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At the same time, millions of seniors and people with disabilities suffer from limited mobility. Driverless cars and taxis might someday provide mobility for this population.
The promise of the driverless car is huge: It could free up a lot of time, spare us the need to get a driver’s license, improve road safety, empty our parking lots, or even replace car ownership.
But making self-driving cars is easier said than done. There still are quite a few technological and regulatory puzzles that need to be solved before AVs (autonomous vehicles) can be adopted on a mass scale. Let’s see what they are.
Circa 2025. An autonomous BMW sedan with a passenger slows down near a crossing in LA. It has sensed an elderly couple on the pavement waiting to cross the road. A couple of minutes pass by, and both parties remain static. The couple — who is actually waiting for their son to pick them up — has no clue why the driverless car has come to a halt in front of them. They gesture the car to go ahead even as the passenger fumes in the backseat. But the vehicle has "machine learned" to be polite and careful.
It does not have an alternative course of behavior, unlike the resourceful Jeeves in a PG Wodehouse novel.
Driverless cars both generate and rely upon huge quantities of data, and there have been understandable concerns raised about the security of that data, the availability of it for insurance and regulatory concerns, and even ownership of it for the greater societal good. It’s on this latter topic that a recent paper from Dartmouth was published.
Autonomous vehicles are generating huge quantities of data as they attempt to make sense of the world around them. Data on traffic, pedestrian movements, other vehicles, and all manner of environmental features are all consumed and absorbed. There is a temptation for companies to keep a tight grip on this data, but governments, citizens, and other groups have a vested interest, too.