are 10 times better than what existing alternatives can provide. This can create a dilemma, especially when promoting driverless cars. On the one hand, we have a euphoric industry that wants to launch a radically new product; on the other, there are drivers who will
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though there are many new functions. In many markets, multipliers and influencers will play a role in promoting such a radical new product as the driverless car. CHAPTER 22 NEW TYPES, NEW SEGMENTS Numerous examples from a variety of industries show that successfully launching radical product innovation will require the assistance of
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followers. Their tweets have a reach that classic communication channels could only achieve with major financial investment. One potentially important multiplier in the field of driverless cars is Jason Statham, a British actor and dedicated Audi fan. He can boast over 11 million subscribers on Instagram and has over 55 million Facebook
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not take into consideration the technical development of vehicle automation. These laws are often many decades old and refer to horses and carriages rather than driverless cars, giving the impression that technology has left legislation behind in some areas [10, 19]. The definition of the degree of a vehicle’s automation (Levels
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, in doing so, generate meaning. SKETCHES AND DRAFTS The sketches shown in Figures 27.1 and 27.2 express the ideas, thoughts and feelings that driverless cars inspired in Audi designers. Although not every facet of these visions has been fully implemented, it is already evident that 268 Autonomous Driving Figure 27
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.3. Audi Designers’ Drafts of Short-Distance Vehicles. Source: Audi AG. 270 Autonomous Driving customisable exterior. In contrast to today’s cars, the design of driverless cars will be dedicated to entirely new usage situations. Furthermore, designers are also considering other ways for passengers to get into and out of cars, and
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is to help create a structure for the occupants’ 400 billion passenger hours. Figure 27.4 shows two drafts depicting a work environment in a driverless car. The first depicts an office scenario in which the windows serve as screens and the laptop is linked to the Internet. Figure 27.4. Audi
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-owned cars, the booming driver assistance systems market is the gateway to automated driving technology. In a parallel development, we can expect to see completely driverless cars in cities in the form of fleets of shared autonomous vehicles. Automated driving affects every aspect of the vehicle brakes, steering, and sensors powertrain, and
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cooperation with an established car manufacturer (in this case Volvo). According to the latest announcements (December 2016), Google now wants to discontinue the development of driverless cars and to cooperate with car manufacturers instead. This would make it possible to start a commercial service with self-driving cars by the end of
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be improved. It is also to be expected that cities, car manufacturers, railway and bus companies or new market players would operate entire fleets of driverless cars on the first and last mile. Professional fleet operation should significantly reduce the costs of purchasing, maintaining and repairing these vehicles, so the price of
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domestic product that car accidents currently cost every year could thus be appropriated otherwise. In 2016, the US Department of Transportation issued national guidelines for driverless cars. These guidelines comprise outlines on how manufacturers can obtain approval for autonomous vehicles, handling of collected data and details for cyber security defence [95]. So
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34.1). Box 34.1. Statement by Jose Castillo Jose Castillo, Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design, Harvard University, and architect In Santa Fe, driverless cars would be the solution for the severe traffic problems in and around Mexico City. With its population of 35,000, Santa Fe is one of
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dedicated to the topic of autonomous driving. For example, the German autobahn between Munich and Nuremberg has been equipped with the necessary infrastructure to allow driverless cars to be tested. There are also plans to establish the necessary technical prerequisites in some German cities so that within a few years, self-driving
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in selfdriving cars as far as the legal framework and procedures for permitting them in traffic are concerned; currently, no other country has as many driverless cars on the road. There are, however, efforts underway in the European Union to adapt legislation for autonomous driving as soon as possible and to equip
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Forbes, Head of the United Kingdom Government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, Department for Transport The UK government has defined a pathway to driverless cars to enable the testing and development of automated vehicle technology. The UK automotive industry is taking developments in the technologies that enable automated driving very
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public with the assurance that the technology is being developed safely and will improve their lives. In 2015, the UK government published The Pathway to Driverless Cars, a regulatory review of what will be necessary to enable the testing and development of automated vehicle technology. The publication of the Code of Practice
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technology. PROJECTS IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES Throughout the United States and Europe, there are multiple ongoing projects dedicated to developing, integrating and optimising driverless cars. In the course of the CityMobil project, several self-driving buses have already been put into service on the roads of many European cities. Empirical
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the years ahead. Additional financial incentives are to be anticipated, since many state and federal government representatives frequently emphasise the financial and social significance of driverless cars. The governments of states with a tradition of automotive manufacturing such as Michigan, Indiana and Ohio are concerned about the efforts of IT giants in
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started working together to set up an autonomous driving test area. South Korea’s road traffic regulations were revised in November 2016 and now allow driverless cars to be deployed on public roads. At present, there are eight autonomous vehicles registered with the Department of Transportation of South Korea that may be
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Ethics and Automated Vehicles, in: Meyer, G., Beiker, S., Road Vehicles Automation, Berlin, 93 102. [52] Great Britain Department of Transport, 2015: The Pathway to Driverless Cars. [53] Grundwald, A., 2016: Societal Risk Constellations for Autonomous Driving, Analysis, Historical Context and Assessment, in: Maurer, M., Gerdes, C. J., Lenz, B., Winner, H
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, 317, 345 Driver, 235 role, 235 238 Driver distraction, 55 causes and consequences, 278 Driver-assistance systems, 53, 71, 160, 174, 222, 298, 333, 353 Driverless cars, 3, 7, 27 28, 222, 233, 244 taxis, 302 vans, 406 vehicles, 168 Index Driverless Audi RS7, 227 229 Driverless Race Car of Audi, 5
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and drafts, 267 Audi designers’ drafts of short-distance vehicles, 269 270 Audi designers’ sketches of long-distance vehicles, 268 Budii car concept, 272 273 driverless cars, 267 269 interview with Houchan Shoeibi, 271 272 Nissan Teatro for Dayz, 273 274 Volkswagen Sedric, 274 275 Vehicle-to-cloud communication (V-to-C
The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle · 4 Sep 2019 · 374pp · 111,284 words
