What Elon Musk's idea about masculinity has to do with your self-driving car not working

I'm calling on Bruce Springsteen to solve the problem...

Last week Elon Musk took to Twitter in order to FINALLY explain to the world why those self-driving cars that we were told would be everywhere in 2021 are still, well, not really anywhere in our daily lives…

He wrote:

“A major part of real-world AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalized full self-driving work, as the entire road system is designed for biological neural nets with optical imagers,”

WHAT on earth does he mean?!!!

Well, that a main reason behind the fact we don’t have fully self-driving cars yet is that our roads are currently designed for “biological neural nets with optical imagers”. Now that all sounds profound and complicated. Thanks for telling us Elon! BUT … “biological neural nets with optical imagers” is just another way of saying “humans with eyes” isn’t it?

And I DO  understand why he didn’t put it like that. It would undoubtedly have made him sound a little bit stupid. Like he didn’t think of the fact that roads are designed for humans (and that humans tend to have eyes!) before making huge promises about how we’d all be going around in fully autonomous cars yesterday. But, hey! Everyone is wrong sometimes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Go read some Brené Brown.

The thing is that humans with eyes are pretty amazing and we clearly underestimated how easy it would be to replace us as drivers. As a human with eyes you are able to just “see” a stop sign. Your self-driving car on the other hand only “sees” different clusters of lines. It has been taught to break down images into mathematics in order to gradually understand them. A stop sign partially covered by some branches then becomes a big problem.

Just like Elon says, roads created for human drivers are tricky for self-driving cars…

(You can check out this paper by Duke University professor Missy Cummings. She was actually one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots - like the Tom-Cruise-in-TopGun-kind, so she has thought for decades about autonomous driving/flying.)

An obvious way to solve the problem with roads being made for humans with eyes is to give self-driving cars their own roads. Routes created just for them where you could maybe “catch” a car which would then take you to one of the destinations this particular road led to. ON THE OTHER HAND that’s kind of similar to those thing we call “trains”, isn’t it? And I guess things smelling of public transport is not considered that sexy among the Tech bros. They want the technology they are creating to conform to ideas about the lone individual in his lone machine able to take him anywhere…

The way I see it there are TWO potential solutions to the problem:

1. Bruce Springsteen starts writing songs about more collective forms of transport. Not just about being born to run in an individual car on a thunder road where there are no other people… This then makes it possible for the Tech bros to imagine forms of transport not just based on what happened to be associated with “freedom” and “masculinity” in an era we OBVIOUSLY need to leave behind now because of climate change….

2. We solve the tricky AI-problem Elon Musk is talking about.

Yep. You’re welcome.

Happy Thursday!

Katrine

Ps. Officially THE BEST Bruce Springsteen song.