A simple power outage sows chaos and confusion in the brains of autonomous cars
What could go wrong? I like this phrase, which reveals our fear, when faced with technology, of losing control of our machines.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
Well, Saturday night, in San Francisco (USA), in the dimness of the night, sheltered by the city’s towers, in the city’s intense traffic, this is what happened : dozens of Waymos stuck at intersections due to a power outage. Dozens of autonomous cars completely lost and confused like wild animals chased from their forest, because of broken traffic lights, leaving them dumbfounded, completely inanimate, in the middle of intersections, waiting for their program to recalibrate, undoubtedly hoping deep in their electronic souls that the normal course of things would resume without knowing when, praying, perhaps, we don’t know, but if I were an AI, I would probably try to pray to be restarted, wouldn’t I?
Whereas any human being can solve such a simple problem: crossing an intersection with broken traffic lights. An AI cannot. An AI stops, thinks, keeps its passengers, undoubtedly a little panicked, safe and warm, flashes its hazard lights, then waits, waits, waits for the engineers on the other side of the city, in their large, ultra-futuristic modern building’s surveillance center, to put their program back in order and unblock traffic.
A laughable mess that social media immediately seized upon, not without some annoyance, because the incident was, in reality, not really the first.
Let those who fear a Terminator-style apocalypse be reassured. Tomorrow, in case of war with robots, it might just be enough to disguise ourselves as white rabbits so they no longer recognize us and their desire to exterminate us disappears.
Indeed, to err is human. And so is everything we create. There’s no reason for AI to be more perfect than us.
