Stanford Professor Raises Questions About Self-Driving Technology, Auto Industry Takes Note

A Stanford engineering professor named Chris Gerdes is suddenly causing a great deal of discomfort to the automakers and technology companies who are working on the development of self-driving cars.

Gerdes has been at the enthusiastic forefront of the driverless car movement since being raised in North Carolina in the shadow of the Charlotte Motor Speedway, monitoring the brains of top racecar drivers in action and programming cars to imitate their moves. As he notes in his 2012 TED talk and in other public appearances, the professor and his students have programmed their Audi race car, named Shelly, to flawlessly make the 153 turns on 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak trail in Colorado, without a driver at the wheel.

However, as the autonomous car movement quickly races forward, Gerdes has gone from enthusiast to concerned. He is raising many questions about the ethical choices that he feels must inevitably be programmed into the robotic minds that are expected to one day soon drive on the country’s highways. And perhaps in part because Gerdes speaks honestly and directly, the auto industry is paying careful attention to his concerns, with top executives racing to his lab in Palo Alto to discuss the issues that he has raised.

“Within the autonomous driving industry, Chris is regarded as Switzerland, he’s neutral,” explained Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor at Cal Poly who spent a year working with Gerdes in his 7-bay garage filled with robotic cars. “He’s asking the hard questions about ethics and how it’s going to work. He’s pointing out that we have to do more than just obey the law.”

Gerdes recently met separately at his lab with the CEOs of GM and Ford, about one week after he hosted a workshop on driverless ethics for 90 engineers and researchers, including representatives from Tesla and Google, which has stated its plans to release an autonomous car as soon as 2017. Tesla will introduce an auto-pilot feature this year, GM will debut a 2017 Cadillac that drives hands-free, and Ford CEO Mark Fields says that he believes driverless cars will arrive on our roads by 2020.

But Gerdes’ message is clear: not so fast.

“People often say the technology is solved, but I don’t quite believe that,” he explained. “There’s a lot of context, a lot of subtle, but important things yet to be solved.”

For example, Gerdes has spoken about the double-yellow line problem. Although it’s clear that the car should cross it to avoid a road crew, it is less clear how to program a machine to break the law when necessary, or to make even more complex ethical decisions that arise when driving.

“We need to take a step back and say, ‘Wait a minute, is that what we should be programming the car to think about? Is that even the right question to ask?” said Gerdes. “We need to think about traffic codes reflecting actual behavior to avoid putting the programmer in a situation of deciding what is safe versus what is legal.”

Gerdes raises some very important questions about the finer details of what it will take to make driverless cars able to effectively tackle the complexities of driving on city roads and highways. By sharing his concepts and findings with automakers and tech companies, Gerdes is helping to make autonomous driving safe and efficient in the future.