A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control by Kartik Hosanagar

Author:Kartik Hosanagar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2019-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

TAMING THE CODE

7.

In Algorithms We Trust

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon in May 2016, on a sunny stretch of road in northern Florida, Joshua Brown, a forty-year-old entrepreneur and technology enthusiast from northeastern Ohio, was sitting behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S sedan. He’d just spent a week with family at Disney World, they had all said goodbye that morning, and he was now driving to a business meeting for a company he had started five years earlier, to help bring internet access to rural areas.

At about twenty minutes before 5:00 p.m., Brown’s car was zipping along U.S. highway 27A when a semi carrying blueberries in the opposite direction pulled into a left turn lane and then crossed the road ahead of him. Reports suggest that the truck driver ought to have waited for Brown to pass, but there was still sufficient time for Brown to slow down.

The Tesla, which Brown had put into self-driving Autopilot mode, failed to register the white truck against the bright sky. Brown himself failed to take control and engage the brakes. The car crashed into the side of the truck-trailer at seventy-four miles an hour, then continued under it until hitting a utility pole, spinning, and finally coming to rest. Brown, investigators believe, was killed almost instantly upon the Tesla’s impact with the truck.

Brown’s death is the first known fatality in a car operating in self-driving mode, and it got a lot of attention in the technology and automobile worlds. Some media commentators and industry analysts had already faulted Tesla for including Autopilot in its cars because the technology was still in beta mode. Others had criticized the company for not doing more to ensure that drivers are actively in control of their vehicles while Autopilot is engaged. Less than a month before the accident, Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, had promoted a video Brown himself had made of a different Tesla Autopilot experience, wherein the car successfully noted and avoided a truck pulling ahead of it. Now, after the fatal accident, Musk found himself defending Autopilot as a lifesaving technology that, when used correctly, would reduce the overall number of vehicle fatalities.

Most experts agree. In more than 90 percent of conventional crashes, human error is to blame. According to some estimates, self-driving cars could save up to 1.5 million lives just in the United States and close to 50 million lives globally in the next fifty years. Yet in an April 2018 poll, 50 percent of the respondents said they believed autonomous cars were less safe than human drivers. After the Tesla crash, consumers were apoplectic. “This dangerous technology should be banned. Get it off the road. The public streets are not a place to experiment with unproven self-driving systems,” wrote a San Franciscan commenting in a discussion forum. Clearly, people viewed Brown’s death as less an anomaly than a harbinger of things to come.

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