Is Human Involvement a Liability When It Comes to Autonomous Driving?
Commuting is awful. Unless you’re fortunate enough to have spartanly populated backroads between you and the office, that drive to work can be excruciatingly dull — with the only excitement coming from near misses and whatever terrible jokes drive-time radio offers up during that hour. When you get right down to it, most daily commutes are little more than unpleasant ways to add miles onto the odometer.
Of course, with the promise of autonomous driving, that experience is supposed to transform into a worry-free jaunt. But there’s a problem. Most self-driving systems of the near future will require operators to pay roughly the same amount of attention they do now. After all, if your car miscalculates a situation, you’ll want to be ready to take over the instant something seems awry. If that’s the direction we’re heading with this technology, I’m starting to think it might just be easier to automate all of our jobs instead of the the method we use to get to them.
However, at least one self-driving firm has abandoned the development of features that would require human intervention — leaving the car to make up its own mind in an emergency situation.
Waymo, Alphabet Inc’s autonomous vehicle arm, says it won’t pursue any technologies that require occupants to take over in the event of an emergency. The reason? Because not driving your car for an extended period of time makes you a particularly poor candidate to take evasive action.
We’ve previously covered how autonomous features and driving aides are turning everyone into terrible drivers. Now, imagine you’ve been cruising for an hour with your future car doing all the work. It suddenly asks you avoid an obstacle while you’re in the middle of a sudoku puzzle. How prepared do you think you would be?
According to Waymo, not prepared enough. Reuters reports that the company recently decided to ditch the human contingency plan after trials showed test users napping, putting on makeup, and fiddling with their phones as vehicles clipped along at 56 mph. “What we found was pretty scary,” John Krafcik, head of Waymo, said on Monday. “It’s hard to take over because they have lost contextual awareness.”
Those tests were conducted in 2013 with Google employees behind the wheel; the company saw fit to release the footage earlier this week. Waymo has been fairly focused on getting the human element out of autonomous driving since 2015, going so far as to suggest the removal all traditional controls. Monday’s video reel of occupants snoozing behind the wheel was clearly intended to help build that position up.
“Our technology takes care of all of the driving, allowing passengers to stay passengers,” the company said in report released earlier this month.
Presently, Waymo only operates a small pilot program around Phoenix, Arizona, where locals can utilize driverless technology for taxi services. However, Krafcik is hinting that more self-driving experiments are forthcoming. This month, the company will field a fleet of autonomous Chrysler Pacificas in Michigan to test winter weather effectiveness. It also hopes to develop self-driving trucks and municipal transit services in the near future.
[Image: Waymo]
A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.
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Your comment is contradictory. It's not treating SHTF as a result, but an external given. The question is, are better results likely with or without the driven human? Waymo's answer is the latter. So it's not really a matter of "good enough for prime time" but where should the buck stop when SHTF, and what the intersection of tech and legal worlds looks like from that standpoint.
>>> It suddenly asks you avoid an obstacle while you’re in the middle of a sudoku puzzle. How prepared do you think you would be?