A few days ago I was surfing multiple online retail websites in the hope of landing a bargain on some of the stuff I needed, and wanted, before Diwali. One of the products on sale was an automatic toothpaste dispenser from China. You stick the toothbrush into the slot and an inch-long serving of paste gets delivered, said the description.
Now, the question is, how much automation are we going to seek in our lives? Will we want someone or something else to do our eating and breathing too? “Oh! That cold chicken dish is so rubbery; why don’t you give it to ‘Chewbakka’ to regurgitate it for me?”
Sedans for the sedentary
For me and other driving enthusiasts, the concept of a driverless car seems as terrible as that brand of laziness. However bad the traffic, can someone give up the joy of driving? Seems inconceivable to me, but that is the direction the global car industry is heading towards. In the next five years, self-driving cars will be sharing the streets with regular cars in many parts of the world. Almost every major multinational car manufacturer is involved in the testing of driverless cars today.
Funny thing here is that car makers are accelerating the development of self-driving cars because it now seems like soon it will be an issue of survival for them. Why? Because companies like Google and Apple are getting into the automotive business through the driver-less cars route.
Imagine that… Companies that are into creating user interfaces and intuitive operating systems are going to be making cars. They made you lazy by offering you the convenience of doing everything by simply touching your smartphone; and now they are going to allow you spend more quality time with your phone even as you commute on the roads. So, in a few years, road-signs might offer a new, ad-like take on the warnings we currently see; maybe they would read: “Please text while driving” and “Go ahead, drink and drive”.
Honestly, driverless cars in the so-called developed automotive markets are probably going to be chosen over conventional vehicles for multiple reasons. Convenience, yes, but also for improved safety and productivity (you can be expected to start office work as soon as you step into the car), and even lower risk of litigations arising from accidents. Lawyers might lose their jobs due to the fewer lawsuits, but the law itself will love self-driving cars due to the near elimination of traffic violations.
‘Al-gore-ithms’
But a lot of questions still remain about driverless cars and their potential vulnerabilities. What happens if someone hacks into the onboard computer and kidnaps you even as you are napping in the backseat? Or imagine if these robots on wheels were to become super-intelligent and take control of our lives a la I, Robot.
More simplistically, the current debate is centred on who will be held responsible if there is an error of judgement by the machine. Will the owner, who was not really driving, be culpable for the crash or will the manufacturer be found guilty?
Self-driving cars are currently being tested with algorithms that program them to sacrifice themselves in the event of a potential accident situation, where the fallout (if corrective action wasn’t taken) could be the inevitable death of a pedestrian or the other vehicle’s occupant. So, safety could be compromised for the occupants of the driverless car.
' Gaadi dekh-kar chalao'
A recent study published by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute suggested that self-driving vehicles have a higher crash rate per million miles travelled than conventional vehicles. Based on data collected over three years, the result hasn’t ruffled any feathers, however, because numbers are from prototype vehicles and apparently because they were still caused by humans either taking control of the driver-less car or being in control of the other vehicles that led to the crash.
But that is the case in markets where traffic is already orderly and almost perfectly coordinated. What will happen if these vehicles were to ply on Indian roads? Being at the top of the list of countries with the highest number of fatalities on the roads every year, we desperately need solutions like self-driving cars. But, given the chaotic traffic on our roads, will driverless cars work or will they remain forever stalled in the middle of the road, trying to avoid potential collisions.
Maybe a healthy dose of human error in judgment is what these cars will need to stay on the move. Or maybe, the owners of self-driving cars can put their drivers to work to first clear the road ahead in their conventional cars! There will have to be some hatke solutions for our roads. But, any which way you look at it, driverless cars seem to be the future of road travel.
Welcome to the thinking Machine!