Self Driving Cars Failing? Next Up: Automate the Street
What will this Silicon Valley obsession mean for our streets?
Those who have promised us the delivery of self-driving cars for a decade and “at the latest” in 2020 have come up against a very old philosophical problem that is disguised as an engineering one:
How can we replicate something, in this case, the conscious being behind a car steering wheel, if we don’t understand what it is and how it interacts with the world?
And following from that do we:
1.Try to understand what being conscious in this world means first, a very hard problem. Or
2. Move straight to trying to replicate it with problem-solving in a continually more complicated manner so that all actions are ticked in real-time? Therefore, mimicking consciousness.
Self-driving cars research has, quite sensibly, as it is a profit-making enterprise at heart, and there is not much money in philosophical questions, opted for option two. And it has been productive, with advances such as lane departure warning systems and collision avoidance systems creating the incremental improvements in safety that are as brilliant as they are clever.