Fooled You, How Driverless Car Road Trips Are Staged
Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider
Let’s suppose I tell you that I am going to make a person disappear before your very eyes. That would be quite a magic trick.
But, suppose I then say that the person needs to get into this box that I have conveniently placed onto a stage. Well, okay, that sounds interesting, though it isn’t quite the same as having the person just suddenly vanish while standing directly in front of you.
Then, I tell you that the person will get into the box and I need to drape a curtain over the box. Then I tell you that you must stand back and cannot inspect the box and nor peek behind the curtain.
All in all, I have gone from claiming I could make a person disappear to now having so many qualifications and restrictions that the trick seems a lot less impressive than my original proclamation.
That’s exactly what is happening with the various miraculous claims about some of the emerging self-driving driverless trucks and cars.
How so?
Well, let me take you behind the curtain so you can see how the magic is performed for many of self-driving truck and car headline stories.
You’ll be somewhat dismayed that road trips by so-called fully self-driving trucks and cars are really oftentimes being done via a bunch of smoke and mirrors. I don’t want to seem overly critical about this, but at the same time these efforts to mislead the public and the media are a dual edged sword. On the one hand, it creates rapt attention to the advent of self-driving vehicles and gives us all an exciting jolt about the future. At the same time, it over-inflates what is currently possible and confuses the true status of self-driving and AI capabilities.
I’ll first discuss one of the most now-famous examples of such tomfoolery, of which few people today realize the trickery involved. Magic trick about to be revealed.
You might recall that in October about two years ago, an alleged self-driving truck drove one hundred twenty miles across Colorado on the Interstate 25 and delivered 51,744 cans of Budweiser to its destination. This has been touted as the first commercial delivery by use of a fully self-driving truck.
