The history of autonomous vehicles
actually goes back quite far.
The oldest example where
we had autopilots,
that's actually aeroplanes,
and the first autopilot
was already in 1912,
where people were using an
autopilot in an aeroplane
to stabilise the flight
and make it much easier
for the pilot to fly the aeroplane.
Maybe the most exciting right now,
that's actually self-driving cars.
In self-driving cars,
we are not yet really
at the full potential
of self-driving cars.
We're not driving
completely without drivers.
There are different
levels of autonomy.
We are actually making big progress
with artificial intelligence
in these vehicles that
will hopefully get us soon
to higher levels of autonomy.
What we need to do is we need
to collect tonnes of datasets,
images of people in
different situations,
images of pedestrians on the road,
images maybe of hidden
pedestrians behind cars,
and we need really thousands,
millions, of these images.
AI is trained on examples,
to train a network to recognise
objects on the road,
of images where something
is labelled as a truck
or is labelled as a car.
And if you have only been
training on cars and trucks
then you will never be able
to recognise a bicycle,
so you will have to provide
examples of recognising a bicycle.
The whole point is to teach the
computers to mimic the computation
that happens in the human brain
when we do object recognition,
because it's very easy for us to
tell if this is a dog or a cat,
but it's very difficult
to write down the code
that actually captures what
is a dog and what is a cat.
Traditionally, trust
has been among people.
It's a social phenomenon that relates
to how people interact
with each other,
but now that you're looking at the
trust between humans and machines,
then the trust gets slightly
twisted in its meaning.
For example, it has been shown that
if people ride an autonomous train,
they are more likely to
trust the autonomous train
than when they ride
an autonomous car.
And interestingly, it has been shown
that if there is a human-like body
with his or her hand
on the steering wheel,
that could also positively
influence the issue of trust,
although that human body is not going
to steer the autonomous vehicle.
We want to show that
if people understand
how the AI works in
an autonomous vehicle
and they can explain how it works,
then they are more likely to accept
it from a trust point of view.
Usually, these cars have sensors
that look all around the car.
They might have information from
other cars that they are sharing,
so they are much better in
detecting some situations
where there might be pedestrians
on the road or hidden,
or other cars driving
in a strange way,
or there's an accident
behind a corner.
The problem with the data on how
much they will reduce accidents
is that there was one statistic
I think which is quite credible,
which says that it's 40%,
but then there are ones
that say basically 96% of the
accidents are based on human error,
so self-driving cars can rule
out 96% of the accidents.
Another advantage is that
there are still some people
who don't have access to
either their own car,
or maybe they cannot drive
themselves for various reasons,
maybe because of age or disability.
All these people, they would have
wider access to individual autonomy
by self-driving cars.
A lot of people perceive AI as
something which has its own ideas
and emotions and feelings, and
that can perhaps show initiative
in situations that it has
never encountered before,
or have initiatives on
their own for how to act.
This is quite inaccurate, at least at
the level of AI that we have today.
I think the current perception
of AI is really much influenced
by the media, by science
fiction movies.
They think AI has its own intention,
it does what it wants
to do basically,
and also, at a certain moment,
it may basically go beyond
the human capabilities
and then rule over human beings.
It's nothing but an algorithm
that looks at the past examples
and, based on that, makes a decision.
AI does nothing but what
you have programmed,
and in that sense, it's not magic.
When it comes to autonomous vehicles,
making sure that they are safe
and also that we can explain why
they are safe to the public,
that also can contribute
enormously to the issue of trust.
