Caditz/Newman

Our thoughts about autonomous vehicles and traffic flow

The Incomplete Transition from Horse to Automobile

High-tech titans use AI to replicate the capabilities of a horse

 

Horse drawn US Mail car

 

The transition from horse to streetcar to automobile did not pass without a fight. There were winners and losers among the political, economic and social factions. Simply making streets the domain of machines and not mammals required paradigm-shifting media campaigns, maligning, for example walking in roads as so-called ‘jaywalking’. The result, however, was a transition from cold and bumpy carriage rides on rutted, muddy and dung-filled roads to smooth asphalt-paved highways, comfort, speed, air pollution and oil-driven climate change.

Here are some of the advantages of the horse as a means of transportation: Horses can self-fuel, self-navigate, communicate with other nearby horses, recognize obstacles and perform collision avoidance maneuvers, self-heal from minor injuries and self-replicate. They can recognize and follow their owners and respond to verbal commands and gestures. They can travel safely at speeds up to 40 miles per hour. Historical records show that a major cause of horse-related injury was runaway, where a horse team became spooked by, for example, a passing bicycle or automobile, and overturned its passenger carriage. This was the equivalent of a modern automobile losing its brakes on a steep mountain road. Other common causes of injury were mechanical failure of carriages and hoof kicks.

The Society of Automotive Engineers defines 5 levels of vehicle autonomy. A Level 0 vehicle may issue warnings and momentarily intervene, for example by applying brakes, in dangerous situations. A Level 5 vehicle requires no human intervention whatsoever to operate. By my estimation, a horse qualifies as a Level 4 autonomous vehicle: “…no driver attention …required for safety…. the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver's seat……the vehicle must be able to safely abort the trip…. if the driver does not retake control.”

One could argue that the transition from horse to machine is still incomplete. It is rare (but not impossible) to find a horse on modern city roads. Yet, current automobiles have not proved to be what engineers would call ‘in-kind replacements’ - i.e., all replacement part specs are at least as good as those of the part being replaced. This may change with the coming AI-driven transportation revolution. Industry analysts and automobile manufacturers predict the availability of Level 4 autonomous vehicles sometime in the 2020’s, one hundred years after the Model T replaced the horse carriage on dusty city streets. Then the transition from horse to automobile be complete.