Full Self Driving is Likely Bullsh*t
Why is the asterisk the go to replacement for letters in curse words? I mean, it hardly looks like any of them. How am I supposed to learn new profanity without contextual clues?
A Waymo self-driving car got pulled over for driving down the oncoming lane. (they did not ticket the car because it is too difficult to ticket the car’s owner when it’s a corporation.). I think Google’s explanation really highlights why fully autonomous cars are likely, at this point and for the foreseeable future, bullshit. Google claims that the car drove the wrong way down the lane because:
Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli told The Verge in an email that the vehicle, which had no passengers, drove into the oncoming lane when it “encountered inconsistent construction signage,” and that “it was blocked from navigating back into the correct lane.”
Roads are made for humans, or at least human drivers. This sounds like a truism, but it profoundly affects the chase for fully self-driving cars. Humans can handle a much higher level of chaos than machines can. We are really good at picking out important information in ambiguous situations. A confusing construction sign would almost certainly not send a human down the wrong lane because we can decipher all of the other contextual cluses that tell use heading into incoming traffic is, you know, bad.
Computers have a much harder time with that level of chaos. They are logic and rule driven. While they can tolerate some ambiguity, the level of ambiguity they can handle is significantly less than the level humans can. And that is significant problem for self-driving cars. We are not going to change our roads to comply with their needs. Outside limited, well-defined areas, then, it seems as if fully autonomous self-driving cars have a very limited possibility of ever coming to pass. And that is before we get to what the world looks like if they do come to pass. How are people with disabilities going to be able to use taxis that have no one aboard to help them? What do our roads look like if these things replace mass transit?
I am not trying to downplay the very real advances in safety this research has produced. Lane assist, intelligent cruise control, automatic safety braking, parking assistance — all massive advances that make driving a lot safer. I know that I was probably more comfortable giving the keys to the car to my teenage son than my dad was, in part because of all the safety features modern cars possess that did not exist when I was getting my license. (It helps that my son is a better driver than me. I put that down to him having a better teacher than I did. Dad.).
My point is not that automation is bullshit. My point is that replacing humans is a difference in kind more difficult than augmenting humans, not just a difference in degree. Any predictions about self-driving cars needs to take that difference into account. Too many in the media and the industry don’t seem to.
I once interviewed a new tech CEO who had just come off a very, very high profile self-driving car team. (I promised him I would never reveal the source, or the company, as this person was under a very strict NDA.) I asked them why they would leave one of the best gigs in the business for people interested in product design, self-driving vehicles, or automotive.
They explained that their team realized that, to achieve a six-sigma level of safety in self-driving vehicles (that is for every million operations or decisions made by the vehicle, only about 3.4 could result in an error or unsafe condition), the computing power of the car would double the car's power requirements.
In other words, it wasn't a problem with the software or the hardware. It was a power problem where a full half of the car's charge or gas tank would be required to run the computer driving the car, using any hardware that would be available for the foreseeable future.
When the team made that discovery, they soft abandoned the project, which is why this person left. Their former company formally announced that it was going to be discontinued a year later (about six months after I did my interview).
I remember this whenever I see a company that offers a vehicle with a "self-driving" mode. That mode probably works great the vast majority of the time -- I'm sure that there's an exponential increase in power consumption to achieve very small reductions in risk.
That said, a car that's safe 99 percent of the time can kill you or someone else pretty quickly if you spend more than a few hours on the road every year.
Couldn't ticket the car because it was owned by a corporation? Don't they know corporations are people?