autonomous vehicles

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving

by Jason Torchinsky  · 6 May 2019  · 175pp  · 54,755 words

Beau Boeckmann, President and Chief Operating Officer of Galpin Motors Why would an automobile dealer be asked to write a foreword for a book about autonomous vehicles, which some people say will cause an automobile industry apocalypse? Great question. I think it has something to do with the fact that Jason

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an enthusiast and someone whose career is on the line, I can honestly say that I am excited about our autonomous automotive future. As consumers, autonomous vehicles will bring us choices. Taxis and public transportation will be revolutionized. The car business and dealers are going to need to adapt. I’m geeked

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portable phones, we’re talking about autonomous cars—but we’re still imagining the future the same way: like now, but better. If portable phones have taught us anything, it’s that we’re really bad at predicting where new technologies will lead us. Most automakers developing autonomous vehicles, which is pretty much every

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think some things through. Don’t worry. It’ll be fun. Chapter 1 We’ve Been Here Before For all the excitement and hype surrounding autonomous vehicles, it’s worth remembering that, for most of the history of mankind, we’ve been using vehicles that were capable of full autonomy. We call

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’re not in a position to enjoy such traits. Once autonomous cars start to become common, we will be passengers, and our nearly two-century-long experiment in mechanical body enhancement as personal transportation could come to an end. As passengers in autonomous vehicles, we won’t have the opportunity any longer to experience

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programmable machine, capable of executing a stored set of instructions for a very short journey. That, at least in a very simple sense, is an autonomous vehicle. Da Vinci never actually produced his cart, but a replica based on his original drawings was built in 2004 by Paolo Galluzzi, director of the

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need some degree of clutch actuation. The thing seemed to work generally well enough for a proof of concept, and in the overall scope of autonomous vehicles the American Wonder proved that motors, servos (automatic devices with some form of error-sensing and correction), and similar mechanisms could be used to actuate

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we replace those radio signals from a human with signals from onboard cameras, sensors, and computers, you’ve effectively got the basics of how modern autonomous vehicles are built. One fascinating footnote to this has to do with the inventor’s name: Houdina. As you probably already noticed, that name is an

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other autopilot systems, and Mike proved to be remarkably reliable. Mechanical Mike and other early gyro-based autopilot systems are significant in the development of autonomous vehicles because they represent the very first time a fully mechanical vehicular control system was trusted enough to transport passengers. The wide use of the Mechanical

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ability to “see” its environment, detect obstacles, and take steps to avoid them. This was the birth of nearly all computer vision systems employed by autonomous vehicles (and, really, any robot that uses some manner of camera-based synthetic vision) today. By 1964 the cart had been re-outfitted with a low

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was hugely influential, and laid the template for AVs to follow. 2004: The DARPA Grand Challenge If there was one final crucible that truly made autonomous vehicles a viable, achievable possibility, it had to be the DARPA Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge was a project run by the US Department of Defense

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Mellon’s team won with a very modified Chevy Tahoe named “Boss.”²³ The Grand Challenge victory in 2004 can be seen as the moment that autonomous vehicles graduated from the laboratory and went into the real world. The Grand Challenge victory by Stanford was one of the first times the mainstream public

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became aware of all the research into autonomous vehicles, and the first time many people and businesses saw that autonomous cars weren’t just some weird, bubble-top painting from a Popular Mechanics they sort of remembered seeing on their uncle

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low speeds. They bounce ultrasonic sound waves off objects to determine how close you are to them. These don’t have much use in fully autonomous vehicles, but they do help a car understand its environment, so they’re worth a mention. Automatic parallel parking systems use them, so there are

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and even things like potholes and manhole covers in the road. Lidar units are also the most likely things to really challenge designers of future autonomous vehicles, since they require a high vantage point and an unobstructed 360-degree view. That’s why lidar units are most commonly seen as domed objects

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image of a car’s surroundings can require significantly less processing time than a camera image, which translates to a faster response time for the autonomous vehicle. Lidar is still a relatively new technology, and as such it’s still not cheap; preparing lidar systems to withstand the brutal life of

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and other gleefully geeky stuff like that. It’s not a trivial problem, but there are many viable solutions. GPS is also the technology that autonomous vehicles will use to report their locations back to any number of possible organizations: local law enforcement, your insurance provider, the carmaker who built the car

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where more than three toppings are specified, for example. Really, the more information available to cars on the road, the better, and communication will allow autonomous vehicles to act as parts of a self-modifying system to maintain optimal traffic flow and, ideally, eliminate many of the traffic issues that so annoy

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theoretically, be outfitted with a unit that sends such information as speed, throttle position, steering angle, and GPS location, all of which would help surrounding autonomous vehicles prepare themselves for the presence of the loon whipping a sixty-year-old Volkswagen around the streets. Self-Driving Cars Don’t Really Get to

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washer systems are usually good enough to deal with weather and a bit of dirt, and some cars have similar wiper/washer systems for headlamps. Autonomous vehicles will likely utilize similar systems, like washer nozzles for radar or camera windows, or a sort of wiper “ring” for lidar domes, or . . . something.

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would splash in your face to make it even harder. It’s likely that any safety standards for autonomous cars will include a set of standards for sensor cleaning and/or protecting systems. Really, autonomous vehicles will need to be self-aware. This isn’t the sort of self-awareness that leads to your

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-lidar-tech-autonomous-vehicles/. 31 Dwivedi, Priya, “Tracking a self-driving car with high precision,” Towards Data Science, April 30, 2017, https://towardsdatascience.com/helping-a-self-driving-car-localize-itself-88705f419e4a. 32 Kichun Jo; Yongwoo Jo; Jae Kyu Suhr; Ho Gi Jung; Myoungho Sunwoo, “Precise Localization of an Autonomous Car Based on Probabilistic

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would have a facility with some number of specially trained remote drivers in front of what would essentially be fancy driving-simulation rigs. When an autonomous vehicle determines it cannot continue, it would contact the remote driving facility, and the car’s controls would be patched to a remote driver’s terminal

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biggest advantage and disadvantage. Yes, their deployment on public roads provides a lot of data that will undoubtedly help the development of future, more advanced autonomous vehicles, but even so there’s a lot of debate about whether deploying these cars in the public realm unwittingly makes drivers on public roads participants

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and the way they’re understood in popular culture: in both cases, as far more capable systems than they actually are. There are no fully autonomous vehicles currently available for purchase—arguably, some prototype test vehicles exist that could be considered fully autonomous, at least in some controlled circumstances. Sure, if you

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a prosthetic extension of our human bodies. It’s a physical thing we control with our bodies. An autonomous car is decidedly not that. We will all ride in autonomous cars, not drive them. Fully autonomous vehicles won’t ask anything of us other than to provide an end destination and not do anything crazy like

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to go.” That sounds a hell of a lot like Uber, which, of course, is conducting a lot of research into autonomous vehicles. The emphasis on safety as the primary justification for autonomous car development is something we see a lot of today. Even though there are many reasons why people may desire an

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awareness vehicles, mapping vehicles, food delivery and/or vending trucks, and so many other ideas I’ve yet to think of. Really, the most useful autonomous vehicle in your life could end up being the one you’ll never ride in. * * * 46 “Do We Need Asimov’s Laws?” MIT Technology Review,

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begin to address the truly autonomous nature of robotic vehicles. If we assume that all of the current hurdles and bugs and issues regarding how autonomous vehicles can drive without running into things are solved, there’s still the question of exactly how these cars will behave, and how we will react

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dark thoughts about a robotic-vehicle future; a 2017 report from the United Kingdom’s UCL Transport Institute titled Social and Behavioral Questions Associated with Autonomous Vehicles⁶⁶ explored many of these same ideas, and in one section even described a robot-vehicle trapping scenario in detail, in the form of an imagined

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serious concerns raised by a wide range of motoring and consumer group organisations (see LTT passim). These relate to the vulnerability of occupants of fully autonomous vehicles following a series of high profile vehicle-jackings and personal muggings in wealthy, low-density areas at night—throwing into question the whole idea of

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of computers and phones and spy cams and internet-­connected refrigerators generally work. But we’d be foolish to think that hacking of connected and autonomous vehicles won’t happen. Because it will. Really, the only absolute fail-safe solutions we may be able to use are physical; big, obvious buttons

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anything could be possible. In terms of more mainstream entertainment and culture, it’s interesting to note that we’ve had many popular works involving autonomous vehicles for decades and decades. For whatever reason, the 1960s seemed to spawn a lot of the more famous examples of this genre, starting with Ian

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, anyway. * * * 65 Torchinsky, Jason, “Here’s How to Prank Autonomous Cars When They Come,” Jalopnik, July 25, 2013, https://jalopnik.com/heres-how-to-prank-autonomous-cars-when-they-come-874123410. 66 Cohen, Tom; Jones, Peter; and Cavoli, Clemence, Social and Behavioural Questions Associated with Autonomous Vehicles, Scoping Study by UCL Transport Institute, Final Report, London

