Avoiding Accidents

The death of a young girl outside a school the other day prompted some thoughts about autonomous vehicles (the accident was caused by a human driver). Will the autonomous vehicles receive updates over the air, so they are all exactly the same. Or will they be capable of some learning so they can adapt to local conditions? The possible combination of:

Heavy rain
Giant hail
Snow
Black ice
High winds
Flash flooding
Narrow, winding streets in the old parts of a city
A new suburb, with roads too narrow for cars parked on the side of the road and two-way traffic.
Temporary road closures and diversions (GPS maps could handle these)
Driving with poor visibility, or at night
Driving with a damaged system

How much effort do we put into teaching people to drive (in NSW)?

We teach them English, so they can read the Road Rules and signs on the road.

They can apply for a Learner Driver Licence at 16 years of age, and must accumulate 120 hours of logged driving before proceeding to a Provisional Licence.

Humans have a severe weakness – how many things they can think about at once. They have demonstrated that driving carefully is within their range, except in the most arduous conditions, or with a mobile phone held to their ear.

 

Excerpts from Transport for NSW Road User Handbook

Give way to pedestrians

As a driver, you must give way to pedestrians:

·       ………..

·       when entering or leaving a driveway

 

What to do if you are leaving a driveway, and there are walls or fences, so all that is visible of the footpath is the driveway? Sound your horn? It could have been a school for deaf children.

Children

Children have not developed the skills to understand and react to danger. They’re still learning where to cross safely, and they can find it hard to judge the speed and distance of vehicles. This means they can act unpredictably around traffic.

Take extra care near:

·       children playing, walking or riding bikes near the edge of the road

·       schools, particularly when children are arriving or leaving

·       school buses or school bus zones where children may be getting on or off the bus.

This is the crux of the problem. A teenager of 16 will (likely only just) understand all the references in the road rules: child, driveway, school, bus, developed, unpredictably. An autonomous vehicle has no structure which allows it to comprehend what is said in the road rule. Yes, it can be programmed, but that will miss all the complex relationships linking “understand”, “danger”, “speed”, “visibility”. If children are not able to do these things, the autonomous vehicle must do it for them.

We strongly recommend that autonomous vehicles on our roads have sufficient English to read and understand the Road Rules.

Of course you would say that – you sell Semantic AI!

OK, but how else do you make the machine that is the car understand the rules? The machine has to create generalised objects (children are not short adults) with complex attributes. Machine Learning? It would have to knock down thousands of children before it learnt that it was a bad idea. Instead, the machine has to anticipate, be alert to, and guard against, the possibility. This is not how autonomous vehicle software currently works.

We have an Unconscious Mind, which ic continually scanning for problems:

The Road Rules again

Scanning

Scanning is essential for safe driving. Scanning is keeping your eyes moving, checking in one area for a couple of seconds and then moving your eye to another area.

When scanning look:

• ·     in the distance
• ·       at the road surface
• ·       to your left and right
  
• ·       regularly at your mirrors and instruments.

Orion Semantic AI