Recode Decode: Ford CTO Ken Washington

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Business

4.3 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2019

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ford CTO Ken Washington talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about AI and autonomous vehicles in this live interview recorded at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. In this episode: The current state of autonomous vehicles; where Ford is testing its self-driving cars and why it picked those cities; 3-D printing and other AI-enabled engineering tools; mapping the whole world, again; Ford’s history in self-driving and the DARPA challenge; the difference between a human car collision and an AI one; when will we see the first fully self-driving cars?; is Ford still a "car company?"; the medium- and long-term vision of AI-enabled vehicles; how AI could fix wrinkly seats (and make driving safer); the creepy side of AI; data privacy and ethics; how Ford works with the big tech companies getting into the car business; the weirdest, scariest, and coolest things Washington has seen from AI; the cool side of deepfakes; hovercrafts, VTOL vehicles and scooters; the impact of self-driving cars on jobs; and equity of access to self-driving cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sabotage, hired goons and a landfill in Utah.
0:05.0	How Steve Jobs' revolutionary catastrophe of a computer, the Apple Lisa, earned a brief
0:10.7	second life and then was buried for good.
0:14.8	Watch the Verges documentary, Lisa's final act, now on YouTube.
0:23.0	Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Editor at Large of Reco.
0:25.4	You may know me as someone who drives around San Francisco like Steve McQueen, but in my
0:28.9	spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Reco Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:33.8	Today in the red chair is Ken Washington, the CTO of Ford Motor Company.
0:37.8	He's also the company's vice president of research and advanced engineering.
0:41.8	Washington says that anything we're going to call a self-driving car has to have a 3D
0:46.0	map of its environment everywhere it goes.
0:48.9	This is a map that's developed by driving the space with an autonomous vehicle.
0:54.5	If you don't have that part of the map, you're relying on in real time detecting everything
0:59.9	that might happen and that's just too hard of a problem.
1:03.1	We also talked about privacy and ethical considerations around self-driving cars and all the data
1:07.9	about their drivers that they might collect.
1:10.4	You can choose what kind of activity you want to do in your own car because it's your
1:14.1	car.
1:15.1	Right.
1:16.1	If you've given us access to that data because we're going to offer you some service, we
1:21.4	have the responsibility to not share that with other people or use it for any other purpose.
1:27.5	If you're going to work with us, we have to agree how you're going to treat the data
	...

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