Slashdot Mirror
Why Self-Driving Cars Should Never Be Fully Autonomous (roboticstrends.com)
An anonymous reader writes: David Mindell, an MIT professor, says self-driving cars should never be fully autonomous. "There's an idea that progress in robotics leads to full autonomy. That may be a valuable idea to guide research but when automated and autonomous systems get into the real world, that's not the direction they head. We need to rethink the notion of progress, not as progress toward full autonomy, but as progress toward trusted, transparent, reliable, safe autonomy that is fully interactive: The car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it." Mindell writes, "Google's utopian autonomy is a more brittle, less functional solution than a rich, human-centered automation."
safe autonomy that is fully interactive: The car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it."
Sure, if I own the car it should do only what I want it to when I want it to, but why should I own a car at all? I use a car only a few times a month, driving maybe 5000 miles/year total. Why should I spend $30,000 on a depreciating asset and devote 200 sq ft of space towards housing it.
I want to call a car and have it come when I want it, take me where I want to go, then go away until I need it again.
There are already systems that will warn you if you're drifting out of your lane, and systems that will warn you/apply brakes if you're in danger of collision. And of course systems that will plot a route for you and give you step by step directions to your destination have been around for quite awhile at this point.
If the goal isn't full autonomy then it doesn't really seem like we need to do much more research and development. How boring will it be to be "driving" a car that can do 99% of the driving by itself but insists on you paying attention (at least intermittently) to do the remaining 1%, instead of kicking back and enjoying your time doing something else?
(And note that anything less than full automation will provide little benefit to the biggest commercial interest, long distance trucking. Having to pay a person to ride along and babysit the automation doesn't save anything over just making that person drive in the first place.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
“The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as driving to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that,” -- David Mindell
I'm not sure I agree with that. Sounds similar to someone 150 years ago saying "The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as growing and hunting the food to feed my family to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that".
People get comfortable with a great number of things if you make their life significantly better even while asking them to give up a little control.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The guy in the article has just written a book about robots and automation. It was released today.
The purpose of this article, and the connection with driverless cars, is to draw attention to the book, so he can sell more copies.
If he had brought up reasonable points, I could accept that, but the points he brings up in the article seem rather lame to me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From the article:
“[Full automation is] just proven to be a loser of an approach in a lot of other domains,” Mindell says. “I’m not arguing this from first principles. There are 40 years’ worth of examples.”
For how many of those 40 years have today's sensors, computing hardware, and AI been available?
It's possible that fully automated driving will turn out to be hard like commercial fusion power, or like commercial space travel. I think it's more likely, though, that it will turn out to be hard like speech recognition or cheap, lightweight flying drones -- each popularly regarded to be "a few years away" for decades, until suddenly it was here, courtesy of a few research advances and a great deal of exponential improvement in computer hardware.
Incorrect in principal and practice. It's like the angry bear vs the two people. You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other human being. The cars' don't need to be perfect - they just need to beat a human mind that is NOT an expert. If the car by itself can do better than a human without the AI, than it is sufficiently good to replace the current model that is human without the AI.
The idea that we need to achieve the maximum possible result of human+AI ignores the current situation's inherent problems of poor drivers, the elderly, drunk drivers, children, etc. etc. etc.
Parents of teenagers, children of the elderly, alcoholics and their loved ones ALL are VERY comfortable with the idea of having the car drive, not the person. They will provide the demand and market. Once their demand is met, then simple continuing research will eventually make EVERYBODY comfortable with letting the AI drive. If you are OK with the AI drive your teenager, your grandma, and your drunk cousin Joe - knowing they might be in the car next to you, then you will be OK with letting them drive you.
His comparison of other modes of transportation such as space, submarine and airplane, is also flawed.
The main reason we never automated those is that their need for accuracy was much much higher than we have for automobiles and up until recently, computers have not had the real ability to beat a trained, expert human. But in cars, they don't have to beat an expert, just a licensed and impaired human - drunk, young, elderly for example.
A better comparison is to look at welding. Originally people welded. Then robots came along and were better. Automated welding has taken over a large proportion of welding, we don't have humans over-riding them. Why? Because the robots are better at it than humans in most cases.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com