Words matter. These are the best Karl Iagnemma Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Our first iteration of driverless cars kind of drove like trolleys on a track. This uncanny notion threw people off.
To the extent that trolley problem scenarios exist in the real world, AVs will make them rarer, not more frequent.
When I first started writing, I didn’t write about scientists at all. I think I wanted a break from that part of my world.
The fundamental problem here is that humans and automation approach the driving task differently.
For self-driving cars in particular, there are lots of dimensions of this technology beyond just impact on labour. There is a massive potential improvement in public health.
From a technology and economic perspective, it’s vastly more likely that autonomy will be used for mobility services.
Singapore is likely to be the world’s first market for self-driving cars. Commercial services around self-driving vehicles will likely be in Singapore before they are anywhere else in the world.
Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way, and the reality is that autonomous vehicles in the future may have to do the same thing if they don’t want to be the source of bottlenecks.
If you’re a large organization, you may welcome a bit of regulation to keep the small guys out.
Everything that’s transported over ground, whether it’s people or parcels, will be impacted by autonomous vehicle technology.
I’m really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn’t good at conveying information: It’s good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.
I grew up in Michigan, in the Detroit area, so cars are sort of in my DNA.
We hope to get to the place where there are thousands of Peugeot cars on the road running nuTonomy software.
If you develop a technology that only works in a single city, where it’s kind of optimized for a specific city, that’s not really that exciting.
The thing about stories is that they almost always find their way onto the page, even if it takes a while.
Uniformity is the friend of scalability.
I usually have a general idea of where the story is going, but I try to avoid planning in too much detail. The best endings are those that emerge only after I’ve thought long and hard about the various ways the story might end. Then I choose the ending that seems surprising yet somehow inevitable.
It’s challenging to drive in a way that’s human-like.
Building cars is highly specialized, it’s hard, and it’s capital intensive.
From a societal aspect, when you are impatient behind a driverless car and there’s no one to listen to your beeping horn, what are people going to do? How are they going to take out their aggression?
Singapore’s not a very big country. They speak with one voice, and they have a clear idea of what their regulatory environment should look like.
My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It’s always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.
There’s so much rich interaction with drivers that we take for granted. It seems like a mundane thing, but it turns out to be a really big deal.
For better or worse, we have to bridge this divide between developing cars that drive by the book and cars that drive how you and I drive.
Even if trolley problems were a realistic concern for AVs, it is not clear what, if anything, regulators or companies developing AVs should do about them. The trolley problem is an intensely debated thought experiment precisely because there isn’t a consensus on what should be done.
Surveys show that while many people are open to the idea of an autonomous vehicle driving them to work, far fewer are willing to let one drive their child to soccer practice.
It’s a cultural question. Will people want to share cars?
It’s funny how life works. You end up sometimes back where you started.
All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It’s not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn’t develop this technology.
Partnerships remain critical to nuTonomy’s success, and our aim is to work with groups with whom we share strategic aims and core values. These are partners that are transparent, innovative, and are focused on putting autonomous fleets on the road.
Everybody likes driving through scenic, winding roads. It’s hard to find people who like sitting in traffic in cities.
In Singapore, drivers generally obey the rules, but the attitude around pedestrians is actually quite different. It’s culturally different. People drive safely, but it’s not the same deference shown to pedestrians.
We want to develop a technology that’s globally applicable, that’s not customized for a specific city or a specific country. The only way to do that is to be able to test every day in a diversity of environments.
Even if we wanted to imbue an autonomous vehicle with an ethical engine, we don’t have the technical capability today to do so.
Writing, for me at least, takes a lot of concentrated work and effort. It takes dedication and the willingness to do the work even when that feeling of inspiration isn’t there at all.
