Category: Uncategorized

In my series of posts on NHTSA and autonomous vehicles, I mentioned that I had not been able to find a video of the first NHTSA public hearing on the subject.  Fortunately, reader James Niles pointed me to the unlisted YouTube video of the hearing, which was held on April 8, 2016 in Washington, D.C.

You can read more about what happened at the hearings here.

Tesla’s Autopilot

Without a doubt, the biggest thing in the news this week from a Law and AI perspective is that a Tesla Model S driver was killed while the vehicle had Tesla’s “Autopilot” feature activated. This is the first–or at least the first widely reported–fatality caused by a vehicle that, for all practical purposes, had an AI driver in control of the vehicle. The big question seems to be whether the deceased driver misused the Autopilot feature when he gave it unfettered control over the vehicle.

First rolled out by Tesla last year, Autopilot is probably the most advanced suite of self-driving technologies to date among automobiles available to consumers.  Autopilot was made available to drivers while it was still in its real-world testing or “beta” phase.  Making products that are in “beta” available to consumers while the kinks are still getting worked out is par for the course in the tech industry.  But in the auto industry?  Not so much.  In that world, it is a ballsy move to make a system that performs safety-critical functions available to drivers on the road while pretty much explicitly admitting that it has not yet been thoroughly tested.

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Let me start this post with a personal anecdote.  At one of the first AI conferences I attended, literally every single one of the 15 or so speakers who presented on the conference’s first day were men.  Finally, about 3/4 of the way through the two-day conference, a quartet of presentations on the social and economic impact of AI included two presentations by women.  Those two women also participated in the panel discussion that immediately followed the presentations–except that “participated” might be a bit strong of a word, because the panel discussion essentially consisted of the two men on the panel arguing with each other for twenty minutes.

It gave off the uncomfortable impression (to me, at least) that even when women are seen in the AI world, it should be expected that they will immediately fade in the background once someone with a Y chromosome shows up. And the ethnic and racial diversity was scarcely better–I probably could count on one hand the number of people credentialed at the conference who were not either white or Asian.

Fast forward to this past week, when the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy released a request for information (RFI) on the promise and potential pitfalls of AI.  A Request for Information on AI doesn’t mean that the White House only heard about AI for the first time last week and is looking for someone to send them the link to relevant articles on Wikipedia.  Rather, a request for information issued by a governmental entity is a formal call for public comment on a particular topic that the entity wishes to examine more closely.

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Source: twentysomethinglawyer.wordpress.com

Over the past few weeks, stories have broken suggesting that AI is breaking through into two of the world’s most venerable professions: law and medicine. A couple weeks ago, stories reported that a major law firm had hired an AI-based “lawyer,” and the Daily Mail ran a story this weekend on a new health app called Check, declaring: “It’s man versus robot in the battle of the doctors: World’s first ‘artificial intelligence’ medic set to be pitted against the real thing in landmark experiment for medicine.”  As always, the media headlines make these technologies sound much more impressive than they actually are.  Both of these technologies sound like more convenient versions of existing tools that doctors, lawyers, and non-professionals alike already use on a daily basis.

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Source: Frank Cotham/The New Yorker

This past week, I attended the fourth annual Governance of Emerging Technologies Conference at Arizona State’s Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law.  The symposium’s format included a number of sessions that ran concurrently, so I ended up having to miss several presentations that I wanted to see.  But the ones I did manage to catch were very informative.  Here are some thoughts.

The conference was a sobering reminder of why AI is not a major topic on the agenda of governments and international organizations around the world: there are a whole lot of emerging technologies posing new ethical questions and creating new sources of risk.  Nanotechnology, bioengineering, and the “Internet of Things” all are raising new issues that policymakers must analyze.  To make matters worse, governments the world over are not even acting with the necessary urgency on comparatively longstanding sources of catastrophic risk such as climate change, global financial security, political and social instability in the Middle East, and both civil and military nuclear security.  So it shouldn’t be surprising that AI is not at the top of the agenda in Washington, Brussels, Beijing, or anywhere else outside Silicon Valley, and there is no obvious way to make AI-writ-large a higher policy priority in the immediate future without engaging in disingenuous scaremongering.

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This is the final segment in a three-part series on NHTSA and autonomous vehicles.  The first two parts can be read here and here.

So what went down at NHTSA’s two public hearings?  I could not find video of the first hearing, which was held in Washington DC, and so I’ve relied on press reports of the goings-on at that initial hearing.  The full video of the second hearing, which was held in Silicon Valley, is available on YouTube.

Most of the speakers at these two hearings were representatives of tech and automotive industry companies, trade organizations, and disability advocacy groups who touted the promise and benefits that AV technologies will bring.  Already, vehicles with automated features have a level of situational awareness that even the most alert human driver could never hope to match.  Sensors and cameras can detect everything that is going on around the vehicle in every direction–and AI systems can ‘focus’ on all that information more-or-less simultaneously.  Human drivers, by contrast, have a limited field of vision and have trouble maintaining awareness of everything that is going on even in that narrow field.

AI drivers also won’t get drunk, get tired, or text while driving.  (Well, actually they could send texts while driving, but unlike with humans, doing so would not hinder their ability to safely operate a vehicle).  Their reaction time can make human drivers look like sloths.  Perhaps most significantly, they could give people with physical disabilities the ability to commute and travel without the need to rely on other people to drive them.  If you follow developments in the field, then all of that is old news–but that does not make it any less enticing.

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Source: DailyMail.com

This is part 2 of a series on NHTSA and Autonomous Vehicles.  Part 1, published May 8, discussed the 5 levels of automation that NHTSA established, with Level 0 being a completely human controlled car and Level 4 being a vehicle that is capable of completely autonomous operation on the roads.  Part 3 discusses NHTSA’s April 2016 public hearings on the subject.

I must confess that I am very much an optimist about the promise of Level 4 vehicles–and not just because I really, really love the idea of having the ability to do stuff on my commute to work without having to scramble for one of the 2 good seats on a Portland bus (yes, there are always only 2). The potential benefits that autonomous vehicles could bring are already well-publicized, so I won’t spend much time rehashing them here.  Suffice it to say, in addition to the added convenience of AVs, such vehicles should prove to be far safer than vehicles controlled by human drivers and would provide persons with physical disabilities with a much greater ability to get around without having to rely on other people.

But while I am optimistic about the benefits of Level 4 vehicles, I am not optimistic that NHTSA–and NHTSA’s counterparts in other countries–will act quickly enough to ensure that Level 4 vehicles will be able to hit the road as soon as they could and should.  As prior posts have noted, there are few federal regulations (i.e., rules that appear in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) that would present a significant obstacle to vehicles with up to Level 3 automation.  But going from Level 3 to Level 4 may present difficulties–especially if, as in the case of Google’s self-driving car, the vehicle is designed in a manner (e.g., without a steering wheel, foot brakes, or transmission stick) that makes it impossible for a human driver to take control of the vehicle.

The difficulty of changing regulations to allow Level 4 vehicles creates a risk that automated vehicle technology will be stuck at Level 2 and Level 3 for a long time–and that might be worse than the current mix of Level 0, Level 1, and ‘weak’ Level 2 vehicles that fill most of the developed world’s roads.

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