Meeting of minds
What AI means for cars
It’s a phrase that’s used an awful lot, but what does artificial intelligence (or AI) actually mean for cars? We seek enlightenment from two experts: Paul Newman, CTO of Oxbotica, an Oxford-based autonomous-vehicle software company; and emerging-tech expert Dr Jack Stilgoe, associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s centre for data science and AI.
Paul Newman (Oxbotica): ‘I don’t think anyone imagines they will be able to get a steering wheel- and pedal-free car any day now. But a normal-looking car with super-advanced controls offered to you in certain places? I reckon that starts to happen soon, within three to five years.’
Dr Jack Stilgoe (UCL): ‘It’s not a question of when, but where. It may well be there’s autonomous driving in some places, in some circumstances, on some roads, at some speeds, relatively soon. And it may be that in other places it remains impossible forever.’
PN (Oxbotica): ‘People don’t take a few dozen days to learn to drive – it’s taken 16-18 years of life to enable them to drive. That’s to do with maturity and brain development. However, to change the way you move people you don’t necessarily have to have human levels of performance.’
JS (UCL): ‘It’s a mistake to talk about computers learning to drive the same way as humans. Computers recognise their surroundings differently and make predictions in very different ways. The assumption is that, just because a computer is better than a human at playing chess it will, therefore, be better at driving, but computers will drive differently. To what extent is a self-driving car learning to drive in its own way, versus being taught a human’s existing understanding of the rules of the road? It has to be a combination of both.’
PN (Oxbotica): ‘There’s one knockout reason why this technology is extraordinary and offers some unusual solutions: have you ever had an accident, and did it make you a better driver? Of course. The difference with autonomous driving systems is that I will be able to get into a vehicle that has been gifted the experience of every mile driven, every near-miss, every prang and every unusual or benign event experienced by every vehicle, ever. And that’s inhuman. It’s vehicles talking to each other; the aggregation and machine learning. I have not benefited from your human experience but a vehicle in Copenhagen will benefit from a vehicle in Cape Town. Although they might start at a sub-human level, their ability to copy and learn from each other is inhuman.’
JS (UCL): ‘So-called “edge” cases are interesting. No cyclist is exactly the same as another, let alone peculiar examples like someone crossing the road with a big bunch of balloons. How do you make an automated system adaptable for those environments? That’s a huge challenge, which is one reason why we’ll see self-driving cars appear in circumstances where edge cases are least likely to happen.’
PN (Oxbotica): ‘The hardest thing autonomous vehicle developers are working on is predicting the future; they’ve pretty much nailed what is happening now, from the data coming in. Predicting what those things are going to do in 1012 seconds’ time still remains hard. Humans are very good at doing that, but what machines can do is cheat – they can build up models of what they’re expecting humans to do, and when they don’t they can revert to a minimum safety feature. I don’t think that’s insurmountable.’
JS (UCL): ‘At the moment the American four-way stop junction is a bit of a nightmare for autonomous cars [not to mention anyone not from America…]. Trac lights are much easier since they regiment the process of who goes when.’
PN (Oxbotica): ‘Intelligence is a skill set. Driving is a skill set, and I don’t believe that it’s a skill set beyond machines.’
JS (UCL): ‘You will see this technology applied where we can be really confident that the world is suciently predictable for the computer to do the driving.’
‘Humans are very good at predicting what will happen in 10 seconds’ time’