Cherish your Uber drivers. Soon they will be robots
This column was not written by ChatGPT. But it did have the benefit of another breathtaking technology that could change life as we know it. It was partly typed in the back of a Waymo self-driving taxi that, with ghostly serenity, climbed the hills of San Francisco, through the fog of Twin Peaks (it was still “Fogust”), around the spaced-out hippies of Haight-Ashbury to the Golden Gate Bridge. Rather than driving into wet concrete, as one of its hapless rivals did recently, it politely gave way to a cement mixer that swerved across its path. It was a scenic—and entirely trustworthy—office-on-wheels.
Like ChatGPT, self-driving vehicles are one of those marvels of artificial intelligence (AI) that make you pinch yourself when you encounter them because they seem so strange, and then pinch yourself afterwards because they become so familiar. The strangeness is quirky rather than scary. The robotaxi arrives at the tap of an app, with your initials quaintly lit up on the laser cone on the roof. You wave at it to stop, but there’s no driver with whom to make eye contact, so you run up the hill in hot pursuit until it finds a safe spot. Get in and a disembodied voice advises you that though the experience may be “futuristic”, you still have to buckle up. Then the steering wheel gently turns itself, and at a speed steady enough that you can use your laptop without feeling sick, you set off on a journey up the foothills of the AI revolution.
This part of the revolution is not yet on the breakneck scale of ChatGPT. Self-driving cars are AI in the physical rather than digital realm, and though it is annoying when chatbots “hallucinate”, any mischief-making by a robotaxi could be fatal. That is why safety, not speed, is paramount. Yet once you become accustomed to the experience, it is easy to imagine a future where more of life is spent in self-driving taxis; where commuters can work, watch videos or snooze…
2023-08-31 08:03:12
Link from www.economist.com