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Autonomous Cars Aren't As Smart as They're Cracked Up To Be (computerworld.com)
Gill Pratt, executive technical adviser at Toyota, offers a note of caution, even as more car companies start putting AI elements into their cars. Speaking in Tokyo at the announcement of a Silicon Valley AI research center that Toyota is to open in early 2016, Pratt pointed out the big shortcoming in an AI system as applied to automobile: Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways, "but soon fail when faced with tasks that human drivers find simple." From the article:
Drivers, for example, can pretty much get behind the wheel of a car and drive it wherever it may be, he said. Autonomous vehicles use GPS and laser imaging sensors to figure out where they are by matching data against a complex map that goes beyond simple roads and includes details down to lane markings. The cars rely on all that data to drive, so they quickly hit problems in areas that haven't been mapped in advance. ... A truly intelligent self-driving car needs artificial intelligence that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS, and manage to navigate highways and follow routes even if there are diversions or changing in lane markings, he said.
I regularly drive a stretch of road that's just a few miles long, but between construction, accidents, poor marking, bicycles, and heavy traffic I'd be nervous about letting an AI system navigate. In what real-world driving scenarios would you most want humans to take over?
Well, neither are human drivers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The biggest problems aren't actually going to be point to point navigation or even obstacle avoidance, though those aren't trivial. Navigation when you know the destinations is a solved problem and we've got a pretty good idea how to handle obstacle avoidance and terrain following though there is progress to be made
Possibly the hardest problem to solve it you want completely autonomous cars will be navigation in the last quarter mile and for destinations where you aren't actually sure exactly where you are going. This is a human interface problem and those are always challenging. In those circumstances it is REALLY hard to instruct a computer efficiently without actually taking the controls yourself. For example how do you explain to the computer that you want the parking space 3 places over but you want to back in? Or that you don't want to block in the car so park next to it on the lawn? Sounds easy but it really isn't - not yet anyway. Humans can do it mostly competently but we don't have any computer that is anywhere close to human level processing of verbal commands. Stuff like parking lots will be surprisingly hard to automate in a way that will be pleasing to most people. There are solutions but they are going to take a long time and require a lot of infrastructure. Probably several decades away at minimum. Sort of how we had autopilot for planes many year before we had the ability to do autonomous takeoffs and landings. (and the aviation problem is arguably easier as it has fewer variables)
I think we will see semi-autonomous systems relatively soon particularly for stuff like highway driving. But I think there is going to remain driver controls for quite some time because steering into that parking space or instructing the car to back up to the front door is actually pretty hard to do well. What will happen is that you'll program in your destination, the car will take you close to where you want to go and then you'll probably drive the last little bit yourself in a lot of cases. I think this piece of navigation will be solved last if at all.
No, the correct decision of an car's AI is to always prioritize the life and safety of it's occupant. And you can bet that's what every vehicle will be programmed to do. People on the outside can take care of themselves.
Note that this doesn't mean speeding recklessly and then plowing into a crowd to save the driver. That only occurs because of previously made poor choices. Obstacles don't magically teleport in front of cars. It only appears that way to human drivers because we have a bad habit of not paying attention. Computers don't have that little flaw, and so will be braking the car before the human occupant even realizes there's a potential situation ahead.
Car manufacturers are not exactly strangers to litigation. The notion that any single court case will doom an industry is overstating things, I believe.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Sure. But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it, or is it going to know that while squishing Fluffy is sad and regrettable, it's preferable to causing an accident in which property will be damaged, and more to the point, where human beings might be injured or killed? It won't, because it won't differentiate between a cat, a dog, a squirrel, or a human child, or some kids' balloon that drifts on the breeze from his birthday party into the roadway. Please don't talk about how this won't be a problem because all cars will be autonomous cars and never operated by a human being because that's about as likely to happen in our lifetime as practical and widespread use of fusion reactors to supply electricity is likely to happen in our lifetime. Also there will always be bicyclists and motorcycles, and you can't make those 'autonomous' so there's always going to be other variables in the traffic equation that you can't control and can't accurately predict the behavior of, and before you say it, claiming that we'll outlaw those things is at best unrealistic. Also, I don't want to live in a world where you can't 'drive for fun', and I know I'm far from being alone in that sentiment. Honestly, the whole 'autonomous car' thing is so completely overblown that I don't know how anyone can take it seriously anymore. It's just not going to happen anywhere near like some people think it's going to happen, and I don't understand why some people can't see that.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The "AI" we're talking about presently and in the near future is mostly "A" and almost no "I" at all.
The kind of thing marketroids and the naive are calling AI today, including the tech that's beginning to show up in vehicles, is so one-dimensional in its "intelligence" as to be on about the same level as a toaster that "knows" not to burn my toast, or a chess playing program that can kick my ass at chess. The toaster "AI" couldn't control a robot vacuum cleaner, and the chess "AI" can't even play checkers, much less deal with anything further out of it's 1D "I" zone of competence, including not burn my toast.
In order for a vehicle to be able to "know where it is" and "know what to do about it", it will have to be more than one dimensional; it will have to be able to read signs, it will have to know destinations as things other than map references and paths other than mapped roads (parking lots, unmarked roads, etc.), it will have to make decisions based on extremely vague inputs and be able to do things such as ask for, and locate sources for, directions and understand them in pretty much whatever form they are provided. It will have to deal with the various situations that come up when the maps don't match the roads, too. Judging by my GPS, that's a lot more common than one might otherwise assume. It changes over time in random, unpredictable ways, too.
A general intelligence system designed for service (by which I mean to imply not conscious... otherwise we're talking about slavery, and we should know better than that by now) is not that close as yet. Frankly -- and I'm speaking with my AI researcher hat on now -- I think we'll get to a conscious general purpose intelligence well before we get to an unconscious one. We have a great deal of experience with imparting information to consciousnesses and we have considerable information available to us about what comprises one in our study of the human brain, whereas we have almost none about building a general purpose non-conscious intelligence, other than stacking multiple one-dimensional intelligences one upon another, which approach is approximately equivalent to solving the problem of multiplying by a million by adding one to an initial value of zero a million times. In other words, it'll eventually get the answer, but it's not in any way efficient.
As far as AI goes, all we really have right now is AI research, and various (not insignificant) benefits from the various tech insights and advances that fall out of that process. We don't have AI at all, at least not in the sense that is even slightly worthy of the term. The way AI is being used today, you'd want to be very careful telling your kid they were "intelligent", because they're likely to take away the idea that you think you just told them they're about as bright as the toaster. Not to mention the fact that when an actual AI is finally brought to light, we're not going to have anything useful left to call it. At that point, "AI" would be an insult. Not a great way to start a conversation with a new entity, IMHO.
The whole "it's AI!" meme reminds me strongly of the whole "3D TV" debacle. Again, marketroids and the ignorant built and propagated that appellation as a supposedly appropriate designation for fixed-viewpoint stereo vision, where fixed-viewpoint stereo vision is constrained, even by a relatively coarse and generous measure using whole-number degrees, to about 2 and 1/64800D or 2.000015432...D, whichever notation you prefer, leaving the viewer with something that in very few ways indeed resembles an actual 3D perception. When trying to describe actual 3D imaging, one is left with no accurate terminology. Unlike AI, we even actually have some low-performance versions of real 3D imaging now, so the linguistic problem is already on the roost, so to speak.
Sure, language evolves, that's a legitimate and real thing, but language also devolves, and that's what we're seeing in both these cases. I'm going with it, but I'm going kicking and screaming about the word-crap the marketroids are leaving on my lawn. Goddamn kids and their unleashed word-mutts. Where'd I leave my shotgun, anyway?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.