It's Monday, July 15th, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Andrea Viscontas.

Each week we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics,

and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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Today's interview was hosted by our now pretty regular correspondent.

Adam Bristol, welcome back to Inquiring Minds.

Thank you so much. I'm having a great time.

So, you know, we live in San Francisco, and we often see these cars driving around that presumably are collecting data as they're becoming driverless.

I've recently been writing a lecture on big data and how we've gone from this model of,

you know, having a hypothesis about how something works, then, you know, designing an experiment,

finding the right sample size, you know, collecting the data

and then analyzing the data to basically letting the data drive the problems or drive the approach.

So, you know, for a long time, we didn't make a lot of progress in terms of driverless vehicles

until I think people had this insight where all of a sudden, what if you,

what if you instead of trying to program a computer to be able to drive around, what if you

took a whole bunch of data and fed it through the computer and used this kind of big data

approach to solve the problem? Well, that's been an important part of the advancements.

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