(traffic whooshing)
(upbeat cymbals music)
("Good Times Roll")
Psychologically, driving is an extraordinarily
satisfying activity for those who choose to invest in it.
("Good Times Roll")
It taps into freedom and autonomy.
These are really fundamental human desires.
I wanna go somewhere and I wanna control
that process myself.
Now we're at the dawn of driverless cars,
and we're about to redefine that dramatically.
And as we give over control of our mobility
in exchange for convenience,
I worry we may be giving over more than we realize.
There's a lot to be concerned about,
and a lot to be excited about,
and you need to know what's coming.
(upbeat music)
(light switches clicking)
For many people, the car is the most aesthetically
and technologically sophisticated object they will ever own.
I don't have a Rembrandt on my wall.
The most beautiful thing I own is a 2003 BMW M5.
You know, there's no question,
that's my piece of art, right, that is.
And I'll never, I'll probably never have anything
as beautiful as that car.
My first really vivid car memory
was when my dad got a Corvette. (laughing)
His midlife crisis, maybe,
but my kind of automotive awakening.
(upbeat music)
It was just like pure animal sex, you know, it was amazing.
Everyone develops a connection to their automobile.
And there's something about the feel of the vehicle,
the emotion, that has an influence on them.
They pick a vehicle that just
kind of fits their personality.
Cars really represent the symbol of mobility,
and it's about enabling people to move about
and get to where they need to go
when they want to on their own terms.
The car is not just transportation
from point A to point B.
The car really is the ultimate freedom machine.
(engines roaring)
In a world without cars that you as a driver drive,
I think what we'd miss most is the pleasure
and the satisfaction of being good at something,
whether it be driving to work
or driving out on the racetrack.
And I think some of the things you're doing
become unconscious, you just do them,
and the car becomes an extension of your body.
I think it's great to love your car.
And I think it's awesome to love driving.
And I actually enjoy driving a small fraction of the time.
I have a convertible, and I get out onto 280 over here,
and in the spring with the roof down
and good music playing, it's awesome.
And then I get to San Francisco and it's not.
(slow electronic music)
As human beings we didn't evolve to spend
an hour and a half every day sitting in a metal box.
And so I think the commute to work is like a prime example
of where an automated driving system
will be something that's very attractive.
This is a technology to give people back time.
And I think, to be honest,
our sense of the value of time has changed a lot recently.
Technologies like the cell phone
have made it so that we're very impatient now.
On the other side, those who predict
that soon it will be illegal to drive your own car,
I don't think that society's going to put up with that.
To me, this is not about taking driving away.
Even the most ardent car fanatic does not enjoy commuting.
Let's take that part that sucks, and let's make it better.
We've actually lived with cars
that are highly automated for decades.
Every year we see new features introduced
that have more self-driving capabilities.
We're being promised that we can trust robots
to keep us safer than human drivers.
The hypothesis is there, and now it's up to us as a society
to be able to prove it.
As we start moving into a world of autonomous vehicles,
if you're just a plain old driver
that's trying to figure out what's coming,
it's hard to figure that out.
(dramatic music)
So what does the future hold
for this soon-to-be booming business?
You have sort of three different categories
of players here, you have the car manufacturers,
who are moving from drivered cars to driverless cars.
You have a tech company, Google, that's moving
into the car manufacturing business for the first time,
and then you have Uber, and their advantage might be,
all right, isn't all you want, the ability to access
the driving itself, with the push of a button?
It is pretty crazy, the investment, the energy,
the hype around it has gone through the roof.
This technology is self-driving towards us,
whether we like it or not.
I've had six billionaires on this show,
and three of them are working on self-driving cars.
It's not gonna happen tomorrow, but it will happen.
It'll be a slow process. So you can send it
to pick up your kids, and you could stay home and--
Well imagine if you're disabled,
if you're drunk, or if you're blind.
I love this!
If we can reduce the human error,
we can actually increase safety on our roads.
We can make the world safer now,
and we should pursue this immediately
and not make a cynical decision that says,
well let's wait for future generations.
They'll figure it all out.
I think we'd be missing an opportunity.
Finally, a high-tech alternative to jamming a brick
on the gas pedal and jumping in the back seat.
(audience laughing)
Oh, dear Jesus. I could never! (screams)
This has gone from no one thought that it
was going to happen, to wow, it's gonna happen tomorrow.
Back when we started in 2009,
this is what our system looked like.
Once we started driving on city streets,
the problem becomes a whole new level of difficulty.
How soon can we bring it out?
Well, these are my two boys.
My oldest son is 11, and that means in 4 1/2 years,
he's gonna be able to get his driver's license.
My team and I are committed to making sure
that doesn't happen.
(audience laughing) (audience applauding)
One of the distressing things about transitioning
from human-driven to computer-driven cars is,
how in control will you be?
I think that's an unanswered question
and it's a scary question.
I think people are reluctant to give up that control.
I don't want the car taking over for me.
Well in a sense, your car does take over for you
if you have antilock brakes, and stability control,
and a bunch of other things, but no matter what,
there will always be nostalgists.
They wanna live in a log cabin and drive a '74 Camaro.
(laughs)
(car engine revving)
(rock music)
(tires squealing)
All right, guys, welcome.
This is the August meeting, Drag'n Knights.
The Drag'n Knights are a cohesive unit of car collectors.
The theory of Drag'n Knights is a pre-smog,
American-powered vehicles, and it doesn't necessarily
have to be a very beautiful car.
This doesn't have a rear window. (laughs)
You get satisfaction out of building something yourself,
you know what I mean?
And I think those are the true car guys,
and especially this club, everybody builds their own cars.
And we all get together and we get to talk about that.
Here's a question.
Are you a safer driver in an autonomous car,
or a car that has all those features,
or in a car like this?
Now, I say you're safer in a car like this.
Because you're aware when you're driving that thing,
that that thing can fly apart at any minute.
It's a huge responsibility, driving these cars.
(rock music)
I tell you what, dude, you're gonna get whacked
by this frickin' thing.
I've heard that before. -: All right.
(tires squealing)
(engines revving)
The bond between one and the car is unbreakable.
In a self-driving car, you always have like a computer.
It takes the personality out of the car,
and takes the bond between
man and machine out of the picture.
(engines revving)
Yeah, come on, that was freaking awesome.
(men cheering)
Let's see the autonomous car do that.
(gentle music)
Engaging full autonomous mode
in three, two, one, go.
(car engine revving)
(classical waltz music)
I remember when this was science fiction,
and how cool it was gonna be
when we could actually see this coming.
I don't think in my lifetime I even had a small inkling
that we'd get beyond a neat science fiction episode,
and here we are.
(classical waltz music)
The idea of the driverless car
is a long, long gestating dream.
(classical waltz music)
Okay, um...
