Detroit, Michigan - Self-driving vehicles hold the key to reducing traffic fatalities and will transform the automobile industry, according to Google.
Ray Kurzweil, a leading expert in artificial intelligence who joined Google in 2012, told the annual conference of the Society of Automotive Engineers on Tuesday that the rapidly declining cost of computing power and the advances in artificial intelligence would soon make autonomous driving a reality.
Kurzweil told the audience that autonomous driving, using artificial intelligence, was definitely coming.
“The technology works. It's not far away,” said Kurzweil, though he was not prepared to say just when self-driving cars would become a common sight.
The need and value of autonomous vehicles was clear, he told hundreds of the industry's top engineers.
“Google cars have gone close to a million miles without incident,” he said. “Some day an autonomous car will cause an accident and it will be big news. But while we've been talking several people have died from human drivers.”
Autonomous cars “are ultimately going to save millions of lives,” he said, noting that road accidents kill 1.2 million people worldwide a year.
“They also provide more efficient use of roads and parking lots. There are a lot of benefits.”
But he said Google was not going to let its self-drive cars into the market “until they're safe.”
“They have to be much more reliable than the technology they replace.”
MOTOR INDUSTRY NOW PART OF THE DIGITAL WORLD
The appearance of the original Google Car prototype touched off a race among the world's carmakers, with Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Nissan setting up engineering centres near Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley to focus on self-driving technologies.
“People will still buy cars,” Kurzweil said. “But the Uber model with self-driving cars will become very popular. We should share our cars. I think that model will grow when we have autonomous cars.
“Every company has to reinvent itself. Not everything is predictable.”
Kurzweil said that until now the transportation industry, including the automobile business, had not been considered part of the digital world.
“But we see information of every kind coming into every form of transportation,” he added.
At the same time, the price of digital information is dropping dramatically.
As for slower-moving technologies such as batteries - the key to more electric cars - he predicted longer lasting batteries in 10-15 years, at a “more mature phase of nanotechnology where you can manipulate matter on the atomic level.”
Other technology, such as solar power, was developing more quickly than many experts expected.
“Solar power is growing exponentially. It's doubling every two years. In many parts of the world, it's reached parity with fossil fuel,” Kurzweil said.
AFP