This month's issue of Wired Magazine has a very thorough article on the current state of Artificial Intelligence in society at large, written by senior writer Steven Levy.
After a lengthy introductory essay which explores and compares the history of what we, in terms of pop cultural expressions, thought A.I. was going to be forty years ago to what it is today, it focuses on two major areas where A.I. is making serious inroads and already affecting our experiences in some profound, though not always obvious, ways; Wall Street Trading and Personal Transportation.
The tone for the analysis of the personal transportation sector can be summed up by the following quote on page 89:
"Even formerly mechanical processes like driving a car have become
collaborations with AI systems. "At first it was the automatic braking
system" Brooks says. "The person's foot was saying, I want to brake
this much, and the intelligent system in the middle figured when to
actually apply the brakes to make it work. Now you're starting to get
automatic parking and lane-changing." Indeed, Google has been
developing and testing cars that drive themselves with only minimal
human involvement; by October, they had already covered 140,000
miles of pavement."
The article is very insightful, not so much because of the detail (or lack thereof) it provides as far as the technology is concerned, but in terms of helping the reader come to terms with some of the implications this technology has already had on our driving habits, and what they will have in the future, in both a practical and cultural sense.
Now, I would like to delve much deeper into both the practical and cultural realms of this issue and I see this article as an excellent launch point for these explorations.
Just now, my mind has been racing to imagine a time when automotive manufacturers will be designing, refining, and marketing bespoke vehicles not in terms of their drive-ability, responsiveness, power, or road holding capabilities, but in terms of, say, the interior space and chair arrangement flexibility, the ability to do yoga in your vehicle, or sleep to and from your commute, or receive an anatomical massage or even cook a meal while on the go. Of course, for all we know, the ever greater feasibility of working from ones home in a growing number of professions begs the question "where would we all be driving to, and do we really need to drive at all?"
Perhaps, in a future filled with vehicles that drive themselves, we will finally be able (GASP!!!) to decouple the "driver experience" from the idea of personal automotive transportation.
The issue of communication also comes up in my mind on a number of fronts; In the last sentence of the article, the author states "this machine man language barrier is something we are really going to have to work on." This is probably one of the mildest understatements I've come across in a long time, though I can understand why he would choose not to lend too much gravity to what he felt was a mild miss-communication issue with the User Interaction experience he had with a Lincoln MKT during a self parking session. I foresee there being a need to streamline, and perhaps even regulate the types, frequencies, and modalities of regulation between man and machine in both voice and button activated automation sequences, along with a mandatory general education sequence in all driver ed courses of the future which would alert all future drivers of driver-less interaction protocols.
I wonder, on a different note, whether communication between automobile and automobile, automobile and road, and road/road will also begin to emerge. One easily can be prompted to contemplate the synchronized movement of a flock of migratory birds heading south for the winter...
No comments:
Post a Comment