[McLaren Rulez]

Originally Posted by dark.knight

More than anything else, I'd say that the people themselves, are learning that the nature-embedded intelligence, reaction time, empathy, and unique mindset is so far above and beyond what man can put into the machines that there literally is no competition.

I would disagree with this sentiment. If you'd asked someone about computers playing intellectual games like chess, people would have told you the same thing.

Driving is most certainly not a skill that requires "intelligence", in the traditional sense. Thirty years ago, it was unimaginable that a car could navigate the changing conditions of roads, traffic lights, other vehicles, pedestrians, road markings and so on. Learning to deal with India's idiosyncratic road conditions is an additional challenge but certainly not one that is beyond the capabilities of what a computer can do.

I'd argue that establishing legal frameworks for development and testing, figuring out how we'll deal with insurance claims when things go wrong and above all, getting humans to adopt it will be the bottleneck.

[arun687]

The growth in AI and ML applications is exponential, not linear. The magnitude of progress we made in the last 10 years could possibly happen in the next 2 years, and so on. The primary driver is the amount of data that the computer can learn off, which is exponentially increasing and so is the computing power.

I think it's realistically possible to have level 5 autonomous cars fully 'capable' to navigate our roads in the next decade. Whether they will be allowed to function due to regulatory restrictions is a whole different topic.

[meetgds]

Originally Posted by smartcat

My crystal ball says self driving autonomous car technology will eventually come to India a few years down the line, but with manual override. The steering, brakes and accelerator will still be around. Just like cruise control, this is likely to be a convenience feature. The owner can use self driving feature if he feels the conditions are right.

This may be a possibility but the sort of premium this 'convenience feature' will demand, I really don't think it'll make sense. In other sections of this forum we have seen how people rarely use cruise control in India, it goes on to say that the opportunities for utilising self driven feature would be a lot rarer, if any at all.
Car manufacturers can introduce autonomous cars, government can fix roads and the conditions, but who can correct people's terrible mindset of not following rules!

[Sn1p3r]

What happened is a tragic in case of Über accident. Google car had a non-fatal accident and the systems were updated. We are at the very beginning of an exponential curve.

As I read through the comments. I do not understand why everyone is jumping to the Never conclusion.

A mindset change will come about. Indians are good at money calculation. If autonomous car rentals are a fraction of what you would end up as owner and comes with a benefit of no ownership headaches (parking, maintenance, reliance on drivers, peak hours etc), most people will not own the car but rent it for a fair. Think of it as the cost of ownership is negligible and so the companies will put them as rentals. A car will always be available for you.

Speed of learning for an unassisted AI is currently only restricted by compute power and our ability to understand AI. Notable is AlphaGo winning AI could theoretically do more calculations than the best human mind at that game. So 'special me' thinking is wrong.

The yearly stats of death rate was not mentioned by the OP. If autonomous cars can dent those and bring it down on the exponential curve then it will be most welcomed.

Motorcycle, is a necessity to plug the gap in income level disparity. It is replaceable with shared/single seater AI vehicle. I guess OP is stuck with the shape mindset. Renault Twizzy is a single person road legal electric car right now, it can be made autonomous too. So if you are traveling with family or as single person will dictate the car you get.

Transportation of personal luggage on your vehicle. With worlds best minds solving the delivery system for your digital age requirement you will not be too inclined to strap your goat to the bike and transport it.

Overall I want to see death rate due to human errors on roads come down? It is one off case and the system will upgrade.

Most arguments are focused about solvable problems. Naysayers will convert sooner or later. That is a fact.


The future is inevitable.

[Lone Ranger]

Every time I read about autonomous cars, it brings a smile to my face. Our generation loves a dash of technology in everything! Especially technology in glamorous, sexy and exciting 'hot sector' areas that we can easily relate to. Self driving cars, space travel and 3D printing are all examples of these. And people have been dreaming of self driving cars for much longer than you can imagine - for example, the 1927 german (silent!) movie Metropolis featured them!

In my view, the cars by themselves are only a very small part of the ecosystem that will need to exist for this to become a 'disruptive' (another word that is casually tossed around to make otherwise mundane conversations sound exciting) technology. Think of it along these lines - self driving cars are like the flagship smartphones on the market today. They are fantastically powerful, but using them to their full potential requires robust cellular networks, high speed data, a huge variety of high quality apps and reasonable costs.

Indian road conditions (the ecosystem, so as to speak) are currently in no way conducive for fully autonomous driving of any sort of meaningful scale. As others have mentioned, they'll probably be a novelty feature for a long time to come.

