Self-driving cars are the subject of more hype than even true artificial intelligence, perhaps because they already exist and a number of big companies are committed to making them a marketable reality. So it’s worth listening when a top executive of one of these companies says self-driving vehicles are a long way off.
“The technology will be held back by the ultimate moral question on who’s responsible,” said Ian Robertson, head of sales for BMW in Munich.
Figuring this out isn’t as easy as simply changing insurance rules. Imagine you’re driving along a narrow mountain road at high speed, and a child jumps in front of your car. If you swerve to avoid hitting him, you’ll crash into a cliff or plunge into an abyss. In both cases, it means certain death for you.
Now imagine the car is driving itself.
“An algorithm will make a decision which might not be acceptable from a cultural or societal point of view,” Robertson explained.
BMW is as advanced as anyone when it comes to automated driving: It manufactures an electric car you can send away to look for a parking spot and then summon via your smartwatch to pick you up. The moral issue remains as pressing today as when Isaac Asimov formulated his famous Three Laws of Robotics.
In the 1953 short story “Sally,” Asiimov imagined self- driving cars run by “positronic brains.” His concept would be familiar to self-driving car enthusiasts of today, such as Google’s Larry Page or Tesla’s Elon Musk.
The plot of the story, however, is to illustrate that things can go wrong. An autonomous vehicle ends up killing an unscrupulous businessman who wanted to harm other such machines. It makes a moral decision, and that worries the story’s protagonist, who runs a robotic car farm. “I don’t get as much pleasure out of my cars as I used to,” he says.
The only way to resolve the moral dilemma is for the human inside the car to have full responsibility. In legal terms, this means having the driver behind the wheel all the time, able to take over at any moment.
Until recently, the Vienna Convention on road traffic, which went into effect in 1977, banned autonomous vehicles, saying that “every driver shall at all times be able to control his vehicle.” Last year, the U.N. working group responsible for keeping the convention up to date accepted an amendment saying assisted driving is acceptable if “such systems can be overridden or switched off by the driver.” German, French and Italian automakers pushed through this change, because it lets them keep up with Silicon Valley competition in developing self-driving car technology.
It means, however, that even though drivers will be able to cruise on autopilot, they will still have to keep watching the road, ready to take over if necessary. This is not an insurmountable hurdle for assisted driving technology, which is still going to be useful and highly lucrative. It’s just a reason to take off the rose-colored glasses and recognize that, even when the technology becomes widely available, we may never move to the back seat or sleep peacefully when alone in a moving car.
To see the original story, go to The Detroit News.
