RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
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- Jun 15, 2007
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Geek on the Hill
Interesting article in the NY Times about Google's autonomous cars, which apparently have come closer than any others to being able to drive themselves:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html
Several things about this fascinate me. For one, autopilot devices, in some form or another, have existed for aircraft for almost a century, since Sperry corporation invented the first one in 1912. That device was primitive by modern standards, but it did allow the aircraft to fly straight and level. Today's most advanced aircraft autopilots can practically complete an entire flight by themselves.
And yet, until recently, no one has been able to build an autopilot that can drive a car, even on roads with no traffic. Google's entry is one of the few that seems capable of doing so consistently, and one of even fewer that are capable of negotiating traffic.
This makes me wonder about how complex human thought really is, and how difficult it is for machines to do what we do so almost naturally.
I suspect that human thought is hard for machines to simulate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that we don't always make logical decisions. Driving, then, becomes the collective actions of a whole bunch of people, none of whose actions can be predicted with absolute precision, trying to do so anyway in order to avoid collisions while reaching their destinations. Viewed in this context, it's a miracle is that most trips are accident-free.
Personally, I find driving to be more physically and mentally challenging, to require more attention, to demand faster reflexes and responses, and to be less forgiving of any errors or even momentary inattention, than any flying I've ever done. True, I live in a major metropolitan area. During periods of my life when I lived in the sticks, driving was easy. Here, it's not, especially when the traffic is actually moving. (It doesn't take much skill to sit still in a traffic jam.)
An engineer friend of mine once suggested that driving in city traffic demands more decisions than we can consciously enumerate. To test his idea, we drove from Queens to Connecticut and back (I had to pick something up in Stamford, anyway), me driving there, and him driving back. While driving, we attempted to verbalize everything we were doing, including things like glancing at other cars to try to predict what their drivers would do next, factoring the distance and speed of a car behind us in the adjacent lane when making lane changes, glancing at the instruments, navigating, and so forth.
You know what? He was right. It was impossible to verbalize, much less keep track of, all of the decisions we had to make during a relatively routine driving trip. We make them, act on them, and almost immediately forget all about them. It's actually quite amazing. Try it some time.
Okay, I'm rambling. There's no real point to this post. I just thought the article was interesting, and it got me thinking about driving compared to flying.
-Rich
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html
Several things about this fascinate me. For one, autopilot devices, in some form or another, have existed for aircraft for almost a century, since Sperry corporation invented the first one in 1912. That device was primitive by modern standards, but it did allow the aircraft to fly straight and level. Today's most advanced aircraft autopilots can practically complete an entire flight by themselves.
And yet, until recently, no one has been able to build an autopilot that can drive a car, even on roads with no traffic. Google's entry is one of the few that seems capable of doing so consistently, and one of even fewer that are capable of negotiating traffic.
This makes me wonder about how complex human thought really is, and how difficult it is for machines to do what we do so almost naturally.
I suspect that human thought is hard for machines to simulate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that we don't always make logical decisions. Driving, then, becomes the collective actions of a whole bunch of people, none of whose actions can be predicted with absolute precision, trying to do so anyway in order to avoid collisions while reaching their destinations. Viewed in this context, it's a miracle is that most trips are accident-free.
Personally, I find driving to be more physically and mentally challenging, to require more attention, to demand faster reflexes and responses, and to be less forgiving of any errors or even momentary inattention, than any flying I've ever done. True, I live in a major metropolitan area. During periods of my life when I lived in the sticks, driving was easy. Here, it's not, especially when the traffic is actually moving. (It doesn't take much skill to sit still in a traffic jam.)
An engineer friend of mine once suggested that driving in city traffic demands more decisions than we can consciously enumerate. To test his idea, we drove from Queens to Connecticut and back (I had to pick something up in Stamford, anyway), me driving there, and him driving back. While driving, we attempted to verbalize everything we were doing, including things like glancing at other cars to try to predict what their drivers would do next, factoring the distance and speed of a car behind us in the adjacent lane when making lane changes, glancing at the instruments, navigating, and so forth.
You know what? He was right. It was impossible to verbalize, much less keep track of, all of the decisions we had to make during a relatively routine driving trip. We make them, act on them, and almost immediately forget all about them. It's actually quite amazing. Try it some time.
Okay, I'm rambling. There's no real point to this post. I just thought the article was interesting, and it got me thinking about driving compared to flying.
-Rich
