Deadly Hand-off to Human Drivers in AI Self-Driving Cars, Gonna Hurt

Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider

Co-Sharing in Level 3 Self-Driving Cars is a Deadly Recipe for Human Hand-off Failure

For AI self-driving cars that are less than fully autonomous, the human driver is considered co-sharing the driving task with the AI system. Some human drivers misunderstand this co-sharing arrangement. You’ve likely seen some human drivers that take their hands and feet away from the driving controls, maybe even sticking their head out the window, all of which means that if the AI suddenly opts to hand the driving back over to the human, it could be curtains for all.

Why would it be deadly? Because the time needed for you to put your head back into the game, along with positioning your hands and feet to drive the car, and then figure out what is happening, including discovering on your own why the AI has surprisingly tossed the controls back over to you, well, you won’t likely have any time left to decide what to do, let alone take the required driving action to avert disaster.

The odds are that in those precious few seconds of getting your body and noggin into the traffic situation will usurp the time that you would have had to do something useful to avoid a pending accident. Instead, the self-driving car is going to be proceeding along like a bullet or missile, heading towards an untoward situation that the AI cannot handle. If the AI could not handle the matter, it is probably a scary moment and one that requires great driving prowess by a human driver.

Except that the human driver wasn’t likely paying attention to the roadway, the human driver wasn’t in a posture to immediately take over the controls, the human driver might not be informed by the AI of what the predicament consists of, and the human driver has now gotten the proverbial hot potato.

A real hot potato. A multi-ton car, barreling into trouble, with the chances of injuring or killing the human driver, injuring or killing the passengers in the car, and injuring or killing any innocent bystanders such as pedestrians or drivers or occupants of other cars.

Not good.

We are just now seeing the emergence of Level 3 self-driving cars. The Tesla and its Autopilot capability are considered a Level 2. Level 3 is more advanced automation, often referred to as Advanced…