Autonomous Vehicles Face Unexpected Hurdles: Advertisements and Pedestrian Behaviour Pose Challenges
The rapid advancement of autonomous vehicle technology, promising a future of driverless transport, is encountering unforeseen obstacles. Recent incidents highlight the sophisticated systems’ susceptibility to misinterpretation, raising concerns as trials of self-driving taxis are set to launch in London and have already been underway in various British locales, including York. Despite the rollout of these computer-controlled vehicles, questions surrounding the robustness of their safety protocols persist.
Professor John McDermid, a software expert and advisor to the UK government on self-driving vehicles, speaking at London’s Science Media Centre, elaborated on the ease with which these vehicles can be misled. He cited a particularly striking example where a driverless car executed an abrupt emergency stop after misidentifying a life-size advertisement on the side of a bus as a group of actual pedestrians. This advertisement, promoting the 2015 film The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and featuring several actors, was processed by the vehicle’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a real-world hazard.
“One of the automated vehicle companies I work with had a situation where their vehicle did a sudden emergency stop because it’s all pedestrians in the road, except they weren’t,” Professor McDermid explained. “It was a life-size advert on the side of a bus, but to an AI, it was human beings. That seems very obvious [to us], but actually, to the AI, it’s not.” Such misinterpretations, while seemingly straightforward to human observers, underscore the current limitations of AI in discerning nuanced visual information.
Further compounding the challenges, Professor McDermid noted that during trials in his university city of York, driverless cars struggled with the unpredictable movements characteristic of human pedestrians. This included instances where individuals proceeded to cross the road even after the traffic light had turned green, while the ‘no crossing’ red man signal was still illuminated.
In contrast, the United States, a pioneer in self-driving car development, treats ‘jaywalking’ as a criminal offense with potentially severe repercussions. This legal framework may encourage pedestrians to adhere more strictly to designated crossing signals. However, in Britain, the pedestrian often appears to hold a more dominant position on the road, a dynamic that these emerging robotic vehicles seem ill-equipped to fully comprehend.
Professor McDermid described the confusion observed in York: “It’s seen that there’s a traffic light, so identified the hazard, because the light is red. It changes to green, the vehicle is about to move off. But this is York, so the tourists – although the lights change to green – still walk across the road. Computer vision doesn’t understand what it doesn’t have models for in the world. It doesn’t know what a roundabout is.” This highlights a critical gap: the AI’s reliance on pre-programmed models versus its ability to adapt to novel or culturally specific behaviours.
London Trials Loom Amidst Growing Safety Concerns
The impending launch of Waymo’s driverless taxi trials in London from Easter, with plans for Uber to integrate the service and eventually offer robotaxis to the public, brings these safety concerns to the forefront. However, past incidents involving Waymo vehicles in San Francisco offer a cautionary tale. Approximately two years ago, school crossing guards reported numerous near-misses with these futuristic vehicles.
A survey conducted among 30 crossing attendants revealed that around a quarter had experienced a “close call” with an autonomous vehicle, with some forced to quickly move out of the way to avoid an accident. Theresa Dorn, a seasoned crossing guard, recounted three such near-misses within a single year. In one alarming incident, a parent had to intervene swiftly to pull a child to safety. “The parent grabbed the child, looked at the car – and there was nobody driving it,” she stated, expressing her unease: “Why do they have these driverless cars? I think somebody should be driving them.”
Regulatory Standards and Public Apprehension
In the United Kingdom, current government guidance stipulates that “self-driving vehicles should be held to the same high standard behaviour as that expected of human drivers.” However, a significant portion of the public surveyed indicated a desire for even higher safety standards, reflecting a palpable fear of an increase in road fatalities. The UK tragically records approximately 1,600 road deaths annually, a figure that many are anxious to see reduced, not exacerbated, by new technologies.
Professor McDermid has issued a stern warning against allowing pedestrians to become a “moral crumple zone” for the expanding fleet of robocars. This statement underscores the ethical imperative to ensure that the safety of vulnerable road users is paramount, and that the introduction of autonomous vehicles does not inadvertently shift the burden of risk onto them. The ongoing development and deployment of driverless technology must therefore be accompanied by rigorous testing, transparent safety protocols, and a clear understanding of the complex interactions between machines and human behaviour.