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stages, it may prove helpful for robotic vehicles to make their presence very obvious. With this in mind, something like a federally mandated external robotic/autonomous vehicle warning lamp could prove effective. It may sound a bit like I’m paranoid about a massive robo-car uprising and I want to be

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as well? If human-driven cars broadcast such information on the same vehicle-to-vehicle network that all the connected robotic cars are using, those autonomous vehicles could be made aware of the fact that there are, say, six human-driven cars around me, so I should be aware that these vehicles

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operation may be restricted in a number of ways. While we’re still not exactly sure how insurance and responsibility for accidents will work for autonomous vehicles—is the carmaker at fault? The company that produced the software? The makers of the individual components? The owner/passenger?—we do know how

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don’t see any reasonable way around that. There’s also the fact that no matter what happens with economies of scale or technological innovations, autonomous vehicles will require increasingly more complex hardware to work than human-driven cars, and as such will be more expensive. In areas where car sharing or

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human-driven cars, if not in the United States, perhaps in countries with lower standards of living. There are also circumstances and situations where an autonomous vehicle wouldn’t make sense; certain utility vehicles and trucks, for example, that don’t operate on set routes but are used more as mules or

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for there to be “robotic chauffeurs” that could be retrofitted into human-driven cars—even extremely old ones—so they could be driven autonomously. If autonomous vehicles become truly widespread, it’s possible that knowing how to drive might be uncommon enough that even people with vintage car collections may not know

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.com/a-mix-of-human-driven-and-robot-cars-on-the -road-will-p-1791978251. 69 Governor’s Highway Safety Association, “Driver Behavior Paramount as Autonomous Vehicles Introduced,” New Release, February 2, 2017, https://www.ghsa.org/resources/av17-release. 70 Valeii, Kathi, “Kids Aren’t Taking Driver’s Ed Anymore,”

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

by Stephen Graham  · 30 Oct 2009  · 717pp  · 150,288 words

develop ‘technology that will keep warfighters off the battlefield and out of harm’s way’.127 It was ‘the first time in history that truly autonomous vehicles met and (mostly) avoided each other on the open road’.128 The event required that competing teams build vehicles capable of driving autonomously in traffic

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. To ramp up the challenge, thirty manned vehicles also roamed the course. Urban Challenge was truly groundbreaking, declared DARPA, as it was ‘the first time autonomous vehicles have interacted with both manned and unmanned vehicle traffic in an urban environment’.129 Thirty-five teams from twenty-two US states entered the competition

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Challenge presentations of Stanford University’s entry. Whilst driverless cars are unlikely to become available to consumers until 2030 at the earliest, the Urban Challenge robocars are already being displayed at car shows, billed as a way to ‘fortify road safety and eliminate driver error as the most common cause of

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Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and both have been the target of a jamming campaign (Figure 10.13). (In Chapter 9 we already encountered NREC: its ‘robocar’ was the winner of DARPA’s 2007 Urban Challenge competition.) The Carnegie Mellon campaign, labelled ‘Barricade the War Machine’, is challenging the take-over of

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

to do with cryptocurrency. Tech leaders were obsessed with the possibilities of artificial intelligence—a capacious category that seemed to encompass everything from chatbots to autonomous vehicles to image generation tools, all of them imbued with totemic power. AI fever spread to practically every business leader, university administrator, and politician. California governor

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan  · 18 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 80,835 words

to my family, and my friends who bought my first book, encouraged me to finish this one, and put up with me talking incessantly about robocars for the last few years….especially Aideen, David, Caroline, Lorraine, Simon, Kim, Johanna, Susan, Sylvia, Fergal, Gregg, Sinead, Gabrielle B., Adam, Ian, Abhi, Andy, Peter

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economic upheaval that driverless vehicles could unleash over the coming decades is unparalleled in modern times. According to a comprehensive report from Morgan Stanley,[2] autonomous vehicles can contribute $1.3 trillion annually to the U.S. economy in a base case scenario. Anything which has that much potential influence is surely

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on their laptops, eating meals, reading books, watching movies, and/or calling friends from the comfort of a car– safely. Yet, the imminent proliferation of autonomous vehicles is far from guaranteed. High costs of some of the technologies required will, initially at least, hamper large-scale production and mass consumer availability. Complex

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proven so baffling just a year earlier. And just two years later, in 2007, six teams finished the new DARPA Urban Challenge, with the participating Autonomous Vehicles (AV) required to obey traffic rules, deal with blocked routes and manoeuvre around fixed and moving obstacles, together providing realistic, everyday urban driving scenarios. Learning

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would an acceptable probability be? Would we make a manoeuvre that had a less than 100% likelihood of safe completion? 80%? 60%? And of course, robocars will make astonishingly accurate and rational decisions. Whether or not that is always a good thing will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6

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requiring that a driver takes manual control some of the time, in certain situations or is at least available to take control. The nomenclature around autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars can be confusing - not least because (and not without precedent for new technologies), there are two different scales being widely used

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its driverless cars technology, including its vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, freely available to others, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.[120] A Baidu driverless car prototype. Photo courtesy Baidu. Disruption? While the interest of technology companies in driverless cars has grabbed the headlines, it’s

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beyond car ownership. But for car companies, the on-demand ride market is just a first step toward a more radically altered future dominated by autonomous vehicles. In a report in 2016, investment bank Morgan Stanley said the motor industry was being disrupted “far sooner, faster and more powerfully than one might

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that conventional carmakers would scramble in the coming years to reinvent themselves.[186] Brian Johnson, Director of Equity Research at Barclays Capital,[187] says that autonomous vehicles shared across family and community lines will displace much of the current fleet of privately owned cars. Annual auto sales in the United States could

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cars. They concluded that automation can substantially reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions but that these benefits could be nullified by greater travel due to autonomous vehicles. A breakdown of the components contributing to energy consumption (both reductions and increases) is shown here: Gas Stations & Maintenance As we examine the use of

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, in practical terms, it represents about twice the amount of time Americans already spend on Facebook, an attention-based company worth around $350 billion. When autonomous vehicles become available at scale, the car will transform from just a mode of transportation into a new-age entertainment hub, with captive consumers surrounded by

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Scania have begun the first full-scale autonomous truck platooning in Singapore where the two companies are testing a fleet of trucks composed of three autonomous vehicles following a human-driven one.[261] In June 2017, Waymo announced that it was beginning testing of their driverless technology on trucks.[262] Daimler, which

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questions of timing and the extent of the impacts, both positive and negative. The sheer magnitude of a full transition from human-driven vehicles to autonomous vehicles requires the detailed consideration of a vast array of potential issues, many of which will require complex and creative solutions that may also prove very

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the trolley will save five lives, we shouldn't do it because we would be actively killing one. In their paper on Implementable Ethics for Autonomous Vehicles,[295] Gerdes & Thornton contend that the behavior of the vehicle and its control algorithms will ultimately be judged not by statistics or test track performance

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robot to obey human commands cannot override the First Law. Thus, the need to protect human life outweighs the priority given to human commands. All autonomous vehicles with which the authors are familiar have an emergency stop switch or “big red button” that returns control to the driver when desired. The existence

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human would do in the same situation. It’s said that in the moments before an inevitable crash, for those involved, time slows. For a robocar, relative to humans, everything is in slow motion. It can meticulously review the situation in milliseconds and make rational decisions. The notion that human drivers

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among multiple people, it is harder for someone to want to put work into modifying a vehicle. There is no doubt that the implementation of autonomous vehicles will hurt the culture and economy around personal car modification. “The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status

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clear that regulators will be receiving widely varying advice as they craft their legislation: Rand Corporation’s Center for Decision Making: It seems sensible that autonomous vehicles should be allowed on America’s roads when they are judged safer than the average human driver, allowing more lives to be saved and sooner

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. The starting point was to require special driver’s license endorsements for anyone operating an autonomous or semi-autonomous car requiring, that the driver take lessons and tests on the capabilities and limits of the autonomous vehicle, as well as how to take over control in an emergency. Other recommendations include state limitations on

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currently evolving: California has led the way, with the most companies testing driverless cars in the Golden State. As of April 2017, DMV has issued Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permits to 30 separate entities[329]. The DMV also require that the driverless car manufacturers submit system disengagement reports and accident reports. Although disengagement

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collective knowledge and experience of the system. New York's Upstate Transportation Association (UTA) and Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) are both pressing for bans on autonomous vehicles in the state, out of concern that they'll ultimately cost thousands of transportation jobs. The IDG believes that it only needs to preserve existing

