Driverless cars won’t be safe until they think like humans

● AI vehicles can’t drink and drive or get tired, but there have been several accidents as tech is rolled out

So far this year, more than 60 people have died on our roads; one-third of them were under 25. Globally, more than one million people die annually in traffic accidents. Are driverless cars safer and a way to stop this carnage? And how close are we to getting into the back of a car and asking it to drive us somewhere as we watch a movie?

Despite tens of billions of dollars being spent on trying to develop them, we are a long way off driverless cars being everywhere. Three cities in the US have them in the form of robo-taxis — San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin. But will they ever come to Ireland?

Last week, Tesla settled a case brought by the family of an engineer called Walter Huang who died in a crash while using the autopilot function in his Model X Tesla. The amount Tesla paid to settle the case was not disclosed.

We read a lot about artificial intelligence (AI); how at one extreme it might eventually destroy us, but at the other it will bring enormous benefits.

Driverless cars are AI’s greatest test. If AI can’t be effectively deployed in them it’s unlikely to bring the much-touted benefits where machines learn and take over tasks currently being done by us mere humans but with greater efficiency and accuracy.

The effort to construct a driverless car goes back to the mid-Noughties when the US military put up a $1m prize to whoever could make one. This led to many companies getting involved in the race. The challenge was to make a car that could operate in all conditions but with no driver.

The main benefit is safety. But that challenge has been the key problem so far.

Uber invested heavily in research, spending over $1bn between 2015 and 2020, with precious little to show for all that investment. It pulled out of the effort after one of its driverless cars was involved in a fatal accident with a woman called Elaine Herzberg in 2018.

She was wheeling her bicycle across a street in Tempe, Arizona, with shopping bags dangling from the handlebars. The computer system in the driverless car became confused and was unable to quickly interpret what it was seeing, with tragic consequences.

Uber had planned to eventually disupdate” pense with its drivers, instead having a fleet of robo-taxis. That plan is now on hold.

Another company, Cruise, is also scaling back its efforts. Cruise was bought by General Motors in 2016 for more than $500m. This gives you an idea of the probable future value of driverless cars. General Motors can well afford it, making more than $170bn last year.

Like Uber, Cruise was deterred because of an accident, although mercifully nobody died. Last October, a woman crossing a street in San Francisco was hit by a regular car and knocked in front of an oncoming Cruise robo-taxi. The taxi was programmed to swing to the right in an unknown situation and that’s what happened, hitting the unfortunate woman. Cruise has since removed all its robo-taxis from the road.

Tesla has also become more cautious, not least because of the recent litigation. It offers “full self-driving capability”, but the cars still need drivers to take over and be watchful. There have been numerous accidents with Teslas in the US when in “full self-driving” mode.

Tesla also issued a “wireless software to the owners of two million of its cars in the US because of concerns about the safety of its autopilot technology.

Autopilot allows cars to self-steer and control speed. The only trouble is the cars sometimes stop for various reasons, including thinking a stop sign on a billboard is the real thing or even that a yellow moon is an amber traffic light.

In San Francisco, where Waymo is the main provider of driverless cars, the fire department has been complaining. At least 55 incidents have been reported. They include robo-taxis stopping in the middle of the road and not allowing fire engines to get through to an emergency. They have also stopped outside fire stations, blocking the exit for the fire engine. In the cities where there are robo-taxis, there are reports of rear-ending by regular cars, given the propensity of the robo-taxi to stop suddenly.

Autonomous trucks might soon be delivering goods

The engineers developing driverless cars have realised there are a huge number of potential situations cars might confront. It seems impossible to anticipate them all.

Us humans are great at rapidly assessing risk in any situation. It’s why we’ve survived through evolutionary history. The car that hit Elaine Herzberg was confused for six seconds, with fatal consequences.

Driving involves a lot of social interaction with other drivers we encounter on the road. We try to anticipate what another driver might do, say, at a roundabout. Driverless cars are currently not as good at that, although with time and data being stored and interpreted they might well be able to, via machine learning.

If driverless cars are to be on the road with regular cars, whole new algorithms able to think like a human will be needed.

This, of course, could be useful in other areas where AI holds promise, including in medicine and teaching.

We mustn’t, however, write off the prospect of driverless cars. A lot of research is still going on. In the US, 23 states are exploring their deployment. It may be that they will run in a separate lane initially, until they learn. Autonomous trucks might soon be delivering goods.

Driverless cars don’t drink alcohol or take drugs, or get tired and disobey the rules of that road. If we can make them safer, it will mean many lives are saved.

The Beatles sang: “I got no car and it’s breaking my heart.” That remains the case for driverless cars, heartbreak being especially evident for Uber and General Motors, who have spent so much with no return as yet.

They will also be great for me, as I never learnt to drive. Hopefully one day we will have driverless cars with all the safety and convenience they will bring.

Luke O’Neill is professor of biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin