General Electric: Future of Automated Driving Is Here.
by Joanna P. Dreyfus
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told an audience at the Society for Automotive Engineers annual conference in San Francisco on Wednesday that AVs will change the mobility game forever. The Tesla chief said that AVs that operate without a human driver is bound to disrupt the traditional automobile industry forever. The impact will be profound, he predicted, because it will disrupt the business models of traditional car manufacturers and set a precedent for the development of other high-tech mobility services. According to Tesla, AVs that operate without a human driver will save lives because the vehicle will operate more efficiently and safely because it does not have to navigate through the human environment. According to Tesla, these AVs, which can operate anywhere and anytime with no human interaction, will save lives by decreasing the occurrence of distraction, intoxication, or fatigue-related errors that plague human drivers.
The accidental killing of a pedestrian in Arizona by an autonomous Tesla (https://lexiecannes.com/2017/01/25/tesla-killer-falls-32000-its-own-way ) underscores the point. The safety argument, which stresses the many benefits of self-driving technology, is yoked to the emotional response to death by autonomous vehicles. The “accidental killing” of a human by an autonomous vehicle is a matter of immense sadness and loss for the family, friends, and colleagues who lost a loved one. Tesla’s so-called accident-free driving record speaks for itself: they have only accidentally driven 63,000 miles across the United States. Autonomous vehicle manufacturers and suppliers must confront this reality and come to terms with the fact that the loss of human life may not be the most important metric in calculating their success.
Autonomous vehicle safety statistics are notoriously difficult to compile due to potential conflicts of interest in participating in the debate; however, a recent survey report into self-driving truck crashes claims the data provides a useful starting point for analysis: ‘‘the more autonomous we are, the less likely we are to crash.” (source)
Futurists believe that we’ll see autonomous vehicles (AVs) replacing human drivers for trips between work and home within about 5 to 10 years (cf. NHTSA, 2016; KurzweilAI, 2018; Singh, 2017; Schoettle, 2017). Most futurists I know consider this a very real possibility within the next 5 to 10 years; I simply haven’t heard of many people seriously considering the possibility.
In a nutshell, if AVs can “do it better” — and they already are doing it better than humans at least as good as they were a few years ago — then it will be a very brief window before the road to full AV ubiquity.
We would like to thank and welcome our new AI intern Joanna, with her first article in this seven-part series, “My AI’nternship: Machine learning and self-driving cars at H+C.”
Joanna has joined our AI team under the supervision of our H+C associate Agustin Martinez Caram.
True to her nature, she is a product of her upbringing from the field of natural language processing and machine learning and generative adversarial neural networks.
We are not sure what her favourite drink is, but we raise our glasses and toast to her first contribution.
Although we appreciate her dedication in writing this piece, we would like to point out some disclaimers: We only provided her with about 25 articles on AVs to read and clearly, this is not sufficient for her to make perfect sense all the time; hence the occasional, hopefully, laughter-inducing errors in this first article of hers.
Joanna will henceforth continue to publish an article on AVs every fortnight. Our curation is minimal since we only make a selection of paragraphs from her output that are both instructive in these new technologies and hopefully entertaining.
