All The Questions About Autonomous Cars You Wanted Answers To But Didn't Know Who To Ask

The world is deeply divided between people who love autonomous cars and people who spend their lives making memes about them or trolling them. And why not, the space in the middle whether it comes to dogs rights or politics is getting drastically reduced, which means people on both sides are equally passionate and uninformed. But not a lot has been said about what happens when the age of the autonomous car arrives?

What stage of the autonomous car revolution are we currently in?

According to Ayman Alashkar, CEO of Oboteo, Tesla and other passenger cars which work autonomously with a human being acting as a fail safe are the third stage of the autonomous cars. The final and last stage will be completely autonomous cars which won¡¯t need a fail safe. So theoretically, the car will be able to operate just as well, even if not even a single human is in it. Indiatimes met Alashkar at the AI Everything summit in Dubai recently. Oboteo is a boutique AI company.

Would there be anarchy when driverless cars and human driven cars both are running together on the road?

Ayman Alashkar, CEO-Oboteo

Women might love electric cars on the road, an electric autonomous car will not pull up next to women drivers and make lewd gestures or spend his next hour being a complete buffoon that many men in many countries do. It will also not flick you, if you cut it off. While it might be disorienting to drive past a car and see no one at the wheel, autonomous cars and good old human driven cars can co-exist on the roads.

My fear arises out of the same question that¡¯s a hallmark of the driverless cars - their safety. Driverless cars (even though some get into scary and hilarious accidents like the Tesla who thought a white trailer was actually just clear white sky) are supposed to observe better lane discipline than humans, stick to rules and observe speed limits. But what happens when they run on the roads with human beings who don¡¯t do any of these things?

Alashkar estimates that running on the roads alongside the human-driven cars wouldn¡¯t be a problem for autonomous cars, purely because they have/are evolving to take faster evasive actions than humans do. So in principle, they would react quicker to someone slamming their breaks or suddenly swerving into your lane.

Also read: Best Thing About Self-Driving Cars? You Won't Have To Park Them, Which Is Also Bad For Traffic

Would it increase the number of cars on the road or decrease them?

While there isn¡¯t the need for drastic changes to the road infrastructure in developed cities like Dubai or parts of Germany and USA with clearly demarcated and divided roads, the road infrastructure in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and by and large populous/developing countries will have to upgrade their road infrastructure.

¡°A completely driverless car will be able to drop you to work and go back home, or take your wife shopping or pick up your kid from school instead of just sitting around in the parking for 8 hours,¡± Alashkar says.

This does present a unique benefit of the driverless cars - they might actually help reduce the number of cars on the road, once we completely switch to them. If you don¡¯t have kids - don¡¯t be too surprised if Uber or another champion of the shared economy lets you run your car as a cab while you are at work.

One of Waymo's fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan under testing. (Image: Waymo)

What about the roads?

If you stick to the hypothetical situation that driverless cars will make the second car redundant, it would also put less pressure on the roads and rule out the need for constantly expanding them. The money, resources and fossil energy saved could be used for the benefit of other things. This, hypothetical is a very promising one especially for booming cities with terrible traffic like Delhi, Paris and London.

Delhi had 109.86 lakh vehicles in March 2018 (Delhi Economic Survey) and was growing at 5.81 per cent. For the same year, the number of cycles was drastically reducing. Cities like Delhi also face an acute parking crisis of personal car parking, lack of parking in city centres and other areas - issues that reduced cars can help with (with or without driver).

To be honest though, this is a more generic fix and a comparable reduction in second cars can happen due to car pooling and using cabs instead of driving.

Will driverless cars be better for the environment?

Even though a lot of the autonomous cars being tested are Electric, there is a debate on whether or not all autonomous cars will be electric. While it makes sense to couple the two technologies, there are other very clear concerns on the battery - electric car batteries would need to provide even more juice for the autonomous sensors and paraphernalia. And note - they have much better things to do with the juice right now as they make a dent - like improving range.

Tesla AutoPilot UI confirming lane change amidst traffic. (Image: Tesla)

Worst case scenario?

The biggest concern here is common with everything to do with AI. We live in times when all it takes to turn an AI chatbot into a racist asshat is 24 hours. So what happens when the AI here starts adapting according to the biases of the programmers and others on the roads?

For instance would the autonomous cars in Gurgaon learn to cut lanes aggressively and those in Paris start to aggressively cut off electric scooters as a way of adopting to driving on the road? While some of these thoughts might seem a bit tin-foil, not all of them are.

Also read: This Autonomous Car Warns Pedestrians Of Its Intentions With The Help Of Pulsating Lights

What about cyber security?

With the connectivity of such autonomous cars, the need for cyber security will rise correspondingly. A scene from 'The Fate of The Furious' gives us a glimpse of the worst-case (almost impossible) scenario but something similar on a small scale is not really out of the question.

A much simpler cyber attack, affecting an individual vehicle and its driving dynamics can potentially have a devastating effect. An even lowly hack can simply lock a user out of his or her vehicle. With such a risk, can the makers be trusted to keep such attacks at bay, more importantly, forever?

History has shown us that no connected device has been hack-proof. So what happens when a 1 ton moving vehicle on the road is vulnerable to such attacks? Can they potentially be the next form of terrorism? Are there any guidelines in place to ensure optimum cyber security?

A depiction of how an autonomous car detects objects and signs on the road (Image: Civil Maps)

Another point to ponder - the autonomous tech is not limited to vehicles on the road. The world is moving towards autonomous drones, delivery robots and more. Uber has a plan of bringing an autonomous air ride system from one nodal to other. How should the masses be comfortable with such objects flying overhead, and potentially being at risk of a cyber attack?

Another extension to this risk is the ¡®User data¡¯ of such autonomous vehicles being collected and stored by the respective makers. Such vehicles record each and every data point while moving, including the driving style, driver's behaviour and even the locations and routes taken by the driver. Where is this user data stored? With the advent of new ventures in the autonomous tech space, can all their servers and data-safety measures be trusted? Data leaks have been known to affect even the tech giants like Google and Facebook. How is this data safer than that?

If I had an accident in an autonomous car, will I be thrown in jail?

Even the lawyers are stumped by this one. Uber's self-driving car was recently in an accident that led to the death of a cyclist crossing the street. There was an observer in the driver seat, but turns out she wasn't paying attention and couldn't override the system in time. The test fleet was pulled off the streets. Till the time the laws around autonomous cars aren't framed, these cars are most likely to be (or rather, should be) limited to test tracks. The other legal issue that needs to be dealt with is that of insurance.