Apple Car Tour (presumably) shows increased hit automation

Apple has always said that it tries to put the person at the heart of everything it does. He will probably find that he has to do the same with Apple Car for a simple reason: human augmentation prefers human replacement through automation.

Here’s why.

People stay smarter than machines

The Knowledge challenges of the Apple Car project are reported. That’s bad, I think, but the emerging truth seems to be that, to put it in a phrase from Elon Musk, the need for people was not too low for those who were pushing automated AI coverage.

Look at it this way. Argo.ai CEO Bryan Salesky wrote in 2017: “We need to build algorithms that enable our autonomous vehicles to respond to a deeper understanding of the likely behavior of other road users.”

That means smart cars need to be smart enough not to collide with pedestrians, cyclists, other vehicles or even unexpected crash barriers or wind obstacles. To achieve this, they must have machine-vision intelligence, intelligent algorithms to make good decisions in an infinite range of unpredictable situations (including errors in their own code) and the ability of things like trajectory and measure and evaluate the speed of other road users.

Soft skills are difficult to code

To be safe on the road, these vehicles must emulate the sixth sense of most drivers, an intellect that sometimes warns us when things are about to go awry. Not only that, but they will have to understand the interactions that human drivers use to communicate with others on the road. And, of course, these systems must be completely reliable in any type of weather, including rain, ice and snow – and, indeed, when network coverage is not available.