The White Knuckle Future
On my 16th birthday, as was a tradition in my house, I went to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation office on Walkley Road in Ottawa and took the written exam to get a G1 license — a learner’s permit that allowed one to drive a car with an experienced driver in the front passenger seat. There were other restrictions on the license, such as types of roads, vehicles, and hours one could drive, but it was the start of being independent.
It is only last week that I fully appreciated my mother’s bravery on my sixteenth birthday. Later that day, on the drive home from school, she took me to the empty parking lot of Sir Robert Borden High School and let me get a feel for steering, braking, and accelerating. It was exciting for me but I can only image her horror at the loss of control at letting this novice drive her around. She would later allow me to drive every day to and from school, giving me a lot of experience and helping me pass my driving tests on the first attempt.
Last week, after several attempts to configure it, and after predicting we’d have commercially available self-driving by 2020 (back in 2011), I experienced it for the first time.
It was terrifying.
In my nervousness of initiating it up on the Tesla, I didn’t put in the correct address and the destination wasn’t visible on the screen, so after about 2 minutes, I had no idea where I was heading. The self-driving computer put the car in the left lane going the speed limit and a car was approaching from behind. Normally, I’d move over to the right to let the car pass but the self-driving computer made me out to be an inconsiderate jerk. Instead, I ended up taking over the self-driving mode and accelerating. The warnings beeped at me, the car slammed on the brakes at a yellow light. I grabbed the steering wheel and again put on the brakes to take over.
While the engineers at Tesla through millions if not billions of hours of training are convinced that the car has met some threshold for safety, I have still to be convinced. “That’s enough for me today,” I thought.
The issue with adopting technology that takes on a lot of responsibility is that is needs some easing into. Maybe make me watch a video? Maybe show me a few things so I know what to expect? How should I respond when I disagree with how the car is driving? How quickly do I need to react to prevent skipping a curb or hurting someone?
We’re going to encounter this type of automation more in our lives — way beyond driving. If we’re the ones implementing this automation, we should make an extra effort for being transparent and explaining what we’re doing, especially for first time users.
It’s key to building trust and confidence in our work.