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state has tried to create a progressive/permissive framework that allows autonomous technology on public roads, including testing of platoons and on-demand fleets of autonomous vehicles, there’s a protectionist element (also seen in Tennessee), where the wording reserves the right to operate on-demand robo-fleets for “motor vehicle manufacturers

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few years may be the most important in automotive regulation history, as federal and state authorities work out their response to the impending arrival of autonomous vehicles. Regulators must try to tackle the safety, operational and privacy/cybersecurity questions blocking the technology’s way; as its creators lobby and play states off

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soured by crashed computers, unintelligible error messages or unresponsive machines. The acceptance of driverless cars will be largely a matter of trust - do people trust robocars to be on the roads? Ironically, despite the demonstrable and consistent behaviour of robots, many people are inherently nervous of them. How do we react

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doesn’t. You need to tread carefully about this because if in writing some article that is negative you are effectively dissuading people from using autonomous vehicles, you are killing people” Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Media coverage is under the spotlight worldwide as never before after allegations of fake news, echo bubbles

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cars has often been sensationalist (both negative and positive) rather than genuinely analytical or even just informative. I don’t think the fact that the robocars (which are by all accounts still years away from use) needed occasional intervention is worthy of a headline like the BBC used: “Google’s self

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characterised them in the familiar terms of the past, using the only frame of reference with which they were comfortable. Similarly, most people think of autonomous vehicles simply as driverless cars, when in fact they potentially represent a revolutionary new form of transportation. But no matter how innovative, transformative or disruptive a

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disposal to address world-changing issues and chose to delay action? Bryan Reimer, the associate director of the New England Transportation Center at MIT, says autonomous vehicles will change everything. "It changes how we move. It changes how packages are moved. It changes how we behave. It changes the future of old

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-choose/?utm_term=.4d4d2f0dad4c http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie/2017/04/the-ethics-of-crash-optimisation.html https://www.wired.com/2017/03/make-us-safer-robocars-will-sometimes-kill/ http://www.wired.com/2016/06/self-driving-cars-will-power-kill-wont-conscience/?mbid=nl_6916 Tumbleweeds example coverage: http://www

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-sports-car http://www.wired.com/2016/03/self-driving-cars-wont-work-change-roads-attitudes/?mbid=nl_31516 http://www.nlc.org/article/new-autonomous-vehicle-guide-helps-cities-prepare-for-a-driverless-future http://www.nctr.usf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Implications-for-Public-Transit-of-Emerging-Technologies

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-11-1-16.pdf http://globalpolicysolutions.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Stick-Shift-Autonomous-Vehicles.pdf https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomous-car-has-a-huge-impact-on-alleviating-traffic/ Chapter 7 - Regulation & Acceptance https://www.transportation.gov/AV/federal-automated-vehicles-policy

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-feels-safe http://newsroom.aaa.com/2017/03/americans-feel-unsafe-sharing-road-fully-self-driving-cars/ https://www.fastcompany.com/40419374/the-future-of-autonomous-vehicles-relies-on-middle-america Negative articles include: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2599426/emerging-technology/did-you-know-googles-self-driving-cars-cant-handle-99

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_juice/2014/07/driving_vs_flying_which_is_more_harmful_to_the_environment.html [75] http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/where-to-a-history-of-autonomous-vehicles/ [76] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/the-secret-history-of-the-robot-car/380791/ [77] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/

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/16/rolls-royce-ditches-the-chauffeur-in-this-futuristic-concept-car.html [133] https://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-race-to-2021-the-state-of-autonomous-vehicles-and-a-whos-who-of-industry-drivers [134] https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwyman/2017/05/17/google-racks-up-more-patents-than-most-automakers

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-driverless-taxis-to-market-by-early-2020s/#1ae1d8b53c4b [198] http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/john-gallagher/2017/05/03/park-downtown-transit-detroit-autonomous-vehicles/100978296/ [199] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ncr.4110250227/abstract [200] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-21/self-driving-cars

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-will-create-a-fight-over-zoning-and-land-use [201] http://urbanland.uli.org/economy-markets-trends/autonomous-vehicles-hype-potential/ [202] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-autonomous-infrastructure-insig-idUSKCN0WX131 [203] Matthew E. Kahn, 1996. "The Efficiency and Equity of Vehicle

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.com/articles/will-the-driverless-car-upend-insurance-1425428891 [230] https://www.kpmg.com/US/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/automobile-insurance-in-the-era-of-autonomous-vehicles-survey-results-june-2015.pdf [231] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF [232] https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills

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?PageNum=0&docid=09196164&IDKey=&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpdfpiw.uspto.gov%2F [276] http://www.knightscope.com/ [277] https://www.starship.xyz/ [278] Pedestrians, Autonomous Vehicles, and Cities. Adam Millard-Ball. Journal of Planning Education and Research, October-27-2016 [279] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking [280] https://www.theguardian

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-outlines-three-laws-of-robotics-for-self-driving-cars [291] http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ [292] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301293464_The_Social_Dilemma_of_Autonomous_Vehicles [293] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6293/1573 [294] https://www.wired.com/2016/06/self-driving-cars-will-power-kill-wont-conscience/ [295

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-driving-cars-will-power-kill-wont-conscience/ [299] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/22/self-driving-cars-moral-dilemmas [300] http://wardsauto.com/autonomous-vehicles/google-self-driving-car-passes-woman-wheelchair-chasing-duck-test [301] https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/driving-lessons [302] Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the

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2017 [358] Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez, 2002 [359] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/14/move-over-humans-the-robocars-are-coming/ [360] https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/a-brief-history-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/ [361] http://www.wsj.com/articles/could-self-driving

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

war with local rival DiDi, forcing a sale of its China operations in 2016. Finally, Uber’s dream of self-driving cars unraveled after its autonomous vehicle killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018. (Two years later, Uber would quietly shutter its self-driving unit.) Despite these failures, the company rushed

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile

by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek  · 21 Oct 2025  · 330pp  · 85,349 words

Luddite. The auto-dominant paradigm rests on the idea that the problems cars create can be solved only with new and different cars. Electric cars, autonomous cars. Cars that fly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being anachronistic relics, nineteenth-century inventions such as trains and bikes are the

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public transit and delivery vehicles rather than unquestioningly buying into yet another naive fantasy of harm-free personal motor vehicle transport as salvation. As for autonomous vehicles, they may well prove to be much safer than human drivers—although the vision promoted by their boosters gets pushed further into the future each

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the San Francisco neighbors of a parking lot where Waymo cars shuffled around all night, honking when they back up to let each other pass. Autonomous cars at scale will require highly regulated, predictable streetscapes—exactly the kind of life-crushing, soul-destroying road hells that make humans and other animals want

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. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If there is an official history of the automobile”: Peter Norton, “Autonomous Vehicles: A Powerful Tool If You Can Get the Problem Right,” Robohub, June 25, 2014, robohub.org/autonomous-vehicles-a-powerful-tool-if-you-can-get-the-problem-right. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The

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–18 Athens, GR, 118 Atlanta, GA, 54, 147–48 Auckland, NZ, 35 Austin, TX, 20, 105–6, 167, 176, 229 automotive industry, 126–27, 136 autonomous vehicles (AVs), 228 autonomy of children. See children; independence B Baltimore, MD, 9, 10 Balto, Sam, 52–53, 53, 54, 69 bans on car ads, 90

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World

by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler  · 25 Mar 2018

and Sustainable Transportation at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA Iain Forbes Head of the United Kingdom Government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in the Department for Transport, London, United Kingdom Emilio Frazzoli, Dr. Founder and Chief Technical Officer, NuTonomy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor of Dynamic Systems and

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find the best, fastest or shortest route to that destination, taking traffic conditions into consideration. In the future, railroad companies may operate fleets of autonomous vehicles to supplement their existing services. ECOSYSTEM Autonomous driving not only involves technological challenges, but will also change the very essence of cars, which have been

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about smart use of various mobility services. Megatrends in Mobility 29 K e y T a ke a w a y s The development of autonomous vehicles is inherent in social and technical megatrends, especially connectivity, urbanisation, sustainability, electrification and sharing. All of these trends promote autonomous mobility; and equally, autonomous

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technology of autonomous driving helps to considerably extend the range of electric vehicles, enhancing their attractiveness and thus supporting the trend towards sustainable mobility. As autonomous vehicles are connected with the infrastructure, the Internet, one’s home and workplace, a large variety of information and communication services can be developed. Many

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Audi and Mercedes as examples. Autonomous Driving 42 Box 5.1. Statement by Jan Becker Jan Becker, Senior Director, Faraday Future The development of autonomous vehicles requires the collaboration of companies with various skills. The Urban Challenge marked the transition from academic research to industrial development. Google started to work on