Think about it - would you really be able to sit back and read a book as your car drove you to your office during rush hour? Or would you be holding your sweaty palms inches away the steering wheel while watching that two wheeler casually exiting the side street in front of you?

One exception could be in the area of active safety systems - I do hope that technology in this area permeates quickly to the mass market. Imagine state transport buses that don't allow drivers to apex every turn, just because they are 'superfast express highway king'.

[locusjag]

I had written a mini-thesis of sorts some time back on this forum after extensively reading about AI and its ramifications.

In it, I'd written about the deceptive nature of exponential growth and why we could get caught with our trousers down -

Why humans will certainly be caught unawares by AGI*
Computing power has been doubling itself every year according to the Moore's law. The Moon rocket by NASA had lesser computing power than today's washing machines. AI researchers estimate that when exascale operations are made possible for computers (giga is 10 raised to the power of 9; exa is 10 to the power of 18), AGI is most likely to arrive. This is since human brains process information at an exa-scale.
Anyway, let me illustrate how this exponential growth will catch humans off-guard. Exponential growth simply means that with every step, there is a doubling of whatever you're measuring. Let's take a football stadium and fill 1 drop of water in it in 1 minute. The next minute you fill 2 drops, and 4 drops in the next and so on. The football field would have a thin coating of water somewhere around the 40th minute. The field would be inundated with a few feet of water by the 45th minute. But the entire stadium would be inundated (including the stands) by somewhere around the 47th minute. In the last 2 minutes, any over-confident spectators who were watching this experiment from the stands would be doomed. Many AI researchers are stating that we are in that last stretch when our doom is near. I too doubt if many of us realize that most of our jobs are going to get taken away all too soon.

* AGI = Artificial General Intelligence; AGI is a very high level of AI capability. Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) is all we have today.

Link to the full post quoted from: http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian...ml#post4160990

Mathematically speaking, we could get into the thick of things before we know it. I see so many Team-BHPians swearing that self-driving cars can never happen in India as long as we're all alive. On this topic however, I wouldn't swear on anything that I hold dear!

All it'll take is one more leap in computing technology for it to become a reality in the developed countries. Add 5 - 10 years to that and you'll have it in India, if politics in India allows it, i.e. (since job losses would occur and Mr.Gadkari has already let loose a rumbling about disallowing self-driving technology in India).

I understand Moore's law hasn't held true in the past 1 or 2 years (correct me if I'm wrong) but computing power could well leap back to its exponential growth curve, as it has for a couple of decades now.

[blackwasp]

Originally Posted by smartcat

My crystal ball says self driving autonomous car technology will eventually come to India a few years down the line, but with manual override. The steering, brakes and accelerator will still be around. Just like cruise control, this is likely to be a convenience feature. The owner can use self driving feature if he feels the conditions are right.

Even I'm thinking on the same lines, however active safety features like auto braking, lane assist, blind spot indication and rear collision alerts (car can detect rear ending collision), etc. will probably be introduced (or made compulsory) in the interest of safety.

And personally, I don't think that self-driving cars are going the be very successful in India anytime soon. Firstly, any company interested to get such a car in India should have already started testing by now (atleast on well-marked highways as a start). Unless the mentality of Indians - queue jumping, making 4 lanes out of 2, jumping signals, criss crossing across the lanes etc. changes, it will be hilarious watching autonomous cars moving around town.

[srishiva]

In UK I believe they are trying to come up with a infrastructure that can support autonomous driving. Its all about training the systems for an environment. Controlling the environment itself might be easier and make it workable.

You can train systems for any complicated environment but I hope there is a good collaborative development by all since it involves human life. The Uber thing did not swerve or slow given the sensors it had. (doesn't Volvo itself have some safety systems in place ? or they turn them off ?) Even ethical/moral related decisions also impact such systems.

I would say put them on highways, railways etc first and then think about inner city roads.

[NiInJa]

While I am confident that self driving cars (fully autonomous) will not be coming to Indian roads while I am still alive, I am excited about how the technology related to it is growing day by day, we will soon have LIDAR in small cars for driver assist as the tech will become more and more affordable and efficient by each passing day. There is a lot that can be learnt from this new wave and its applications can not be limited only to public roads.

Think of it, fully autonomous tech can become a possibility very early in highly controlled environments like Airports. Who knows, we will have fully autonomous airports with buses and other vehicles on airports run by Artificial Intelligence.

[DRIVE_ADDICT]

I ve ~20 yrs and >40k kms of driving experience, Even today if i take my car out, be it shorter office commute or a highway trip i ve at least 2-3 new things to learn.
I really like to see how the conditional checkS will get build by this self learning AI in our Indian condition :-). A highly trained algo built by the AI, ready for India will stay right in the middle of the road to make a decision.

