Gigaom AI Minute – November 2

Transcript

An executive at Nvidia recently announced that he thought we would have fully autonomous cars in four years. Fully autonomous cars are called level five cars, and the cars we have today are operating at about level three. Elon Musk says Tesla will have level five cars "soon." Scott Miller, who heads up General Motors autonomous vehicle integration, said, "Musk is full of crap." Isn't it interesting that even at this late stage we don't know when a level five car will be made? Is it one year or four years or ten years?

Part of the challenge is, how perfect does the car have to be? Does it simply have to be safer than a human driver? For instance right now human drivers kill 40,000 people a year. What if self-driving car came around that only killed 20,000 people? I think that they would still be regarded as a mechanical menace and for self driving cars to really take a hold they're going to have to be vastly better than human drivers.