Can A.I. All but End Car Crashes? The Potential Is There.

This is the last article in a series on artificial intelligence's potential to solve everyday problems.

According to the World Health Organization, 1.35 million people are killed in crashes on the world's roads each year. According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation, there was a six-month spike in deaths in the United States. Speeding, distraction, impaired driving and not wearing a seatbelt were the top causes.

Artificial intelligence is being used to improve driving safety by using cellphone apps that monitor behavior behind the wheel and reward safe drivers with perks and connected vehicles that communicate with each other and with road infrastructure.

But what will happen in the future? Can A.I. do what humans can do? Will the technology develop before self-driving cars?

David Ward, president of the Global New Car Assessment Program, said that there is too much hype around A.I., road safety and self-driving vehicles. He said the focus should be on the low-hanging fruit and not on a utopian promise.

Advocates like Mr. Ward look for low-cost, intermediate technologies. I.S.A., which uses A.I., is a prime example of intelligent speed assistance. The technology will be mandatory in all new vehicles in the European Union, but not in the United States.

Artificial intelligence is being used by companies to address road safety. The cameras use high-resolution images and machine learning to identify dangerous driving behaviors that are difficult to detect and enforce.

Mark Etzbach, the company's vice president of sales for North America, said that they have technology that can save lives.

The patent-pending technology, which is unaffected by weather conditions or high speeds, can view and record behavior inside the vehicle. There are cameras that can be installed on existing roadside infrastructure. Images are trained to specific parameters.

The company says it can determine with a high degree of probability whether a driver is engaging in risky behavior. We can see how fast the vehicle is. We can look at three behaviors at the same time. The majority of the behaviors are happening below the dashboard.

Law enforcement would be able to see if a driver is holding something besides the steering wheel and if the driver is texting. Clear penetration of the windshield can be achieved with an invisible flash.

The technology was developed by Alexander Jannink after a friend and fellow software engineer was killed while biking.

The company's main product, Heads-Up, was first introduced in New South Wales, Australia. The images that are captured by the heads-up system are later screened by the authorities for the likelihood of an offense. In the first two years, the state experienced a reduction in deaths and a decrease in phone use. There are currently pilot projects in Australia and abroad with the technology.

The next iteration of the technology, Heads-Up Real Time, is being proposed for deployment in the United States. Data and images would be sent in real time to officers in patrol cars, which they can view on laptops.

It's about being able to use technology to help us understand what people are doing behind the wheel that could put themselves and others at risk.

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When there is high visibility traffic enforcement, people behave better, they slow down, and they put their phones down.

They do things that are supposed to be done. We know that we can't put an officer on every road, so we're always looking at technology that can help.

Helping determine where officials may need to improve enforcement, make changes to infrastructure or adopt new legislation are some of the things that can be done with the help of technology. In recent months, the company has conducted demonstrations and evaluations for a number of agencies.

More than 11,000 vehicles drove by during an 18-hour assessment in August of a high-risk corridor in Missouri that averaged three and a half crashes a day. At least 60 percent of the drivers were speeding; an average of 6.5 percent were using mobile phones, more than twice the national average; and just under 5.5 percent were engaged in two concurrent risky driving behaviors.

They had a record year for road deaths last year.

The technology is gaining interest at the state level. Indiana is piloting the technology for the evaluation of enforcement deployability.

Europe is considering technology similar to Acusensus. The secretary general of the European Metropolitan Transport Authorities in Paris said that large-scale data collection has huge potential for use in preventing crashes.

In Barcelona, Spain, a recent trial used computer vision technology on city buses to map places along the route where there were conflicts with vehicles, pedestrians and others to identify where accident risks were highest. I would recommend every city to do it.

Computer vision technology uses A.I. to make sense of the raw video feeds from bus cameras. Mr. Santacreu said that the video data is often destroyed after being processed.

The report noted that A.I. can identify dangerous locations before crashes happen.

Mr. Santacreu said that it is important that governments share data and make room for data marketplaces.

Vision Zero was first introduced in Sweden in the 1990s and is now adopted by many cities around the world, as it aims to eliminate all road deaths and serious injuries by creating multiple layers of protection.

Some people don't like the idea of relying on computer learning. Humans are still better than artificial intelligence, said Mr. Ward of the Global New Car Assessment Program.

A driver who makes eye contact with a pedestrian can determine if that person is going to cross the street. He said that A.I. is not able to do that yet.

Privacy issues are raised by the technology.

This is a classic question about how much intrusion we want in our lives to keep ourselves safe.

There are limits to our liberty in the closed environment of cars, but it does imply a greater degree of intrusion.