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to play a role in the starting phase of autonomous driving (see Table 9.2 and Box 9.3 [113]). One category will be autonomous robocars, which will primarily be used in cities, to transport people from the railway station to their homes, for example. In conjunction with other modes of

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a static, digital image of the surroundings. This includes guard rails, traffic lights, road signs and other solid objects that constitute reference points by which autonomous vehicles can navigate. This map also 102 Autonomous Driving includes a database with information on hotels, filling stations, shops, restaurants, etc. The second layer (live

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combination with electric mobility and autonomous driving enables new vehicle concepts and architectures. In extreme cases, vehicle architectures are 124 Autonomous Driving possible for autonomous vehicles with limited requirements in terms of longitudinal and lateral dynamics that use just four motors for propulsion, braking and steering. The development towards autonomous driving

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Statement by Markwart von Pentz Markwart von Pentz, President Agriculture and Turf, Europe, Asia, Africa, John Deere & Company Agricultural productivity can be significantly increased with autonomous vehicles (tractors, combine harvesters etc.). The development of self-driving tractors, combine harvesters and other vehicles is embedded in the precision farming system at John Deere

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and can be equipped with cameras. TECHNOLOGY AND TELECOMMUNICATION COMPANIES Numerous technology companies have for some time now been developing software for the control of autonomous vehicles. For example, Google has equipped existing vehicles such as the Lexus with technology that makes autonomous driving possible. In addition, Google has been developing

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on autonomous driving for politicians and to discuss dilemma situations. CHAPTER 16 PLAYERS In mid-2017, some 50 companies worldwide are currently working on developing autonomous vehicles with varying focuses and degrees of intensity. In addition to well-known names like Audi, Tesla, Mercedes or Google, numerous automotive suppliers and technology

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models, and companies launch them with great euphoria and solid conviction. Especially when disruptive technologies that lead to radical product innovations are involved such as autonomous vehicles it is dangerous to underestimate the risk of developing something beyond what the market wants. The reason for this risk of failure is obvious,

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experiences. The campaign generated 11 million social networking impressions, 5 million engagements on social networks, 11,000 videos posted and 15,000 tweets. If autonomous vehicles are to be positioned successfully, a content house will be needed to develop and generate information that is target-group appropriate and channel specific. After

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a dangerous situation. Google and Facebook may succeed in keeping secret their algorithms for searching and sorting information, but this will not be possible with autonomous vehicles because of their safety relevance. It is therefore to be hoped that the authorities will look into those algorithms before vehicles receive type approval. 

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level of transparency does not prevent customers from using this technology extensively and revealing all kinds of private information. The situation could be similar with autonomous vehicles, which, despite an unresolved dilemma, take over the tedious task of driving and offer great convenience. Furthermore, they should significantly reduce the number of

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a new technology is concerned. Participants were placed in a driving simulator that resembled either a normal car, an autonomous vehicle able to control its own steering and speed, or a comparable autonomous car augmented Autonomous Driving 292 Box 28.5. Statement by Nicholas Epley Nicholas Epley, John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioural

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analyses suggest amounts that lie between those scenarios. The figures vary so greatly because differing assumptions are made on what people want to do in autonomous vehicles. DATA CREATORS Irrespective of automated driving, vehicles are increasingly developing into information and communication platforms due to Internet connectivity. The data generated as of

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to automated driving technology. In a parallel development, we can expect to see completely driverless cars in cities in the form of fleets of shared autonomous vehicles. Automated driving affects every aspect of the vehicle brakes, steering, and sensors powertrain, and creates additional requirements for vehicle connectivity. For automakers and suppliers,

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in a significant reduction of the financing, maintenance, insurance and fuel costs. Some estimates suggest that compared to individually owned vehicles, the transport costs of robocars could be up to 10 times lower. In the United States, this would mean that an average family would save about $5,600 a year

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would also fall. Apart from controlling the traffic flow, the traffic management centre could also intervene when the control system of an autonomous vehicle reaches its limits. Imagine that an autonomous car approaches another vehicle that has broken down and blocks the road. The continuous line in the middle tells the control system that

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otherwise. In 2016, the US Department of Transportation issued national guidelines for driverless cars. These guidelines comprise outlines on how manufacturers can obtain approval for autonomous vehicles, handling of collected data and details for cyber security defence [95]. So far, eight states of the USA (Nevada, California, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, North

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self-driving cars on public roads. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration alone has earmarked $4 billion for improving the safety of automated and autonomous vehicles in the years ahead. Additional financial incentives are to be anticipated, since many state and federal government representatives frequently emphasise the financial and social

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project is giving the authorities helpful information about how the infrastructure is developing in Sweden, which in turn is supporting Volvo’s efforts to develop autonomous vehicles. Competitiveness 371 In Finland, a multimodal transport app was presented that can quickly and easily provide information about the wide range of transportation options

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different visions of the technological foundations. By contrast, the Chinese are currently developing a roadmap with the objectives of defining technical standards for automated and autonomous vehicles, standardising the infrastructure, and regulating communication among vehicles and with the infrastructure. By the time certain industrial standards have been clarified in the United

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development. In many other countries such as the Netherlands, New Zealand and Japan, the national governments are in the process of issuing licenses for autonomous vehicles and adapting the corresponding legislation. Projects involving the development of control software for self-driving cars are also underway, additional autonomousdriving areas are being developed

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to become major players in the automotive industry. In China, a roadmap is being created with the objectives of defining technical standards for automated and autonomous vehicles, designing a uniform infrastructure and regulating the communication between vehicles and the infrastructure. Furthermore, Singapore is making a name for itself as a test

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lane markings and challenging weather conditions with fog and thunderstorms, the trip was completed without incident. The discussion about potential markets and schedules for launching autonomous vehicles is important because in the automotive industry, there is always a question of standardised architectures and platforms, which in turn is a question of

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that what is needed is an intelligent link between different modes of transportation, including all kinds of car- and ride-sharing concepts. But rapidly implementing autonomous vehicles could ease the traffic situation as well, since throughput can be greatly increased. Urban Development 383 As a result, many car manufacturers are intently

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modes of transport and would serve as reloading centres for goods. ESTABLISHING AUTONOMOUS MOBILITY AS AN INDUSTRY OF THE FUTURE The production and maintenance of autonomous vehicles means that manufacturers, suppliers and repair garages will require completely new expertise and occupations, as well as development of their existing capabilities. Car mechanics

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behavioural sciences and transport science. This means that interdisciplinary institutions are needed to reflect the social and economic aspects of the issue. PROMOTING TESTS WITH AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES Politics is not in a position to replace entrepreneurial activity, but can at best create framework conditions for private initiatives. It should define test areas

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of Innovation Policy Intervention, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School. [16] Bonnefon, J. F., Shariff, A., Rahwan, I., 2016: The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles, in: Science, 1573 1576. [17] Bundesministerium für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2017: Ethik-Kommission: Automatisiertes und vernetztes Fahren, Berlin. [18] Burns,

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? [33] European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, 2015: The Truck of the Future - Innovative, Fuel-Efficient, Safe, Brussels. [34] Faerber, B., 2016: Communication and Communication Problems between Autonomous Vehicles and Human Drivers, in: Maurer, M., Bibliography 416 Gerdes, C. J., Lenz, B., Winner, H., Autonomous Driving, Berlin, 125 148. [35] Fernandez, P., Nunes,

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U., 2012: Platooning with IVC-enabled Autonomous Vehicles Strategies to Mitigate Communication Delays, Improve Safety and Traffic Flow, in: IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 91 106. [36] Fitch, G. M., 2015: The

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Institut, 2015: Hochautomatisiertes Fahren auf Autobahnen Industriepolitische Schlussfolgerungen. [44] Fraunhofer Institut, Horvath & Partners, 2016: The Value of Time. [45] Friedrich, B., 2016: The Effect of Autonomous Vehicles onTraffic, in: Maurer, M., Gerdes, C. J., Lenz, B., Winner, H., Autonomous Driving, Berlin, 317 334. [46] Frost and Sullivan, 2016: Strategic Outlook of

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ethische Fragen, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January. [70] KPMG, 2012: Self-driving Cars: The Next Revolution. [71] KPMG, 2015: Automobile Insurance in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles. Bibliography 419 [72] KPMG, 2015: Global Automotive Executive Survey. [73] Kroeger, F., 2016: Automated Driving in its Social, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, in: Maurer,

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Automation, Berlin, 25 35. [105] PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2015: Connected Car Study. [106] PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2016: Connected Car Report 2016 Opportunities, Risk, and Turmoil on the Road to Autonomous Vehicles. [107] Radlmayr, J., Gold, C., Lorenz, L., Farid, M., Bengler, K., 2014: How Traffic Situations and Non-driving Related Tasks Affect the Take-over

