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Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman
Published in September of 2016.
What technological advance is likely to have the largest impact on society between now and 2035?
How would you answer the same question for higher education?
A good candidate might be the driverless car.
Columbia University professor Hod Lipson, working with technology writer Melba Kurman, have written just the book we need to have an informed discussion on the coming driverless vehicle revolution.
Lipson, a well-known roboticist, proves to be the perfect guide in explaining the technology that makes driverless cars possible. We tend to think that self-driving cars are a relatively new invention, born out the ability of Google, Uber, and others to throw huge sums of money to tackle this challenge. The reality is that today’s autonomous cars depend on decades of research into artificial intelligence, sensors, processors, and robotics. Driverless is the first book that I’ve read that situates the development of autonomous vehicles within a much larger technology story.
Libson and Kurman not only excel at explaining the technology that enables self-driving cars, they make a strong case for the social benefits of eliminating human drivers. In 2016, there were 40,200 motor-vehicle deaths on U.S. roads. Car accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans age 3 to 34. Driverless car technology may not be foolproof, but it promises to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers.
The authors of Driverless are skeptical about combining autonomous driving technology with human drivers. They tend to agree with Google’s self-driving car project - now spun-off as Waymo - that the safest way to go is fully autonomous. The reason for this is that we humans are very bad at intermittent attention. The idea that we can suddenly take over for an autonomous car when trouble strikes is a fantasy.
Lipson and Kurman are equally critical of government efforts to promote smart roads and interconnected vehicles. They argue that placing transponders in roads and communication beacons in cars is both prohibitively expensive, and ultimately likely to fail. A much better approach is a mix of sensors - radar, video cameras, LIDAR, etc - combined with advanced mapping, deep learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.
The one area of Driverless that I found somewhat lacking was perhaps a more detailed and robust discussion of the employment impact of autonomous vehicles. The authors recognize the capacity of driverless vehicles to cause economic hardship. They recognize that driving a truck is one of the few jobs still available that allows non-college educated workers to receive a middle-class wage. Tractor trailer and delivery trucks are likely to be one of the first types of vehicles that move from human to computer controlled, and it is not clear what will happen to the 3 million people who now make their living driving these vehicles.
Self-driving cars are the perfect topic for campus debates. Discussions about the future of autonomous vehicles touch every discipline. Driverless is the perfect book to catalyze these campus conversations.
What are you reading?
