Lessons From A Self-Driving Car Wreck

Last week, Google reported on a new wreck involving one of its self-driving cars.  Google is trying to sell this as the first wreck involving its self-driving cars, but reports of other wrecks are out there.

Regardless, a new article from a computer/tech writer brings out one of the important issues with self-driving cars — you can’t program intuition.

And tuition is really important when driving.  My daughter is about to turn 16.  As we’re teaching her to drive, we spend a lot of time talking about anticipating what’s going on around us.

Intuition plays a big part of that.  You might not think that, but we all know it.

Some of it is obvious.  We can see a driver who might be drifting in his lane or driving aggressively, all indications that we need to watch them.  Or we can be driving downtown and see the pedestrians on the corner and ascertain whether they’re paying attention or whether they’re staring at their phones.

But it’s even beyond that.  In many instances, drivers develop intuition that helps the drive more safely even when we don’t know it.    We’re able to see a driver and, not really knowing why, know that we need to watch out for them.

Computers can never do that.  As the author writes in the article:

Yet, the dirty little secret here is that, while artificial intelligence has many advantages over a human driver (it can look in all directions at once, it can use multiple sensors, it never gets distracted), it could be another 20 years before robots can muster something that humans posses even from a very young age.

I’m talking about intuition, of course. It has a few other names — a “feeling” or a vibe, a sixth sense, or an awareness that’s incredibly difficult to program into a robot.

There are a lot of great advancements in technology that have made driving safer:  backup cameras, lane departure warnings, blind spot warnings, automatic braking when you might be close to a wreck.  And I appreciate them and am glad for them having seen the devastation that wrecks can cause, but I’m very skeptical about self-driving cars and the problems that they might bring.