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B., Winner, H., Autonomous Driving, Berlin, 301 316. [143] Waytz, A., Heafner, J., Epley, N., 2014: The Mind in the Machine: Anthropomorphism increases Trust in autonomous Vehicles, in: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 113 117. [144] Winkle, T., 2016: Safety Benefits of Automated Vehicles: Extended Findings from Accident Research for Development, Validation

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144 Aisin, 9 Albert (head of design at Yahoo), 228 Alexandra (founder and owner of Powerful Minds), 228 Alibaba Alipay payment system, 372 Alternative fuels, autonomous vehicles enabling use of, 305 Altruistic mode (a-drive mode), 252 Amazon, 138, 141, 311 American Trucking Association, 68 Android operating system, 327 Anthropomorphise products,

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, 16 17, 172, 405 establishment as industry of future, 404 405 resistance to, 171 172 Autonomous Robocars, 81 Autonomous sharp, 274 ‘Autonomous soft’ mode, 274 Autonomous trucks, 161 from Daimler, 163 savings effects from, 68 69 Autonomous vehicles, 26, 81, 99, 138, 155, 182, 221, 238, 249, 255, 353 354 enabling use

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experts, 132 Telematics data, 356 devices, 142 services, 142 Ten-point plan for governments, 401 autonomous mobility establishment as industry of future, 404 405 autonomous vehicles integration in cities, 406 industry clusters development, 405 406 initiating social discourse, 402 investing in communication infrastructure, 403 404 investing in transport infrastructure, 402 403

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

by Zoë Schiffer  · 13 Feb 2024  · 343pp  · 92,693 words

hubristic, but hubris had served Hotz well so far. He’d hacked the iPhone when everyone said it couldn’t be done, then took on autonomous vehicles to compete with tech giants like Uber and Apple when everyone said he was crazy. Twitter engineers were not impressed. Hotz had good ideas but

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

by Matthew B. Crawford  · 8 Jun 2020  · 386pp  · 113,709 words

of non-negotiable terms of service that would allow your robocar provider to aggregate and sell where you go, when, with whom, and for what purpose.” One can imagine the removal of street signs, those eyesores that aren’t needed by autonomous vehicles, tipping us further into dependence on the cartel. Bogost writes

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’s analysis, one has to wonder: is Uber’s conspicuous interest in driverless cars really driven by a hope to replace low-wage drivers with autonomous vehicles? Why transfer the capital costs of Uber cars from immigrants who are often financially unsavvy, and get locked into ruthless auto-lease agreements, to the

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where it leads. The necessity of doing so becomes apparent once you start to look more closely at the safety claims made on behalf of autonomous cars, and on behalf of various steps in that direction, already available, that allow hands-free driving. In January 2017, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

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Musk “berated reporters for focusing on stories about crashes instead of touting the safety benefits of Autopilot.” “They should be writing a story about how autonomous cars are really safe,” Musk said in a May 2018 earnings call. “But that’s not a story that people want to click on. They write

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Randy Whitfield the last word, as he states the lesson of this episode with admirable clarity: The larger question is whether the field experience of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems will be fairly and transparently assessed by the public officials charged with insuring the public’s safety while this technology

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, human intelligence and machine intelligence have a hard time sharing control. This becomes evident in the problems posed by partially autonomous cars, and is evident also in the problems posed when fully autonomous cars have to share the road with human drivers. Driverless cars are programmed to follow traffic rules to the letter and

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as an interesting assignment. I brushed up on the direction Porsche was currently taking, and I learned that they were making a big investment in autonomous car technology, which surprised me given their niche and their legacy. I came across a public statement from the CEO, who asked us to imagine that

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and the unique pleasure that comes from enlarging those bodily powers through a mechanical extension of ourselves. Automation as Moral Reeducation What happens when an autonomous car cannot avoid colliding with another car, or with pedestrians, or a dog, and it must make a decision whom to hit? What sort of moral

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the situation. As embodied practical skills, the virtues have to be exercised or they atrophy. The point of this digression is not to complain that autonomous cars will lack Aristotelian virtue, but rather to consider their effect on us, in combination with all the other ways we are ceding responsibility to “intelligent

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, and within any given culture local norms develop that further ease the predictive problem faced by individual minds. According to the Times, “Experimental designs for autonomous cars incorporate as many as 16 video cameras, 12 radar sensors, half a dozen ultrasonic sensors, and four or five lidar detectors. And still more sensors

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that computers aren’t nearly as smart as humans—and won’t be for a very, very long time.”5 It is estimated that an autonomous car will need a computer capable of 300 trillion operations per second. RADICAL MONOPOLY If, at some late date in the future, a highly coordinated system

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of autonomous cars were to achieve the level of efficiency that prevails today at an intersection in the old country, it would be counted a smashing success. But

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after a light turns green before proceeding. But of course, that in itself could cause testy reactions from other drivers, if turned into a rule. Autonomous cars face the same predictive problem as human drivers, except that they are subject to neither the benefits nor the hazards of being engaged in a

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manage its affairs. But in fact the firm has refused to share the data, and this has been the case wherever it has deployed its autonomous cars. “This was an opportunity missed,” said Pittsburgh’s city controller. He might have misunderstood what the opportunity was in the first place. We might be

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for (like an automatic transmission, or a hybrid power train). But what they have in mind is something altogether different from a market exchange. An autonomous car may hold some genuine utility for you, but their purpose is not to make the car better for you, and ask for money in return

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. Autonomous cars may increase the efficiency of traffic and its safety. But their development is not driven by such public-spirited concerns. To understand the forces behind

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your rectum. If you find this intrusive, or extraneous to the purpose for which you bought a thermometer, you may not be ready for an autonomous car. Give yourself an adjustment period. With time, your expectations will dilate to accommodate the probing style of your new friend. Nest is a company that

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/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20171105/INDUSTRY_REDESIGNED/171109944/industry-redesigned-bob-lutz. 7.Ian Bogost, “Will Robocars Kick Humans off City Streets?” Atlantic, June 23, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/robocars-only/488129/. 8.A. M. Glenberg and J. Hayes, “Contribution of Embodiment to Solving the Riddle

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.S. adults think automated vehicles are more dangerous than traditional vehicles operated by people, while nearly two-thirds said they would not buy a fully autonomous vehicle, according to [a 2019 Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll]. In the same poll, about 63 percent of those who responded said they would not pay more

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on this matter, the firm states that it has no financial stake in Tesla, its competitors, or any other interests connected to the technology of autonomous cars and driver assistance systems. 5.“NHTSA’s finding that the airbag deployment crash rate for Teslas dropped following the installation of Autosteer would have been

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, p. B5. “Self-driving cars will generate 4 terabytes of data per hour.” A senior director at one of the suppliers of computer chips for autonomous car research says, “They think we need 300 teraflops of computing power.” Quain writes, “A teraflop is a trillion operations per second, which means that every

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exit ramp and every traffic light—and update it in real time as traffic is rerouted around construction and accidents? . . . ‘If we want to have autonomous cars everywhere, we have to have digital maps everywhere,’ said Amnon Shashua, chief technology officer at Mobileye, an Israeli company that makes advanced vision systems for

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in, 123 traffic enforcement, 217 automobile safety. See also risk reduction airbag deployment, 86, 88 airbags, 90–91, 95, 96–97 automated. See automation in autonomous cars, 86–87, 301 Autosteer, 86–89 in-car information system, 99 changing driving behavior, 90–91 cost of, 95–96 design elements, 91–92 deskilling

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traction control, 92 unobtrusive features, 93–94, 96–97 vitalist critique of, 33–34 automobiles. See also automobile safety; old cars; project cars autonomous. See autonomous cars; driverless cars, semiautonomous cars; Uber deadening of cities and, 35–36 driver’s attitudes toward, 41–42 empowered moral isolation of, 239 horses vs., 36

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–39 personalities of, 41–42 as sheltering space, 40–42 transformation of cities and, 35–36 automotive improv artist, 81–83 automotive subcultures, 10, 28 autonomous cars. See also driverless cars; semiautonomous cars; Uber efficiency of, 246–247 experimental designs for, 246 predictive problems of, 259 programming local social norms, 259 safety

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compared to figure skating, 167 countersteering, 167 as motor sport, 164–168 practice run, 165–168 tandem drift, 167–168 driverless cars. See also automation; autonomous cars; semiautonomous cars; Uber affect on people, 122 boredom and, 5 communicating with one another, 104 dystopian films on, 22 ethical dilemmas of, 117 future scenario

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–79 seat belts, 90, 97 Sedaris, David, 249–250 Seeing Like a State (Scott), 267–268, 284–285 self, better, 170 self-driving cars. See autonomous cars; driverless cars; semiautonomous cars self-government, 31–32, 193, 204 self-locomotion, 12–13 self-mobility, memory and, 12–14, 60–61 semiautonomous cars. See

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also autonomous cars; driverless cars in-car information system, 99 cognitive demands in, 102–103 driver’s role in, 98 lane departure warnings, 101 lane-keeping alerts, 100

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead

by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman  · 22 Sep 2016

The MIT Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012608 | ISBN 9780262035224 (hardcover : alk. paper) eISBN 9780262336635 Subjects: LCSH: Automobiles--Automatic control. | Autonomous vehicles. | Autonomous vehicles--Social aspects. | Autonomous vehicles--Environmental aspects. | Traffic safety--Technological innovations. Classification: LCC TL152.8 .L57 2016 | DDC 388.3/42--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc

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(parking cars, building barriers, street lamps). Grid based operation at 24Ghz. Source: SmartMicro 3DHD Figure 9.5 Key sensors used in driverless cars. Most autonomous vehicles use multiples and combinations of some of these sensors. Figure 10.1 Frank Rosenblatt and the Perceptron, shown here in connection with a television appearance

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mention that replacing human drivers with robots would not solve everything. Humans might simply find new ways to misbehave. Some analysts point out that while autonomous vehicles offer some safety benefits, they could introduce new risks, such as hacking. Passengers could take on new risks because they feel safe, for example,

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into seven myths. These myths are: Autonomous driving technology will evolve out of today’s driver-assist technology. Some believe that the transition to autonomous vehicles should take place in stages, by gradually expanding the use of driver-assist features like adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. In reality, a

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but more likely to corporations and some municipalities as a niche transportation solution. At some point there will be a quiet crossing over, and the autonomous vehicles will venture outside their enclosed territories and onto city highways. Another aspect of the transition to driverless cars is location, that is, where the

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auto, media, and retail industries. We explore the long, rich history of previous efforts to liberate cars from human drivers, culminating in today’s autonomous vehicles that are the fruit of decades of academic research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Notes 1. Andrew Parker, “In the Blink of an Eye

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Silberg, “Self-Driving Cars: Are We Ready?” KPMG whitepaper, October 2013. 4. Boston Consulting Group, “Revolution in the Driver’s Seat: The Road to Autonomous Vehicles,” April 2014. 5. “The Driverless Debate: Equal Percentages of Americans See Self-Driving Cars as the ‘Wave of the Future’ Yet Would Never Consider Purchasing

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Older Population, Washington, D.C.: NHTSA; 2012. 14. IHS Automotive report, Autonomous Driving: Question Is When, Not If, 2015. 15. Litman, “Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions.” 16. Ravi Shanker et al., “Autonomous Cars: Self-Driving the New Auto Industry Paradigm,” Morgan Stanley report, November 2013. 2 A Driverless World If the billion cars that roam

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be made available in Manhattan, Ann Arbor, and a small town in Florida. Columbia’s research concluded that the combined effect of on-demand autonomous vehicles, lightweight car bodies, and freedom from the overhead costs of car ownership would significantly reduce the cost of personal transportation. The study revealed that

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Make a friend.” Notes 1. The Economist, “From Horseless to Driverless,” in The World If, August 2015, http://worldif.economist.com/article/11/what-if-autonomous-vehicles-rule-the-world-from-horseless-to-driverless 2. Luis Martinez, “Urban Mobility System Upgrade: How Shared Self-Driving Cars Could Change City Traffic,” International Transport

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About Eighteen Wheelers,” Truckers Report, June 2013, http://www.thetruckersreport.com/facts-about-trucks/ 12. Daniel J. Fagnant and Kara Kockelman, “Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles: Opportunities, Barriers and Policy Recommendations for Capitalizing on Self-Driven Vehicles,” Transportation Research Part A 77: 167–181, 2015. 13. Manyika, Chui, Bughin, Dobbs,

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parent company, Alphabet, Inc.) is the front-runner, but Apple is rumored to be hiring automotive engineers and software developers to build its own autonomous vehicle. Adding to the speculation, in a recent speech at a tech conference, Apple vice president Jeff Williams cryptically described cars as “the ultimate mobile

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and another in Massachusetts, near MIT. Four trends are forcing car companies to rethink their business models: electric cars, ubiquitous wireless, car-sharing, and autonomous vehicles. As driverless-car technology matures, these four trends will be folded into one: autonomy. To survive, car companies will have to reenvision their product as

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Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). All the big players in the car industry were there, showcasing their company’s latest and greatest autonomous vehicle technology. The atmosphere of the conference was reminiscent of a poker game at an exclusive men’s club: lots of cheerful bonhomie among the players

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autonomous parking software or machine-vision technology capable of … identifying street signs. Despite a healthy dose of hype about driverless cars, the so-called “autonomous vehicle” projects presented by the big car companies were essentially driver-assist systems on steroids. Ironically, car companies are experts in robotics, but of another sort

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for extended periods of time. In contrast, Google’s strategy aims to dive directly into full autonomy. If Google gets there first, its fully autonomous vehicles will become commercially available in a few select environments. As these early driverless cars prove their reliability, they’ll eventually creep into mainstream use on

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Shop in Silicon Valley,” Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ford-mercedes-set-up-shop-in-silicon-valley-1427475558 5. “Autonomous Vehicles: Self-Driving—the New Auto Industry Paradigm,” Morgan Stanley Research, December 6, 2013. 6. Industrial Robot Statistics, World Robotics 2015, March 19, 2016,

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bus incident here, https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-0216.pdf 21. Kevin Root, “Self Driving Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Shared Mobility,” Slideshare, http://www.slideshare.net/traveler138/self-driving-cars-v11 4 A Mind of Its Own There’s an old joke that

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, mobile robots, we journeyed to the robotic mecca, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. CMU has been at the forefront of robotics and autonomous vehicle research for decades. Led by legendary robotics professor William “Red” Whittaker, CMU’s Tartan racing team dominated the series of three government-sponsored races between

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agricultural companies automate farming equipment. Modern agricultural practices are technologically sophisticated, using an approach called precision agriculture. Carl explained that farmers have used partially autonomous vehicles for more than a decade. In the early stages of automation, farmers equipped their tractors with highly accurate GPS systems and used farm management software

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anything in its image library. Rule-based AI fares especially poorly when used to provide artificial scene understanding to a driverless car. While watching several autonomous vehicles race in the DARPA Challenge of 2007, I witnessed an excellent (and unintentional) demonstration of a rule-based AI program’s failure to understand

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by the immaturity of the era’s information and communication technologies. Figure 6.5 The History of Driverless Cars: Key milestones in the evolution of autonomous vehicles. Notes 1. Wikipedia, “Futurama (New York World’s Fair),” retrieved March 24, 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World’s_Fair

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that the $100 million that has been earmarked for V2X pilots is money that should have been creatively and intelligently spent on addressing challenges in autonomous vehicle research. Not only is the notion of a “connected car” technologically inadequate and out of date, there are several significant practical barriers that ensure

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continue to promote the notion of V2X technologies? The answer is that V2X networks could offer tremendous value, but only in a world of fully autonomous vehicles, where connected cars could exchange data with the roadside infrastructure to optimize traffic flow in real-time, prioritize the passage of emergency vehicles, and

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stoplights could navigate vehicles through an urban area on a “green wave” with the appropriate engine performance and minimized fuel consumption.14 Perhaps someday, autonomous vehicles will communicate with one another over some kind of network. Even if this day arrives, however, it’s unlikely V2X-equipped cars of the

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driverless-car technology. First, we would create an agency devoted to the topic of fully autonomous driving. Let’s call this new agency the Federal Autonomous Vehicles Agency, or AVA, similar to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that governs air traffic. The AVA would be responsible for setting aggressive and visionary

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an annual driverless-car competition sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The DARPA Grand Challenges of 2004, 2005, and 2007 showcased the best autonomous vehicle technology of the day, catalyzing the careers of dozens of bright minds who have since helped spark today’s renaissance in driverless technologies. States and

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, and Florida. In addition, states with long empty stretches of highway should be encouraged to create designated lanes for testing and validation of fully autonomous vehicles and trucks. None of these goals will be easy to accomplish and writing good technology policy is notoriously difficult. When the technology involves cars and

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shoddy or malfunctioning software and inflated claims. This proposed regulation, in fact, should go further and define the process for state inspection for individual autonomous vehicles. Similar to the periodic inspections of car brakes and emissions, driverless-car technology will also need to be periodically inspected by city governments to make

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focus on improving public safety by making intelligent policy that smooths the path for robotic vehicles and helps cities and states make it possible for autonomous vehicles to flourish. The regions and nations with the most forward-thinking policy will reap future economic benefits associated with being the epicenter of driverless

