Pardon my French, but it’s a fait accompli.
Yep, a done deal: We’re going to be sharing the road with robot drivers. While it's difficult to predict exact dates, with estimates ranging from 10 to 30 years or more, it likely will happen sooner than most people think. And nothing can be done to stop it.
Begun a decade ago with little fanfare, automated transportation initiatives already have considerable momentum. The rush to develop, sell and operate self-driven vehicles is accelerating; and even the prodigious gridlocking talents of federal and state legislatures will be challenged to slow it down.
Opinions on the proper roles for government aside, slow might be a good thing in this case. Someone needs to take the time to ensure the rollout goes as smoothly as humanly (and mechanically) possible. A lot is riding on it.
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| The future is hazy -- but there will be robots |
Backed by DARPA and to an extent steered by their agenda, Google and a host of others are developing the relevant technologies with breathtaking speed. It’s already difficult to keep abreast of what’s happening in the field. Soon it will be impossible, which is why it’s important that everyone who’s affected (i.e., every last one of us) begins to learn about autonomous vehicle technologies now, while there’s time to minimize their negative impacts.
Who's Driving This Thing?
Depends on where you’re looking and what you mean by drive. First, let’s be clear, I’m a car-lover and avid technophile; the majority of my consciousness actively salivates over the promise of automation’s idealized end-state -- including a safe and reliable transportation grid.
A somewhat smaller part of me believes Google is the perfect company to usher in that tantalizing future. Their technological innovation and skillful, almost prescient, management will be crucial to resolving the complexities of integrating a vast information network with a distributed hive-mind of robot vehicles.
A still smaller fraction even takes a degree of comfort in DARPA’s motivating presence in the epic endeavor. After all, the agency has a history of finding and funding R&D in new technologies (e.g., ARPANET, TRANSIT/NAVSAT, etc.) that become not just commercial successes, but vitally important contributors to billions of lives, each day.
Recall that what began life as ARPANET became the World Wide Web. The TRANSIT/NAVSAT system turned into today’s Global Positioning System (GPS). Each extremely powerful in its own right; together, a synergy that continually reshapes humanity’s view of the planet and of itself.
Transformative as these technologies have been, however, the changes they brought about were relatively easy to embrace. Their advantages are abundant, their problems are few. Most significantly, neither GPS nor Internet carry any inherently serious physical risks, either to those who use them, or to those who don’t. Not so, autonomous vehicles.
Disruptive Technologies
What’s coming isn’t another human-computer chess match, results to be met with a collective sigh of, “Gee whiz, who cares?”
What’s coming is more likely to produce variations on the theme, “Whiskey!? Tango!? Foxtrot!?”
What’s coming is Human driver vs. Robot driver -- a struggle made all the more fascinating because the open road is one of the few arenas where man and machine may exist in direct competition for decades.
As things play out to their inevitable end (spoiler alert: robots win), it will be interesting, but it won’t always be pretty. We need to make sure it doesn’t become hell on wheels along the way. The way we’re wired -- erratic emotional pathways hopelessly intertwined with our more rational selves -- won’t make it easy.
If it’s true unrestrained anger differs from violent psychosis by only a few degrees of the psychological compass, road rage is even more closely aligned. When the products of automation escape the factories and spill into the streets, the push-back may take inappropriate, even bizarre forms. (I leave possible examples to the reader’s imagination.)
Those doing the planning for our automated future must take into account the emotional aspects of driving, because emotions are certain to play a big part in the transition. When humans and robots start vying for position in the high-speed lane, some complex, volatile feelings will be stirred in the former. Some of the responses will be simply inappropriate. Others will be downright dangerous.
Robot vehicles -- cars, trucks and busses -- will cause disruption on a scale unlike anything society has faced since the automobile displaced the horse-drawn carriage. A number of factors will conspire to make this modern analog much more difficult.
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| A new King of the Road |
For one thing, there were fewer people then, and they were more inclined to respect each other, more inclined to acknowledge civil and federal authorities. For another, horses were being supplanted by an arguably better technology that gave users greater autonomy and increased range and rate of travel.
