So Smart They're Dumb The idea of self-driving cars has been much in the news lately. In the most recent round of Google-acquired self-driving car technology, they’ve been showing off on public roads. The problem is, they just haven’t got it quite right yet. They run into a lot of difficulties on the road. When you’re a software engineer, there’s only one way to find out for sure if a computer is actually working: you put it through its paces in the real world. You turn it loose in the real world and see if it works. Well, Google did that. They put two vehicles, one called Ford Fusion Hybrid and one called Toyota Prius, on public roads, and told them to try and drive themselves, but to come to a full stop whenever someone who was not on board told them to, like a police officer or a crossing guard. What Google found out was that the cars drove down the street and, as far as they could tell, stopped for every pedestrian they saw. If you were at a crosswalk, however, you had better get your head out of the car or the car wouldn’t see you. The car stopped and looked, not to see if you were waiting for it to go, but just to be sure that it hadn’t actually hit you. Then it would go and continue on its way. This has a number of negative consequences. First of all, if you want to be a pedestrian and the self-driving car is around, it’s going to stop when it comes to your corner, as if it’s already decided that you don’t exist. If you want to cross the street to wait for it to go, it’s also going to stop. If you get into the car and are planning to use the car for something other than moving with no one but the driver in the car, it will wait until the road is clear, then go and let you out. If you need to go to a doctor or get groceries or visit a friend, it’s not going to go. It’s going to wait. You’re in no position to argue, because you’re going to be standing in front of it, waiting for it to go, all the while the self-driving car is sitting there thinking. Even if you don’t want to cross the street, there are a number of other ways that the self-driving cars can get you into trouble. For example, they don’t understand lanes. If you look closely at Google’s video, you can see the car changing lanes without seeing anyone doing so first, which suggests that the car isn’t even aware of other cars. In Google’s video, the other car is moving at a much slower speed. What if someone is speeding down the road, not stopping, but speeding along the way and the car decides to come to a stop for that? What if someone darts in front of you when the self-driving car has its driver’s eyes off the road, looking back at the map or taking a phone call? What if someone is out there driving an RV or a pickup truck? You can even imagine a situation where you tell the self-driving car to take you to a store. How does the self-driving car know where the store is? It’s not going to ask you where the store is, is it? The reality is that we won’t be seeing much self-driving cars for quite a while. But what will happen is that people will be convinced that they can drive their car down the street and go to work and do all sorts of things, all by themselves. After the initial excitement about self-driving cars, we’re going to go through a process much like what we’ve just seen, and then we’re going to forget about the idea of self-driving cars altogether. Imagine, however, if we got off that first excitement and just continued to think about self-driving cars the way Google does. We’d come to the conclusion that these cars aren’t safe. You’re getting into a strange new way of moving that seems like it ought to work, but it doesn’t. We wouldn’t want to get into a vehicle with that level of uncertainty and danger. It’s kind of like the concept of having an intelligent machine that does everything you could do on your own, only better. The most promising developments are those machines that do everything better than human beings can do them. A computer that can beat a human at poker does something the human can’t do. A computer that can solve a mathematical equation is better at mathematics than humans are, at least in terms of the time it takes. What’s the benefit? What’s the improvement? Most of the time, it’s that they can do things at such a rate that you don’t even have time to object. When a computer is faster than a human, it’s not because it can do something a human can’t do. It’s because a human can’t do something the computer can do. The only problem is that this is a fallacy. Just because the computer can do something better doesn’t mean it will. If it starts acting in a human-like manner, there are going to be a lot of people who’ll want to use it. You’ve heard of the law of unintended consequences. Well, there are unintended consequences to the law of unintended consequences. Just because you have faster computers that are more capable doesn’t mean that you won’t be taking advantage of them in an inappropriate way. The self-driving cars are a perfect example. The idea is that you would use it to avoid driving. If you put up a big enough reward and punish the self-driving cars if they commit traffic violations, then the more sophisticated self-driving cars will be programmed not to do anything illegal, but they’ll do it anyway. If you put up a big enough reward and punish the self-driving cars if they commit traffic violations, then the more sophisticated self-driving cars will be programmed not to do anything illegal, but they’ll do it anyway. This is why we won’t see the Google self-driving car in our streets in the near future. As a solution to traffic, it won’t work. It’s a cool idea, but it won’t solve our problem. There are people in politics who keep demanding that we solve our traffic problem by building more roads. That’s a bad idea. We need to change our thinking about the problem. Let’s build our system for freeway traffic management so that it gives us the benefit of people sitting in their cars when they want, and lets us make changes as the traffic changes in the same way a computer with a database would do, not by reprogramming the whole thing at each intersection, which is how we would have to go if we used the Google self-driving car. Let’s make a system that can respond to traffic conditions, but doesn’t create more of a problem than it was trying to solve. Let’s get a government that works for us, not for those who think they’re entitled to have the same kind of fun as the rest of us. The other night, I got together with one of my sisters and her husband for some of their 30th-anniversary-party preparations. One of the things they had asked me to do was pick up some of the hors d’oeuvres and the flowers and cakes. I was in my car. It was a nice night, and I’d been up from early that morning, so I had been up a number of hours and wasn’t really paying a lot of attention. All of a sudden, I came to a stop. There was an SUV in the middle of the road and a traffic light that said green. There were cars at a complete stop behind it. Then the light changed to red, and a car, honking its horn in frustration, started moving up slowly on the left side of the car in front of me. There were a couple more cars following behind the first. I started moving up slowly and pulled into the right lane, but there was no way the car in front of me was going to move. He would not let me go through. Then I realized that he was going to continue to sit there even though he had a green light. The red light was for me to go through, not for him to keep his position. The light had changed and everyone else was moving. I realized that he was just like me. He had been sitting there going through his day while I had been having a long day of my own, so he wasn’t going to move just because the light had changed. We just kind of sat there for a moment, all of us having a little laugh. He started moving again and I drove on my way. I didn’t even mind that he didn’t move. This was just one instance where the light changed, but I know it will happen again. He did the right thing, and I did the wrong thing, but our actions wouldn’t have had any effect on each other’s actions. You’re all familiar with that story. A number of people were waiting in line at the grocery store. The doors opened and suddenly there was a stampede for the next level down. When the people at