The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban design

Sight Lines: To see how driverless cars might perceive — and misperceive — the world, ScanLAB Projects drove a 3-D laser scanner

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Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the book ‘‘Robot Futures,’’ uses the metaphor of the perfect storm to describe an event so strange that no amount of programming or image-­recognition technology can be expected to understand it. Imagine someone wearing a T-­shirt with a stop sign printed on it, he told me. ‘‘If they’re outside walking, and the sun is at just the right glare level, and there’s a mirrored truck stopped next to you, and the sun bounces off that truck and hits the guy so that you can’t see his face anymore — well, now your car just sees a stop sign. The chances of all that happening are diminishingly small — it’s very, very unlikely — but the problem is we will have millions of these cars. The very unlikely will happen all the time.’’

The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment. The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists: a parallel landscape seen only by machine-­sensing technology in which objects and signs invisible to human beings nevertheless have real effects in the operation of the city. If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?

All of the glares, reflections and misunderstood signs that Nourbakhsh warned about are exactly what ScanLAB now seeks to capture. Their goal, Shaw said, is to explore ‘‘the peripheral vision of driverless vehicles,’’ or what he calls ‘‘the sideline stuff,’’ the overlooked edges of the city that autonomous cars and their unblinking scanners will ‘‘perpetually, accidentally see.’’ By deliberately disabling certain aspects of their scanner’s sensors, ScanLAB discovered that they could tweak the equipment into revealing its overlooked artistic potential. While a self-­driving car would normally use corrective algorithms to account for things like long periods stuck in traffic, Trossell and Shaw instead let those flaws accumulate. Moments of inadvertent information density become part of the resulting aesthetic.

The London that their work reveals is a landscape of aging monuments and ornate buildings, but also one haunted by duplications and digital ghosts. The city’s double-­decker buses, scanned over and over again, become time-­stretched into featureless mega-­structures blocking whole streets at a time. Other buildings seem to repeat and stutter, a riot of Houses of Parliament jostling shoulder to shoulder with themselves in the distance. Workers setting out for a lunchtime stroll become spectral silhouettes popping up as aberrations on the edge of the image. Glass towers unravel into the sky like smoke. Trossell calls these ‘‘mad machine hallucinations,’’ as if he and Shaw had woken up some sort of Frankenstein’s monster asleep inside the automotive industry’s most advanced imaging technology.

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