Seattle City Wire

With much of the world's technology becoming "smart technology," it was only a matter of time before cars utilized these advancements as well.

William Dembski, a noted mathematician and philosopher, as well as a Discovery Institute board of directors member, said automobiles completely dependent on Artificial Intelligence (AI) no longer seem to be a good idea because of the latest reported failures. 

Concern about the issue of fully AI-driven cars is becoming more prevalent, especially after the recent fatal accident of two passengers in a Tesla Model S on April 16, according to CNN Business. According to police, the Tesla had no one in the driver's seat at the time of the crash, as reported by CNN.

William Dembski | Discovery Institute

"The failure of automated driving to reach level 5 (i.e., full automation with no need whatsoever of human guidance) remains not just out of reach, but seems to be getting more out of reach even as machine/deep learning gets more powerful and sophisticated. This itself suggests that the approach being taken is ill-starred," Dembski wrote in Evolution News & Science Today.

Dembski references programmer and philosopher Erik Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence" in criticizing automotive AI systems.

"Self-driving cars are an obvious case in point. It’s all well and good to talk up advances in visual object recognition until, somewhere out on the long tail of unanticipated consequences, and therefore not included in the training data, your vehicle happily rams a passenger bus as it takes care to miss a pylon. (This happened)," Larson said in his book.

One issue AI developers are working on involves "level 6" automated cars, which detect a driver's eye contact to see if the system should "hold back" or "move forward."

"Now that’s a happy prospect for fully automated driving. Perhaps we need 'level 6' automation, at which AI systems learn to read the eyes of drivers to determine whether they are going to hold back or make that left turn into oncoming traffic," Dembski wrote. "This example suggests to me that AI is hopelessly behind the full range of human intellectual capabilities. It also suggests that we, in the cossetted and sanitized environments that we have constructed for ourselves in the U.S., have no clue of what capabilities AI actually needs to achieve to truly match what humans can do. The shortfall facing AI is extreme."

In the case of the deadly Tesla Model S accident, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that logs show the car was not engaged in "autopilot" mode when the accident happened. He also stated that the more advanced self-driving feature, Full Self-Driving (FSD), was not purchased with the vehicle involved in the accident, as it is available on only a limited number of Tesla cars. 

According to police, the drivers of the Tesla Model S had been warned that their system was not "foolproof" and about the need to be attentive because there were limitations to the self-driving system, CNN reported. According to the article, an MIT study found that Tesla drivers paid less attention to driving while in autopilot mode, even though it is not a full-service self-driving feature, and drivers should be prepared to take control at any time. 

Musk said that approximately 2,000 Tesla owners are currently testing "full self-driving" as of March, according to CNN.