The team notes that a typical autonomous car system will recognise an image of the road ahead by running an analysis through its complex logic system. This process largely occurs in a black box and is not fully understood by anyone, including a system’s creators. Any errors also occur in a black box, they continue, making it difficult to identify and fix them.
Should we be surprised? No. Should we be worried? Probably not.
A couple of years ago, the Electronics Design Show Conference featured a session on autonomous vehicles. A question from the floor asked those in the room who had not written software with errors to raise their hands – and none did. The bottom line is that no software is going to be perfect.
But let’s contrast that with a human driver. Autonomous cars are expected to improve road safety, even with inherent software errors, which makes you think we have many more corner case errors in our ‘software’.
