We won’t be letting go of the wheel anytime soon
Driverless Science Museum
We have been waiting a long time for fully autonomous vehicles to glide safely through our streets. The hype says any day now. It’s been saying that for a while. But despite intense global competition and billions spent on research, don’t hold your breath. Such is the message of Driverless:
Who is in Control? Take the most eye-catching items on display: a cutting-edge “roborace” car – hardly likely to pull up in a driveway near you anytime soon – and a Citroen DS, whose glorious, sinuous frame was modified in 1960 to allow it to coast down a motorway guided by a cable, not human hand.
The urge to let go of the steering wheel, then, has been with us for almost as long as the steering wheel itself. But as it takes us on a whistlestop tour of self-guided vehicles on land, water and air, the exhibition makes clear that our congested streets have hardly been the most hospitable environment to perfect robot control.
By contrast, the almost empty oceans are far more welcoming, and are already home to vast unmanned US Navy ships, which can operate at sea for weeks. The watery depths prove an unexplored paradise for such submersibles as Boaty Mcboatface, chugging along slowly, sending back reams of data without the risk of a toddler darting in front of them.
The air, meanwhile, provides near endless space for those drones we
have become so familiar with. Yet what really matters is not their aeronautical abilities, but whether their cargos are life-saving transplant organs or life-ending explosives.
And that, of course, is down to us. Which is why it is not so much this exhibition’s title that matters. For narrow questions of technological feasibility are of secondary interest. What really counts is summed up by its subtitle – Who is in Control? The answer, again and again, is us.
Cannily, an evaluation of the real balance of power between man and machine accompanies each item. This is bolstered by a sliding scale of just how current and real-world the tech on display is, from “first test version” at the beginning of the development journey to “in use” at the other.
This is effectively a pie-in-the-skyometer, and every curator unable to resist the siren call of fashionable tech themes would be well-advised to include one. For the chief task of such exhibitions, is not to blind us with what might, very hypothetically, happen, but to apply critical thinking to tell us what is actually likely. They should have no fear in doing so. Because the wonder of verification (or enlightenment of debunking) follows – as with the moment I held up my notebook to one exhibit, an “object recognition” system of the sort used by autonomous vehicles to navigate. “Mobile phone 75pc sure,” it estimated. At least it reckoned I was “Person. 95pc sure.”
The truth, revealed throughout this clever exhibition, is that so much of our own communication is unspoken and nuanced: hard to interpret and near impossible to emulate.
Studies show that 9 out of 10 of us walk out into the road without waiting for oncoming cars to stop. That’s a big risk, you would think. Not really, because almost magically, with mysteriously effective hand gestures, pedestrian and driver transmit and sign a pact: I want to cross the road – OK, I will let you.
Computers will struggle to match that for many years to come. But the more profound conclusion of this exhibition, as so often with tech, is that the real marvel, the supreme machine, is us.