Quick, Make Me a Magic Robot Car!

As I write these words, here in Melbourne, it’s nearly 7 AM, it’s still dark outside, cold, a bit of fog. I’d hate to be out riding my bike.

I’m discussing self-driving cars on a cycle forum with some chap who thinks it’s all too hard and we’ll never get there. He raised the example of robot cars trying to peer through rain, snow, and fog.

We’ve got them already.

We don’t have to design or understand the systems. Others are doing that. Quite a bit of our current world is, effectively, magic in the Clarkeian sense.

That’s Arthur C Clarke of course. His Three Laws have a certain fame:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C Clarke, Profiles of the Future

A more poetic way of looking at the same thing comes from Virginia Woolf, of all people, writing in 1928:

Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying — but how it’s done I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns. — Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Rain, snow, and fog are exactly the reasons we need more automation and not less. You’ve probably seen the videos of massive pile-ups on motorways. Here’s an example:

American interstates have fleets of semi-trailers barreling along. Likewise the endless stream of semis along the Trans-European Highway west of Istanbul. All over the world; I once drove up to Sydney along the Hume and just short of Goulburn in thick fog I encountered a chain like this. Luckily I pulled onto the shoulder in time and nobody was in my path. Somebody had had a collision in the fog, stopped — of course — and more and more vehicles had ploughed in, their drivers travelling too fast for the conditions and their drivers not applying the brakes until far too late.

The sort of adaptive cruise control you get on cars nowadays would have avoided this. They don’t use light, so rain and dark and sleet don’t affect them. Something as simple as “seeing” a kangaroo at night preparing to bound across the road out of the dark would be a huge help here.

Most people are thinking about robot drivers replacing humans, with human capabilities. That’s not how it works. Sound, radar, infra-red, ultra-violet; these are beyond the reach of humans but easily handled by robots. Information coming in from other vehicles or road infrastructure continuously broadcasting their positions and vectors.

As a cyclist, I wear a helmet, ride with lights on, have hi-viz features on my equipment. I’d add a dongle to reflect radar or broadcast my local position with no worries at all.

And if it all gets too difficult, just hand over to a human pilot sitting in a call-centre environment somewhere who can drive the car out of difficulty like a drone. The circumstances are recorded, analysed, integrated and it doesn’t happen again.

And I ask, what is informing the thinking of those who think it impossible? Do they have any actual knowledge or are they trying to solve all the problems all by themselves when the reality is that there are tens of thousands of engineers who have been doing exactly that for several years with bags of money being thrown at them?

Our systems don’t have to be perfect. Like the slower friend you take along in case of meeting a bear, the self-driving systems just have to be better than the average galoot on the road. A system that doesn’t have an unreasoning hatred of cyclists, for example. I’d vote for that.

Britni