Can sheep drive better than people?
I guess we will find out soon; when we get the hang of leaving the driving to the technology. When cars and lorries start driving themselves I guess we will be able to answer the question.
Is car even going to be the right word for it?
Legislators are struggling to keep up with the pace of change around cars that drive themselves and while I will take a bit more of a look at this aspect in later blogs I thought for this one I’d try and address what might at first appear to be a relatively simple concern. What happens when someone needs to take over the control of the car from the machinery.
In most of the cars being tested currently you need a steering wheel and a qualified driver waiting to take over from the electronics should the car ‘decide’ that there is something it doesn’t like or understand.
So that’s OK then.
Unless of course you’ve been doing the crossword and aren’t actually paying attention at all. Grabbing the wheel as your car decides it no longer wants to drive is going to really tax your reflexes, situational awareness (whatever that is), nerves etc. And of course that assumes you have actually learned to drive. What happens if the driver is new to the roads and on their first trip out? Or if you’re happily debating with your partner about the direction taking as obviously, being a man, you still know better than the technology.
Perhaps as your mind is wandering through the menu of the restaurant that you’re heading to the car will bong and simply say ‘over to you, I’m out.’ Your reply is like to be something along the lines of ‘Oh ####’ or some such at just about the same time as you disappear off the road and into the tree happy in the knowledge that the IT engineers will donwload the data and make sure that this type of crash can’t happen again.
Do you want a 17 year old with all their youthfull exuberance hoping that the car will hand them control? How will you persude the software that on no account is it to allow the car to be driven manually. Even if it has to commit the equivalent of electronic suicide.
What happens if you or the 17 year old have had a drink. If you breathe heavily inside your car after a night out could there be an argument that your car is intoxicated?
There is of course a huge argument in favour of cars that drive themselves. Not the least is the reduction in accidents and injuries that occur every year. According to the august sounding body the ‘Association for Safe International Road Travel’ 1.3 million people are killed in road accidents every year and somewhere between 20 and 50 million are injured, so the benefits of cars driven by computers that don’t sleep, play on their phones or simply forget to stop at traffic lights is huge.
But there is still a huge amount to learn about how these cars, and perhaps a lot more importantly, how humans will actually work with them; and what happens when the technology does simply have an off day.
Some of you will recall the made up, but strangely prescient, discussion between Bill Gates the then CEO of Microsoft and General Motors. In 2005 Bill supposedly compared car companies to dinosaurs while GM alledgly responded along the lines of software designed cars needing to be rebooted every couple of hours for no apparent reason. It seems to me that, where we are today it is the drivers who may need rebooting while the car quietly gets on with keeping you safe.
Until it decides not to.
The Burble 