Burkhard Bilder's brilliant New Yorker essay on driverless cars:
"Every Monday at eleven-thirty, the lead engineers for the Google car project meet for a status update. They mostly cleave to a familiar Silicon Valley demographic—white, male, thirty to forty years old—but they come from all over the world. I counted members from Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, China, and Russia at one sitting. Thrun began by cherry-picking the top talent from the Grand Challenges: Chris Urmson was hired to develop the software, Levandowski the hardware, Mike Montemerlo the digital maps. (Urmson now directs the project, while Thrun has shifted his attention to Udacity, an online education company that he co-founded two years ago.) Then they branched out to prodigies of other sorts: lawyers, laser designers, interface gurus—anyone, at first, except automotive engineers. “We hired a new breed,” Thrun told me. People at Google X had a habit of saying that So-and-So on the team was the smartest person they’d ever met, till the virtuous circle closed and almost everyone had been singled out by someone else. As Levandowski said of Thrun, “He thinks at a hundred miles an hour. I like to think at ninety.”
And that process of teaching the car to think like us:
"Four-way stops were a good example. Most drivers don’t just sit and wait their turn. They nose into the intersection, nudging ahead while the previous car is still passing through. The Google car didn’t do that. Being a law-abiding robot, it waited until the crossing was completely clear—and promptly lost its place in line. “The nudging is a kind of communication,” Thrun told me. “It tells people that it’s your turn. The same thing with lane changes: if you start to pull into a gap and the driver in that lane moves forward, he’s giving you a clear no. If he pulls back, it’s a yes. The car has to learn that language.”
"Every Monday at eleven-thirty, the lead engineers for the Google car project meet for a status update. They mostly cleave to a familiar Silicon Valley demographic—white, male, thirty to forty years old—but they come from all over the world. I counted members from Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, China, and Russia at one sitting. Thrun began by cherry-picking the top talent from the Grand Challenges: Chris Urmson was hired to develop the software, Levandowski the hardware, Mike Montemerlo the digital maps. (Urmson now directs the project, while Thrun has shifted his attention to Udacity, an online education company that he co-founded two years ago.) Then they branched out to prodigies of other sorts: lawyers, laser designers, interface gurus—anyone, at first, except automotive engineers. “We hired a new breed,” Thrun told me. People at Google X had a habit of saying that So-and-So on the team was the smartest person they’d ever met, till the virtuous circle closed and almost everyone had been singled out by someone else. As Levandowski said of Thrun, “He thinks at a hundred miles an hour. I like to think at ninety.”
And that process of teaching the car to think like us:
"Four-way stops were a good example. Most drivers don’t just sit and wait their turn. They nose into the intersection, nudging ahead while the previous car is still passing through. The Google car didn’t do that. Being a law-abiding robot, it waited until the crossing was completely clear—and promptly lost its place in line. “The nudging is a kind of communication,” Thrun told me. “It tells people that it’s your turn. The same thing with lane changes: if you start to pull into a gap and the driver in that lane moves forward, he’s giving you a clear no. If he pulls back, it’s a yes. The car has to learn that language.”
No comments:
Post a Comment