TECHNOLOGY companies from Google to Audi have made remarkable strides in autonomous vehicle technology over the past few years. This progress is the more impressive given the fact that a decade ago technologists considered driving to be a near un-automatable task. Despite the extraordinary pace of improvement, however, driverless cars still attract plenty of sceptics.
Some reckon that regulators and lawyers will keep the cars from reaching their full potential. They might do, though many local governments have been surprisingly open to crafting rules to accommodate the new driverless vehicles. Other critics argue that remaining technological hurdles could prove near-insurmountable. Yet such worries look overstated, both because recent progress suggests that obstacles are easy to overestimate and because remaining shortcomings ever more closely resemble those shared by humans.
Writing at Slate, for instance, Lee Gomes frets that driverless vehicles struggle in unfamiliar territory when they lack good maps, can make errors when sun blinds their cameras, and are occasionally caught out by the unexpected appearance of new traffic signals. Human drivers, of course, share these weaknesses, and others: like difficulty operating in adverse weather conditions. The big difference between driverless vehicles and humans, in these cases, is that the computer can be programmed to behave cautiously when stumped, while humans often plow ahead heedlessly. When critiquing driverless cars it is often useful to recall that human drivers kill and maim millions of people each year.