will start by discussing the positive case and reviewing the potential impact, before moving on to the criticisms and problems. The potential and the promise Driverless cars are not a fantasy: they are already working – admittedly only, so far, in restricted areas, such as parts of the city of Phoenix, Arizona. The
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state of California has recently approved new rules allowing driverless cars to operate without a human driver sitting behind the wheel. In the UK the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, told the BBC that he
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aimed to have “fully driverless cars” in use by 2021. About 50 companies, including Alphabet, Apple, Ford, GM, Toyota, and Uber, are already testing self-driving cars in California. Indeed, more
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evidence, I hope, to enable you to make up your own mind on this question. You can readily understand the reasons for the enthusiasm for driverless cars. Partly, this is the matter of cost saving, referred to above. But the advantages go well beyond this. Human drivers kill 1.2 million people
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old and infirm members of society who can no longer drive, as well as all those who never could drive, who, in a world with driverless cars, would not need to drive. They would have as much mobility as the rest of the population, freed from the inadequacies of public transport and
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a floating pool. A joint study by the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group sees substantial scope for the sharing of rides in driverless cars, thereby undermining the market for public transport.6 Elon Musk has said that “owning a human-driven vehicle will be similar to owning a horse
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, etc.). Additionally, there would be less demand for space to park cars that remain idle most of the time. While they are waiting for users, driverless cars can be parked end to end and stacked. This could potentially transform urban landscapes and free up much scarce space for other uses. In 2016
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US Congressional Committee that in the US parking takes up an area the size of Connecticut. By implication, if everything went according to plan with driverless cars, this space could be freed up for other uses. And the potential implications go wider still. Perhaps traffic wardens would also disappear as the need
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that will have come and gone in pretty short order. Fifty years ago, the job of traffic warden didn’t exist. If the enthusiasts for driverless cars are right, in less even than a normal human life span, it could now be headed for the scrap heap. And there are potentially major
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.) Indeed, this whole issue has been characterized by overoptimism since then – and it still is. In 2012 Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, said that driverless cars would be available to Google’s employees within a year and would be available on the commercial market in “no more than six years.” That
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seeing a large-scale move to driverless vehicles. For, even without the ride sharing and the switch from petrol to electric, the widespread use of driverless cars is not as straightforward as is usually implied. Feasibility is not the issue. Safety is. Demis Hassabis, one of the founders of DeepMind, said in
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the crash rate is higher for driverless vehicles.9 The study suggested that, when they occur, crashes are almost always not the fault of the driverless cars. The problem seems to be that human drivers find it difficult to interact with other vehicles when the latter are driverless. This is such a
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problem that some tech companies are trying to make driverless cars less robotic, even inducing them to cut corners, be aggressive, and inch forward at junctions. In fact, things aren’t quite so simple as even
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have been used to sitting passively while an automatic system did all the work and made all the decisions? This phenomenon is not restricted to driverless cars. The same thing applies to aircraft and ships. The most significant, and tragic, example of this is the loss of the Air France flight A330
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. This isn’t an issue with level 5 automated driving because in this case human intervention isn’t even possible. But, to reach level 5, driverless cars will need to be able to cope with all weather conditions, including fog, blizzards, and snow, be able to distinguish between a football being kicked
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, and be able to negotiate their way along streets crowded with people, often doing unpredictable, and sometimes apparently nonsensical, things. None of these things can driverless cars readily do now. Moreover, a way must be found of coping with unmapped roads and changes to road layouts. Wonderful though GPS is, it has
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their technical feasibility. But, quite apart from the important, but narrow, matter of driver, passenger, and third-party safety, there are three other problems that driverless cars throw up. Of course, accidents are a serious source of concern, but suppose that a nefarious person or organization was able to hack into the
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cause mass slaughter on an industrial scale by turning the whole transport system into a weapon. Second, there are also serious issues about privacy because driverless cars, of course, carry cameras that look outside and inside the car and transmit data about what they see. Who will own this data and who
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fatalities, there is room for driverless vehicles to cause some fatal accidents that a human driver could have avoided and yet for the introduction of driverless cars still to reduce the overall accident rate and the number of fatalities. But I don’t think this line will wash with either regulators or
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, a recent House of Lords Committee on the subject came to a skeptical conclusion and criticized the UK government for falling for the hype surrounding driverless cars. It recommended that research should be concentrated elsewhere, including marine and agriculture. There is some evidence that in private this is increasingly recognized within the
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away as soon as the bubble burst and people recovered their senses. If it is right to think of the time and treasure spent on driverless cars as reflecting a bubble, then there is going to be a serious reckoning when it bursts. The new tech monopolies have surplus billions to burn
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traditional taxi drivers. In the USA, it is claimed, they earn about $19 per hour compared to about $13 for traditional taxis.19 Admittedly, if driverless cars eventually proliferate, this increase in incomes for at least some commercial drivers may prove to be merely transitory. Yet, as I argued in the last
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under Roman law? (Surely not once the Singularity has occurred. But that must wait until the Epilogue.) Take, for instance, our well-worn example of driverless cars. When these vehicles are involved in accidents who is to be held responsible? What obligations fall upon other, human, drivers when interacting with driverless vehicles
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. 14 For a skeptical view of the prospects for driverless vehicles, see Christian Wolmar, “False Start,” The Spectator, July 7, 2018 and his book (2017) Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere, London: London Publishing Partnership. 15 Wikipedia (2018) “Military Robot,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_robot. 16 P. Lin et
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