Driverless Vehicles

Ready for Primetime?

The key to interpreting all these driverless vehicle announcements are: IF you can constrain and control a theater of operation sufficiently tightly, you can make it possible for robots to operate more efficiently than humans.  Exactly how tightly you have to control is evolving.  As sensors, processing and basic leaning algorithms improve, richer and more complex theaters, which were off limits before, now become possible. And simultaneously, as first hand experience grows, you'll get more confidence.

Eventually, someone will attempt extending the operating theater of drive bots, with commercial as opposed to pure pie-in-the-sky research intent: From closed mines to the most predictable corners of the public roads transportation network. More likely than not, moving to long haul trucking on the most predictable, hence least risky, stretches of freeway. When that happens, especially as soon as more than one group is doing it profitably and hence competition ensues, that will be a big step forward.

Then, the race will be on; slowly at first as the risk of real injury is great once you’re flinging objects around at freeway speeds, improvements will open up more stretches of roadway.

The takeaway is a much bigger step from "autonomous vehicles being viable somewhere" to "being viable anywhere."  

They're already viable in some specific mining sectors. That hurdle is already met. But that hurdle is also only the tiniest of baby steps of the way to the latter, which after all does include drive bots conducting themselves better than humans as drivers of police cruisers and others engaged in running gun battles through rush hour Manhattan.

Exactly how quickly the level of complexity increases as you move away from the most predictable of environments and into richer ones, is the central question of concern for those bent on a fully general deployment of drive bots into infrastructures fully shared with humans. No one has even the remotest idea how to estimate that yet.

But so far, in EVERY other attempt at AI: Early developments has proven easy, promising AND very impressive.  Then, they have ALL; fairly quickly hit a complexity wall so steep, almost any progress from the quick, "easy" early stages ends up being completely stymied. Until eventually all those involved get sufficiently frustrated, that they slink back to do something more rewarding with their Nobel laureate sized brains.

But so far, in EVERY other attempt at AI: Early developments has proven easy, promising AND very impressive.  Then, they have ALL; fairly quickly hit a complexity wall so steep, almost any progress from the quick, "easy" early stages ends up being completely stymied. Until eventually all those involved get sufficiently frustrated, that they slink back to do something more rewarding with their Nobel laureate sized brains.

So, predicting when autonomous vehicles are viable doesn't really mean much, unless you specify the environments in which you posit viability. Do you mean in certain, tightly selected mining operations? Do you mean as pure research without even a concern about whether a certain scenario can be self funding? Do you mean commercially viable operation on 10% the total mileage of US freeways? Or do you mean running gun battles through Manhattan? The difference in years from the first to the last, could be 20 years. Or it could be 50 years or more. No one knows, and the history of previous flirtations with AI booms, certainly don't provide much grounds for optimism.

DYI