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-iot-device-demand-in-2016-gartner.html?google_editors_picks=true 13. Tsz-Chiu Au, Shun Zhang, and Peter Stone, “Autonomous Intersection Management for Semi-Autonomous Vehicles,” Handbook of Transportation, ed. Dušan Teodorović (New York: Routledge 2015). 14. Daimler Press Release, “AUDI AG, BMW Group and Daimler AG agree with Nokia

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?_r=0 17. Brad Templeton “California DMV Regulations May Kill the State’s Robocar Lead,” 4brad.com, December 17, 2015, http://ideas.4brad.com/california-dmv-regulations-may-kill-states-robocar-lead 18. Grace Meng, “H.R.3876—Autonomous Vehicle Privacy Protection Act of 2015,” Congress.gov, https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th

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cars began to emerge from the labs of robotics researchers in the final decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, German autonomous-vehicle pioneer Ernst Dickmanns built several prototypes that used sensors and intelligent software to steer themselves. In Italy, Professor Alberto Broggi created a car that

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s elite roboticists, the best driverless-car technology of the day was still unpredictable. To ensure the safety of traffic judges and competing teams, each autonomous vehicle was trailed by a human “babysitter” vehicle, a professional driver in a specially reinforced Ford Taurus. Should a car’s on-board artificial intelligence

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Virginia Tech University, was third. The real winner of the day, however, was the robotics community. The results of the 2007 challenge proved that autonomous vehicles could someday be a viable technology, capable of successfully navigating bustling urban environments, negotiating four-way intersections, and detecting the presence of other cars on

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s Law has led some experts to describe any technology whose performance improves at an exponential rate as an exponential technology. The gradual improvement of autonomous vehicle prototypes since the 1970s demonstrates the power of recombinant innovation, and also the beneficial effects of Moore’s Law.8 In the 1980s, Carnegie

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City Room of the New York Times), http://newyorkparkingticket.com/some-shocking-nyc-parking-ticket-statistics/ 15. Robert W. Peterson, “New Technology, Old Law: Autonomous Vehicles and California’s Insurance Framework,” Santa Clara Law Review 52 (2012). 16. U.S. Federal Highway Administration “The Economic Costs of Freight Transportation,” http://ops

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retail-forever/ 18. Survey conducted by the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, January, 2015, http://engineering.cmu.edu/media/press/2015/01_22_autonomous_vehicle_survey.html 19. “Radio Facts and Figures,” compiled from 2016 Nielsen Audio Today; Pew State of the News Media 2015, News Generation, http://www

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Ethics, 249–253 Exponential technologies, 183, 255. See also Moore’s law Face recognition, 233 Federal Highway Administration (FHA), 129, 132, 133 Federal policy on autonomous vehicles History of, 131–135 Overview of, 102, 103, 127 Recommendations for See also Humansafe ratings; Intelligent Transportation Systems; U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT);

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48, 58, 62, 102, 168–169 Google’s HD maps, 237, 238 Google’s self-driving prototype, 45, 77 Government oversight. See Federal policy on autonomous vehicles) GPS. See Global positioning system GPUs. See Graphics processing units Graphic processing units (GPUs), 221, 222 Hackers, 99, 195, 249, 274 Handoff problem, See

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence

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Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

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Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Jerry Kaplan  · 3 Aug 2015  · 237pp  · 64,411 words

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines

by William Davidow and Michael Malone  · 18 Feb 2020  · 304pp  · 80,143 words

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott  · 9 May 2016  · 515pp  · 126,820 words

The Road to Conscious Machines

by Michael Wooldridge  · 2 Nov 2018  · 346pp  · 97,890 words

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb  · 16 Apr 2018  · 345pp  · 75,660 words

Demystifying Smart Cities

by Anders Lisdorf

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

by Mustafa Suleyman  · 4 Sep 2023  · 444pp  · 117,770 words

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control

by Medea Benjamin  · 8 Apr 2013  · 188pp  · 54,942 words

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar  · 19 Oct 2017  · 416pp  · 106,532 words

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

by Marc Goodman  · 24 Feb 2015  · 677pp  · 206,548 words

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield

by Robert H. Latiff  · 25 Sep 2017  · 158pp  · 46,353 words

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

by Jamie Susskind  · 3 Sep 2018  · 533pp

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

by Azeem Azhar  · 6 Sep 2021  · 447pp  · 111,991 words

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani  · 10 Jun 2019  · 280pp  · 74,559 words

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

by Jeremy Rifkin  · 31 Mar 2014  · 565pp  · 151,129 words

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle  · 6 Apr 2022  · 502pp  · 132,062 words

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

by Parag Khanna  · 18 Apr 2016  · 497pp  · 144,283 words

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil  · 14 Jul 2005  · 761pp  · 231,902 words

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century

by Ronald Bailey  · 20 Jul 2015  · 417pp  · 109,367 words

Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, Volume 1

by Steve Melia  · 351pp  · 91,133 words

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth

by Jeremy Rifkin  · 9 Sep 2019  · 327pp  · 84,627 words

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race

by Tim Fernholz  · 20 Mar 2018  · 328pp  · 96,141 words

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet

by Varun Sivaram  · 2 Mar 2018  · 469pp  · 132,438 words

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz  · 15 Mar 2021  · 414pp  · 109,622 words

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

by George Zarkadakis  · 7 Mar 2016  · 405pp  · 117,219 words

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

by John Elkington  · 6 Apr 2020  · 384pp  · 93,754 words

Interplanetary Robots

by Rod Pyle

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?

by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland  · 15 Jan 2021  · 342pp  · 72,927 words

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 9 Sep 2024  · 566pp  · 169,013 words

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart  · 25 Jun 2018  · 320pp  · 90,526 words

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping

by Roger Faligot  · 30 Jun 2019  · 615pp  · 187,426 words

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power

by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie  · 6 May 2019  · 328pp  · 84,682 words

Artificial Whiteness

by Yarden Katz

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good

by Sarah Williams  · 14 Sep 2020

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

by Amy Webb  · 5 Mar 2019  · 340pp  · 97,723 words

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)

by Terrence J. Sejnowski  · 27 Sep 2018

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman  · 22 Nov 2016  · 602pp  · 177,874 words

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)

by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest  · 17 Oct 2014  · 292pp  · 85,151 words

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake  · 15 Jul 2019  · 409pp  · 112,055 words

The Future of War

by Lawrence Freedman  · 9 Oct 2017  · 592pp  · 161,798 words

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford  · 25 Sep 2023  · 898pp  · 236,779 words

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao  · 19 May 2025  · 660pp  · 179,531 words

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

by Rowan Hooper  · 15 Jan 2020  · 285pp  · 86,858 words

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time

by Steven Osborn  · 17 Sep 2013  · 310pp  · 34,482 words

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard

by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel  · 3 Oct 2016  · 504pp  · 126,835 words

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down

by Tom Standage  · 27 Nov 2018  · 215pp  · 59,188 words

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 7 Sep 2022  · 205pp  · 61,903 words

These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

by Christopher Summerfield  · 11 Mar 2025  · 412pp  · 122,298 words

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives

by Stefan Al  · 11 Apr 2022  · 300pp  · 81,293 words

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

by Brian Merchant  · 25 Sep 2023  · 524pp  · 154,652 words

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone  · 10 May 2021  · 569pp  · 156,139 words

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality

by Melissa Bruntlett and Chris Bruntlett  · 27 Aug 2018  · 230pp  · 71,834 words

Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 22 Jan 2019  · 196pp  · 54,339 words

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations

by Nandan Nilekani  · 4 Feb 2016  · 332pp  · 100,601 words

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World

by Scott Galloway  · 2 Oct 2017  · 305pp  · 79,303 words

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders

by Mariya Yao, Adelyn Zhou and Marlene Jia  · 1 Jun 2018  · 161pp  · 39,526 words

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler  · 14 Sep 2021  · 735pp  · 165,375 words

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work

by Richard Baldwin  · 10 Jan 2019  · 301pp  · 89,076 words

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends

by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika  · 12 May 2015  · 389pp  · 87,758 words

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson  · 3 Jun 2019  · 993pp  · 318,161 words

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction

by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham  · 17 Jan 2020  · 207pp  · 59,298 words

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

by Jacob Ward  · 25 Jan 2022  · 292pp  · 94,660 words

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway  · 15 Jun 2023  · 515pp  · 152,128 words

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts

by Mark Mahaney  · 9 Nov 2021  · 311pp  · 90,172 words

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

by Henry Sanderson  · 12 Sep 2022  · 292pp  · 87,720 words

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind  · 24 Aug 2015  · 742pp  · 137,937 words

