Lee Gomes writes at Slate.com about driverless cars, which are occasionally touted as a panacea for traffic congestion and the appalling death and injury toll on our roads. Not so fast, he says. Expect less autonomy, and longer time to achieve even that.
He describes Google’s current state of the art, and notes that their driverless cars depend completely upon detailed route maps that are orders of magnitude more complex and expensive to create than, say, Google maps. Likewise, car sensors, he says, cannot adequately recognise and react to changes in the car’s mapped environment. He uses the example of a newly installed traffic light, such as at a construction zone. There are other weaknesses, like parking.
But the one that interests me most is the car’s computers’ inability to have and use “everyday common sense”, a.k.a. “generalized intelligence”, which most human drivers have, and which allows them to make rapid decisions when faced with the unexpected. For humans, this consists of rules of thumb, scenarios, behaviour patterns, and other things acquired by experience, observation and the “school of hard knocks”, also known as ICBC U.
That article has received a lot of criticism by the experts in the field. The author had a lot of misunderstandings and didn’t do much fact-checking leading him to draw conclusions that are very far out from what the experts are saying. For an obvious start, the two examples you cited (incredibly detailed maps, inability to respond to new traffic lights) are simply false. While the cars do use an extensive internal map, they are also able to identify and respond to new street signs, traffic lights, pedestrians, cyclists and other factors. It doesn’t rely on having perfect maps or a perfect understanding of the road. Many of the critical issues that he raises are either solved or not issues at all.
I’m not saying the issues are fixed or that it’s ready for the mass-market. Not even saying we can make a good estimate on when that will be. But I think that the advances they’ve made already are reason to be optimistic.