Consider also that motor vehicles are in much wider use now than horses were a hundred years ago. There were 99.1 million people in 1914 and approximately 21 million horses (according to the USDA’s Farmer’s Bulletin). Today, there are more than 317 million people and 254.4 million passenger vehicles (according to a 2007 DOT estimate).
We, as a society and as individuals, need to prepare ourselves for this disruptive technology and for the changes it will bring. Not to resist it, but to understand it -- the better to adapt ourselves to the needs of the technology, the better to adapt the technology to our own needs.
Given our current political and social divides, I wish I could be more optimistic about how we’re going to respond.
What’s It Going To Be Like?
If I want to keep myself awake at night, I imagine what the transition period will be like.
No doubt most people will be curious about and, insofar as it’s practical, accommodating to the new technologies. However, significant numbers will not. There will be those among us who view robots as an abomination. Those who rebel to prevent (or protest) job losses. Those who only want to cause havoc for the sheer spectacle of it. Everyone will have an opinion.
As autonomous vehicles proliferate toward critical mass, some wildly divergent interests and philosophies may be expected to defend their claims to public roadways. The emergence of this unlikely coalition will constitute a resistance, and the Internet and GPS make it likely they’ll be organized.
Initial versions of the robot tech will be expensive, and early adopters may become targets of unwanted attention. Think a 19 year-old car-junkie in his nitro-burning Nissan beater -- or a meth-head in a Ford pickup, or a motorcyclist with a death-wish and a 1000 cc crotch-rocket, etc. -- playing highway tag with a self-driving 2018 Volvo. (Not to suggest that any Prius-by-Google would attract fewer aggressive motorists, but do you really want to be riding shotgun for a Swedish HAL?)
Such possibilities frighten sane people, but manna for television programming directors. Media moguls (or Mongols?) will find many ways to deliver a voyeur’s-eye view of the chaos, including: live-streaming dashboard camera and surveillance video feeds; Win/Fail compilations of people interacting with robot vehicles; bloody accident drive-bys and hover-cam fly-overs. Social media is going to be backed up with the by-play.
Don't Worry, We Won't Be Useless
No matter how confident we may feel going into this battle, there’s only one way it can end. Because they’re going to be tightly integrated with the new transportation grids, every conceivable technical edge will belong to the robots; eventually the roads will, too. However, it’s not going to happen overnight.
Autonomous vehicles won’t be problem-free, particularly the early versions. Nor will they soon (or perhaps ever) be able to completely absolve humans from their responsibilities behind the wheel.
Current incarnations of the robot AI demonstrate limited abilities to deal with the unexpected -- not a good thing in general, and a particularly bad thing when driving next to a drunken angry guy. Additionally, they don’t handle ambiguous situations well; they can’t see road signs and hand-signals; snow and other weather phenomena can thwart the onboard range-finding radar; etc. While ongoing technical developments may be able to mitigate these problems, it’s unlikely that all will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
And this is where we come in. We’re going to be the problem-solvers. We’re going to be interpreters for and -- for the foreseeable future -- final arbiters of the robot-human interface-on-wheels that controls our self-driving vehicles. It will be left to us to oversee the integration of robot-driven vehicles with other vehicles, driverless and human-driven, and with bicyclists and pedestrians.
It’s all but certain that for at least a generation or more the automated transport systems of the future will be more aspirational than functional. In reality, the AI software and robot hardware systems will be less like chauffeurs, and more like autopilots for our road-traveling vessels.
We, on the other hand, will be less like drivers and more like captains. Ignoring for a moment the romantic overtones of the title, it’s sobering to remember we’ll still bear all the legal and operational responsibilities the word implies. For some those burdens may appear needlessly large, but studies show the greatest dangers exist during handoffs -- when the computer releases control back to the captain, er, driver. What if the driver isn’t ready, or able, or willing to accept control?
Answering such questions will not be easy. But on the plus-side -- boldly returning to the notion of captaincy -- when Google’s self-driving car is given the go-ahead to enter the “automated cruise” mode, it gives a little whirring sound, like a star ship’s warp drive!
I wonder how long it will take me to stop saying, “Engage.”
We'll dip into the legal waters next time in There Ought To (I’m forcing myself not to use “Auto”) Be a Law!
photo credit: brizzle born and bred via photopin cc
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