Andrew NG and Yuanqing Lin just published an article “Self-Driving Cars Won’t Work Until We Change Our Roads—And Attitudes“. Decision making in very complex situations is an essential part of this development. Here are some interesting quotes:

“AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES will join human drivers on our roads sooner than most people think. At Baidu, we plan to put commercial, self-driving cars on the roads by 2018. But the way to make them safe is not to make them act just like human driven cars—in fact, the limitations of today’s technology mean that’s not feasible. Instead, we should make modest changes to our infrastructure, program these cars to behave as predictably as possible, and teach the public new ways to interact with them.”

“Car crashes kill more than 3,000 people a day. Autonomous cars will affordably reduce this grim death toll. We have a moral imperative to urgently bring them to fruition.”

“The Train Terrain strategy for autonomous driving:  we might start with a few shuttle routes, and then expand to entire cities. This approach makes it easier to implement the necessary infrastructural changes. It also gives pedestrians and human drivers time to understand how computers drive, and what to expect from them—the same way they expect particular behavior from a student driver.“