MIT Professor counters Google’s approach to self-driving cars

Google unveiled a driverless car prototype last month which has covered over 1.2 million miles in “autonomous mode” – vehicle driven by software, since 2009. Google and other automotive manufacturers and suppliers have said the technology to build driverless cars should be ready by 2020.

These fully automated self-driving vehicles could potentially be safer than regular cars, and might improve traffic conditions on roads.

However, contradicting this line of thought, David Mindell, an MIT professor, says that self-driving cars should not be completely self-driving. Speaking to MIT News, he cites examples including spacecraft, underwater exploration, air travel and others, which have frequently promised full automation, yet they still have a driver or a pilot somewhere in the network.

Although Mindell thinks that "it's reasonable to hope" that technology will help cars "reduce the workload" of drivers in a number of ways in the future, he believes total automation is not the logical endpoint of vehicle development.

"I think the narrative of full autonomy is a 20th-century narrative," Mindell says. "It's a narrative of industrial mechanization that's kind of filtered its way through the 20th century, supported by 20th-century science fiction. These narratives can and should change."

With Google’s self-driving car model, Mindell observes, there are many challenges: Its cars must identify all nearby objects correctly, need perfectly updated mapping systems, and must avoid all software glitches.

Ultimately, Mindell writes, "Google's utopian autonomy is a more brittle, less functional solution than a rich, human-centered automation." He predicts that the fully driverless model will not be the most successful, both for technical and social reasons.

"The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as driving to a big, opaque corporation—people are not comfortable with that," he says. Additionally, other companies and research groups looking at automating cars are "very clearly not going for the Google approach to fully driverless cars."

Mindell believes his perspective will come to be more widely accepted, and that full automation on the roads will not seem as desirable a goal.

"I think the public discourse is slowly coming around to there is another way to do it," Mindell concludes.