INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
At last, it is here! The truly self-driving car, no human behind the wheel! For the public! …A few hundred of them, in a closed beta, in a
small corner of sun-drenched (never snow-drenched, almost never water-drenched) suburban Phoenix, five years later than some people were
predicting six years ago.
Few new technologies have ever been more anticipated and more predicted than the self-driving car
Anyone who drives cannot help but imagine not having to drive any more
It has been said that they will change our cities, our homes, our commerce, even our fundamental way of life.
But at the same time, the
actual progress has seemed … well … glacial, to the casual driver eye
We&re mostly talking about software, after all
OK, and LIDAR, and cameras, but the software is the key
People couldn&t help but expect a roll-out like that of smartphones, where the launch of the iPhone in 2007 led to adoption by every
tech-savvy person by 2010, and the vast majority of the developed world by 2013.
People couldn&t help but expect a mass market push
In 2014, the optimistic attitude was, maybe your next car is electric; then your next one — or even that same one, courtesy of an OTA
software update — will be self-driving! Set the controls for the heart of Los Angeles, or Boston, or both, and lie back and snooze,
baby.
That not how it going to happen
Waymo closed beta is a huge yep, yes, but it is also a tiny incremental iteration
We aren&t going to see a Big Bang moment, when suddenly you buy your next car and it will carry you unaided from Vancouver to Halifax, or
even Vancouver to Whistler
Instead we&re going to see a series of tiny steps forward, measured over years, frequently in industrial or commercial settings rather than
personal ones.
First they drive the broad, sunny streets of Phoenix; then highways; then in more complex situations, such as airports and
downtowns; then in heavy rain; then amid detours and road closures; then in rough, winding country roads prone to landslides and flooding;
then (some considerable time from now, says your Canadian correspondent) in snow and ice…
And even then, how can a truly self-driving car
handle anomalous situations, when the car doesn&t know what to do and screeches to a halt? Even more importantly, how will it know it in an
anomalous situation and it doesn&t know what to do? Will cars be drivable remotely, in such cases? If so, how will we secure that process?
What about adversarial attempts to manipulate the neural networks behind the figurative wheel, by feeding them misleading inputs that they
respond to but the naked human eye might not notice?
I suppose we have to talk about the so-called &trolley problem,& too
It is by far the silliest and most overanalyzed question about self-driving, since in 99.9% of problematic situations the solution is simply
&stop.& Anything like the trolley problem will only come up in the edgiest of edge cases — but, if only to satisfy the public, those cases
will have to be publicly hashed out as well.
The larger issue brought up by the &trolley problem problem& is that we have no collective
social understanding of how to judge the risks posed by self-driving cars, and what risks we should accept
On paper, if all of America moved to self-driving cars overnight and they started killing 100 people every single day … America should
rejoice, because the death rate from car crashes will have fallen!
In practice, however, he understated, it seems likely that America, or at
least American media, will not rejoice
Rather the opposite.
When you step into a self-driving vehicle, you will be taking a risk, just as you do whenever you step into a
But it will be harder to measure this new risk, and even if/when we can, we won&t weigh it the same way that we do the old risk
Liability alone will be a giant can of worms.
We have an entire infrastructure of regulation built around the old risk
It will change only slowly to manage this new risk, and it will have great difficulty sloughing off old preconceptions which no longer apply
Dream of cars with no steering wheels all you like, for example, but my guess is that in many jurisdictions, self-driving cars will have to
include a legal driver among their passengers at all times.
When you consider the combination of the technological challenges, the social
challenges, and the regulatory challenges, all of which are seriously nontrivial — it seems apparent that we are going to creep, rather
than bound, into the self-driving future.
And so: self-driving vehicles will slowly, quietly, take over closed industrial / commercial
Waymo self-driving taxis, followed (apparently at some distance) by others, will very gradually expand their beachhead from Phoenix, bit by
bit and clime by clime, with occasional setbacks
Personal cars will continue to increase their self-driving capabilities one situation at a time: parallel parking, stop-and-go highway
traffic, parking garages, certain patches of quiet suburban territory.
This means there will almost certainly be no point at which you
suddenly have a self-driving car
Self-driving isn&t a product, an event, or a feature; it an aspirational limit to which we will asymptotically approach
We&re collectively already on that curve — which is exciting! — but it seems apparent that its climb will be much more gradual than
almost everyone, including me, thought not so long ago.
