It’s been seven months since my last post on self-driving
automobiles. Normally, that’s too short
a time to tackle the subject again even for many technical propositions, but
this one has been zooming along like a Ferrari.
Since November, a mass of work, most being completely proprietary to the
software companies, automakers, and electronics firms doing it, has been
finished. The otherwise beleaguered
gypsy cab companies Lyft and then Uber have been working with Ford and General
Motors toward offering driverless taxis.
Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have made their like ambitions
public. An elaborate artificial city
section in Ann Arbor, Michigan, complete with storefront facades, 13 different
traffic light varieties, expressway ramps, and parking meters, is being used by
at least five world-class car manufacturers to test their autonomous products,
and others are under construction in Ypsilanti, California, and Virginia. There has been an outpouring of articles,
ranging from Neal E. Boudette’s New York
Times “5 Things That Give Self-Driving Cars Headaches” to one of course much
better than the grammar of its headline, “As a senior citizen, a self-driving
car will be my godsend,” in the Washington
Post, and on to attempts to find the best related investment targets. There is also a subtopic taking form about
driverless large trucks, with many companies seeing them as a way of resolving
their long-standing driver shortages without sufficiently raising pay.
Although it is impossible to even decently estimate the
amount of money and person-hours currently going toward this effort, it is
crystal-clear that by 2020 or so such technology will be usable for ordinary
consumers. That, though, will prove to
be its least limiting factor.
The largest sticking point is the lack of a suitable
environment. At the least, places
allowing driverless vehicles will need large-scale Wi-Fi, for the constant
communication with online facilities these cars and trucks will require. Citywide or better still statewide or
nationwide wireless connectivity, built robustly and redundantly enough to make
outages almost nonexistent, is the best way of dealing with potholes (located
precisely through GPS), poor visibility on snowy roads (through detailed maps),
and detours (with up-to-the-minute rerouting instructions). Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of
infrastructure project that Congress has refused to fund. Ultimately, only countries willing to build such
a network will be able to fully implement driverless technology.
There is a set of additional problems which might be
described as barriers to mentality. The
first is one of the five headaches in Boudette’s story, described as “ethics on
the road.” One example he poses is a
ball, followed by children, bouncing into the car’s path, giving it no choices
beyond hitting the ball’s pursuers or crashing into something on the side of
the road and endangering its occupants. In
this and many other situations, some people will lose and others will be spared,
and there will be no human driver to explain his or her actions, only computer
code with unknown originators. Another
is bizarre accidents rare but not unheard of, which will kill people before
they are programmatically forestalled. A
third problem is one more from Boudette, “unpredictable humans,” which may
never be eliminated. (Could a modern-day
superbly maintained bullet train driven on its immaculate track by a completely
sober, prudent, and experienced engineer avoid tragedy when a person, suicidal
or otherwise, somehow appears, say, 130 feet directly in front of it, or half a
second away at its 180 miles per hour?)
The fourth issue concerns autonomous 18-wheel trucks, of which many
people will, even if mishap rates are microscopic, be terrified. Although it is clear that driverless vehicles
will prove vastly less dangerous than human-driven ones, resistance to the
accidents they will have, many of which would not take place if they were
manually driven, will still be at least a temporary problem.
What are the chances that we can overcome the concerns above? How might self-driving technology be
implemented in stages? What else will
happen with and around it? These will be
the subjects of next week’s post.