Let me back up a little bit.
(whimsical music)
Henry Ford comes along at the beginning of the 20th century,
and he put everybody on wheels, he enriched America,
and he created in many, many ways,
the modern mobile society.
And what happened here really became the manufacturing model
for the rest of America.
Detroit was the 20th-century boom town.
(classic rock music)
As much as Silicon Valley is a 21st-century boom town,
I think that's how people have to think about Detroit
in the 20th century.
It was this hugely positive, expressive age
where people thought anything was possible.
The music was totally upbeat,
the cars were totally extravagant.
Homes were getting larger.
People were moving out to the suburbs.
And a lot of it was fueled by all the wealth in the city.
The great thing about the car
is that it was a source of pleasure for everyone.
It was one of the most democratic pieces of technology
the world's ever come up with.
Move to electronic control strip in center lane.
Detroit also invented the future.
The concept car then allowed people to dream.
You're now under automatic control.
Hands off steering.
We've always wrapped ourselves
around technology in an automobile.
The building blocks of a fully autonomous vehicle
have been introduced over the last couple of decades,
and made us more comfortable with the idea
of technology improving the driving experience.
We see it in pop culture, we see it in novels,
we see it in television.
That sort of Utopian ideal of a technology
that here's to save us really is at the roots
of how we came to understand an autonomous vehicle.
(whistling) Where am I?
You're in a Johnny cab.
Whether it's a pod in "The Jetsons"
or a robot driving us around,
there's really been a bit of romance to it.
The idea of a driverless vehicle
is actually centuries-old.
Leonardo da Vinci drew plans for a self-propelled cart
in the 15th century.
There were full-size, remote-controlled cars by the 1920s,
and later experiments with cars that could follow
electric signals buried in the road,
like an invisible track.
But it wasn't until the late 20th century
that self-driving cars became a reality
and not just a sci-fi fantasy.
You know, for a collection of microprocessors,
you're awfully touchy.
It's just that my circuits function better
when we operate in a reality mode.
KITT? -: Yes, Michael?
Just keep driving.
(upbeat music)
(lava sputtering)
Around 450 million years ago,
an extraordinary event happened,
and it was called the Cambrian explosion.
It was a time where some particularly primitive
types of life explosively diversified
into all the major groups that we have on Earth right now.
It's when evolution came up with really good eyes,
and so suddenly the pace of evolution
just drastically sped up.
The pace of technological improvement
is drastically increasing right now
because of this same kind of explosion,
really because for the first time now,
computers have learned how to see.
Right now, at this very moment,
as you watch these light rays striking the magnified eye,
similar tiny beams of light are entering your own eyes.
When you think about how can a car see,
at the end of the day, the car sees in a sense
very much like we humans do.
So we have eyes, right, light comes in.
It touches a sensor in our brain, where we interpret
that light to be able to recognize objects,
and then put those objects together in a scene
in our brain to have a visual, spatial
kind of understanding of where I am.
In a sense, that's what the camera does as well.
The camera has lenses.
Now we have the advantage that we only have two eyes, right,
but in many of these cars, we can have 6, 8, 12 cameras.
We also have LiDARs, which are kind of laser scanners
that shoot out laser beams to different objects.
We also have radars, so if any one sensor can't see,
temporarily, we can leverage the other sensors.
And then so that's really where
the way these cars sense the environment is more robust
and better than the way we humans can.
Some of the early signals of economies
started with knowing that we could do
computer vision and integrate that into a vehicle.
Some of the early work was done in Japan.
Similarly, for actually controlling the vehicle
with software, some of that early work was done in Germany.
(upbeat music)
Vision has been very central in developing intelligence,
and I thought we could teach technical objects
to have a sense of vision, and do their own decisions.
Dr. Dickmanns was viewed as being a crazy guy.
You know, as totally nuts. Totally weird.
People thought I'm crazy, because this looked impossible.
My first Ph.D. work with Dr. Dickmanns
was actually balancing a black rod on an electro-cart.
It's like, you know, balancing a pole.
And the task was with the camera looking at this rod
and the cart, to move the cart such
that the rod was stabilized.
Well, this was the big breakthrough.
There were definitely people before Dickmanns
who had carts that moved, like there was a Stanford cart,
you know, that took an image, and then it calculated
for 15 minutes, and then drove a meter,
and then it took another image.
But he was the first one to do it in real time.
(car engines roaring)
One morning it came to me
that the Autobahn's environment is very simple.
It's very easy for analysis.
You have a very well-kept surface.
You have white lines, and there is no cross-traffic.
So I made the decision to take this
as the first real-world application of computer vision.
So wouldn't it be nice on those long motorway trips
to just sit back, relax,
and take your hands off the wheel?
Well, maybe one day you'll be able to,
because this purely experimental van
is driving along now at about 35 kilometers an hour,
totally automatically, using only this ordinary camera
to see where it's going.
We equipped a huge bus with a system
and we were able not only to drive,
but also to stop in front of a static obstacle
from a speed of 40 kilometers per hour,
fully autonomously, no intervention by a human.
What his first car did, it was able to follow a road.
Of course, interaction with other moving vehicles,
with other people, with animals, all that was not possible.
But when he showed the first videos of this working,
people started realizing, boy, there's something to it.
We didn't know what was going on in the world.
We thought we were the first to do it.
We knew about one project which had run
in the late '70s in Japan.
(speaking in Japanese)
In the United States, there was a similar project,
the Autonomous Land Vehicle, ALV,
and they had one big vehicle, steered like a tank,
and the European countries came to the decision
that maybe America and Japan is moving ahead,
and then we started working, yeah, as a competition.
October 1994, was the international symposium
on intelligent vehicles in Paris.
So the rest of the world working in this area,
they gathered there, and we were able to demonstrate
free-lane driving at speeds as you liked,
doing lane changes, which has been done
fully autonomously for the first time.
Europe had advanced to the top of the development
in this half a decade.
(speaking in Japanese)
He was the first one to really show
that you could do this at high speeds,
that speed actually is not an issue,
but even today, many people won't know him.
But the work that he did influenced decisions,
like, even the DARPA Grand Challenge
might have not happened without his work.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to the DARPA Grand Challenge.
The objective, create a self-navigating,
autonomous vehicle that can safely drive
132 miles through a harsh desert environment
without human intervention.
So, in 2004, DARPA, the Pentagon's research agency,
put out a challenge, I think it was a million dollars,
to see who could develop a self-driving car.
If you think back in that context,
(explosion blasting)
this was at a time when IEDs were causing
all sorts of mayhem during the Iraq war.
Soldiers were being killed. Convoys were being disrupted.
And so the idea was looking at the pace of robotics,
how could we develop a self-driving vehicle?
There was no more technologically forward
and focused group on the planet.
