LONDON: Self-driving vehicles and people are dangerously out of sync, according to an engineer, who warns in a new book that the technology imposes "a strange new role" that human thought processes "weren't designed for."
According to Ronald McLeod, author of "Transitioning to Autonomy – The Psychology of Human Supervisory Control", autonomous cars "place unprecedented psychological demands on drivers – demands we are currently drastically unprepared for."
Far from being the hands-free, hands-off and safety-guaranteed panacea they are sometimes portrayed as, so-called self-driving cars require people to maintain focus in case they need to take over "at a moment’s notice" if the technology fails or proves unable to handle a complex and potentially dangerous road scenario.
"When autonomous features engage, drivers do not simply become passengers – they become something far more challenging: supervisory controllers. Instead of actively steering and accelerating, they must monitor the system’s ongoing performance and stand ready to intervene," the author explained.
But that is a major concern, according to McLeod, honorary professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, who described people as "incapable of consciously paying continuous attention for more than relatively short periods."
"The cognitive load is actually higher than manual driving in many ways," McLeod warned, as whoever sits at the self-driving wheel has to maintain "a mental model of what the car is currently doing and is capable of doing and its limits, assess whether the car is aware of hazards the driver can see."
At the same time, the erstwhile driver needs to be alert enough to "make split-second decisions about when to intervene" despite having had "minimal direct engagement with the physical driving task," McLeod said.
The type of hands-off but constantly alert supervisory role required of whoever sits behind the wheel of an autonomous car entails a "fundamental shift in thinking that most of us would not recognise," according to publisher Taylor & Francis. – dpa
