People hear autonomous and it conjures up what we've been told in science fiction movies and so on that this is really, capable, and we're still really far from that,

but we're being misled in how it is advertised to us.

So I think that the over-trust in the automation is far more dangerous.

Autonomous vehicles have been in the headlines for a few years now, sometimes for the right reasons,

such as records being broken, new technologies and things like that.

But they are more often in the headlines for the wrong reasons.

Crashes, cars getting confused by the moon and videos emerging of people sleeping in the backseat with no one at the wheel, it seems like as a society, we haven't quite got used to the idea

of autonomous vehicles yet. We don't really know what they can currently do safely. More importantly,

we the public generally don't really know what they can't do when something

goes wrong.

I get the feeling that we're living through an era people will look back on and laugh at,

like quaint black and white films from the 1950s about the home of the year 2000.

Now we laugh at how wrong they were with their robot maids and flying cars, but we might not

be quite so immune.

In this episode, we're going to be taking a look at how close we are to fully autonomous vehicles,

not just as a form of transport, but as an integral part of our society.

We'll be looking at how we can integrate them onto our roads, and how we can strike the right psychological balance of trusting them, or not trusting them to make good decisions.

We're going to make good decisions. You are listening to Technology Untangled, a show which looks at the rapid evolution of technology and unravels the way it's changing our world.

I'm your host, Michael Bird.

Self-driving cars have been around for a few years now.

A trend kicked off with Tesla's release of the autopilot way back in 2014.

And you'll know I only said self-driving rather than autonomous.

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