DARPA, which is responsible for the internet,
is really a funding organization for gizmos.
So I had been working on NASA robots.
The robot I'd been working on was used to develop techniques
for exploring other planets, and we were driving
that around the desert, and it was moving at, I don't know,
15 centimeters a second, which is,
somebody with a walker moves at that pace.
And my advisor said, there's this DARPA Grand Challenge
which was to get a robot to drive from Los Angeles
to Las Vegas in less than 10 hours.
And you know, they said you'd have to hit peak speeds
of 50 miles per hour, and that just sounded really cool.
(gentle music)
The first year, 2004, nobody drove more than 7 1/2 miles
over I think a 150-miles course, in the California desert.
We went seven miles out in the desert,
and then basically the thing burst into flames.
(gentle music)
Nobody'd won the first one.
Some lessons were learned, and they came back at it
the next year, and Stanford University won it.
Then the urban challenge came up where this time
it was driving around a retired air base,
and this was this chance to see these vehicles interacting,
and I think that was probably where I got hooked.
It was kind of a surreal experience.
The whole research community got to see
all of these incredibly sophisticated agents at the time,
driving around completely autonomously on their own,
passing each other, yielding to each other,
stopping in the middle of the road.
And at the end of the day, we all felt that we had
really seen a major step forward for autonomy.
(upbeat music)
(slow rock music)
(speaking in Japanese)
(upbeat music)
For people who don't think they care about design,
they'd be surprised when they start to understand
how a design suffuses every experience
that they have in the car.
When we think about the fact that maybe the car
doesn't ever have to crash, maybe the car never will crash,
well, the idea of bumpers become debatable.
The idea of the shape of the car.
What happens if there's not a combustion engine?
And when there's no transmission,
there's no center hump in the car.
Now, there are no tunnels, there are no bumps,
there's not even hardware.
And it allows us to create this amazing open space
in a relatively short footprint.
Even the wood grain are little displays,
which as you can see on the other side,
it's picking up people walking on the sidewalk.
It gives you an enhanced view of the world around you.
(upbeat music)
I think car design is very much influenced by technology,
and everyone's talking about autonomous vehicles,
and designers are exploring, well, what does that mean?
The steering wheel retracts.
The pedals retract also, and you're able to relax
and do what you were going to do.
Friends in the industry start to talk about
this use of the third space.
If you have home, and you have work,
well, there's this other space that you're gonna occupy.
So then you start to think about questions like,
well, what are you gonna do there?
How are you gonna sit? How are you gonna engage with people?
Are you gonna work in that space?
Are you gonna play in that space?
Are you gonna watch movies?
Everything about the way that we encounter
and think about and experience design of a car
is up for debate now.
It's very hard for me to imagine a driverless car
being anything other than a commodity.
It's an appliance, and appliances have very,
very different rules than art objects.
What do you look for when you buy a fridge?
You don't want it to look radical and edgy,
and you're not interested in its top-end performance.
You're interested in that it functions as a fridge
in a thoroughly predictable way,
day after day after day after day,
and that it not call excessive attention
to itself in the kitchen.
That's what we're looking at for the future of cars.
I think some people were under the misconception
that all autonomous vehicles will be pods.
There could be a wide variety of executions.
Yeah, there may be pods, but autonomous vehicles
could be applied to that car, to a '57 Corvette.
If anything, the technology just allows creativity
to just explode and go into so many different directions.
Once research engineers have proven the viability
of this technology and the design innovators
started expanding the possibilities, then car manufacturers
really began to pay attention, and the industry
gradually moved from dismissing the technology
as far-fetched to embracing it
as the future of their business.
People understand that there's a lot of good
that can be done, but again,
the economic aspect of this is profound.
You wanna be part of that wave,
you don't wanna be kind of washed away by it.
Transportation's one of these things where for years
we've been taught to think of it a certain way.
But when you take a good hard look at the economics
behind your transportation use, for a great many people,
there is an enormous opportunity
to get more value out of that transportation dollar.
If you look at the personal trips that are taken
each year in the U.S., we do 400 billion trips a year,
and 45% of those are for shopping or running errands.
And we think that we have the opportunity
to replace some of those, maybe most of those,
with a vehicle, a friendly little robot
that might do those trips for you
and save you both the time and the effort.
What was your record collection
is now a global library of media.
The house that used to be your home
is now being used by other people
when they're in town for a short period of time.
And the same thing is true for apparel,
handbags, and dozens of other categories.
We're going to move away from the ownership model.
We saw that with the introduction of leasing.
Now we start to see ride sharing come in,
and that idea that maybe you don't need to even lease a car,
you just need to pay for the minutes
that you're gonna use it.
I think we're gonna see a convergence
that we've never before seen
between the movement of people and goods.
There is a rife opportunity
in the commercial trucking industry to leverage
these technologies for commercial gain on the freeways,
but then also in urban environments as well.
We're taking a look tonight
at how jobs as a future are changing.
Take long-haul trucking, for example.
It's not at all clear that the autonomous truck
will no longer have a driver.
It just may be the case that the driver isn't driving.
There's a million things that person does
other than drive the truck.
Those tasks don't go away.
(truck engine rumbling)
Trucking is the backbone of the American economy.
Without trucks, America stops.
The clothes that you're wearing, your shoes, your car,
the food that you're eating, everything came by truck.
Trucks are a necessary evil, because without them,
you're naked and hungry. (laughs)
(upbeat music)
This country's amazing.
There's every kind of scenery you can think of.
To get up every morning and know that you're gonna see
a different sunrise over a different cornfield,
a different lake, or in the mountains, it's just incredible.
I'm a tourist first. I'm a truck driver second.
You go through those little towns and it's nice.
They've got a nice little church,
and people mowing their lawn, they wave to you.
Kids riding their bicycles or standing on the sidewalk
going, "Bonk, bonk!" (laughs)
Trucking is still the same as it always has been,
whereas you climb into a truck and you put it in gear
and you drive, unless it's an automatic. (chuckles)
Will that change in the future?
I guess it's leaning that way.
But no autonomous truck's gonna take my job,
because I do things an autonomous truck can't do.
(gentle music)
Sometimes I've had to do things that are not legal
in order to avoid an accident.
For example, an oncoming car is coming into your lane.
You have to make a judgment call.
You gonna stop, you gonna crash into it,
or you gonna go on the other side of the road?
Which is what I did, and I saved my life,
and the driver's life, and what's a computer gonna do?
Okay, it can probably stop in half the amount of time
I can stop, but even still, the car's gonna crash into it
and that can still kill the driver of that car.
So I just don't think we're ready for it yet.
In a future where autonomous trucks are up and running
and without glitches, it's sad to think
what's gonna happen to trucking as we know it.
Will they have other jobs available in the field?
Probably, like loading trucks and unloading trucks.
But then that'll probably become autonomous
down the road, too.
How can you compete with a robotic forklift
that doesn't require a lunch break,
it doesn't get sick, it doesn't need worker's comp
or any of that stuff, so we're screwed. (laughs)
It's coming to a town near us. (laughs)
(wind howling)
There's some great cultural institutions in Detroit.
And one of them is the Detroit Institute of Arts.
And those have the really,
really subversive Diego Rivera murals.
At the top you've got these beautiful frescoes
of just elements being harnessed,
and all of this stuff that the Earth creates
gets turned into this tiny little car.
And what Rivera was saying was the seeds
of that system's destruction were in the system itself.
(gentle orchestral music)
You look at how it is today,
and the car is really perceived as a dinosaur.
The industry is seen as a dinosaur.
Detroit is sort of seen as this
unsophisticated Midwestern backwater.
It's not the kind of integrated modern society
that people think of when they think of the West Coast,
especially Northern California.
We think of semiconductors and high-performance
processors as some of the most complex products
man has ever made.
But a car, a vehicle, is also quite complex.
You have thousands of parts, a huge supply chain,
and the automotive industry does it very well.
And I think in a sense maybe they don't get credit
for how complex it is actually to bring all of that together
to mass-produce the vehicles that we enjoy on a daily basis.
Making a car is a difficult,
labor-intensive, capital-intensive thing.
It has to be engineered to the highest levels
of safety, reliability, performance.
It's a hard thing to do right, and it's taken us
a hundred years to kind of get to this point
where it's almost perfected.
In contrast, in Silicon Valley, you've got these folks
that are coming at it from the software perspective
and thinking about these interesting problems
in machine learning and computer vision
and how do we make these vehicles drive,
and so there's actually because of the conflict
and challenges they're facing, there is this opportunity
to kind of bring some new thinking into the industry.
Well, there used to be a big three,
Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford.
Every year the dealers would soap up their windows,
and they'd have the cars in the showroom,
but you couldn't see it.
It was the release of the iPhone,
the excitement was exactly the same.
There is a thrill of the new.
The car business was the first
to really capture that and exploit it.
(people cheering)
Silicon Valley is of, I think, that same mindset.
Here's this new invention
that's gonna make your life so much better.
But generally these are not $50,000 things
that go 200 miles an hour,
and they don't have the associated safety risks.
One of my favorite things to say is, you know,
when your app crashes, nobody dies.
So welcome to Silicon Valley, because guess what,
when your vehicle crashes, somebody could die.
It's a whole different mentality for them
to understand what's going on here.
The way Detroit builds a car is you have a concept,
you develop it, you test it, you test it, you test it,
you make sure everything is ready to go
and as good as it can possibly be
before you release it into the wild.
The Silicon Valley way of doing things
is much more progressive.
And you see that expressed in how Tesla does business.
(electronic music)
In Tesla's business, the drivers
are part of the car development process.
It's very fluid, and they do beta test
Autopilot on their customers.
(crowd cheering)
Today we're planning an exciting announcement,
which is the release of Autopilot.
We still think of it sort of as a public beta.
We actually explicitly describe it as beta.
Don't know what I'm gonna do with my hands down here.
(man laughs)
In the short term I think it's very important
that people exercise caution.
We're advising drivers
to keep their hands on the wheel just in case.
Federal safety regulators this morning were investigating
the first deadly crash involving a self-driving car.
Joshua Brown was using the Autopilot feature
on his Tesla Model S when he was killed
in a Florida highway collision.
In that Joshua Brown accident,
he thought he had a high degree of reassurance
in the system, and the Autopilot misread the environment
and sent him, you know, through the side of a truck.
The driver of the truck says that Brown
was watching Harry Potter on the TV in the car at the time,
but the sun blocked the car's camera
from seeing the truck turning,
and that's why the car never braked.
To deliver a truly automotive level of safety,
or beyond that, an aeronautical level of safety,
you can't do the agile beta testing thing.
You just can't, people aren't gonna trust it,
and then people will reject the technology.
There's this sense of independence
that surrounds the idea of autonomy.
It's being able to do something yourself.
The question is, when we call something
an autonomous vehicle, whose autonomy are we talking about?
Is it ours? Is it the robot?
Is it people programming the robot?
And I think it's that sense of otherness
that creates this sense of fear.
We'll put our kids in cars with our aunts and uncles,
who are blind in one eye.
When a human is doing the crashing, we accept it,
because we know we're fallible.
When a computer's doing the crashing,
that's existential dread, man.
Funny enough, that is how people think.
Like, we go, we'd rather be killed by one of our own
than by, yeah, there's people who're like,
yeah, I don't wanna be killed by a machine.
I wanna be killed by Dave.
(audience laughing)
Things that engender trust are open
and clear communication, dialogue, eye contact,
all these things that when you meet another person,
makes you get a sense of trust about them.
Now, we're asking people to do that with a machine.
Machines of course have these stereotypes
as being these soulless, faceless boxes
that are just making arbitrary decisions for us,
and so I think that's a much more difficult challenge.
You're a pedestrian at a crosswalk, and you see a car
being driven by a human pull up to a stop sign.
If their head is turned to the left,
or they're looking in the rear-view mirror,
you know that they don't see you.
There's a tremendous amount of body language information
exchanged between the pedestrian and the driver.
How're you gonna read that in a car?
How are you gonna, as a pedestrian,
know what the car is thinking?
(upbeat music)
Although a lot of focus of research on automated vehicles
has been on the inside, we wanted to explore
what this introduction of this new type of vehicle
into the environment, how that would affect
other road users, like pedestrians, bicyclists,
or even other drivers.
So to do that, we needed to really get out
in the real world to evaluate it.
(upbeat music)
We created a seat suit that would cover up the driver.
You couldn't see their face.
It looked just like a regular seat.
We did not tint the windows.
We wanted people to be able to see in,
and confirm their suspicion that there is nobody in the car
when in reality there was.
We've been researching new types of lighting signals
that would be able to replace those interactions
that would occur between two humans.
In a way we are attempting to create a new type of language.
What we don't want is a scenario where you come
to an intersection where you have different cars,
all with different signals,
signaling their intent in different ways.
And so if we can introduce new technology
that is not overly complex, they'll be able
to learn it quicker, adapt to it,
and then trust it a little bit faster.
Will the transition to full driverless-ness
be a little bit like the transition
to elevator use in skyscrapers?
(elevator bell dings)
Down, boy.
So if you think about elevators,
and the idea that an attendant was needed,
well, initially there was an attendant needed
to actually manipulate the machine.
But as the elevator improved, as technologies enabled
anyone to go and control it,
people still weren't comfortable with that idea.
They still needed to have an attendant in there
just to provide some comfort around the experience.
Social adoption of a new idea vastly lags behind
technological perfection of a new idea.
The ATM was invented in the 1960s.
Ask yourself, when was the first time you used an ATM?
It was probably in the '80s, maybe the late '80s.
But an ATM, super straightforward,
cash from a machine, right?
People took forever to trust the machine.
So with that in mind, I suspect that
full-scale adoption of driverless cars
is something that is not happening overnight.
(gentle music)
Arizona is quickly becoming the state
for self-driving cars.
The lack of rules helps.
Governor Doug Ducey has stripped
any regulations on the industry.
Google's driverless tech program, Waymo,
is offering free rides in driverless cars.
The company has said it's allowing anyone
in the Phoenix area to apply to its early rider program,
which will accept hundreds of people.
Yeah, we've been watching them
here in the Valley for some time.
They started out being Google cars,
and this was before they were labeled,
and now it's a rare day that I don't see one.
About a year and a half ago, I think,
we did a survey of our group,
and we phrased it if a driverless service showed up,
how likely are you to want to ride in that?
So the engineers, there wasn't a single one that said,
I wouldn't consider it.
There were several that, including myself,
that said, you bet.
We then got curious and said, can we get a larger sample
if we went out to all the residents?
We did the poll of the general population here,
and a number of them said, no way, I wouldn't ride in one.
The ones that do wanna get out and around,
there's ways that you do that.
There're all kinds of transportation available here.
You can get on a bus and go shopping.
Doing it without a driver would be a big step,
so they say, I'll just stick to my walker. (laughs)
When you don't have a reason to spend all your time
concentrating on driving the automobile,
there's a lot of options.
There's a lot of time that you can use for other things.
It would be like the subway.
Just getting on the subway,
you read your paper going to work.
You know, you have a car that's kind of long and big
and you have a table in the middle of it,
and you get it in, and the people sit around the car
and you say, "Car, go."
I mean this is all, you know, magic and stuff,
but there's no reason why that can't be done,
why you can't have something like that.
(gentle music)
So today my phone didn't charge,
and so I woke up, and I looked at the time,
and I was like, oh my God, it's 7:30?
And I was like, I need to go to school in like 10 minutes.
Okay, I need to call Waymo, get ready,
and then Waymo pulled up in like five minutes
and it was, yeah, it was really easy.
So you like, you made it? -: Yeah.
It was like, barely made it, but I made it.
Is it weird being in a self-driving car, though?
It's weird the first couple times,
but after you use it you get used to it
and you don't even pay attention.
Yeah, like time after time I just get on my phone,
plug into the aux and then like-
Like do homework or something?
Yeah, it's super easy.
Yeah, I feel like that's probably one of the main reasons
I don't have my license is-
It's 'cause of Waymo? -: Yeah, I mean,
you know, like, 16 is normally the age
that you would get your license,
and at this point, what's the point?
I drive in Waymo.
So do you ever want to learn how to drive
or get your license or anything like that?
I feel like eventually. (laughs)
I still remember, 16th birthday I was there,
got my- Sure.
Got my license, passed the first time and whatever.
Yeah, the world is different,
and I think the younger people today
are really not as interested in driving
as the younger people used to be,
and with being able to function
and get around socially without driving,
a lot of the teenagers today are doing it.
Our parents are always like, "We grew up with landlines.
And we didn't have a computer until we were like
50 years old," and it's just technology as you knew it
is now exploding, and I feel like that's how it was
when the first like iPhone came out
and everyone was like, oh my gosh, and now we're just-
Sparked this whole new thing.
Yeah, exactly. -: So this could do the same
thing for transportation. Exactly.
I mean, the idea that Google
is involved with cars is just so breaks my heart.
What about any of those guys suggests
that they're gonna contribute to car culture
in any meaningful way?
It's about control of the informational element of the car.
It's not about cars.
Whenever you think about what driverless cars look like,
what you're essentially doing is you're creating
an interdependent web of moving automobiles
that are aware of each other and take necessary steps.
That unless you have a kind of systems approach
to this kind of transportation, it wouldn't work.
You need to conceive of what the network of cars looks like
before you unleash this technology onto the roads.
(upbeat music)
We are in a low-speed automated shuttle,
can transport around 10 people.
It's especially designed for campus environments,
possibly airports, amusement parks, and as a passenger,
all I had to do was go to the touchscreen,
select the station that I want to go to,
and hit go, and we were on our way.
Mcity is an off-road facility, first of its kind,
purposely built to test connected and automated vehicles.
We've provided a really unique test platform,
and that is our open, connected, and automated vehicles.
And basically these are research vehicles
that are opened up for researchers to go in
and bring their ideas to the vehicles,
and take them right out into Mcity
and experience quote, unquote "real world,"
in a really safe, repeatable, reliable environment.
A connected vehicle can communicate with other vehicles
and infrastructure around it, for safety,
also for efficiency.
An automated vehicle can actually take responsibility
of the driving from the driver.
The two put together are actually
a very powerful combination.
If the traffic signals can help warn oncoming vehicles
that someone's about to run a red light,
that can help improve safety at an intersection.
We have to accept the fact that if all cars on the road
are part of some connected grid, the opportunity
for catastrophic error now exists
in a way that it never did before.
If it's 2035, somebody can hack in at six o'clock
into the web, as it pertains to the cars on the 405,
and cause every one of those cars to crash into each other.
That's gonna happen, right? It will.
Maybe it only happens once, but like,
it can't happen now, and it will be able to happen,
you know, in the future.
And unless you're comfortable with that,
you can't go down this road.
To the automotive industry, security often meant
physical security, right?
Stealing your car, you know, you need to lock it, right?
To Silicon Valley, security has a very different meaning.
You should never assume that it's possible
to physically secure the car from a connectivity standpoint,
so you need to design for an expectation
that these systems will be attacked.
The hacking of Experian, or the hacking
of everyone's Social Security numbers,
are incredibly devastating acts, but there's something
weirdly intangible about them, right?
You don't see the guy who's got your credit card numbers
and your Social Security number.
The kind of breaches in information technology
that we will see in the world
with dependent cars will be tangible.
I can see in my mind the picture of what the 405 looks like
when someone hacks in and causes 5,000 cars
to crash simultaneously.
I mean, it's not gonna be, it will not be pretty.
(car engine rumbling)
(tires squealing) (car crashing)
For 2016, there were 37,461 lives lost on our highways.
(people screaming)
For the last numbers we have,
there were 2.4 million injuries, 6.3 million crashes.
The reason I made sure everybody knew the exact number
of fatalities is because every one of those is a person.
So it's a mother, father, brother, sister,
your neighbor, a coworker.
People love to talk about statistics, but they're people.
We have this amazing thing with the automobile.
It allows us to get from one place to another
so much quicker than we ever used to a century ago.
But we kill one and a quarter million people worldwide.
That's horrific, and there's an opportunity
to really drive that number down.
The car is relatively safe,
but the car right now is just an instrument.
That instrument is of course led and controlled
and maneuvered by a driver.
(somber music)
94% of crashes are due to the human,
so that's a choice or an error that we make.
A choice to drink, a choice to reach for that phone,
not get enough sleep, an error of looking one direction
when you should've been looking the other.
94% of crashes.
So when you think, where's our opportunity
with new technology, that should be the target.
So the promise of autonomous vehicles
is that they will be safer
and likely much safer than human drivers,
which means that from a rational standpoint,
if your concern is safety, and there are other concerns,
but people's main concern seems to be about safety,
it makes sense to take the self-driving car.
But if you have irrational calculations
about how much more safe it'll make you in particular,
that could make you elect the less safe option
of deciding to drive yourself, and as a result,
if many people do that, then we lose out
on all sorts of safety benefits
that the self-driving cars bring.
We don't give it a second thought when we step
into an airplane, but a car is something
that we're used to being in control of, right?
So I think we have a higher bar
because we're asking them to step back,
give up control on something
that you've always been used to being in control of.
My husband and my son love roller coasters. I'm not a fan.
I get in a roller coaster, and my heart beats really fast,
and I get a sick feeling in my stomach,
and I just wanna close my eyes and make it go away.
Where they do this, right?
And I think self-driving cars are that way, too.
I think some people just like anything new,
and I think as we get older,
we get more fearful of new experiences.
My experience has been that before getting
in a self-driving vehicle, people doubt it.
They think there must be smoke and mirrors.
Could I ever really be comfortable
in a car that's driving itself?
And the amazing thing is,
after a couple of minutes, they are.
(man laughs)
You know it. It was fabulous.
The problem with that is that none of these systems
are up to human performance.
But very quickly, the driver in the vehicle
will trust them, and they'll trust them too much.
And you know, it always works, I've been using it
for a month, every day, it handles this bit of road fine.
And then, you know, month and a day,
and a bad thing happens.
The most predictable thing in the world
was that a self-driving car was eventually
gonna kill someone.
Uber today put the breaks on all road testing
of its self-driving cars after a deadly accident.
A pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona
was killed last night by a self-driving Uber taxi.
It is believed to be the first pedestrian fatality
caused by an autonomous vehicle.
It happened earlier than most people thought,
but the second-most predictable thing in the world
was that people were gonna over-react to it.
And they did.
Developing news, a letter just sent to us
by the governor's office,
asking the Arizona Department of Transportation
to suspend Uber's self-driving cars in Arizona.
So one of the things that makes me crazy
is when people say the new technology
has to be as safe as human drivers.
We really suck right now at being human drivers.
We're killing 37,461 people a year. That's not okay.
If we can find anything, any tool that's gonna help us
save those lives and prevent more injuries,
we should be doing that.
(gentle music)
I look at autonomous vehicles as probably
one of the more transformational, exciting new technologies
that we've seen come along in a long time.
We have a piece of legislation out of the Commerce Committee
that we hope will be considered
in the full Senate here soon.
Yeah, this technology is transformative.
You can call it disruptive or creative.
It is all of those things.
In fact, I believe it is the biggest thing to happen
to the auto industry since the first car
came off of the assembly line.
The AV Start Act that I'm working on with Senator Thune
as bipartisan legislation, is designed to be able to create
the regulatory flexibility necessary to allow
the innovation to move forward,
while also considering that safety is always paramount.
We have thought long and hard about making sure
that safety is first and foremost in this legislation,
making sure that we're trying to find that middle ground
to allow innovation to flourish but also being careful
about making sure these vehicles meet standards
before they get out onto the road.
One of the challenges here is that we have a lot
of traditional, reactive ways of thinking about auto safety.
You wait until somebody dies or gets hurt,
and then you go and figure out was there a defect,
what happened, et cetera.
That typically means let's regulate.
The Department of Transportation prefers to avoid
a patchwork of different approaches
by encouraging interoperability of standards,
and consistent rules, while respecting
the role of state and local governments.
The regulatory bodies,
they do not wanna legislate innovation.
They want the car makers to find the best technology,
and then they'll figure out the regulations around it.
Automated features are becoming increasingly common
in our cars, but we still have a long way to go
to reach full automation, Level 5 as SAE would call it.
The Society of Automotive Engineers
has these levels of autonomy.
Level 0 is just a purely analog car.
Level 5 is where the vehicle drives itself,
doesn't even need a steering wheel or pedals.
Unlike rules for the design of a seatbelt
or airbag, the federal guidelines
for automated vehicle systems are voluntary.
The U.S. Department of Transportation says
mandatory regulations could delay
getting life-saving automated systems on the road.
The regulatory environment around driverless cars
right now is the Wild West.
Yeah, sure, it's the Wild West.
I think that we should try to make it as wild as possible.
In the battle to dominate the future
of self-driving cars, Uber and Google
were on a collision course.
Will it get ugly? Yeah.
But I think we want it to get ugly.
I mean, there's no way around the ugliness.
It's one of Silicon Valley's most anticipated court cases.
The outcome could determine the future
of autonomous car technology.
Will there be a patent war? Well, of course.
But is it just a necessary part of the stage?
Uber will pay $245 million
to Google's Waymo self-driving car division,
settling a legal dispute over trade secrets.
The problem of perfecting these kinds of systems
is hard enough that you wouldn't wanna discourage
anyone from taking a crack at it.
The international competition is intense.
You're seeing big pushes from Europe,
from Japan, from Singapore.
The Chinese are weighing in with everything,
because I think most folks realize that when AI systems
can take that automobile through a very complex environment,
that means artificial intelligence is ready for prime time.
For every single industry, you can imagine,
it'll transform the private sector,
it's gonna transform the military sector.
And so whoever gets there first with this technology
will have a competitive advantage,
not just in mobility in cars, but throughout the economy.
Self-driving cars, there's our future.
Gonna be a lot of litigation, a lot of new technology
coming fast. A lot of bumps
in this road, there are. Yes, indeed.
Senator, when you talk about those matters of safety,
talk about liability.
What happens if there's an accident?
Who's eventually responsible?
Well, those are the questions
that we have to try and answer,
and you know, you have an entirely different,
if you don't have a driver,
who is liable in a case like that?
Almost everyone that I've spoken to
has expressed considerable skepticism and fear,
and one of the bigger concerns is,
well, what's gonna happen when the car has an accident?
People are afraid that they're gonna get blamed.
Well, but I wasn't driving the car.
Why should I be at fault?
Well, maybe you're not gonna be at fault.
I mean, that's yet to be determined,
but I tell people all the time
that self-driving technology is not gonna go away.
We're not gonna stop making the things that are gonna
make the cars autonomous in the next 5 to 10 years.
That's gonna happen.
The question is how safe is safe enough?
What will we allow machines to do?
How much will we allow machines to screw up?
What is our threshold for that?
At this moment where the attention is being paid
to the very occasional self-driving car fatality,
the fact that there's such a massive media coverage of those
distorts people's view of how dangerous
these cars are now and will be.
If we were to see repeatedly how dangerous
it actually is to be a human driver, then maybe we'd have
a more even-keeled view of the relative danger.
If we covered all of those accidents at the rate
that we cover these accidents that involve
self-driving cars, we would not have room
for anything else on TV.
(gentle music)
I guess the first accident I heard,
where this woman was crossing at night,
crossing the street with her bicycle.
The driver had for some reason disabled
the automatic braking. Yes.
So- -: Humans.
It was the human frailties came to pass.
A complex system is one that has unintended consequences.
That is my real concern personally
with the self-driving cars.
It's not Waymo logging eight million miles
of nice, clear roads in Arizona, but very simple things
like some of the roads are still not paved.
And think of that white stuff in the winter.
What markings will help?
(lively pulsating music)
When I took this job, I thought,
let's try something different.
And off-road driving just seemed like an obvious choice.
It's much harder trying to see a path through the woods.
It's even for a human being sometimes hard.
The car is autonomously following the leader vehicle.
The application tracks the leader vehicle
based on LiDAR and camera data.
First you follow another car,
then you generate your own map.
It just knows, okay, I went through a slight left bend,
and then I took a sharp right turn,
so it memorizes these landmarks.
This is the end of the teaching phase.
Then the car would autonomously
start to drive the recorded path backwards.
One application of this is the rescue scenario.
As you can imagine, in Fukushima or in other
disaster scenarios where there is an environment
which is dangerous for people to be in,
it is able to move the injured people
out of this area by itself.
We typically have no maps, or very poor maps,
and what we need to do
is we need to concentrate on perception.
So we have a very biological approach,
you know, human-like approach.
(lively pulsating music)
The implication for AVs extends so far
when we take them off-road.
We can think about how self-driving cars
open up new spaces off of the grid,
and putting people to work in ways they could never imagine.
(upbeat music)
A farm is a pretty expensive business operation.
Gerrish Family Farm's been in with the Gerrish family
for over a hundred years now.
We grow corn and soy beans, alfalfa, and grass-fed beef.
We've got some honey bees, a few chickens,
and fish, a lot of fish. (laughs)
My father just works 18 hours a day,
because farming's his passion.
Well I've talked to some of our farmer friends,
and the reason they said they farm
is 'cause they love to drive tractors.
Well, I like to drive the tractor, but I'm okay
with not doing it that many hours a day,
and I can't find anybody to do it.
He's a creative guy, and he actually went
and took the grandkids to the LEGO store
and just got a ton of bricks and poured 'em out on the table
and told the kids, "Build a robot
that would help Poppy on the farm."
And those were literally used to go talk to universities
and entrepreneurs to say, this is what
an eight-year-old came up with.
What can you do?
We created this challenge where you had to come in
with the autonomous vehicle, didn't care what it was,
car, truck, ATV, tractor, whatever,
to plant autonomously the first year,
to weed and feed the second year,
and then to harvest the third year.
You start bringing these young people in
that have never even been involved in agriculture
and they're like, "Well why don't we do this,
or why don't we do that?"
So the cross-fertilization of ideas
helped build the challenge.
I don't think we could've done it
until they said we can drive automatic cars, right?
Once people started reading that, I'm like, okay,
all we got to do is go back and forth in a field.
That's different than up and down a highway.
Through the agBOT Challenge we were looking
for developing a farmer-centric solution
so that we're smarter farmers.
So we've got two choices right now in our society.
We can take a fear-mongering thing and say,
oh my God, we're gonna lose jobs.
These agbots are gonna take over all the farmers
and make 'em slaves, or we can say,
what if we could really do all of this stuff
and free ourselves to do it better?
And so the opportunities there are just unlimited
for the United States and other countries.
The future's just beautiful with automation.
Think about taking all the domain intelligence
of all of the farmers in the world
and delivering a four-row agbot to people
with a second-grade education in Africa
to grow their own food.
I'm excited about that. That will happen.
I can imagine a situation where the city of Los Angeles
would say let's tailor an autonomous car system
to serve a social and economic function,
to remove the transportation burden
from the bottom economic strata of our society.
If all we're doing is creating
another toy for rich people, so what?
But if the real payoff is it's a way
to create a really cost-effective, efficient
mass transit system, then I would love to see that.
If that's what it'll look like in the end,
I'd be the happiest person in the world.
(gentle music)
Every morning when I head off to my office at MIT,
I head out to the bus stop, get on the bus.
It's about a 20-minute ride.
There's a set of railroad tracks before you get to MIT.
I wait for the bus to hit those tracks,
and I know my stop is next.
If you're a sighted person, you don't have to do that.
But I use all kinds of tricks.
Everybody's got a different voice.
Now, other people don't have to think about that,
'cause they use facial recognition.
I use voice recognition.
Paul?
Oh my gosh, is that Ray?
What are you doing, waiting for the bus?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm waiting for the damn bus.
Today you're not gonna take the bus to work.
Why not, man? I always take the bus.
Well, because you're gonna drive to work.
Woo-hoo! You're kidding.
You're gonna drive. -: I'm ready,
but I left my license at home.
That's all right, that's all right.
I'll be sitting in the backseat
with my football helmet on.
Yeah. Just in case.
All right, here we go. -: Okay.
(upbeat music)
We are in self-driving mode.
Woo! First time for me.
So who's controlling the acceleration? Is that you, Teddy?
I've got my feet off the pedals, hands in the air.
So the car's deciding how fast it should go.
Car's deciding how fast it should go
based on how straight
the road is. Oh, those trees!
(men laughing)
Paul, it's a good thing you can't see me.
You'd be terrified.
(men laughing)
But if you look at the screen,
you can see how far ahead the laser sees.
Doesn't that inspire some confidence?
It does. It's great.
And it's looking behind us, too.
I'm not looking behind us.
Can you estimate how far ahead of us it's-
It's able to see about 300 feet.
Wow. -: Yeah I know, all directions.
For people who are unable to drive
and have to rely on other modes of transportation,
the new technology with autonomous cars
really adds a significant degree of liberation,
I would call it, and independence.
Can I touch the wheel to feel it moving,
or is that gonna?
Can you feel it? -: Oh, wow, that's so cool.
To feel the wheel move and the car respond,
yeah, that is very cool.
I've got a whole new level of control
that I never would've had before.
