CAVs are coming, ready or not

By Cecilia Nasmith

The timing of the British Columbia incident couldn't have been better, leading up to the Northumberland Learning Connection presentation on driverless vehicles as part of its current Artificial Intelligence series, AI + U.

In a Richmond, BC, mall, a driverless car was seen that week circling the parking lot, which (it was later learned) had been activated from an app called Smart Summons.

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Even apart from the shock value, there were a couple of problems that guest speaker Barrie Kirk pointed out – driverless cars are not legal in parking lots and, anyway, the car was travelling in the wrong lane.

Nevertheless, driverless cars will be a common sight within a very few years.

Kirk, executive director of the Canadian Autonomous Vehicles Centre of Excellence, said the idea of giving a car “enough judgment to drive itself” was first foreseen by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century, a full 10 years before Ford's first Model T and 80 years before IBM launched the first personal computer.

The CAV era (connected and autonomous vehicle) has started, and Kirk told the full house at Cobourg's Columbus Community Centre Thursday night that there's no going back.

He displayed photos of CAVs already in operation around the world, such as the employee shuttle bus in a fenced computer-company compound in France.

The move to self-driving vehicles is being embraced by all the major car makers.

Ford should begin selling them by 2021 for the (for now) limited purpose of acting as taxis in certain well mapped and geographically constrained areas.

GM has announced its vision of a car with no steering wheel or pedals by 2022.

The vision of Mercedes retains the steering wheel, but allows the front seats to pivot completely around to face the back seats for cozy conversation.

“These cars will be safer than human-driven cars,” Kirk stated.

At this time, 93% of collisions involve driver error. He believes this trend can reduce the rate of collision to 20%.

In the few remaining years until they are more commonplace, many things will have to change, such as how their insurance will be structured and outdated regulations – such as those that require cars to have brake pedals and air bags in the steering wheels, as well as those regulations that currently govern rules of the road. Most importantly, detailed mapping of all roads must be undertaken.

Another big challenge is ethics. If a self-driving car has a choice of plowing into a group of children at play or seniors who are too slow crossing the street, what will it do? In North America, we obviously would want to save the children. In Japan, however – where seniors are revered and valued elders – the answer would be different. Also, if human-driven vehicles have such a high rate of collisions, should human drivers be banned to prevent all that carnage and destruction?

Other challenges to deployment include dealing with extreme weather, pedestrian protection, work zones and detours.

Kirk displayed the expected time line, beginning with the advanced driver-assistance features of today (like cruise control).

The second generation is being ushered in slowly in a limited way but ramping up through the next decade.

By the 2030s, expect fully automated vehicles that you can buy that can go anywhere at any time.

And it's not just for passenger service. Autonomous vehicles are being phased in already in the form of heavy machinery for agricultural and construction. They can work at one site, Kirk pointed out, then travel on roadways to the next.

In a modified smaller form, you might see them as sidewalk-delivery bots. Even the drones that can be used for parcels delivery are a replacement for human-driven vehicles.

Perhaps a dozen countries are developing small planes for personal transportation with a range of 150 to 200 km. Or, as Kirk put it, “The Jetsons are coming!” It's a concept in which Uber is becoming invested, with a flying-taxi service planned for a US launch in 2022 that makes use of parking-garage roofs as heliports.

“The reality is, younger people are already moving away from car ownership and driver's licences in a way that would have been unheard-of when I was young,” he said.

“The most pushback I get is from middle-aged males.”

Another thing the young are embracing more than their elders is the sharing economy – which is a key part of the shift to driverless cars.

These cars will be more expensive than the ones we drive now – how much more is difficult to say. But when driverless taxis and conveyances are commonplace, there could come a time when people buy rides instead of cars. Even homes that have two cars might opt to keep only one and employ ride purchasing to fill the gap.

Kirk did present the estimate that this replacement of one car with ride purchasing can save a family $3,000 a year.

Ford and GM are already on this page, he said.

“They both know, in the future, they will be selling fewer cars, and they are positioning themselves to offer transportation services. Both are invested in Lyft.”

The effects on people are beginning to be speculated upon, Kirk said. For instance, these vehicles will have more connectivity so people can be on-line in a car that, in another age, they would have been fully occupied in controlling.

But one big winner will emerge, he said – Big Data. Kirk shared the new saying now making the rounds: “Data is the new oil.”

Not only will these cars monitor their passengers, he said. Their external visual features will be capable of 365-degree scans at the rate of 30 times a second, much greater than the human eye. So it will be easy, for example, to identify a woman walking into a chocolate shop. When that woman gets home, she will be getting ads for chocolate when she logs into Facebook.

Whole terabytes of data will be harvested and monetized, Kirk said, which is worth three to 10 times the value of the cars.

“That's why Google is so heavily invested.”

Of course, this makes data ownership and privacy a big issue for the cars of the future. But this concern, and all the others, won't stop the trend. And Kirk is concerned that the Canadian government is not preparing for the future.

“Whether politicians in Canada accept it or not, the end of the era of oil-based transportation is coming,” he stated.

“Alberta oil will be hit hard.

“We know from what the politicians say that the purpose of these multi-billion-dollar pipelines is to help them get oil to market. Why are we spending that money when, by the time the pipeline is finished, it won't matter.”

Kirk observed that both Federal and provincial politicians in Alberta tend not to see beyond the next election.

“They are looking at the short-term impact of jobs and not at the long-term impact to the oil industry.”

