‘Perfect Automation’ an Impossibility With Self-Driving Cars, Says NTSB Chief
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart doesn’t “see it happening anytime real soon” that autonomous cars will get so good that human drivers -- and their susceptibility to human error -- get banned from the road, Hart told the Bloomberg-Western Digital Data Revolution conference on artificial intelligence Thursday in San Francisco. DOT soon may release its long-awaited autonomous-vehicle guidelines, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said earlier at the event (see 1608250049).
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People ask Hart similar questions all the time about what he thinks of a future with pilotless airliners, he told the conference. “My answer to that is Sully,” he said of pilot Chesley Sullenberger, who famously glided his aircraft into the Hudson River in a successful emergency landing. “What if that airplane had been automated when it choked on some birds, and lost the engines and became a glider? That’s an example of unintended consequences.” How to cope with such unforeseen circumstances is “one of the huge challenges for how do we automate a system as complex as this,” Hart said of autonomous driving.
Self-driving cars have an “amazing potential” to bring about safer roads, Hart said. “For decades, we’ve been designing cars to be able to minimize injury if you have a crash,” he said. Building airbags, seat belts and “more robust structures” into cars has saved perhaps “thousands of lives a year,” he said. “Now we’re looking at maximizing new technologies to stop the crash in the first place,” he said. “That has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives. So the potential is absolutely amazing. The question is, how do we get there?”
A big unknown about autonomous driving is “how to respond when the automation doesn’t work,” Hart said. “As reliable as it is -- and it will be getting more and more reliable -- we learned a long time ago, 1912, we stopped saying that ship can’t sink,” he said of the Titanic. “So we’re not going to say, this automation can’t fail. Likewise, what if the automation encounters unanticipated situations -- situations that the software designer did not anticipate?”
Society will “never have perfect automation” in self-driving cars, Hart said. Nor will it ever “eliminate human error, because there’s also human error” in the vehicle's design, manufacture and maintenance, he said. “Plus, there are other humans out there. There are other cars or pedestrians or bicyclists. So there will always be humans in this human-automated system, and that’s the challenge -- how to make the automation and the human interface work most effectively.” The crux of the “challenge” of self-driving cars is introducing automation “into a system that still has humans in it,” he said.
The role NTSB is hoping to play is to “inform” the regulatory process in autonomous driving “with our experience of automation in other modes, and how complex that has been,” Hart said. “I mean, the regulator’s going to have some enormous decisions to make.”
For example, when and in what street scenarios “will a regulator determine that automation is appropriate?” Hart asked. “What if I’m driving in an automated car and there’s an 80,000-pound truck coming at me in my lane? It shouldn’t be, but it is. So now, will my automation run me into the truck and kill me, or will it send me up on the sidewalk to save me, but take out 15 pedestrians? That’s an ethical issue that the regulators are going to have to face.”
Hart concedes there’s no “simple answer” to such ethical questions, “but I do think it needs to be a single answer,” he said. “It should not be something the states decide, state by state. It’s going to have to be a single answer to that, and it’s going to have to come from the government, because the manufacturers aren’t going to do it.”