Auto Industry Insiders Call for Public Education on AI at NAIAS

A panel discussion named “Artificial Intelligence, Beyond The Buzzword” was held at the 2018 NAIAS in Detroit, Michigan on January 14th, 2018. [Photo: Liu Kun/China Plus]

Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic at the on-going 2018 North American International Auto Show, which will last until the 28th. Many auto industry insiders are suggesting that if anyone wants the technology to become a reality in the future, the public needs to be educated about it.

Our reporter Liu Kun sent back this report from the show floor in Detroit.

Without all the new car models at Cobo Center in downtown Detroit as a reminder, I would wonder whether I'm actually at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, because it seems that everyone at this year's Detroit Autos show is talking about artificial intelligence, or AI.

AI technology is being closely integrated into cars today. A good number of this year's newly released cars are either heavily invested in, or flirting with the idea, of an AI control center. Among the traditional Detroit big three, General Motors released Cruise AV, which has no steering wheel or pedals. Among German auto makers, Audi contributed the 2019 edition of the A7 which features automated parking technology. And these two are just among the many who have ventured into AI technology.

The 2019 edition Audi A7 which features automated parking technology was released at the 2018 NAIAS. [Photo: Liu Kun/China Plus]

While it is a big topic this year, many industry insiders are worrying about the fact the pubic now only has a vague idea of what AI is and some are even afraid to embrace the idea. And they say a lot of this has to do with popular media's depiction of AI technologies - and even what people see in the movies.

Sam Abuelsamid is senior research analyst with Navigant, a tech consulting company. At a forum held at the auto show, he said our current AI technology is far from as competent as images such as Skynet in the movie "The Terminator."

"I think there's definitely room for a lot of public education. I think probably most people when they think of AI they think of what they see in the movies. They think of something like HAL in '2001' or 'the Terminator'. They think of the idea of general artificial intelligence that can do everything humans can do at super human level. And that's not what we are doing here in automated driving. And in general I don't think that level of general artificial intelligence exists today or is really even close."

Danny Shapiro is Senior Director of Automotive at NVIDIA, an AI tech company. Talking about the current development of AI at the same forum, he said the current technology is still limited to simple tasks.

"So what we are at is that AI is able to achieve much better results on a specific task. A basic transportation example is that to recognize street signs, one approach is computer vision where you basically write software to analyze the frame of videos coming into the camera and detect what's in there. For example one of our partners Audi was working with a smart camera company who can have smart camera chip and computer vision software. They've spent two years basically developing codes to be able to recognize all the street signs in Germany. The approach we took with deep learning again is to feed in data, so data is what that's writing the software. So we put in thousands and thousands of pictures of a stop sign and labeled it as such, basically instructed it that this is a stop sign."

The 2018 NAIAS is held in Cobo Center of downtown Detroit in the US State of Michigan from January 13th to 28th. [Photo: Liu Kun/China Plus]

Looking into the future of AI, Ken Washington, Chief Technology Officer at Ford Motors, said the public needs to be reminded that no matter how the technology evolves, its ultimate function is to serve human beings.

"I think an important thing that we can help society with is helping the public understand that what we mean when we start tossing around these terms such as AI. Because what we really mean is that we mean software that can help and assist humans. We can't forget that this is about humans, not about software. It's about helping people. In the case of drive assist technologies, you still have a human driving the care and you are assisting that human. So then it's not something that you fear, it's something you are thankful for because it's helping you to lead a better life."

For CRI, this is Liu Kun reporting from Detroit, Michigan.