无人驾驶为何遥遥无期？
汽车
路障
无人车显现了当今AI的局限性
【技术季刊《AI及其局限：比预期更陡峭》系列之六】
今年3月，位于旧金山的无人驾驶卡车公司“星空机器人”（Starsky Robotics）宣告关门。创始人斯蒂芬·塞尔兹-阿克斯马赫（Stefan Seltz-Axmacher）给出了失败的几个原因。由于一系列科技公司上市后表现不佳，加之货运业务衰退，投资者的兴趣已经开始降温。他写道，自己的公司重视安全性，但缺乏耐心的资方对此反应不佳，他们宁愿看到技术花哨的新功能被源源不断地开发出来。但最大的问题是，技术根本无法胜任。“有监督的机器学习达不到现在热炒的程度。这不是类似于c-3PO（《星球大战》电影中的人形机器人）的真正的人工智能。这无非是一种先进的模式匹配工具。”监管社交媒体，发现欺诈行为，在古老的游戏中击败人类——这些固然都很好。但是，制造一种能够在普通道路上自主行驶的汽车（以及让计算机与人开展听上去合理的对话）是现代AI的宏伟目标之一。有人认为无人驾驶汽车可以让人们随时召唤机器人出租车，这样就不需要拥有汽车了。他们也相信这些车会更安全。电脑永不疲倦，也永远不会分神。根据世卫组织的数据，每年有超过一百万人死于易犯错的人类驾驶员引发的车祸。无人车的拥护者们希望能大幅削减这些数字。它们本来很快就要做到了。电动汽车制造商特斯拉的老板埃隆·马斯克在2015年预测，“完全自主”将在2018年到来。通用汽车在2016年收购的无人驾驶公司克鲁斯（Cruise）曾计划2019年之前在旧金山推出无人驾驶出租车。2015年，被广泛视为行业领头羊的谷歌子公司Waymo的时任老板克里斯·厄姆森（Chris Urmson）表示，希望自己11岁的儿子永远不需要驾照。但是进展慢了下来。2018年，网约车公司优步测试的一辆无人车在亚利桑那州撞到了一名推着自行车过马路的女性，成为无人车致行人死亡的第一例。特斯拉的“自动驾驶”（Autopilot）软件虽名为“自动”，用户依然须将手放在方向盘上并看着路（几个看起来没能做到的人在事故中丧生）。极少数几家载客的公司，例如美国的Waymo和中国的文远知行，覆盖的地理范围都不大，并且依赖人类安全驾驶员。已离开Waymo的厄姆森现在认为这项技术的推广速度会更慢、更渐进。… …… …打开《经济学人·商论》App即可免费试读七月刊《路障》（Road block）全文。
IN MARCH Starsky Robotics, a self-driving lorry firm based in San Francisco, closed down. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, its founder, gave several reasons for its failure. Investors’ interest was already cooling, owing to a run of poorly performing tech-sector IPOs and a recession in the trucking business. His firm’s focus on safety, he wrote, did not go down well with impatient funders, who preferred to see a steady stream of whizzy new features. But the biggest problem was that the technology was simply not up to the job. “Supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype. It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to c-3PO [a humanoid robot from the “Star Wars” films]. It’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.”
Policing social media, detecting fraud and defeating humans at ancient games are all very well. But building a vehicle that can drive itself on ordinary roads is—along with getting computers to conduct plausible conversations—one of the grand ambitions of modern AI. Some imagined driverless cars could do away with the need for car ownership by letting people summon robotaxis at will. They believe they would be safer, too. Computers never tire, and their attention never wanders. According to the WHO, over a million people a year die in car accidents caused by fallible human drivers. Advocates hoped to cut those numbers drastically.
And they would do it soon. In 2015 Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car maker, predicted the arrival of “complete autonomy” by 2018. Cruise, a self-driving firm acquired by General Motors in 2016, had planned to launch self-driving taxis in San Francisco by 2019. Chris Urmson, then the boss of Waymo, a Google subsidiary widely seen as the market leader, said in 2015 that he hoped his son, then 11 years old, would never need a driving licence.
But progress has lagged. In 2018 a self-driving car being tested by Uber, a ride-hailing service, became the first to kill a pedestrian when it hit a woman pushing a bicycle across a road in Arizona. Users of Tesla’s “Autopilot” software must, despite its name, keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road (several who seem to have failed to do so have been killed in crashes). The few firms that carry passengers, such as Waymo in America and WeRide in China, are geographically limited and rely on human safety drivers. Mr Urmson, who has since left Waymo, now thinks that adoption will be slower and more gradual.
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网约车模式结合无人驾驶技术，让汽车制造商的商业模式面临有史以来最深刻的挑战。全球汽车市场的价值约为每年两万亿美元，而个人交通市场价值高达10万亿美元。汽车制造商、科技公司和网约车公司都力求在这片新的蓝海分一杯羹，并竞相发展自己的无人驾驶项目。哪种商业模式会胜出？商论2018年三月刊推出自动驾驶专题，欢迎订阅回顾全系列文章（双语版+音频）：
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