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They don’t even exist yet as a commercial product, but the backlash against driverless cars is now fully underway.
Earlier this year, a self-driving vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. There was a back-up driver in the driving seat, but the car – part of a testing programme – was in autonomous mode at the time.
It was a tragic demonstration of the current limitations of the technology. Writing for Bloomberg, Jeremy Khan says that timelines for the development and commercialisation of AV (autonomous vehicle) technology are slipping – as the full complexities of coping with an unpredictable driving environment become clear.
But what if the driving environment could be simplified? Khan focuses on comments made by Andrew Ng – a leading figure in the industry:
“‘What we tell people is, ‘Please be lawful and please be considerate,’’ says Andrew Ng, a well-known machine learning researcher who runs a venture fund that invests in AI-enabled companies, including self-driving startup Drive.AI. In other words: no jaywalking.’”
Certainly, it would be easier for the AV algorithms to identify pedestrians if they only crossed the road at designated and clearly marked crossings. But why should pedestrians modify their behaviour to make life easier for the AV developers?
Pedestrians have had to make allowances for other, more dangerous forms of traffic ever since the taming of the horse. In the modern era, we’ve been slaughtered in our millions by the non-driverless car and even the bicycle is a growing menace (though a rarely fatal one). So, what’s one more reason to mind our step?
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