Clearly, Self Driving Cars are Just Around the Corner

It appears that the latest break-through for self driving cars is a proposal to outlaw pedestrians:

You’re crossing the street wrong.

That is essentially the argument some self-driving car boosters have fallen back on in the months after the first pedestrian death attributed to an autonomous vehicle and amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence capable of real-world driving is further away than many predicted just a few years ago.

In a line reminiscent of Steve Jobs’s famous defense of the iPhone 4’s flawed antennae—“Don't hold it like that”—these technologists say the problem isn’t that self-driving cars don’t work, it’s that people act unpredictably.

“What we tell people is, ‘Please be lawful and please be considerate,’” says Andrew Ng, a well-known machine learning researcher who runs a venture fund that invests in AI-enabled companies, including self-driving startup Drive.AI. In other words: no jaywalking.

Whether self-driving cars can correctly identify and avoid pedestrians crossing streets has become a burning issue since March after an Uber self-driving car killed a woman in Arizona who was walking a bicycle across the street at night outside a designated crosswalk. The incident is still under investigation, but a preliminary report from federal safety regulators said the car’s sensors had detected the woman but its decision-making software discounted the sensor data, concluding it was likely a false positive.

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With these timelines slipping, driverless proponents like Ng say there’s one surefire shortcut to getting self-driving cars on the streets sooner: persuade pedestrians to behave less erratically. If they use crosswalks, where there are contextual clues—pavement markings and stop lights—the software is more likely to identify them.

But to others the very fact that Ng is suggesting such a thing is a sign that today’s technology simply can’t deliver self-driving cars as originally envisioned. “The AI we would really need hasn't yet arrived,” says Gary Marcus, a New York University professor of psychology who researches both human and artificial intelligence. He says Ng is “just redefining the goalposts to make the job easier,” and that if the only way we can achieve safe self-driving cars is to completely segregate them from human drivers and pedestrians, we already had such technology: trains.

Rodney Brooks, a well-known robotics researcher and an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a blog post critical of Ng’s sentiments that “the great promise of self-driving cars has been that they will eliminate traffic deaths. Now [Ng] is saying that they will eliminate traffic deaths as long as all humans are trained to change their behavior? What just happened?”

We can now add hypocrisy to the other short comings of self driving car advocates.