A16z Podcast
Key Takeaways * Waymo believes that a fully autonomous car will be safer than the human-driven alternative * Autonomous driving can be distilled down to: + Is the car aware of what’s happening around it? + Can it anticipate what the things around it are going to do? + Given its surroundings, can the vehicle reason on what it should do next? * Autonomous vehicles use machine learning to make predictions on what pedestrians will do next depending on the gate and hand motions of the given pedestrian * Instead of debating LiDAR vs video, Saswat believes the more important question is whether or not the radars, lasers, cameras, and sensors position the vehicle better than the individual * Waymo has driven +20M miles in testing and billions of miles of simulation * Waymo took every fatal crash that ever occurred in Phoenix, re-simulated them, and showed that Waymo’s technology could have avoided the crash * Our society is designed around driving; consider how much of our cities are designed around parking, the amount of air pollution idling cars cause, and the amount of wasted real estate designated for parking * Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
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Self-driving cars have been on the horizon for quite some time. But, they might actually be here.
We got to ride around in one all over San Francisco with Waymo’s Chief Product Officer, Saswat Panigrahi.
We discussed so much, including the five levels of autonomy, the infamous LIDAR vs video debate, regulation, UX, and the role of AI in fine-tuning these models. But most importantly, if autonomy is here… now what?!
Topics Covered:
Resources:
Check out Waymo: https://waymo.com/
Check out Waymo's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Waymo
Find Saswat on Twitter: https://twitter.com/saswat101
Check out a16z's 8-part series on the autonomous vehicle ecosystem: https://a16z.com/2018/02/03/autonomy-ecosystem-frank-chen-summit/
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