Had a discussion with colleagues on the first self-driving car fatality case over Friday lunch. While we lament the loss of a human life, we remain hopeful of the advancement of technology.
Innovation is inherently risky. Being new is also being different and convention breaking. Exploration involves uncertainties. When human lives are involved, uncertainties translate to danger.
The Tesla death incident may post more uncertainties on commercial self-driving cars’ future. Since the technology is in beta mode, it probably should only be used on Highway only. If the GPS detects that the car is not on the Highway, maybe the car system should alert the driver to take over in manual mode? However, the fatality case should not be a stumbling block. As my colleague pointed out, we are already using Autopilot mode in our planes. Self-driving cars on open market will just be a matter of time. The rest would be policy and regulation issues.
Then my colleague raised the topic of robot barbers. Would you trust a robot waving sharp objects around your head? What if there’s a bug in the system that causes the robot to go crazy and cut more than your hair? As engineers, we then discussed what measures to put in place to control damages by robot barbers. Maybe we can predefined the cutting strength and the sharpness of the razor so it cannot harm the skull? I am amused that we forgot the most important question on robot barber giving an ugly hair cut. _:P_ Safety comes before aesthetics, eh?
As computers and robots take over more aspects of our lives, we wonder whether iRobot will become reality one day. Machine Learning and AI are buzzwords these days, but I still remember how my AI lecturer shared that a simple task such as cleaning up a messy dinner table is super difficult for a robot as it needs to be able to recognised objects of various size and material, and then grab and transfer the objects securely. The holding strength applied to a wine glass should be much smaller than that applied to an iron plate.
Robots are controlled by computer programs and can be hacked. Maybe in the future, assassination will be done by hackers hacking through the target car’s autopilot system. Anything that connects to the internet is hackable. Maybe it’s time to think about an “intranet” for cars? _:P_
What about robot troops for warfare? Then it will really be a cyber warfare as the team that manages to hack into the enemy’s control center has the power of turning the whole army around.
With so much innovation, the world is getting more dangerous, and more fun.
A Fatality Forces Tesla to Confront Its Limits
