– By Gerard Norsa –
If you believe some of the more optimistic industry pundits at the coal-face of automotive technology, infrastructure and manufacturing, the rapid convergence of the Internet of things has us all on a fast-track towards a utopian society where driverless vehicles deliver dramatically improved safety, efficiency, environmental and societal benefits.
But are we really? Other experts in the fields of philosophy, ethics, logistics and human behavioural sciences say that the journey still has many speed bumps to negotiate before everyone can sit back distracted as robotic, computerised transport gets us safely from A to B with monotonous regularity.
In the opening plenary session of the 2016 Australasian Fleet Management Association (AfMA) Conference in Melbourne, a panel of experts dissected the issues around driverless vehicles and highlighted the rapid advancements that has been made in autonomous motoring as well as bringing into question whether the much-hyped nirvana can ever be reached.
Driverless technology is here now and currently being used in some industry verticals such as the resources sector. Meanwhile, there have been sanctioned trials carried out on public roads with Government support and there is massive R&D investment being undertaken by manufacturers.
Of course, the implications for fleet managers are also significant. As Matthew Leyson from the Australian Driverless Vehicle Initiative (ADVI) pointed out to AfMA delegates; “Imagine a world where cars don’t crash and you don’t have to deal with drivers. That is a game changer.”
And he’s right. The ubiquity of this sort of technology is looming large on the horizon. However, a world inhabited by driver-less vehicles has enormous ramifications in so many areas that it literally turns the whole automotive industry on its head. It potentially involves less vehicles, lower insurance costs, reduced carbon emissions, massive disenfranchisement of some traditional employment roles and a total rethink of how vehicles are marketed.
Fellow-panellist, Andrew Somers, a specialist transportation engineer with Transpotim Consulting confessed to being a little more pessimistic about the future of driverless vehicles and opined that there is a lot of regulatory control that has to be negotiated.
“At the end of the day, it is not a matter of whether I am prepared to travel in a driverless vehicle, it is whether you’re prepared to share the road with me travelling in a driverless vehicle,” Somers said. “We are all voters and we express our opinions through the ballot box, so these issues will become political.”
There is an enormous amount of legislative and regulatory change required and massive political implications in the management of that change. However, as Professor Robert Sparrow a philosophy scholar from Monash University who was also on the panel pointed out, perhaps the biggest challenges in regards to driverless vehicles are the ethical ones.
A self-confessed cynic when it comes to the driverless vehicle, Sparrow believes there are more pitfalls along the way than most people recognise or are willing to acknowledge.
“The transition from a system that is 90-95 per cent effective and to a vehicle that has no steering wheel is really hard to manage,” Sparrow said. “It is only really safe when you eliminate humans altogether.
“If you could take all of the humans off the road then it is easier to imagine a driverless future but the situation where computers have to deal with flawed human beings is much harder to manage.”
Sparrow said that in driving vehicles there are classic ethical dilemmas that humans face in the event of forced collision. In a driverless future, it is machines that would have to make those same decisions.
“Even very rare occurrences – say, one in a 100,000 chance – are going to happen somewhere every day once you get enough of these vehicles on the road,” Sparrow said. “Where you have the choice of crashing into a motorcyclist or crashing into the family sedan, what should I do?
“You’ve got to hope that the driverless vehicle can make the distinction between the two and then make a decision as to which one it will kill. Presumably in the event of this unfortunate incident it will choose to kill the motorcyclist and limit the number of casualties to one instead of ploughing into the sedan and taking out Mum, Dad and their three little kids.”
Sparrow pointed out that there are any number of standard ethical dilemmas that will have to be negotiated and an engineer will then have to write it into the source code and the manufacturers will have to include it in their end-user agreements.
“As another example,” he continued, “if the driverless vehicle has to make a decision as to whether it should crash into a tree and kill you or run down two pedestrians, what does it do?
“These are hard marketing messages to sell, so while I think we will get to driverless vehicles eventually, we are not there yet and I think it is more long term than just around the corner.”
