Buckle up. We’ve hit peak Human-Autonomy Clash
I was at an outdoor concert recently in San Francisco. Near the food trucks was a gleaming white Jaguar, two cheery people hovering by its side. But they weren’t selling the car. It was their job to convince me that this Jaguar, a Waymo self-driving car, wouldn’t kill me.
They didn’t put it quite like that, but that was their mission. You could get in the car, look around, learn about the safety features.
Waymo cars have been around for a while, but only recently without anyone behind the wheel. Cruise, the autonomy company owned by GM, also has empty cars driving around. If you think a car without a driver is strange, wait until you see one going down the road without anyone in it at all.
On the road, the cars can be prone to moments of confusion. A local news website reported how one particular cul-de-sac had been tormenting Waymo’s algorithms, leading dozens of cars down a dead end every day.
Last week, a friend sent me a video of a woman in the street shouting “Go! Go!” at a Cruise vehicle temporarily paralysed. “It’s OK, car, it’s not your fault,” my friend said, as it eventually drove on.
We’re in an era when the unpredictability of people meets the as-yet not fully capable autonomous car. In this moment, which I’m calling the Human-Autonomy Clash, there’ll be crashes, there’ll be anger.
And that’s why there was a Waymo Jaguar at the concert: Autonomy needs a publicist. The companies are one incident away from council-meeting oblivion, demands that local streets be protected from becoming Silicon Valley’s testing ground.
The publicists are on edge. When a clip of baffled cops pulling over an empty Cruise car went viral, it didn’t look good. The officer peered in, tried to open the door, and then the empty Cruise car sped off! The officer got back into his car to go after it. Once he’d caught up, two officers — reinforcements! — then got out to take a closer look.
It wasn’t long before Cruise representatives hurled themselves on to social media, saying, actually, all had gone as planned. The car moved up to a safe spot to stop, the cops were in contact with the company, and no infraction had occurred.
San Franciscans as well as those in a small number of other locations are being targeted with ads. Cruise tweets about delivering from food banks. It is trying to humanise its car, naming it Poppy.
This strategy can work. When food-delivery apps rolled out autonomous robots on college campuses, they attached googly eyes to the front in an effort to make them look more friendly (and less kickable). But self-driving cars will need more than googly eyes. One attempt is Let’s Talk Autonomous Driving, a website funded by Waymo that lays out some benefits of the technology.
If public sentiment starts to falter, these benefits will be pushed hard. Stop the innovation, companies will say, and you’re preventing a blind man from being independent, or a Girl Scout from getting home safely. But potential shouldn’t blinker scrutiny.
In time, self-driving cars will unlock economic opportunity. Roads will be magnitudes safer. Besides, the arc of innovation will ultimately mean mass adoption, just perhaps more slowly than the companies might hope. Before that, the Human-Autonomy Clash will get testy. Companies have a right to a voice, but not to control the conversation. As my dad would say on a long drive: “We’ll get there when we get there.”
Welcome to the future. Cop pulls over driverless car (because no lights?) Then Cruise goes on the lamb. (via https://t.co/mtmsIeOAUP) pic.twitter.com/ecQ5xXuSnS
— Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) April 10, 2022
Read the full article Here
