22 years have passed since its premiere Minority ReportTom Cruise’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story of the identical name, and one among the more utopian features of cinema’s vision of our future seems closer than ever – prototypes are popping up all over the place.
No, we’re not talking concerning the oft-cited holographic touch processing displayed throughout the movie – at the least not here. Recent developments in spatial computing (ahem, Apple Vision Pro) really appear to hold a promising future for the technology, and the film is incredibly predictable on this regard, no matter how strange the keyboard gloves are.
Instead, it showcases technology that is a bit more accessible: a traffic-free Washington in 2054, courtesy of autonomous cars racing along elevated white concrete highways that snake gracefully between, around, and even along the perimeters of buildings like an oversized version of toy racing cars. from the early Nineteen Nineties. At one point, the principal character John Anderton’s automobile drives up the wall of his apartment constructing and docks with large glass windows, allowing him to go on to his apartment.
As usual with Philip K. Dick’s invention, this technology proves to be double-edged. When Anderton is falsely accused of murder, his connected autonomous automobile is remotely seized by the authorities. The pedestrian escapes in an intensely acrobatic manner. Apart from the implications of freedom from the corrupt use of technology, could such a network of autonomous cars and a city free from traffic be created?
Modern autonomous cars
As anyone who has driven a Tesla knows, autonomous or near-autonomous cars are already very near reality, even when their application is proscribed. Autonomous taxi firms like Cruise and Waymo transport passengers without drivers in San Francisco from 2022 and 2023, while Tesla and Google investigate the degree of autonomy of cars.
The degree of autonomy is what makes the difference between a hands-free ride within the Model 3 and a highway that drives itself, he says Ram Vasudevan, professor of robotics on the University of Michigan, where he studies software algorithms that could make autonomous vehicles operate more reliably. A distinction is made between automated vehicles and autonomous vehicles, where “automated vehicles can drive without a driver,” he says Reciprocal, “but generally speaking, they are probably monitored by a human from the home base.” Fully autonomous vehicles, in response to Vasudevan’s categorization, can operate without human intervention.
Waymo cars are automated, not fully autonomous. The reason is not that the software itself cannot handle the challenge of driving – it’s just that cars drive alongside people. “People are where driving becomes difficult,” says Vasudevan. Even in Minority Report“It’s the moment when Tom Cruise starts actually trying to operate the vehicle that triggers this chaotic wave of madness.”
Autonomous highway of the long run
“The video is interesting, and when it comes to autonomous driving,” says Vasudavan, “I think they discovered something extraordinary.” In a way, they found that the one approach to avoid the traffic jams, crashes and snags found on our current roads and highways is to let computers do all of it for all and sundry within the vehicle. “Whenever I give speeches in different places to the public, someone in the audience always makes the same comment: These cars are cheating because they drive on segregated, autonomous highways.”
It may appear to be it, but removing humans from the driving equation may really be the one path to a more utopian highway system.
“As human beings, we do many very subtle things to reveal our behaviors to other people; these kinds of subtle signals are much more difficult for an autonomous system to detect,” says Vasudevan. “Variability is really the problem. If they were consistently good or predictably bad, driving would be much easier.”
The problem shouldn’t be just human drivers. “Pedestrians can still behave quite irrationally,” says Vasudevan. “At this point, the unpredictability of a cyclist or pedestrian may pose enough of a problem that these systems cannot be safely implemented at this time.”
So the actual enabling technology in Minority Report, in terms of autonomous cars, may represent more of an undisclosed breakthrough in urban planning and zoning approval than the cars themselves. Fictional vehicle software that controls cars Minority Report it is probably not significantly better than today’s real-world software, but on this world there are roads dedicated to cars: other than Tom Cruise, there are not any people on the roads of the long run on foot or by bike to face. It’s not exactly a system we’ll get to overnight.
“This world is very attractive,” says Vasudevan. “But I caution that this requires massive government investment in a dedicated line, along with industry players.”
Some moves have been made on this direction. At least as of 2020, the state of Michigan and a startup company Cave discussed making a lane dedicated to autonomous vehicles between Ann Arbor and Detroit.
But simply because you possibly can do something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s best to do it. Vasudevan believes within the potential of autonomous technologies – he co-founded a startup spun out of the University of Michigan called AI refraction which uses a three-wheeled robot to deliver food along a bicycle path — but warns that before embarking on any project that may require billions of dollars in investment and reworking society, it is crucial to be certain that it solves real problems for real people, slightly than creating recent problems.
“You take away, for example, one lane of a public road,” says Vasudevan. “Does it actually benefit everyone or just a small handful of people?”
Focus on individual cars
“If your question is, ‘Hey, do we live in a world where we can solve this problem and build a fully autonomous facility in the next five or 10 years?’” says Vasudevan, “with the current nature and state of driving, my answer is probably is: no.
But we’re seeing tons of progress in the way our individual cars sense, take control, and even drive.
After all, there was another feature of cars of the future that was mentioned in the article Minority Report it could be closer and that was their omnidirectional mobility. Cars can rotate 360 degrees and even run into buildings. Mechanically, such things are possible and even in the works. For example, Hyundai Mobissubsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, has developed what it calls “e-Cornersystem. It turns the car’s wheels up to 90 degrees to enable unusual movements such as turning or driving diagonally. However, using such engineering for more than perfect parallel parking can also prove difficult when human drivers are present.
“You could probably build cars that can do a lot more, but people probably wouldn’t be able to use all of those features at once without a lot of training,” Vasudevan says.
This is not a nasty start.
Credit : www.inverse.com
