The unexplored subtleties on “Going autonomous”

On a winter morning before the first light

I was going on my bike on a silent road in the early hours of the day. The road looks entirely abandoned as it was one of the most chilling days of winter and I was not expecting anyone coming on to the road. But I was very much ambivalent and kept an eye on both sides of the road as far I can see through the fog. I was also ready to apply the break and stop if at all someone or some animal shows up suddenly. All those thoughts were running in my subconscious mind.

As per human nature, you get to adapt to things based on your past experiences. Your mental alertness is a precautious state expecting something suddenly might happen such as a human standing in the middle of the road or a stray dog trying to run across or a vehicle coming in the opposite direction etc. Because everyone would have had these experiences one time or the other.

I wanted to add, that I was also observing lot of vehicles parked around and the sight resembles a lone ranger passing through a graveyard of vehicles. As I don’t see any people around, I am not expecting any of those vehicles to move at all.
Imagine a situation where one of the vehicle started moving onto the road to reach the owners front courtyard as it was given a command to do so. The car tries to drive by itself as it was an autonomous car. All of a sudden, that action of car might create a sense of panic in your mind. What the heck? Did I see someone coming around it? How is it moving? Oh..it could be an autonomous car.

You don’t feel this at all?

Let’s not take this very hypothetically instead, let’s try and understand the facts. It’s a simple theory. While we are going on road, our brain does lot of calculations about myriad of dynamic personas that can appear up on the road. Having the sense to control the speed, your readiness on the brakes etc are based on that. Most of those reactions are involuntary and are instinctive.

Along with the dynamic personas, there are some constants too like trees, street lights, road dividers etc. Since you never expect them to walk down the road like a zombie, your brain would always assign them with lesser weights(lesser probability of obstruction) in the equation. Similarly, if you are seeing vehicles parked on a road, you involuntarily treat them as constants unless you see someone coming out of the door to take a ride. But you may and can simply say, why not consider everything as a dynamic persona which can move by itself without the need for humans. But it simply increases the number of variables in your equation and the human brain can only do so much after all.

Didn’t made sense? Let’s take a simple example of you riding a bike inside a crowded market. The chances of you hitting someone is very likely unless you are damn slow and careful. Just because you have so many dynamic factors in the equation your chances of hitting are high and sometimes imminent.

Now don’t tell me that you add more computational power to yourself, it is simply the physical limitation of humans as of today.(Augmented vision/AI assisted driving might help though) Adding on, incase of autonomous vehicles, the complexity of this equation further beefs up if you have to consider the type of the car and it’s manufacturer and the sensors they might have used and intelligence etc.

The scariest thing about these vendors are, they are all developing these self maneuvering technologies in silos without of much coordination between with each other fearing of revealing their so called patentable technology to competitors and may loose their position in the market. We wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with some crazy ideas to beat the competition. This further increases the unknowns in our equation.

Well, if you say, I am opposed to technological advancement, no I am not. All I am trying to do is to highlight the nuances and spin off a thought process, so that we can start fixing it collectively.

More situations!!

You could ask me, are you saying all of this just because you had a random thought that slipped into your mind on a bad winter morning? No, that’s just the beginning. I have started thinking about it more aggressively because it is something which is evident to many people but non trivial to put it in words or express it. In fact I have put my best effort to explain them in a pictorial way.

The absence of human factor:

Below described situation in the picture might completely seem normal to anyone. A motorist trying to move on a road on which lot of vehicles clogged on both sides of it.

Had there been no concept of autonomous vehicles, person rides freely as long as he/she sees no person in and around these vehicles. Glad, this is still going to be the situation at least few years down the line. But this landscape is quickly changing.

Significance of human factor:

Putting myself in bikers shoes. As soon as I see someone in one of the car I would carefully adjust my navigation to circumvent the path of the car by slightly slowing down.

Here the car has become from being a static factor to dynamic factor and the presence of human was very evident from a distance and I would have enough time to think and plan the maneuver.

One more interesting fact here is, I am also dealing with an actual human being in the car. So it gives me the freedom to think that any human would take time to lay up the gear, turn the steering wheel, look at the road in the rear view mirror and move on to the road. This is a generic human behaviour anyone can anticipate and plan accordingly.

Autonomous driving vehicles:

In case of autonomous vehicles, this is all invisible, unknown and differs from car to car and vendor to vendor. Is this any better than the previous case involving human beings?

Above portrayed, is a much puzzled situation for anyone taking this road. 6 to 7 years down the line, you would most probably end up being in similar situation on our roads. Remember the bad winter morning I have started with and the corresponding prognosis will seem very much real and will come to life then.

I still don’t agree with you

Let’s say you don’t agree with all the points above. I will now talk about much real situation I had been in. On my usual office commute way. Some part of the road is really wider. It is so wider that the width of road on the side I am passing by, is much wider than length of a bus. There are lot of new buildings being constructed and new paths that are getting linked to this road being instituted everyday. One fine day, all of a sudden I see a bus coming out of a gate exactly cutting my path.

Initially, I was very puzzled on seeing a bus coming out of the building. As the building was unoccupied until the previous day. Immediately after that, the next puzzle is, which direction would the bus go? Would it take a left turn and join my path or would cut across to take a U turn?

I have no clue about it and as I was approaching the bus more closer and closer, I have shifted my observation from the entire bus to the driver, which immediately helped. My speculations of how the bus would move are solved on observing the driver’s gestures and I have corrected my course accordingly.

The existence of an active human being driving the bus helped everyone heading that way to correct their course immeditely with less disruption. The nuance here is, the existence of an active human being controlling the bus and the person’s gesture helped me and everyone to take decision quickly.

The situation drawn in the picture looks pretty tidy with only two dynamic factors depicting just me and the bus. But the situation I had then was not so simple as this, the road is muddy and slippery because of constructions happening around with lot of traffic.

Can autonomous vehicles understand typical human gestures like a human would do?

If you look at the biker very closely. You can see the biker gave a gesture by looking right, which means person wants to go slight right and overtake the car before him/her. And you could have burst to laugh on imagining this, this is not a valid traffic rule/sign and how can we expect autonomous vehicles supposed to understand this?

Well if I am in the car following the biker, I would have definitely slowed down on biker’s gesture. The same would apply to more explicit gesture depicted below too.

This is very trivial human gesture that we do and observe everyday.

I wanted to ask, are the autonomous vehicles equipped to address this? Before I say I don’t know, I am really skeptical if manufacturers are really concerned about these subtleties!!

Conclusion

Technology is as disastrous as it could help human lives. If you follow autonomous vehicles developments closely, they actually makes the life of the people using the autonomous vehicles more safer and easier, simultaneously can push other people using non autonomous vehicles into various stages of dilemmas all along their daily commute.

I have always heard manufacturers and technologists talking about how safe is autonomous technology to people who use it, but very little of how accommodative it is for people who wish to still live with non autonomous choices. It is unfortunate that no one talks about it.

Why should we accept such a change if there are not going to cope up with our non autonomous world which we have been living.

Though we are living in a world racing towards autonomy, if someone chooses to not to use it, it should still be an easy choice to do so and this happens if this technology is ensured to be more humane for the non autonomous world.

When we all set to invite a change in the society. I think it should play well with existing rules.