A racing car competition was organized last weekend in Abu Dhabi. Racing cars driven entirely by artificial intelligence!
The world is increasingly afraid that AI will replace humans in many productive tasks, which could eliminate millions of jobs in the coming years. But if replacement is anticipated in the professional world, few still think about the impact of AI in the leisure and entertainment sectors. Could the machine eventually replace our favorite athletes? This is the question posed by the race which has just taken place in Abu Dhabi.
Cars behaving erratically
The first race of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL), which included a total of eight cars without a human driver, but equipped with cameras and sensors, took place over the weekend at the Yas Marina circuit. The on-board equipment was intended to constantly send information about the environment back to the AI to enable it to continuously adapt its driving.
However, despite this technology, the race was a fest of failures. We were able to see cars zigzagging randomly, turning on themselves in the middle of a race or even simply going off the track, only to stop!
Humans always go much faster
The final of this competition pitted four cars against each other, and it was the one developed by the Technical University of Munich which ultimately won the event, by eight laps. But if the technological performance is interesting, spectators were faced with cars that went much slower than those driven by great drivers like Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen. The AI is in fact not yet capable of controlling a car at the furious speeds reached by these high-level athletes.
But the question nevertheless arises, if tomorrow, artificial intelligence were to improve very significantly in the field (which is not an incongruous possibility), would this still be of interest to the spectator? Wouldn’t watching automatic cars dragging themselves around without a human element inside with which we can identify simply seem preposterous?
Source : The Verge
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