I was fortunate to attend a fascinating conference in Birmingham, about artificial intelligence (AI).
Some operators are already claiming that data usage is being used to re-invent the way that people travel. While some claim this is bordering on AI, others suggest that it is nothing more than a clever use of algorithms to plan journeys.
AI used in coaches?
Zeelo is claiming to be the first to run the first autonomous coach trip in the UK [routeone/news/21 February]. The on-demand coach service uses data to understand where inter-urban transport demand exists, currently aiming at special events, claiming to cut total journey times by 40%.
There is no doubt that the pace of change is accelerating very fast. The key speaker at the event – Dr Felix Hovsepian of Warwick University – is one of the world’s leading experts and co-author of the renowned book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
He took us back to historic exponents of AI, including the Greek mythological figure Pygmalion and 13th century ‘computerised Talking Heads’.
However it was the invention of printing in the 15th century that started to move the process, along with the development of clocks. In the 17th century Blaise Pascal created what was believed to be the first adding machine called the ‘keyboard’, which was clearly ahead of its time.
By the 19th century, programmable mechanical calculating machines were being built, and it was early in the 20th century when robots and the concept of AI really started to emerge.
Second World War pioneer
Alan Turing of Bletchley Park fame was instrumental in pioneering the concepts of AI. But it was John McCarthy at the 1956 ‘Dartmouth Conference’ in the USA who coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’.
Autonomous vehicle control has been around since the 1970s, and it is worth noting that to understand the development of AI, is to also pay homage to the worlds of machine learning, big data, natural language processing, speech recognition, automation, data science, computer vision, and of course applied mathematics.
What was a humble bus man like myself doing at a conference like this, sitting with techies trying to keep up in a world full of code, fuzzy logic and pythonistas (yes it is a word) and this is the interesting thing.
For all the dark arts and apparent polar opposite of my world and theirs, the truth is that like it or not, this technology is here to stay.
Driverless buses
Trials now being done with driverless buses, and all that goes with it.
We owe it to ourselves to understand what technology is doing and how it will impact on our profession.
And, in a week where the national news focused on the decline of bus use across the UK, these technologies might well form part of the solution and not the problem.
