Remember those old “Star Trek” episodes where the supremely logical Mr. Spock argued with the all-too-human Bones McCoy and James T. Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise?
Longtime highway safety engineer James Hedlund envisions something like those culture clashes taking place on our roads and highways once autonomous vehicles (AVs) share the roads with drivers behind the wheel of traditional cars and trucks.
In a new report done for the Governors Highway Safety Association, the 22-year veteran of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warns that the development of autonomous vehicle technology is racing way ahead of safety concerns that are not being addressed.
The problem that Hedlund sees is that autonomous vehicles arriving in the next few years will be sharing the roads with human drivers in traditional vehicles for years, and probably decades, to come.
That means that the computers of the autonomous vehicles will jostle with the far messier decision-making of humans who may be drunk, distracted, bored, angry, fiddling with the radio, or otherwise not operating at peak efficiency. Sort of like Spock arguing with Bones on “Star Trek.”
“A lot of conversation has been around the technology and how did it work,” Hedlund told me this week. “The conversation has not involved enough the people who must deal with the safety side of this.”
Hedlund gives examples of human drivers cutting off autonomous vehicles knowing the AVs are programmed to stop. And he questions what happens in cases of road rage where a human driver gets mad at an AV that’s blocking him by obeying the speed limits.
“How do you behave at a four-way stop? You look at people, you make hand signals,” he says. But autonomous vehicles don’t follow those simple non-verbal cues that keep human drivers safe. They just do what they’re programmed to do, which may be the opposite of what a human would do.
Hedlund warns that the greatest danger lies with so-called Stage 3 autonomous vehicles — those that have computers handling the vast majority of tasks but require a human driver to be ready to take over at a moment’s notice. How fast the human driver can switch from passive to active control presents one concern, but doing it in a swirl of traditionally driven vehicles presents a whole other layer of challenge.
You can find Hedlund’s report, “Autonomous Vehicles Meet Human Drivers: Traffic Safety Issues for States,” at www.ghsa.org/resources/spotlight-av17.
Hedlund’s report is hardly the first to raise concerns about the rapid pace of development of autonomous technology. A year-old report from the National League of Cities found that only 6% of U.S. cities had devoted planning resources to figuring out changes needed to accommodate self-driving vehicles. And only 3% had studied the impact of on-demand transport services such as Uber and Lyft, which function as alternatives to traditional taxi services and may prove to be the first to deploy self-driving fleets in a widespread fashion.
Autonomous vehicles may require new civic infrastructure, from crisper white lines on pavement to sensors embedded in roads to signal to AVs where they are. Who pays for that massive upgrade in infrastructure when cities, counties and states find it hard to even fill potholes or repair crumbling bridges?
Don’t take these cautions to presume I’m an anti-technology Luddite resisting the future. Autonomous vehicles can be the wonder of the age. But how technology interacts with humans has always been more fascinating than technology alone. The behavioral side of self-driving vehicles needs a lot more thought.
