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'Our Kids Will Not Believe Humans Ever Drove Cars': The Real Question About Driverless Autos

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Do you remember a time before the internet, and a time before television? Now answer the same question for your parents. And do it again for your children.

Carl Bass, chief executive of software design group Autodesk  believes the same query will one day be posed about driverless cars.

“It will definitely happen,” he says.

We are as human beings particularly bad at driving. The range of human performance at driving is enormous. If you take Formula One drivers, they are superb athletes who can do things with a car that you and I can’t imagine and if you take a distracted person texting with a kid in the back seat screaming, we are absolutely awful drivers.

We don’t really ever say it to each other but we literally kill thousands of people every year by driving. I think we will soon come to the conclusion that computers can drive cars way more safely than humans come. Fifty years from now, our kids and grandkids are going to look back and say: ‘I can’t believe they actually drove their own car’ back then’. It will become so routine.

Bass is in a excellent position to judge as Nasdaq-listed Autodesk’s computer-aided design software is used for design and engineering purposes within the architecture and construction, manufacturing industry and film and video game entertainment sectors.

Founded in 1982, the San Francisco-based group has about 9,000 employees. The company had revenues of $2.27 billion last year and has a stock market capitalization of £13 billion. About one quarter of its revenues are made in the U.S., where the company’s software was used to build the New York Freedom Tower and in the development of Tesla electric cars.

“Our tools are used to design cars in general and also driverless cars,” he says.

We’re students of driverless cars because many of our customers are wrestling with what it means to have an autonomous vehicle and all our customers are wrestling with the question of more autonomous, smarter machines.

Whether it’s a car, helicopter, drone, train or industrial machine, every one of these is now getting driven by computers and being done increasingly remotely without anybody standing by. So it’s becoming a much more interesting question of how you design for things for this. How do you put sensors in? How do you monitor. The most dramatic aspect to the public is the driverless car but it’s happening in many different walks of life.

Progress To Autonomy

Indeed, 58-year-old Bass, who joined Autodesk in 1993 when it acquired his Ithaca Software firm and twice left the company, returning again in 2001, has witnessed during his long career the growing presence of microprocessors in many previously unintelligent machines.

“Over the last 30 or 40 years we have perfected things inside the computer and now increasingly people have turned to take low-cost microprocessors and apply them to the physical world,” he says.

The microprocessors have got cheap and powerful enough that they are starting to take on a starring role. Thirty years ago, the automobile probably had no microprocessors in it. Today, it probably has somewhere between one and several dozen.

It’s a constant trajectory to have more computing. We’re just using these small powerful computers to drive all kinds of machinery and finding out that in many cases we can programme them to be more reliable, more immune to the rogue kind of things we do where we as humans tend to lose our focus. Computers are really good in a stupid kind of way. They’re happy to do the same dumb thing over and over and over again.

He believes that it is easy to see this progression leading to a world where the job of a engineer or designer becomes much more about describing the problem, giving suggestions and leaving the more routine work of intensive computation to a computer.

“Instead of a designer trying out one, two or five designs, you could check out tens of thousands, if not millions of designs that way,” he says.

A Bumpy Ride

Bass does not expect the road to driverless vehicles dominating the world’s roads to be smooth or fast, however.

“I don’t think this is going to be one of these steady progressions,” he says:

because the first time a robotic car kills somebody, there will be all kinds of public outrage, even though every day in the U.S. dozens of people are killed by automobile accidents. We have a very strange double standard that we apply to this. But in 50 years you will look back and say that it was crazy to drive. Even within ten years, there will be a significant number of driverless vehicles. The technology is getting very close. Google has demonstrated it; it’s been demonstrated in other projects.

There are at least a handful of manufacturers who have announced plans to come out with either completely autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles. Many of the hurdles between where we are today in driverless cars are really about a legal framework and a cultural understanding of moving in this direction, I think the technical problems will be more easily solved than questions about insurance, liability and ethics. Those I think will be the more difficult questions that we’ll wrestle with for longer.

Does he see anything sinister or problematic with such developments? “Oh yes, plenty,” he replies.

All these are somewhat inevitable but not necessarily utopian. Questions about security and privacy are going to be a huge deal in the future. We have all kinds of issues there. The second question we’re going to have is really more about what happens to how we all make a living. Many of the more routine tasks are being automated, either eliminating or devaluing jobs. I think there’s some significant wrestling to take place with that issue.

Do you agree? What do you think is the future for driverless cars. Do let me know your views.

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