I was once in a band called ‘It’s a Race!’ The daft name seemed to fit. It captured the carefree pointlessness of our music. We were guilty of some of the worst jam-band excesses. Our improvised, 10-minute songs could not cover for our lack of rehearsal or musical mediocrity. We didn’t know where we were going. To say we split up due to artistic differences is to give us too much credit.
A lot of self-driving car journalism uses the metaphor of a ‘race’. In a recent episode of the Autonocast, Ed Niedermeyer (a recent and welcome addition to Partners for Automated Vehicle Education) calls it horse-race journalism. He is rightly critical of this style. There is no point talking about a race if we don’t know where the finish line is.
Niedermeyer’s target is a recent Bloomberg piece on the “The State of the Self-Driving Car Race 2020”. This gets off to a bad start, with an analogy to the space race and a quote from a consultant:
I mean, it’s literally like putting somebody on the moon. It’s that complex
It literally isn’t like putting somebody on the moon. Putting somebody on the moon, ironically, was not rocket science. That problem was hard, but it was not complex. According to Brenda Zimmerman and colleagues, some problems are simple, like following a recipe; some are complicated, like rocketry; others, like raising a child, are complex. The easy things about putting a person on the moon were that most people agreed on what success would look like and that there was nothing in the way. The hard thing – how to take an object containing a person such a vast distance and bring it back – could be solved with enough brains and enough money. Many terrestrial problems, including climate change, obesity and mobility, are wicked. Their is little agreement on the definition of problems, approaches or metrics for success and there are lots of organisations, interests and structures standing in the way.
For systems comprising self-driving cars to work effectively, safely and fairly in a range of different places, much of what needs to happen lies beyond the control of the competitors in the self-driving car ‘race’. This is one reason why the technology’s success will take far longer than the hype currently suggests.
The trouble with the Bloomberg piece, as with so much self-driving car journalism, is that it presumes the finish line is clear. If we are to make good decisions about this technology, we must first recognise that there are many different possible directions. We need to start talking about the desirable directions and working out how to bend current approaches to fit.
Driverless Futures? 