Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association in London, quoted in the Guardian on the prospect of driverless buses in the capital:
“We don’t have a a lot of confidence in anything that comes out of TfL [Transport for London], to be honest, and the fact that they’re suggesting it means it’s almost certainly likely not to happen.
“Who knows with technology, but some of the simplest things, they still can’t do. The best example is voice recognituion technology.
“If you’ve got it on your car… it’s rubbish. If you’ve got it on your phone, it’s probably worse. They’re all crap, aren’t they? None of them work, and they can’t even get that right. And they expect people to get into driverless cars?”
Where do you begin with this?
Firstly, we should note that the Mayor’s office ran a million miles away from the suggestion – in their own paper – that at some point between now and 2050 driverless buses will be on London’s streets. To make it worse they – plainly less than truthfully – tried to claim that references in their own paper to driverless vehicles were a reference to tube trains.
The disappointing thing is that instead of actually once again pioneering a public transport technology – London gave the world underground railways and once had the world’s most admired bus network too – London’s public admisitrators are not willing to lead.
Before anyone on the left says “what about the jobs”, my reply is “what about them?” Is not the left meant to be about freeing human creativity from the realm of necessity? The issue is the distribution of the opportunities freed by the removal of the need to drive buses – it cannot be about preserving relatively low-skilled jobs that are no longer required.
As for Steve McNamara, I am amused by the fact he thinks speech recognition is the “simplest thing”. Should we reply that three billion years of evolution produced only one species that can speak so it can’t be that simple? Or perhaps ask McNamara how many languages he can speak given that speech recognition is so simple?
In fact, my guess would be that speech recognition is probably many more times more difficult, computationally speaking, than driving a bus. However the risk of human injury means that speech recognition software is socially more acceptible than driverless vehicles – for now. But I don’t expect that to last.
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 