The Idiot Green Box
Teaching a machine how to drive
The Uber driver picked me up from the SFO airport at noon. As soon as I settled comfortably in the back seat, I noticed the shiny green box mounted on the dashboard. It had a camera on top, looking at the road ahead. I had never seen it before, so I asked the driver about it.
The driver replied with a thick middle eastern accent, “Oh, the computer box. We call it the idiot green box. By law, we have to carry that thing when we are driving around.”
“Why?”
“Remember what happened a few months ago when they released the stupid autonomous cars onto the public roads?”
“Yes. Fifteen accidents in one month. The cars couldn’t cope up with the real-world conditions.”
“So the government ordered the tech companies to train their autonomous cars thoroughly on real roads where all kind of shit happens. The companies then created this green box and forced us to carry it around in our cars.”
“How does that help?”
“The computer inside the green box sees the road and observes my driving behavior thereby learning how to drive in real-world conditions. I think they call it Machine Teaching or something.”
“Machine Learning.”
There was a pause as I was trying to digest what he said. Then I asked, “How do you feel about teaching the green box?”
“Oh, terrible. Don’t like it. I am teaching this stupid box which will one day take my job…you know what I do nowadays?”
“What?”
With a grin on his face that I can’t see, he said, “I fool around when there is no passenger in the car. I brake suddenly, change lanes with no warning, run red lights, stuff like that.”
I smiled and told myself never to get in an autonomous car.
Check out my other story:
