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

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?