🟢 Want to foresee how AI will impact your business? Look at self-driving technology.
TLDR: Waymo's self-driving ups and downs are the typical template for how a properly disruptive tech is introduced to the market. The alternating hype and push-back phases are the best way to discuss what will happen next with AI.
Waymo’s latest safety data is quietly telling a very loud story.
In a handful of U.S. cities, its autonomous cars are now crashing less, injuring fewer people, and triggering fewer police reports than human drivers operating under the same conditions. A New York Times op-ed frames this as a public-health breakthrough; Nick Heer, commenting on the same data, notes that the figures “look downright impressive” while being rightly cautious about their limits: warm-weather cities, no snow, controlled deployment:
If Waymo’s results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States. While many see this as a tech story, I view it as a public health breakthrough.
At the same time, Waymo is announcing that to scale their technology in our streets further, they need to overcome a social hurdle: making its cars more human: “confidently assertive” in traffic, bending a few rules to survive the everyday chaos of San Francisco streets, and not just pausing and waiting for the street to be 100% secure to move.
That tension between stronger safety data and more human-like behaviour, accepting some degree of risks, is precisely where the interesting story sits. It’s not just about self-driving; it’s a live demo of how transformative technologies really move through society… and how AI is likely to follow the same path.
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