EDITOR’S NOTE: Teaching modern cars to be more human in an increasingly autonomous world
And if this implies that we expect cars to be mind readers, well actually, we kind of do
Today’s car talk is all about the rise of autonomous vehicles, but there’s still a little way to go before their artificial intelligence becomes smart enough to figure out that most enigmatic of questions: what humans want. And if this implies that we expect cars to be mind readers, well actually, we kind of do. Modern cars are increasingly being equipped with vast numbers of sensors to give them 360° views of their surroundings, together with automatic steering and braking in a bid to reduce crashes, but they still don’t have a handle on human behaviour and gestures — things that human drivers intuitively recognise. For instance an autonomous car that sees a pedestrian stepping into the road would come to a halt and wait for the person to cross, but won’t recognise if the pedestrian decides to stop and wave the car on. A company called Perceptive Automata is addressing this particular problem with software that can read the pedestrian’s intent and pass this information to an autono...
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