Artificial intelligence will be in the office long before AVs are circling the parking lot
I'm not worried about computers taking over, I'm worried about the humans operating the computers. Maybe the best smart city device will be the AI robot in the engineering department.
Mobility technology is evolving in the 21st century. The built environment is evolving to adapt to 21st century living. But the mindset of professional engineers and planners is stuck in a bygone era when their college textbooks were first published and still had a glimmer of relevancy.
I’ve worked with them for 25 years—I get it. There’s no time in consulting to gather the team for thought experiments and exploring big ideas. Charging a few hours to “walking with no purpose” will not get approved on the timesheet.
Consider the lowly side-view mirror. Cars, trucks, delivery vans, ambulances–every vehicle has mirrors sticking out from the door frame. Nobody's telling traffic engineering students that the side-view mirror plays a pivotal role in American road design.
Academic studies have shown that 10-ft wide travel lanes are safer than 12-ft lanes in urbanized areas. I'm sure you know why. The wider the lane, the faster we drive. And one of the excuses for wide lanes in urbanized areas is bus or truck traffic.
“Well, you see we need to account for the total width of the vehicles, including the mirror. Take this truck, for example…”
Other countries have a different approach. They buy skinnier buses. They buy skinnier trucks.
Eventually, other countries will use self-driving buses and trucks that don’t even need mirrors. The way American planners and engineers stick to yesteryear process, we’ll be the country with extra wide autonomous vehicles rather than skinnying up lanes to make streets safer. But even before vehicles run entirely on their own, advancements like in-vehicle cameras are already evolving. Mirrors will be obsolete long before human drivers are.
People complain that artificial intelligence isn’t human enough yet. Are you sure? AI finishes my sentences. I shop on Amazon, and that search bar is amazing. AI knows exactly what I need, and when I need it.
I’ve often fantasized about what it would be like to see an AI robot sitting in the transportation team’s Monday morning workload meeting. A transportation mind who didn’t attend an accredited university, yet somehow knows every way to protect human life?! Preposterous!
Let’s name my AI robot Cathy. Someone starts the meeting with questions about the big corridor study everybody’s working on.
“Brian, did you get the average delay below 13 seconds during the busiest 2 hours of the day?”
You see Cathy’s hand go up. Of course she has something to say. She always has something to say. Ugh. The team leader calls on her while a collective breath is held so as not to betray groans and moans.
“LOS A is an indicator of a high-speed road and low property values. It’s dangerous and it hemorrhages money.”
Cathy goes on and on, reciting this study and that study, these safety facts and those safety facts. AI Cathy tells the room everything that’s factually accurate without hesitation or fear of job security. She’d know what you need, just like that Amazon search bar.
What we have today is self-driving engineering. Professionals have been trained to keep some bad assumptions on auto-pilot. Those habits aren’t protecting the safety, health, and welfare of the traveling public.
I’m not afraid of robots designing roads and driving cars. It’s the people doing it now that scare me.