The car horn is an incredibly useful tool in the right situation, and stunningly obnoxious in every other context. You would think that Google, which is trying to build the ultimate safe car, would consider the horn an obsolete tool useful mostly for irritating other people. Instead they’re teaching robots how to honk the horn.
For now, Google’s car is using the horn correctly. It’s been taught to hit two short beeps as a “heads up” to other drivers and a longer, more sustained blare for actual emergencies. Google’s adorable optimism shines through in this paragraph:
Our goal is to teach our cars to honk like a patient, seasoned driver. As we become more experienced honkers, we hope our cars will also be able to predict how other drivers respond to a beep in different situations.
Sure, that’s the goal, but as we all know, algorithms are far from infallible. They learn from humans, and pick up all our bad habits and reprehensible behavior. All it’s going to take is unleashing this thing in the wild and your self-driving car will take a green light in traffic as a cue to try and play a one-note version of The Flight of the Bumblebee. Why not give it a robot hand on a swivel for a hood ornament, so it can also give everybody around it the finger?
Of course, the optimism of Silicon Valley is bottomless, and we’re sure Google assumes that as driverless cars become more common, obnoxious horn solos will decrease. Then again, this is the same company that admits in the same press release they used the mating call of orcas to alert the visually impaired the car was coming. So maybe just disable the horn and teach it to use the brakes, guys.
(via CNET)