Show and Tell - Autonomous Driving

A few days ago I did my Show and Tell about autonomous driving. The overall concept of autonomous driving is that the car will be given a software that will utilize machine and deep learning to teach itself from experience how to drive without a "bag of flesh" interacting with the motion of the car at all. For comprehension purposes, I think I should define what machine and deep learning are and where else they are used in our society. Machine learning is the study, development, and application of algorithms that improve their performance of tasks based on prior interactions. It is the key to making things that learn from experience and get “smarter” with use. Deep learning is a type of machine learning where the algorithm takes the form of a multi- layered neutral network compose of non-linear functions. This form of learning is insanely complicated but is how we get human reactions from our technology. Our smart phones use a form of deep learning by having the voice command and response system of Siri or Cortana or anything similar to that. The ability for a device to understand a human voice and then respond with a human voice is ultimately connecting our human language with a programmable language. Most people probably do not realize how difficult it is to accomplish deep learning, even in our technologically advanced society.

The video I showed was pulled from an article regarding how Tesla is going about applying autonomous driving to their vehicles. The main details are how they want to have their vehicles be completely autonomous by the end of 2017 and that they are utilizing machine learning when the car is set in shadow mode while still being driven by an actual person.

First, I want to focus on the year 2017. Google has been working on cracking autonomous driving since 2009 and is estimating it will have it by about 2021, along with a few other car companies. Four years is a huge difference when it comes to the world of technology considering new phones come out every year and laptops become obsolete after a just a couple. This is directly related to when we discussed Accelerationism in class and defined it as the “best way to improve society is not caution, but a reckless pursuit of “progress””. Autonomous driving would obviously have its benefits; there would be no more drunk driving, traffic flow would be significantly improved since the cars could communicate with each other, and, assuming the system was perfected, there would be absolutely no accidents at all. But honestly, these benefits are too good to be true. Autonomous driving will mature and become a fully functioning capability of most vehicles within probably the next 10 years but there are several issues that have to be considered with this advancement. The biggest problem? Our infrastructure. Our roads and bridges can’t even keep up with the number of cars we have on the road now. How are we to expect our government to provide enough money to completely alter the road system to accommodate for the phase in of autonomous vehicles with the phasing out of manual ones? The answer is that it will most likely not happen when we need it to. And how does this really connect with media? Well, more and more of our activities in life are becoming mediated. We have virtual reality and instead of going outside to play basketball, we decide to play a video game version of it instead.