[sharninder]

I largely agree with the premise of the post but not the conclusion. Traffic in India has not become this chaotic overnight. It has grown over the last two decades and like a lot of ours' parents find it tough to drive in our cities, so will autonomous cars. But, like our generation learnt to live with it, tech will also improve. Also, this assumes, regulation, laws and our driving styles will not improve. I'm slightly pessimistic on that one too, but I'm optimistic if we do get autonomous cars, we'll be better off than we are now.

[shashank.nk]

I think with most cities having a functioning or planned Metro, the two-wheeler density should reduce in the coming decade. I know so many who've opted to use Metro instead of their scooters/bikes where feasible, as the Metro network widens it should result in more two-wheelers going off the road.

I'm hoping in the next 2-3 decades the tech makes it to India to bring down the sheer chaos on our roads and make commuting stress-free.

[coolvenk]

This thread presents an unduly pessimistic view, in my opinion.

There are two aspects of the challenge to getting this to work in India, one of which has arguably been solved to a great degree.

The first aspect is bad/unreliable roads or no roads at all, as pointed out. Believe it or not, this isn't a big hurdle any more. The DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and 2005 was a competition for driver-less cars to drive over 200 km in the Mojave desert. While no team finished the 2004 challenge, 5 teams did in 2005. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

The second aspect is recognizing and responding to Indian driving and pedestrian behavior. This will in the beginning require specialized machine learning algorithms, but in principle, it ought to be possible. Eventually, there might be separate lanes/roads for self driving cars, especially in big cities, so this should be more efficient. If this seems far fetched, did any of you imagine in the 90s, the sort of elevated highways we have now and the sustained triple digit speeds that we drive in them?

Finally, with driverless cars, people don't envision owning them, but them being something you can hail. In low demand times, they'll presumably have large garages where they are parked. Maintenance will also be cheaper due to economies of scale.

[rocksterraghu]

Autonomous cars would most likely evolve as cars that drive by themselves but would have human intervention wherever required. Or in other words, they will be just another mode in the car.

Let us for a minute look at airplanes. The entire traffic in air and airports is extremely well organised. It might be the easiest to automate, yet, there is a pilot AND a co-pilot. Just like a plane can go into an autopilot mode, cars could also have a mode where you can take your feet and hands off but be able to intervene immediately if there is a faulty algorithm. Or if the software fails altogether. I assume that is the reason why they still don't fly planes without pilots - the cost of a mistake is unimaginable.

Completely automated cars? I am not sure. I wouldn't sit in one. Just like I wouldn't sit in a plane that has no pilot. Or a pilot who announces "welcome ladies and gentlemen, we are not feeling too well, so we are going to get off the plane now - don't worry, we hardly fly this thing anyway. You people have a safe and enjoyable flight" and get off the plane. I think the reason why we need a pilot or a driver is because humans don't run on just algorithms and can use creativity and imagination - humans I think, can handle an unforeseen incident that has never happened before. Or imagined by a set of programmers. Or maybe I have just watched too many paranoid Hollywood movies that show robots turning against humans to accept full automation.

[katchkamalesh]

Originally Posted by GTO

crores of 2-wheelers on the road, cost (consider the AT gearbox example), security at night (someone blocking your car), legal liabilities etc.

The only reasons that might/will impede introduction of autonomous vehicles in India, as I see it, are 1) Infrastructure (lack of it, actually) 2) Government might want to delay this as millions of drivers will lose jobs.

While the aspect about high cost is spot-on, we seem to forget another aspect of the whole autonomous business, shared mobility/Pay as you go.

Gone are the days when owing a car was as a matter of pride. If you look at the developed countries, consumer research shows that people are looking at cars/vehicles as a mobility solution provider. They are least interested in owning vehicles if their transportation needs are met.

Just look around people in our very own cities and you will be astonished to look at the sheer number of people who would rather commute using an ola/uber than driving their own vehicle. This is considering the current fares.

A huge part of this fare includes the labor cost i.e., drivers salary. When a vehicle is autonomous, there is no need for this component and other expenses such as on fuel, maintenance will also be less considering that the vehicle will be driven gently. Many researches suggest that average fare per mile/km will be around 20-30% of the current fares.

If and when the fares are slashed to this rate, I do not see the point in owning a vehicle. I would rather use it for my mobility needs and be done with it than spend money on an asset that spends 95% of its time in the parking lot.

So, if you ask me, car ownership will be a thing of the past or will be a rich man’s hobby.