Driverless cars

Tuesday

Frances Gibb

Controlling AI is the great challenge of our age

From our UK edition

In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM computer system called Deep Blue. It had defied all expectations, exploring some 300 million possible moves in one second. The most that skilled chess players can contemplate is about 110 moves at any given time. It was a seminal moment in the advance of artificial intelligence – even if not fully understood, writes Richard Susskind in How to Think About AI. People did not wholly grasp the impact of the exponential power of computers, nor that new ways would be found to develop systems that could achieve human expert-level performance. Fast forward to 2016 and to AlphaGo, a machine designed to play the complex game Go, which has more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe.

Friday

Christian Wolmar

The dream of driverless cars is dying

I was worried that going to the autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart would be tantamount to an atheist walking into St Peter’s while the Pope was conducting a mass. There is something religious about the fervour with which adherents to the driverless credo practise their faith and promise us a new kingdom. Their proselytising has indeed convinced many. Politicians are making outlandish statements, such as Jesse Norman’s two weeks ago, that ‘Our entire use of roads is to be revolutionised by autonomous vehicles’, and pouring large sums — a promised £180 million so far — into bizarre research projects such as the development of strange robot cars slower than a Reliant Robin and allowed only on pavements in Milton Keynes.