Robot race cars and AI
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What robots driving cars can tell us about artificial intelligence. Ed Butler speaks to Bryn Balcombe, chief strategy officer of the autonomous vehicle project Roborace. Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, explains why he thinks AI development is fundamentally limited. Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the University of Montreal in Canada, gives a defence.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Photo: A Roborace robot-driven car in action on the track, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today is artificial intelligence |
| 0:07.8 | quite as intelligent as we've been led to believe. A specialist in self-driving vehicles |
| 0:13.2 | reckons the people who design AI are taking basic shortcuts. AI has limitations. Okay, well, |
| 0:19.4 | let's put something in place so we can just bring it to market |
| 0:21.5 | quicker. We should have full confidence that AI never drives in a careless, dangerous or reckless |
| 0:26.9 | manner. Yes, it is the way that AI is learning about the world fundamentally flawed. |
| 0:32.4 | There's no systematic solution that people have right now because the systems don't really at a deep level |
| 0:38.8 | understand what is we're trying to get them to do and there's no direct way to program to do it. |
| 0:42.8 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:47.8 | Okay then, petrol heads everywhere. Get ready. Business Daily is hitting the track. |
| 0:59.6 | Yeah. get ready. Business Daily is hitting the track. The sound there of two cars racing on a racetrack near Northampton in the English Midlands. |
| 1:05.6 | Nothing odd about that, I suppose, except that neither of these electric vehicles has got anyone behind the wheel. |
| 1:12.7 | Simplistically, some people think of Robo Race as Formula One but without humans. So we take |
| 1:16.9 | the human out and we replace the human with a robot or artificial intelligence which does the |
| 1:21.3 | driving task. That's Bryn Balcom. He's the chief strategy officer of this autonomous vehicle project. It's called Robo Race. |
| 1:29.8 | So you've got a load of identical vehicles being run by different teams, competing to produce the best AI to get the car around the track safely as quickly as possible. |
| 1:42.6 | Exactly. And safe and quick is a good way to think of it as well. |
| 1:45.7 | So the winner of the race is the cleverest robot. Yeah, the smartest software. So here's a bit of the latest race |
| 1:53.8 | recorded in April by Bryn and his colleagues. It's between two cars from the TUM team and another |
| 2:00.4 | arrival. |
| 2:01.7 | Our very own BBC colleague and motorsport enthusiast, Elizabeth Hotson, is in the commentary position. |
| 2:07.5 | We're on lap two and TUM is absolutely cruising. |
... |
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