Where Are Our Self-Driving Cars?
In 2015, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, forecasted the arrival of “complete autonomy” by 2018. Cruise, tester and developer of autonomous automotive technology, planned to launch self-driving taxis in San Francisco by 2019. Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi Motors also promised the arrival of consumer self-driving cars by the end of the decade. Several questions arise as to why the promises have not been fulfilled but according to Starsky Robotics, an autonomous lorry firm that recently dealt with closure, the biggest problem was that the state of current artificial intelligence was simply not capable.
Self-driving cars operate in the same way as other applications of machine learning; computers crunch vast quantities of data to extract the universal principles and rules of driving. The more data, in theory, the more effectively the systems perform. There is a race to develop the first fully autonomous cars between Tesla and Waymo. Whilst Tesla takes advantage of the thousands of semi-autonomous cars it has on roads to collect and use real-world data, Waymo claims to have generated over a billion miles worth of data through virtual environments.
The problem that arises from the use of current artificial intelligence is that deep-learning approaches are mathematically statistical—stored as probabilities. That leaves them susceptible to what software engineers call “edge cases” which are unusual circumstances that deep learning is yet to experience. Given that driving is full of such abnormalities, the inability to corroborate with the one in a thousand’s case makes it incomplete for widespread consumer use. Some examples being, one study found that computer vision systems were thrown off when snow partly obscured lane markings and another found that an obscured “stop” sign would be misidentified as a speed limit of 45mph sign.
As eager as we are about self-driving cars, the current state of artificial intelligence and deep learning limits the progression of developers and firms that once thought we’d already be at that point.
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