And I think autonomous vehicles
bring that opportunity to a whole other level
where one day I'm gonna call my friend Ray
and say I'm gonna come over, pick you up,
and we're going out to dinner.
Now, I hesitate to ask with this,
that big red button, what is that?
Is that the kill switch?
That's if the robot rebels.
Oh, robot rebellion, I've heard of that.
We hit that, we get full control,
the car goes back to being like a regular Prius,
and the robots can't do any harm.
Do no harm, that's important.
So one of the interesting things about self-driving cars
is that not only do we outsource our driving capability
to the cars, but we have to outsource
some of the moral decisions that we make as human drivers.
Now, it's not obvious to people that they are making
moral decisions when they drive,
but in any number of small maneuvers that we make,
we are actually making moral decisions
about where we're gonna distribute risk
between the various stakeholders on the road.
However, because self-driving cars need to be programmed,
those types of values, those types of moral decisions,
have to be baked into the algorithms themselves,
which means that we now have to explicitly decide
what we want cars to do in those situations.
These kind of moral trade-offs are often exemplified
with these stylized thought problems,
and the most famous of these
is probably the trolley problem.
In the trolley problem, you have a runaway trolley
that's barreling down a track,
and as it's directed right now, it can't stop,
and it's going to go down a track
where there are five workers working on the track.
But there's a fork, where it could go
on a different track and run over one person.
But you are off to the side where you can pull the lever
to switch the fork, so you can make the decision
about whether the car is gonna go on the track
and kill five people or kill one person.
So what do you do in this situation?
Human beings are terrible at the trolley problem, okay?
When we feel panicked because we're about
to have an accident, we do random things,
counterproductive things, stupid things.
Because these self-driving cars are much better
defensive drivers than people are
and they're paying attention the whole time,
they shouldn't ever end up in a trolley car situation.
It just shouldn't come up.
When a human being is at the wheel,
we have no idea what they're gonna do.
So why would a programmed evaluation of that
in any way be more scary than a person doing it?
I think this really speaks not to a real technological issue
but rather to this empathy issue that we worry about,
that we can empathize with a person
that panics at the wheel and runs over someone.
It's hard to empathize with a machine making a decision.
My programmers told me this life
is worth more than that one, so I'll take that one.
Decisions that are made
by the algorithms become moralized.
We bake our values into the algorithms, and we have to.
There's no other way to do it.
Can we program these algorithms
to make their own moral decisions?
Well, that's a much more complicated question.
(speaking in Japanese)
(gentle music)
(speaking in Japanese)
(upbeat music)
I object to the use of the term autonomous
to describe self-driving cars
because they're not autonomous.
The autonomous vehicle is the vehicle
that you drive yourself.
It's what we have now.
What we're conceiving of are cars
that are the opposite of autonomous, that are connected.
For generations driving was one of those things
that we were required to master, and once you'd mastered,
it gave you the satisfaction that you had achieved that.
You were to learn how to work a stick-shift
and learn how to parallel park.
These were sort of annoying or even intimidating
when you're doing them for the first time,
but after a while, they gave you satisfaction.
Mastery and pleasure are two sides of the same coin.
It's where pleasure comes from.
If Malcolm wants to parallel park all day,
and that's how he sort of gets his rocks off,
amazing, but he won't have to sit in traffic
and do the other parts that he's less interested in.
The day-to-day grind will be replaced
with something that's frankly far, far more pleasant.
Self-driving cars are going to change
the way our cities function.
They're going to change how we relate to each other.
But if we don't educate people
who are going to benefit or be hurt by this technology,
then we're really missing the whole point
of why we're doing it in the first place.
This is a really important technology,
but we have to be thoughtful about making sure
that we're not rushing to bring it to market
before it really is ready.
I want it to be at least as good
as human drivers that are on the road.
I think society will recognize
that the technology of autonomous vehicle
will be a benefit to mankind.
The most important thing is safety.
I sure worry about my kids driving.
I sure worry about their safety.
I sure am paranoid every time they get behind the wheel.
Would I love a world with no accidents
where they're totally safe?
Yeah, I think that's worth it.
But how do you maintain control of that technology?
How do you preserve your own agency within that technology?
We've been promised that technology
was gonna set us free, give us more leisure time.
Has that happened?
Could it go bad? Sure, it can go bad.
But every technology is like that.
Fire can be used to make weapons.
It can be used to cook food and heat our homes.
But I don't want to limit in any way the technology
just because we're afraid of the bad uses.
We should use those fears to make sure that we use it well.
There's a long history of people being
almost comically suspicious of technologies as they emerge.
We have this status quo bias. We're used to what exists now.
But if we stuck with the status quo,
we would not have airplanes, or elevators,
or the printing press, or writing.
I know the self-driving technology
seems very foreign to folks,
and it's very difficult to conceive
getting into an automobile and have it take you
to some place without you ever touching a steering wheel.
But that technology has the promise
that tens of thousands of people's lives
will be saved in the United States every year.
That's a big deal. Not to develop it would be wrong.
I won't go down without a fight.
I'll be the last of a dying breed.
But I'd say, maybe start training for another career.
If you're young enough, go to night school.
You know, you could do online lessons
in your truck at night.
You could become a lawyer.
And then you can sue the autonomous trucking companies,
right, when they kill people. (laughs)
Be cautious, be vigilant, but be open,
because there's a chance to totally change your life.
Autonomous vehicles will give people the freedom
to go wherever they wanna go, whenever they wanna go.
And that's huge.
Beyond all of the cool things
about autonomous vehicles, that's important.
I think there are significant costs to the individual,
and significant benefits to society at large.
What is lost with driverless cars
is interaction with the physical world.
And one by one it strikes me we are stripping away
those traditional forms of interaction.
And that is not without consequence.
For the last 50 years, the focus of the automobile industry
has been to make the car accessible
to a broader percentage of the population.
It's made it possible for people
who don't know anything about cars to drive cars,
people who don't know how to fix cars to drive cars,
people like my mom who's benefited from incredibly
reliable cars, and now we're giving her a technology
which will allow her to drive around into her 90s.
That's the point of this technology.
This whole massive industry has been serving me
for generations, and now they're gonna
not serve me in the same way anymore.
And that's maybe inevitable, but it breaks my heart.
I've been, you know, I've been at the center
of their dartboard for a hundred years,
and now I'm being replaced with a picture of my mom.
(upbeat music)
(new wave music)
♪ Here in my car ♪
♪ I feel safest of all ♪
♪ I can lock all my doors ♪
♪ It's the only way to live ♪
♪ In cars ♪
♪ Here in my car ♪
♪ I can only receive ♪
♪ I can listen to you ♪
♪ It keeps me stable for days ♪
♪ In cars ♪
(new wave music)