“No human drivers wanted”: That just might be the road sign for the high-speed highway transit lanes of the future, if artificial intelligence and driverless cars turn out the way Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz expects.
The managing director of Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab sketched out his vision of the future today at MIT’s EmTech conference in Cambridge, Mass., which highlights emerging technologies in computing, biomedicine and other fields. Part of that vision is the creation of “hyper lanes” that would smooth the way for autonomous vehicles, and potentially leave those pesky human drivers behind.
"I think we will have the rise of special lanes, hyper lanes, closed to manual traffic" — @erichorvitz on driverless cars #EmTechMIT
— John Miley (@johntmiley) November 2, 2015
“The Hyperlane idea is just a personal observation Eric’s had recently while driving his Tesla around Seattle,” Travis Reed, a spokesman for Microsoft Research, said in an email to GeekWire.
Driverless cars are clearly among the most promising near-term frontiers for A.I.: Tesla, Google, Uber, Toyota and Boeing are just a few of the companies that want to build more artificial intelligence into next-generation vehicles. And it’s not surprising that a leading scientist at Microsoft Research is also interested in the topic.
Horvitz said about a quarter of the roughly 1,200 scientists and engineers at Microsoft Research are working on A.I. – and it sounds as if they’re just getting started. Here are a few more tweets from EmTech that give you an idea where Horvitz’s head is at:
"I think we are just barely on the windy beach of Kitty Hawk" when it comes to AI — @erichorvitz, Microsoft Research #EmTechMIT
— John Miley (@johntmiley) November 2, 2015
MSFT's Eric Horvitz: AI threat to elections near-term because it can adapt candidate messages to effectively sway voters. #EmTechMIT
— bobparks (@bobparks) November 2, 2015
.@erichorvitz "The future of #AI is uncertain but it is just as likely we'll have new kinds of jobs as well as replacements" #EmTechMIT
— MIT Tech Review Arab (@TechReviewAR) November 2, 2015
Changes at Microsoft Research under @satyanadella? "We're seeing faster tech transfer, new forms of joint ventures"–@erichorvitz #EmTechMIT
— John Miley (@johntmiley) November 2, 2015
During last week’s Xconomy Seattle 2035 conference, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence said manual driving would someday become a hobby analogous to hunting, and Madrona Venture Group’s Tom Alberg said driverless cars are shaping up as “another platform” for advanced technology, on a par with virtual reality and cloud computing.
Will Microsoft get in on that platform? That would be the naturally intelligent bet.
