The News
Autonomous vehicles have to be around 10 times safer than human drivers for people to trust them, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Friday.
Uber is ramping up its self-driving car services by offering rides via Waymo in select cities. The rides are available through Uber in Austin, Texas, and are coming to Atlanta. Certain urban areas, like New York City, are more challenging for autonomous vehicles because of pedestrian behavior, including jaywalking and maneuvering between moving cars.
Such behavior “is absolutely going to happen” in places like New York, “but the autonomous and AI technology that we’re seeing will be able to adjust,” Khosrowshahi told Semafor’s Ben Smith.
“I’m not saying it’s a small problem, but the AIs now are acting in much more human ways,” he added. “You will see autonomous drivers who drive more and more like a super safe human.”
The Semafor View
Artificial general intelligence seems imminent, with increasingly capable robots coming along for the ride, but it remains unclear how increasingly powerful computers will impact the world’s knowledge workers. The billions of dollars companies are pouring into AI have not paid off, yet.