From Irving Wladawsky-Berger:
A few weeks ago I attended MIT’s Second Machine Age Conference,
where I heard a number of very interesting presentations on the
evolution of AI, robotics, and other advanced technologies. The
prospects for truly autonomous vehicles
was one of the main topics of discussion. With most other topics, there
was considerable audience consensus, but not so with self-driving
cars. While many thought that fully autonomous vehicles will be all
around us within a decade, others, myself included, were not quite so
sure due to the many technical and societal issues involved.
What do we really mean by self-driving cars?
There seems to be no precise definition. Are we talking about a human
driver assisted by all kinds of advanced technologies, or is there no
driver whatsoever? Will such vehicles operate amidst regular
human-driven ones, or will they be confined to special lanes equipped
with sophisticated navigational technologies? And, is self-driving per se the actual objective, or is it a metaphor for the development of near-crashless cars regardless of whether human drivers are still in the picture.
These
questions are not surprising given the very early stages of such a
complex area. When exciting new initiatives are first launched, we
sometimes describe them using an attention-grabbing phrase that, while
potentially unattainable in practice, should be taken more as a
marketing pointer to a general direction rather than as a realistic
near-term objective.
For example, in the early 1980s the paperless office became a metaphor for the PC-based office of the future.
The past 30 years have seen major transformations in just about every
aspect of the office, including the very nature of work. But, we have
come nowhere near getting rid of paper. In fact, printers, copiers and
scanners are all around us. The office of the future is alive and well, but no one seems to mind that the paperless office never really came about.
Similarly, we are now talking about the cashless economy as a metaphor for the evolution toward mobile digital payments. But while expecting
that over time a much larger percentage of payments will become
digital, few believe that cash will disappear any time soon, - if ever.
While highly sophisticated robots
are now being developed for all kinds of exciting applications, they
have not quite caught our imagination because, so far, they’ve been
generally aimed at industrial applications that few of us have any
direct experience with. Cars, on the other hand, are a major part of
our daily lives. A self-driven car is thus a concept we can
immediately grasp, concrete proof that our machines are becoming really
intelligent. The notion that in the not too-distant future we’ll be
able to read, work or sleep while an autonomous car drives us around
feels like the stuff of science fiction. But, how real is this future,
and how long will it take us to get there?...MORE
