What The AI Needs To Do When Humans Inside A Self-Driving Car Panic

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

Don’t panic.

Wait, change that, go ahead and panic.

Are you panicked yet?

Sometimes people momentarily lose their minds and opt to panic.

This primal urge can be handy as it invokes the classic fight-or-flight instinctive reaction to a situation, though it can also cause people to make poor decisions and get themselves into a precarious position accordingly.

Contagion And Panic

When a person panics while in a crowd, it can have spreading consequences like a kind of virus.

When one person panics, others often opt to do the same. This could be a monkey-see, monkey-do kind of reaction.

Or, it could be a follow-the-leader reaction, namely they assume that the other person knows something they don’t know.

Ranges Of Panic Behavior

There are ranges of panic.

You’ve got your everyday typical panic.

You’ve got the panic that is severe and the person is really crazed and out of their head.

You’ve got the person that seems to be continually in a semi-panic mode, no matter what the situation.

And so on.

We’ll use these classifications for now:

• No panic
• Mild panic
• Panic (everyday style)
• Severe panic

These forms of panic can be one-time, they can be intermittent, they can be persistent. Therefore, the frequency can be an added element to consider:

• One-time panic (of any of the aforementioned kinds)
• Intermittent panic
• Persistent panic

We can also add another factor, which some would debate fervently about, namely deliberate panic versus happenstance panic.