We want to develop a technology that's globally applicable, that's not customized for a specific city or a specific country. The only way to do that is to be able to test every day in a diversity of environments.
I love driving through Western Massachusetts, out through the Berkshires, when the road is empty and it's a nice day. I don't like driving home on Memorial Drive at 5:45 or 6:45 at night when it's crowded and stressful. I think that's true of most people, and the goal of automated driving is to take the stressful part of driving out of the task.
It's important for automated cars to be able to drive in a human-like fashion - and that does mean adapting to the driving patterns around you.
I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.
The AV ecosystem is constantly evolving, and no single winner will be crowned.
Even if trolley problems were a realistic concern for AVs, it is not clear what, if anything, regulators or companies developing AVs should do about them. The trolley problem is an intensely debated thought experiment precisely because there isn't a consensus on what should be done.
Cities like New Delhi for example, where traffic is dense and it's a more fluid driving environment, that's hard for self-driving technology to deal with.
Conflating thought experiments with reality could slow the deployment of AVs that are reliably safer than human drivers.
When you contribute to an open-source or a shared solution, and there's a liability issue that arises from the use of that solution, how will this be tracked back to individual contributors?
There's a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads. When you take lightweight vehicles and granular soils of varying composition, it's a very complex modeling process.
We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks.
To the extent that trolley problem scenarios exist in the real world, AVs will make them rarer, not more frequent.
All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It's not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn't develop this technology.
Everybody likes driving through scenic, winding roads. It's hard to find people who like sitting in traffic in cities.
You have to force yourself to give up and to move onto something else. That's the way you grow as a writer, by trying new things and tackling new subjects. But it's difficult. There's part of you that doesn't want to give up because you realize that, in some way, you're surrendering.
It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition.
Uniformity is the friend of scalability.
