The Future of Self-Driving Cars: Who/What Teaches Them to Drive?

Technology Revolution: The Future of Now

Bonnie D Graham

News, Business News, Technology

4.9 • 112 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Buzz 1: The future promised by self-driving car companies — in which the streets would be filled with autonomous vehicles — has yet to arrive. In May 2021, The New York Times reported that the cars are still unable to manage the multitude of scenarios they may encounter while driving…if it’s drizzling, all the cameras are so strong that they can capture the tiniest water drop in the atmosphere. In a category called atmospherics, workers may be asked to label each individual drop of water so the cars don’t mistake them for obstacles. (nytimes.com) The Buzz 2: “Mounting technical problems proved more difficult than designers expected, including the challenge of teaching cars to interpret the gazillion different types of everyday objects and data that real life presents, from passing birds to a moon that looks like a yellow traffic light to hand gestures from other drivers. (vice.com/en/) The Buzz 3: Training self-driving cars for $1 an hour: To master the roads, autonomous vehicles need lots of data. Workers everywhere from Kenya to Venezuela are providing it. (restofworld.org) The Buzz 4: Self-Taught, Self-Driving Cars? Boston University engineer Eshed Ohn-Bar is developing a new way for autonomous vehicles to learn safe driving techniques—by watching other cars on the road, predicting how they will respond to their environment, and using that information to make their own driving decisions.…Researchers had autonomous cars navigate two virtual towns—one with straightforward turns and obstacles similar to their training environment, and another with unexpected twists, like 5-way intersections…with just one hour of driving data to train the machine learning algorithm, the autonomous vehicles arrived safely at their destinations 92 percent of the time.” (bu.edu) We’ll ask automotive and AI visionaries Tom Madonna, Patrick Maroney and Praveen Ramamurthy for their take on The Future of Self-Driving Cars: Who Will Teach Them to Drive?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Where does yesterday's future, which is already here, really here, really here, meet today's future, which is about to happen, and tomorrow's future, which could be just minutes away?
0:16.3	Welcome to Technology Revolution, the future of now.
0:27.5	Where host Bonnie D. Graham asks savvy futurists for their predictions about the tech-driven trends that are shaping our future right now.
0:30.9	Here's your host who will take us into the future of now, Bonnie D. Graham.
0:36.2	I'm never sure when I'm on LinkedIn, live streaming the video,
0:40.2	which direction is the future. So I'm just going to say, we're just going to go into the future.
0:45.1	Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's October 20th, 2021. Where is the year going? Can't wait for this one to be
0:50.6	over. We thought we'd never get through 2020. And 2021 seems to be moving very fast,
0:56.1	not quite at the end of that tunnel where we hope to be through by now, but I hope we're getting
1:01.2	there. So if you're getting ready for a good 2022, get something ready for a very big
1:06.0	celebration on New Year's Eve. So we're talking today about the future of self-driving cars.
1:11.2	You know, you probably don't have one yet. And you're talking today about the future of self-driving cars. You know,
1:16.2	you probably don't have one yet. And you're probably saying, what? A car that'll figure out how to drive me? Are you serious? You've heard news. You've heard stories. And I want to tell you there's a TV
1:22.2	show called Upload that I started. It was a little too creepy for me where a guy is on his way to pick up groceries
1:28.9	in his self-driving car and it malfunctions and it crashes into the back of a bus. And before you
1:34.5	know it, he is uploaded to some place else where he has choices on how he's going to live
1:40.3	virtually sponsored by his wealthy girlfriend and wants to join him in the future. We won't go
1:45.2	there, but it was scary. So I have a panel that's very eager to talk, but I want to do some
1:50.0	buzz quotes before we start to get to wet your appetite for the topic. So I have a quote here from
1:55.1	the New York Times. Oh my goodness. From this year, May 24th. And let me just read a little bit.
2:00.0	I have four buzz quotes, so bear with me.
2:01.8	Number one, the future promised by self-driving car companies in which the streets would be filled
	...

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