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Science-Technology Title: Driverless cars yield to reality Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning society has only begun wrestling with the changes needed to a system created a century ago for horseless carriages. What happens if a police officer wants to pull one of these vehicles over? When it stops at a four-way intersection, would it be too polite to take its turn ahead of aggressive human drivers or equally polite robots? What sort of insurance would it need? These and other implications of what Google calls autonomous vehicles were debated by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars and government regulators at a symposium sponsored by the Law Review and High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. As Google has demonstrated, computerised systems that replace human drivers are largely workable and could greatly limit human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that occur each year on America's roads. Such vehicles also hold the potential for greater fuel efficiency and lower emissions — and, more broadly, for restoring US primacy in the global automobile industry. But questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation have yet to be addressed, and an array of speakers suggested that such challenges might pose bigger obstacles than the technological ones. Major automobile makers have already deployed advanced sensor-based safety systems both assist and, in some cases, correct driver actions. But Google's project goes much further, transforming human drivers into passengers and coexisting with conventional vehicles driven by people. In September, Sebastian Thrun, director of Google's autonomous vehicle research program, wrote that the project had achieved more than 320,000 kilometres of driving without an accident while cars were under computer control. Over the past two years, Google and automakers have lobbied for legislative changes to allow autonomous vehicles on the nation's roads. Nevada became the first state to legalise driverless vehicles last year, and similar laws have been introduced before legislatures in Florida and Hawaii. Several participants at the Santa Clara event said a similar bill would soon be introduced in California. The federal government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies, said Kevin Vincent, chief counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But he added: "We think it's a scary concept for the public. If you have two tonnes of steel going down the highway at 60 miles an hour [95 kilometres an hour] a few feet away from 2 tonnes of steel going in the exact opposite direction at 60 miles an hour, the public is fully aware of what happens when those two hunks of metal collide and they're inside one of those hunks of metal. They ought to be petrified of that concept." And despite Google's early success, technological barriers remain. Some of the most trivial tasks for human drivers — like recognising an safety worker motioning a driver to change routes — await a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that may not come soon. Moreover, even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant issues would remain, suggested Sven Beiker, executive director of the Centre for Automotive Research at Stanford University. Today, human drivers frequently bend the rules by rolling through stop signs and driving above speed limits, he noted; how would a polite and law-abiding robot vehicle fare against such competition? "Everybody might be bending the rules a little bit," he said. "This is what the researchers are telling me — because the car is so polite it might be sitting at a four-way intersection forever, because no one else is coming to a stop." Because of the array of challenges, Mr Beiker said he was wary about predicting when autonomous vehicles might arrive. "Twenty years from now we might have completely autonomous vehicles," he said, "maybe on limited roads." Questions of legal liability and insurance are also unknown territory. There will be huge potential liabilities for the designers and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles, said Gary Marchant, director of the Centre for Law, Science and Innovation at the Arizona State University law school. "Why would you even put money into developing it?" he asked. "I see this as a huge barrier to this technology unless there are some policy ways around it" — though he noted that there were precedents for Congress' adopting such policies. For example, liability exemptions have been mandated for vaccines, which are believed to offer great value for the general health of the population, despite some risks. There will also be unpredictable technological risks, several participants said. For example, future autonomous vehicles will rely heavily on global positioning satellite data and other systems, which are vulnerable to jamming by malicious computer hackers. Although they did not participate in any of the panel discussions, several Google engineers and employees attended the event. The company has declined to discuss its autonomous vehicle research, and several participants said privately that they did not believe the company planned to become a provider of autonomous navigation systems to the automobile industry. Indeed, several people familiar with the company's plans said the fact that Google was lobbying for state laws to permit autonomous driving indicated that it hoped to introduce such vehicles soon — perhaps driverless delivery vans or taxis, as early as 2013 or 2014. Several participants suggested that in addition to technological and legal challenges, autonomous driving could use a more consumer-friendly name. Indeed, some called the definition itself into question. "It won't truly be an autonomous vehicle," said Brad Templeton, a software designer and a consultant for Google, "until you instruct it to drive to work and it heads to the beach instead."
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Maybe in another hundred years or so after the Mother-of-ALL-Nuclear-Wars that the neocons plan for America can this idea be re-surfaced. Of course, that shall happen when a few straggling Americans crawl out of their old lead-lined bomb shelters/bunkers with far fewer people on the roads wherein the technology might be re-built if anyone has a book or two. Those folks won't need technology however. They will want some food and water for their swollen bellies and parched lips.
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