Sri Lanka has begun installing AI monitoring systems in long-distance private buses capable of detecting driver fatigue, mobile-phone use and other dangerous behaviour. Ten buses will test the technology first. It is a sensible experiment, but technology will achieve little unless the warnings it produces lead to safer driving.
Somewhere on a long overnight bus journey, a driver begins to fall asleep. His eyes remain closed a fraction too long, his concentration slips or he reaches for his mobile telephone while carrying dozens of passengers along a Sri Lankan road.
A new system being tested on long-distance private buses is intended to notice.
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Sri Lanka has begun installing artificial intelligence-based monitoring equipment on an initial ten buses as part of a pilot programme coordinated by the National Council for Road Safety and implemented through the National Transport Commission.
Installation began at Colombo’s Bastian Mawatha Bus Terminal over the weekend. If the trial proves effective, authorities intend progressively to extend the technology to other buses.
The concept is relatively straightforward. Cameras and associated technology monitor the driver and conditions inside the bus throughout the journey, looking for behaviour which could indicate danger.
The system can detect signs of driver fatigue or drowsiness, mobile-phone use while driving and failure to wear a seat belt. When it identifies unsafe behaviour, it issues a voice warning intended to alert the driver and allow immediate corrective action.
It is an attractive use of technology because some of the greatest dangers on Sri Lankan roads are stubbornly human.
A driver who is exhausted cannot be made less tired by better brakes. A driver looking at a telephone cannot simultaneously give the road his full attention, while excessive hours behind the wheel inevitably increase risk however experienced the person driving may be.
The Government’s own Road Safety Action Plan had contemplated AI-powered camera systems and GPS monitoring of long-distance buses, including measures aimed at ensuring drivers receive adequate breaks. The arrival of actual equipment on buses therefore represents movement from policy paper to practical experiment.
That deserves encouragement.
But ten buses are a pilot, not a road-safety revolution.
Sri Lanka operates thousands of buses, public and private, across an enormous network. The value of the experiment will depend on whether the technology actually identifies dangerous behaviour accurately, whether drivers respond to the warnings and whether operators change working practices when fatigue becomes apparent.
There are practical questions too.
Who supplies the equipment? What does each unit cost? Who pays if the programme is expanded across the country? Where is the information recorded, who has access to it and for how long is it retained?
Those questions become particularly important if monitoring technology eventually moves beyond issuing an immediate warning and begins storing information about drivers, passengers or journeys.
There is also the danger of mistaking technology for enforcement.
An electronic voice telling an exhausted driver to remain awake cannot give him eight hours of sleep. If schedules require drivers to work unreasonable hours, if operators pressure them to complete journeys regardless of fatigue or if rules governing rest periods are ignored, artificial intelligence will merely become a sophisticated machine describing a problem everybody already knows exists.
The technology should therefore be judged against something much simpler than the excitement surrounding AI: does it reduce dangerous driving and, ultimately, accidents?
If the ten-bus trial demonstrates that it does, expand it.
If it merely produces warnings which everybody learns to ignore, no amount of artificial intelligence will compensate for the absence of ordinary common sense.
Be that as it may.
