Autonomous Driving: Are Machines Expected To Be Perfect? Posted on : Aug 18 - 2018

Despite our increasing reliance on machines, they are still held with a bit of contempt in the mind of most people. Consider the multitude of science fiction works dealing in some way with machines taking over the world and either enslaving or exterminating all humans. Despite lifetimes of mostly positive experiences with machines, we still seem to have a flicker of doubt as to whether they are completely under our control.

That brings up an interesting question when thinking about the autonomous vehicles that we are developing with haste. What does the public expect from a machine in care of their life without human intervention?

I believe that expectation is “Perfection.”

For example, in April this year, one person was tragically killed when a broken fan blade caused an uncontained engine failure on a Southwest Airlines flight. Two things were significant about that accident when it comes to our expectation of perfection: 1) Southwest had a perfect record of no inflight fatalities for their entire 51-year history, and 2) The accident was preceded by nine years of perfection—not a single fatality since 2009.

Despite the rarity of that tragic event, it was the number one story across the country. Southwest estimated that they would lose $50-$100 million in bookings in the aftermath, and people started avoiding the window seat adjacent the engine nacelle. One article made the leap to offer up that if all the 737s were affected by this problem, it could be a disaster. That’s an incredible leap to distrust considering your chance of dying in a plane crash is about 1 in 7 billion, and your odds of dying from a lightning strike are three-and-a-half times greater!

Tragic accidents involving autonomous automobiles have brought similar reactions. After a fatal accident this past March involving a Tesla, their stock took a steep and sudden plunge before recovering again. An accident a month earlier where an autonomous Uber car killed a pedestrian with a bicycle at night led to Uber suspending all tests.

These two accidents led Jack Stewart to pen an opinion piece in Wired titled, “For a Much-Needed Win, Self-Driving Cars Should Aim Lower.” In that article, Steward concludes that “… AV makers are clearing the technological hurdles and tripping over the psychological ones.” View More