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So back in 2013, we had the first test of a self-driving car where we let regular people use it. Three minutes into his talk, Urmson told a profound story that pretty much every congressperson and citizen should be pondering, deeply, right about now: One of its early driverless car pioneers Chris Urmson, gave one of the first TED talks on autonomous vehicles, in 2015. Google quickly learned that attention would eventually wander humans in the loop couldn’t be trusted.

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Most people working on autonomous vehicles (and throughout the field of engineering known as human factors ) recognize this fundamental truth, either because they know Mackworth’s work, or because they are aware of more recent work showing the same, or because they eventually discover it for themselves.Įarly in Google’s autonomous vehicle efforts, Google had tried to develop driver-assisted cars, in which AI did most of the work, but in which a human driver sat in front of the steering wheel, poised at all moments to take over. As a later summary of Mackworth’s work and the hundreds of subsequent papers put it, “ Vigilance Requires Hard Mental Work and Is Stressful ”. Mackworth published some of his first results in 1948, under the title “The breakdown of vigilance during prolonged visual search.” The term “ vigilance ” as Mackworth used it, and as cognitive psychologists today continue to use it, means paying close attention for long periods of time.

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Operators would open their shift doing a great job looking for radar signals that were rare but important but it wouldn’t take long, perhaps half an hour, before they stopped paying full attention. Mackworth himself noticed that people had trouble with vigilance while studying radar operators. In Mackworth’s terminology, the editors’ vigilance wasn’t high enough. Anyone who thinks about how AI is used should know about it-especially as we are about to head into an era of ubiquitous yet fallible AI.ĬNET’s editors learned this the hard way last week, when they published a bunch of machine-generated articles that turned out to be filled with subtle but important errors, with errors in 41 of the 77 articles the bot wrote, all missed by editors who weren’t paying enough attention. His finding is so foundational to cognitive psychology, and especially the field of attention, that I learned about it as a teenager. In the midst of World War II, the cognitive psychologist Norman (“Mack”) Mackworth made a fundamental discovery that is central to how any sensible person should think about artificial intelligence: humans, he discovered, were attentionally challenged if you gave them a repetitive task, particularly one in which most of the time they don’t have to do anything, they will eventually tune out.