Huffington Magazine Issue 68 | Page 41

THE MOST DANGEROUS MOMENT PREVIOUS PAGE: MARTIN GEE in a self-driving car involves no immediate or obvious peril. It is not when, say, the computer must avoid a vehicle swerving into its lane or navigate some other recognizable hazard of the road — a patch of ice, or a clueless pedestrian stepping into traffic. It is when something much more routine takes place: The computer hands over control of the vehicle to a human being. ¶ In that instant, the human must quickly rouse herself from whatever else she might have been doing while the computer handled the car and focus her attention on the road. As scientists now studying this moment have come to realize, the hand-off is laden with risks. “People worry about the wrong thing when it comes to the safety of autonomous cars,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor and director of the Revs Program, an interdisciplinary research center. “There are going to be times where the driver has to take over. And that turns out to be by far the most dangerous and totally understudied issue.” Thrust back into control while going full-speed on the freeway, the driver might be unable to take stock of all the obstacles on the road, or she might still be expecting her computer to do something it can’t. Her reaction speed might be slower than if she’d been driving all along, she might be distracted by the email she was writing or she might choose not to take over at all, leaving a confused car in command. There’s also the worry that people’s driving skills will rapidly deteriorate as they come to rely on their robo-chauffeurs. In the effort to engineer selfdriving cars, the best and brightest minds have already mastered many of the technological questions, producing vehicles that can park themselves, navigate highways and handle stop-and-go