Kulraj Smagh, head of Open Innovation Group at EY, shares a human perspective on the technological, legal and moral developments of autonomous vehicles.
In 1982, the fictional Knight Industries Two Thousand or KITT, sidekick to ‘The Hoff’s’ Knight Rider, was one of the very first visions of what an artificially intelligent autonomous vehicle might become. Now in the year 2016, the vision is somewhat realised, albeit minus the hairdo, backchat and bag of 007-esque trickery.
In the last couple of months we have observed some ground-breaking developments. In late August, the very first driverless taxis hit the streets of Singapore for a trial headed up by an MIT spin-off and its accompaniment of Einsteinium IQs. We also saw very public declarations of bringing the autonomous vehicle to the masses by some of the biggest players in the automotive game, as early as 2019 in some cases. And finally, we saw Musk’s ‘Master Plan, Part Deux’ describing, in some form, the method he will adopt to make autonomous vehicles truly mainstream and self-sufficient regarding energy. This future gives rise to lots of questions around legality, morality and techno-ethics, which are worth digging into a little deeper....