Building a vehicle that can drive itself on ordinary roads is one of the grand ambitions of modern AI. But expectations are cooling
Starsky Robotics, a self-driving lorry firm based in San Francisco, closed down. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, its founder, gave several reasons for its failure. Investors’ interest was already cooling, owing to a run of poorly performing tech-sectors and a recession in the trucking business. His firm’s focus on safety, he wrote, did not go down well with impatient funders, who preferred to see a steady stream of whizzy new features.
But progress has lagged. In 2018 a self-driving car being tested by Uber, a ride-hailing service, became the first to kill a pedestrian when it hit a woman pushing a bicycle across a road in Arizona. Users of Tesla’s “Autopilot” software must, despite its name, keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road . The few firms that carry passengers, such as Waymo in America and WeRide in China, are geographically limited and rely on human safety drivers.
One study, for instance, found that computer-vision systems were thrown when snow partly obscured lane markings. Another found that a handful of stickers could cause a car to misidentify a “stop” sign as one showing a speed limit of 45mph. Even unobscured objects can baffle computers when seen in unusual orientations: in one paper a motorbike was classified as a parachute or a bobsled. Fixing such issues has proved extremely difficult, says Mr Seltz-Axmacher.
This narrow intelligence is visible in areas beyond just self-driving cars. Google’s “Translate” system usually does a decent job at translating between languages. But in 2018 researchers noticed that, when asked to translate 18 repetitions of the word “dog” into Yoruba and then back into English, it came up with the following: “Doomsday Clock is at three minutes to twelve.
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