Perspective: Attitudes Towards Autonomous Technology

Andrew Ng, a chief scientist at Baidu, a Beijing based web services company, has authored an article that suggests a more productive way of thinking about autonomous driving technology.   He posits that we should avoid trying to make autonomous vehicles act like human driven cars, change our infrastructure to make vehicle behavior as predictable as possible, and “teach” the public how to interact with autonomous cars because trying to make autonomous cars behave like humans would be like paving over the cow paths.  Ng, however, oversimplifies the teaching part of the equation.  What we “teach” will ultimately end up establishing our social norms that will in turn lay the foundation for the regulation of autonomous vehicles.   

 

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