Alberta must prepare for the new reality, as must another large adversely-affected group – drivers who will lose their jobs. This includes driving instructors, bus drivers, tow-truck drivers, transport-truck drivers, taxi drivers, even Uber and Lyft contractors.

“I really hope government at all levels step up to provide, as best they can, for safety net and training,” Kirk said.

One potential for jobs is the supply chain that will produce CAVs. Another surfaced in his discussions with a large Canadian technology company, whose representative told Kirk that only 20% of his company's jobs are STEM-related – meaning science, technology, engineering and math. For those without the capacity to train for such jobs, he said, there's the other 80% of jobs in that company related to such things as marketing, sales and legal services.

Another impact will be medical. Because so many auto-fatality victims are young people who otherwise were healthy, there could well be a shortage of viable organs for transplant.

Ill effects and disruptive changes notwithstanding, work goes on to perfect the CAV, at the upper levels of government, in the industry and even in Kanata on two significant test tracks.

Meanwhile, these changes will start to become evident in 2020, Kirk predicted, presenting a Top 10 list of how our lives and cities will ultimately be different:

10- - The oil and pipeline industries will decline, and gas stations will become obsolete.

9 – You will see autonomous garbage collection.

8 – You can fly from Ottawa to Montreal, downtown to downtown.

7 – MAAS (Mobility As A Service) will become more popular, as private car ownership declines.

6 – There will be fewer parking lots.

5 – The Ottawa LRT will be in trouble.

4 – Government departments will suffer disruption.

3 – Humans will be banned from driving.

2 – The air will be cleaner.

1 – Collisions and deaths and injuries will be down to 20%.

Fear of change is very real, Kirk acknowledged, and it is likely to occasion a good deal of social unrest. But it won't make a difference in the end.

Kirk said his organization puts out a free monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for at www.cavcoe.com.

Though his area of focus is the CAV, Kirk did offer some thoughts on the field of AI, which the late Stephen Hawking said was potentially the end of the human race.

“In terms of the long range, a world run by autonomous robots is scary,” he acknowledged.
“There's a concern that, around 2040-2050, when they start to have the ability to reprogram themselves, we could unwittingly be facing a race of very powerful artificial beings who will regard us as a nuisance – and nobody has really addressed that yet.

“It's a very real concern.”

As science-fiction as it sounds, he continued, “futurists are concerned about that technology getting away from us. I don't have an answer for that.”

Which inevitably brings up the potential of hacking, which already plagues so many automated services.

Theoretically, he acknowledged, terrorists could commandeer one of these cars, load it up with explosives, send it to a designated spot and blow it up – in effect, putting suicide bombers out of work.

“The simple answer is, it's an arm race,” Kirk said.

“Bad guys are well funded, very smart, and they are doing their best to create mayhem and disruption. Good guys are trying to keep up with them, and trying to put in roadblocks to prevent them.

“It's like the war on drugs or the war on cybersecurity. We will never completely stop them. We can try to minimize it, but never completely.”

The powers-that-be are aware of this, including the RCMP and the AI industry. One effort some big companies are trying is the so-called white-hat hackers whom companies hire to hack into systems just for the purposes of finding where access might be hand and finding a way to deny it.

Kirk described an experiment at Blackberry that caused more than a little unease, when a successful hack into a simple wi-fi-enabled coffee pot proved eventually to be the portal that gave access to the company's entire IT system.

The current AI + U series is the first time Northumberland Learning Connection has seen individual sessions sold out in advance – for example, the Nov. 8 session on Smart Cities – Smart Planning? Presented by Waterfront Toronto Vice-president of Innovation, Sustainability and Prosperity Kristina Verner.

Six sessions remain in ths series, though the presenter for the Nov. 14 and 15 sessions – Petra Molnar of the University of Toronto – had to forego the Northumberland commitment in favour of an invitation from the United Nations to present her findings for them. Betty Ivory announced that her colleague Vincent Wong will make the Nov. 14 presentation – High Risk Experiments: AI, Migration and Human Rights – in her stead, with an emphasis on social-control efforts in China and resistance movements in Hong Kong,

Otherwise, remaining components of the series include;

Nov. 15 - The Discriminating Algorithm

Nov. 21 – Is Big Data Changing Democracy with Wesley Wark of the University of Ottawa

Nov. 22 – Wark returns to present Rebooting Regulation

Nov. 28 – AI and Health Care Is Really IA – Intelligence Augmented with future strategist E health Zayna Khayat of Singularity University

Nov. 29 – What Do Patients Need To Know with Melissa McCradden of Sick Kids Hospital and Vector Institute for AI

Tickets, if available, can be purchased at the NLC website at $20 plus $1 handling fee. Thursday sessions begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Columbus Comunity Centre (232 Spencer St. E., Cobourg), and Friday sessions at 10 a.m. (except for a 9:30 a.m. start on Nov. 15) at the Port Hope Knights of Columbus Hall (1 Elias St., behind the Capitol Theatre).

There is also a Dec. 6 event called AI 101 with only 30 tickets available, as Brent Barron leads an interactive session with facilitators from CIFAR (Canada's global-science think tank) to tackle issues in public policy surrounding health care, housing and law. This will take place at 10 a.m. at Venture 13 (739 D'Arcy St., Cobourg).

As well, The Loft (upstairs at 201 Division St., Cobourg) is screening Blade Runner on Nov. 19, a film that is very much in tune with the AI theme – and incidentally, though it was filmed in 1982, it is set in 2019.

For more information, visit www.connectnlc.ca.