Whatever happened to the promise of self-driving cars?
As I pedal my mousy way across London every day, I peer with interest at the various vehicles on the road. But I have yet to see a taxi or any sort of vehicle gliding past me without a driver.
This is not what the overlords of Silicon Valley foretold. For over a decade, they have been promising the conquest of the roads by driverless taxis and cars, and their propaganda has been effective.
Ten years ago, I remember my friend Mr Fox confidently asserting, ‘In five years’ time, Uber’s entire fleet will be driverless.’
There have been some steps forward towards this goal. A company called Waymo, owned by Google, has a handful of self- driving cars on the streets of San Francisco and Phoenix. Though they’re easily disabled by protesters who confuse them by putting a traffic cone on the bonnet, Waymo claims they’re now providing 10,000 rides each week, along pre-planned routes.
Uber announced its plans to create a fleet of automatic cars in February 2015. But, following a 2018 incident in which a pedestrian was killed by one of its vehicles, they’ve been very quiet on the matter.
Elon Musk has been absurdly bullish in his predictions.
In 2016, he said Tesla fully self-driving cars were ‘two years away’. In 2017, he said ‘six months, definitely’, and claimed that people would be able to sleep in their Tesla while it did all the driving in ‘two years’. In 2018, the dream was still ‘a year away’ but would be ‘200-per-cent safer’ than human driving. In 2019, he said there would be ‘complete, full self-driving this year’. Ford and Apple mentioned 2020 as the year when it would start happening.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Musk ‘told investors in 2019 that Tesla would have more than one million robotaxis on the road by the following year. The company hasn’t deployed a single autonomous vehicle in the years since.’
Tusk recently revised his estimate to 2027. We shall see. So far – nothing from Tesla. You can’t help concluding that talk of self-driving cars is a mirage promoted by companies to boost the share price.
Safety isn’t great either. One down from fully self-driving cars are semi-self-driving cars. In other words, you need a driver.
But this isn’t as safe as promised. According to website The Verge, US federal regulators are investigating at least 1,000 individual Tesla crashes involving autopilot and fully self-driving (FSD) cars. At least 44 people died in these crashes.
Why? Because of what is known as ‘automation complacency’.
Mica Endsley, former chief scientist at the US Air Force, has studied the issue: ‘The public don’t quite understand the subtle ways automation affects their attention [but] it’s like giving people a sedative. They’re going to find something else to do or they’re going to zone out, and neither is good.’
The Chair of Robotics at Eindhoven University of Technology, René van de Molengraft, is also sceptical about self-driving cars. He says the problem is that self-driving cars are stupid. They need to be lazier, like humans, and become capable of weeding out the unimportant information.
‘Imagine yourself on a bicycle. You perceive all the information that you do not require for safe participation in traffic, but you don’t store that information. That person walking out of the supermarket you’re cycling past: unimportant!
‘A self-driving car cannot do that yet. It has 20 cameras running simultaneously, viewing and analysing each image. Everything is equally important, which takes a lot of computing power and a lot of energy. That needs to be improved.’
Even the highest-level FSD software is patchy, to say the least. FSD struggles to recognise motorcyclists, says tech site The Verge: ‘A 28-year-old motorcycle- owner was killed near Seattle earlier this year by a Model S driver who was using the driver-assist feature.’
‘Fully-self driving – human-level or above, in all possible conditions, where you can put kids by themselves in the car to send them to arbitrary locations without worrying – is not something I expect to see by 2031,’ says Necmiye Ozay, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan.
This mouse doesn’t expect to see robot taxis on the streets of London any time soon. Human beings are infinitely more sophisticated than computers. When I’m cycling, I’m making a million calculations a second and, in the middle of those, I still have time to acknowledge a friendly wave from a driver who is letting me pull out. And humans are happy to take on the high risk of managing a car because they all think they’re better at driving than they really are.
Musk uses his considerable clowning and circus-master skills to part the unwary from their cash, like a P T Barnum of technological capitalism. But I ain’t buying it.
