Working in the marketing department of MicksGarage naturally involves reading about the latest developments in the motor industry. In
recent times there has been an increase in the number of articles relating to news about self-driving cars. You may think that it’s inevitable that all cars will be
self-driving in the future especially with companies like Google involved, but it's far too dangerous. In fact, for it to work, these cars would need a
heart.
First, let’s look at the traffic implications, self-driving cars
may actually lead to more traffic. As driving becomes easier and more
convenient, people tend to live further away from work and cities. Take
motorways for example, they made longer commutes to work far more bearable. It
opened up the countryside for people looking for the dream house in the
countryside and consequently caused more traffic especially in what used to be
quiet countryside villages.
Why would a car need a heart? The technology in these cars is never going to be
perfect and it needs to be. There is no way to fully encode a piece of
software to think or function like a human brain. Can software be programmed to
make moral decisions in the event of an imminent crash? Could it make the
decision to swerve to avoid hitting a child and hit something else? Who knows
what a computer would do in a situation like that. If you have watched the movie i, Robot then you will remember Will Smith (Detective Del Spooner) pointing to his heart
and saying “nothing here, just lights and clockwork” after one of the NS-5 robots
rescued him instead of an 11 year old girl after a car accident.
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| The Self-Driving Car that Features in the i,Robot Movie |
What about a compromise between self-driving cars where a
human could get involved and override the car if needs be? Ok, but would a
human be vigilant enough in a situation like this to react in time? It’s doubtful,
considering the amount of drivers who still fall asleep at the wheel. I think
the companies who are building these robotic cars should start working closely
with some lawyers. Driving is probably one of the most dangerous things we do
every day, I would rather see more developments in making cars safer than
giving them a brain so to speak.
Words by Niall
Words by Niall
I too agree with the fact that the cars need the safer design than the brain which is been developed recent days. A self-driven car though sounds good, can prove to be dangerous as sometimes it may fail to perform at its most. All we could do is nothing but to regret!!
ReplyDeleteI'm a car fan. I love driving. And I'm all for driverless cars. Yet whenever I read about them, I keep seeing the same "Argh! Robot! Pitchforks!" arguments against them, so I thought I'd chip in my 2c here.
ReplyDeleteDriverless cars are not artificially intelligent machines. They're smart, but they're not sentient. They don't need to be. They just see better than we can, and react faster than we do. Google's self driving pod is only about as smart as a terrier, not the Terminator.
You have described the "Runaway Trolley" ethical scenario above, where the car has to decide whether to save one person, or ten people, at the cost of that one person's life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
The goal of driverless cars is to build a safe, smart system to avoid the trolley running away in the first place, not to make an ethical call on who lives or who dies. You can build safer cars, AND driverless cars. They're not mutually exclusive.
Instead of a driverless system with the option of human intervention, we're seeing the opposite, computer intervention in human-driven cars. For example, in Mercedes Benz's and Volvo's automatic brakes.
It's interesting that "I, Robot" is used as an example of AI gone wrong. It's based on a story by Isaac Asimov, the creator of the Three Law of Robotics, and a man who's probably written more about human/robot interactions than anyone else. And in nearly all his stories, wherever there's a problem between humans and their robots, the root cause of the problem is down to the squishy meatbags, rather than their creations.
When the driverless cars become mainstream we will have the option to live in an urban area, and have a short, automated commute, or live in the sticks, and have a long, automated commute? With our dispersed, one-off, road-frontage-worshipping rural spread, whether or not the car drives itself will be far less significant than say, whether I can get decent broadband, or will the fast food delivery get here before it goes cold?
TL;DR It's the human's fault, not the robots. And they're not robots, they're just smart.