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

by Nick Bostrom  · 3 Jun 2014  · 574pp  · 164,509 words

Uncharted: How to Map the Future

by Margaret Heffernan  · 20 Feb 2020  · 335pp  · 97,468 words

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)

by Tom Vanderbilt  · 28 Jul 2008  · 512pp  · 165,704 words

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities

by Alain Bertaud  · 9 Nov 2018  · 769pp  · 169,096 words

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell  · 11 May 2015  · 409pp  · 105,551 words

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice

by Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones  · 27 Apr 2020  · 419pp  · 102,488 words

House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds  · 16 Apr 2008  · 635pp  · 186,208 words

The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna  · 5 Feb 2019  · 496pp  · 131,938 words

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan  · 1 Feb 2019  · 309pp  · 81,975 words

Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World

by Sara C. Bronin  · 30 Sep 2024  · 230pp  · 74,949 words

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy

by Jeremias Prassl  · 7 May 2018  · 491pp  · 77,650 words

With a Little Help

by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton and Russell Galen  · 7 Dec 2010  · 549pp  · 116,200 words

The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

by Isabel Kershner  · 16 May 2023  · 472pp  · 145,476 words

Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade  · 4 Apr 2018  · 390pp  · 109,438 words

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets

by Brett Scott  · 4 Jul 2022  · 308pp  · 85,850 words

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All

by Robert Elliott Smith  · 26 Jun 2019  · 370pp  · 107,983 words

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt  · 10 May 2021  · 291pp  · 80,068 words

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne  · 9 Sep 2019  · 482pp  · 121,173 words

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

by Dan Lyons  · 22 Oct 2018  · 252pp  · 78,780 words

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)

by Jamie Bartlett  · 4 Apr 2018  · 170pp  · 49,193 words

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky  · 1 May 2017  · 1,261pp  · 294,715 words

Your Computer Is on Fire

by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip  · 9 Mar 2021  · 661pp  · 156,009 words

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi  · 24 Jun 2021  · 816pp  · 191,889 words

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

by Madhumita Murgia  · 20 Mar 2024  · 336pp  · 91,806 words

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee  · 13 May 2025  · 377pp  · 138,306 words

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success

by Tom Eisenmann  · 29 Mar 2021  · 387pp  · 106,753 words

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do

by Erik J. Larson  · 5 Apr 2021

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

by Janette Sadik-Khan  · 8 Mar 2016  · 441pp  · 96,534 words

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

by Jeanette Winterson  · 15 Mar 2021  · 256pp  · 73,068 words

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt  · 8 Apr 2025  · 260pp  · 82,629 words

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg  · 11 Oct 2021  · 521pp  · 118,183 words

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be

by Diane Coyle  · 11 Oct 2021  · 305pp  · 75,697 words

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us

by Joel Kotkin  · 11 Apr 2016  · 565pp  · 122,605 words

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

by Diane Coyle  · 15 Apr 2025  · 321pp  · 112,477 words

Makers

by Chris Anderson  · 1 Oct 2012  · 238pp  · 73,824 words

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh  · 14 Apr 2018  · 286pp  · 87,401 words

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It

by Mark Thomas  · 7 Aug 2019  · 286pp  · 79,305 words

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them

by Nouriel Roubini  · 17 Oct 2022  · 328pp  · 96,678 words

Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future

by Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman  · 8 Jul 2024  · 207pp  · 65,156 words

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol  · 13 Apr 2020  · 389pp  · 112,319 words

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle  · 18 Jun 2018  · 301pp  · 85,263 words

Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy

by Diane Coyle  · 14 Jan 2020  · 384pp  · 108,414 words

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future

by Mervyn King and John Kay  · 5 Mar 2020  · 807pp  · 154,435 words

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

by Kurt Andersen  · 14 Sep 2020  · 486pp  · 150,849 words

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future

by Alec Ross  · 13 Sep 2021  · 363pp  · 109,077 words

The AI-First Company

by Ash Fontana  · 4 May 2021  · 296pp  · 66,815 words

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

by Simone Browne  · 1 Oct 2015  · 326pp  · 84,180 words

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara  · 8 Jul 2019

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think

by James Vlahos  · 1 Mar 2019  · 392pp  · 108,745 words

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass

by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri  · 6 May 2019  · 346pp  · 97,330 words

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else

by Jordan Ellenberg  · 14 May 2021  · 665pp  · 159,350 words

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

by Martin Lindstrom  · 23 Feb 2016  · 295pp  · 89,430 words

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann  · 17 Jun 2019

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr  · 14 Jun 2017  · 431pp  · 129,071 words

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling

by Carlton Reid  · 14 Jun 2017  · 309pp  · 84,038 words

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

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The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

by Brad Stone  · 30 Jan 2017  · 373pp  · 112,822 words

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil  · 23 Sep 2019

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook

by Extinction Rebellion  · 12 Jun 2019  · 138pp  · 40,525 words

Peak Car: The Future of Travel

by David Metz  · 21 Jan 2014  · 133pp  · 36,528 words

Alpha Trader

by Brent Donnelly  · 11 May 2021

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

by Philip Coggan  · 6 Feb 2020  · 524pp  · 155,947 words

Not the End of the World

by Hannah Ritchie  · 9 Jan 2024  · 335pp  · 101,992 words

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy

by George Magnus  · 10 Sep 2018  · 371pp  · 98,534 words

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

by Malcolm Gladwell  · 1 Oct 2024  · 283pp  · 85,644 words

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang  · 12 Jul 2021  · 372pp  · 100,947 words

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols  · 25 Sep 2017  · 391pp  · 71,600 words

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All

by Martin Sandbu  · 15 Jun 2020  · 322pp  · 84,580 words

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech

by Geoffrey Cain  · 15 Mar 2020  · 540pp  · 119,731 words

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

by Xiaowei Wang  · 12 Oct 2020  · 196pp  · 61,981 words

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times

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Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere

by Christian Wolmar  · 18 Jan 2018

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise

by Eric Ries  · 15 Mar 2017  · 406pp  · 105,602 words

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War

by Paul Scharre  · 23 Apr 2018  · 590pp  · 152,595 words

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

by Robert J. Shiller  · 14 Oct 2019  · 611pp  · 130,419 words

The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians

by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar  · 14 Oct 2024  · 175pp  · 46,192 words

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 28 Jan 2020  · 501pp  · 114,888 words

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee  · 14 Sep 2018  · 307pp  · 88,180 words

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition

by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek  · 17 Aug 2015  · 257pp  · 64,285 words

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx  · 4 Jul 2022  · 295pp  · 81,861 words

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

by Christopher Mims  · 13 Sep 2021  · 385pp  · 112,842 words

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict

by Kenneth Payne  · 16 Jun 2021  · 339pp  · 92,785 words

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff  · 8 Jul 2024  · 272pp  · 103,638 words

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen  · 13 Sep 2021

Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit

by Steven Higashide  · 9 Oct 2019  · 195pp  · 52,701 words

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It

by Brian Dumaine  · 11 May 2020  · 411pp  · 98,128 words

Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business

by Veljko Krunic  · 29 Mar 2020

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig  · 14 Jul 2019  · 2,466pp  · 668,761 words

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry  · 17 Sep 2018  · 296pp  · 78,631 words

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global

by Rebecca Fannin  · 2 Sep 2019  · 269pp  · 70,543 words

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

by Stuart Russell  · 7 Oct 2019  · 416pp  · 112,268 words

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

by Brett King  · 5 May 2016  · 385pp  · 111,113 words

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie  · 3 Jul 2024  · 348pp  · 119,358 words

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

by Martin Ford  · 13 Sep 2021  · 288pp  · 86,995 words

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein  · 6 Sep 2021

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

by Angie Schmitt  · 26 Aug 2020  · 274pp  · 63,679 words

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future

by Levi Tillemann  · 20 Jan 2015  · 431pp  · 107,868 words

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin  · 14 Sep 2020

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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Architects of Intelligence

by Martin Ford  · 16 Nov 2018  · 586pp  · 186,548 words

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

by Samuel I. Schwartz  · 17 Aug 2015  · 340pp  · 92,904 words

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things

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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton  · 19 Feb 2016  · 903pp  · 235,753 words

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future

by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever  · 2 Apr 2017  · 181pp  · 52,147 words

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World

by Bruce Schneier  · 3 Sep 2018  · 448pp  · 117,325 words

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI

by Frank Pasquale  · 14 May 2020  · 1,172pp  · 114,305 words

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

by Melanie Mitchell  · 14 Oct 2019  · 350pp  · 98,077 words

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

by Scott Belsky  · 1 Oct 2018  · 425pp  · 112,220 words

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

by Carl Benedikt Frey  · 17 Jun 2019  · 626pp  · 167,836 words

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire

by Hans Gremeil and William Sposato  · 15 Dec 2021  · 404pp  · 126,447 words

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil  · 25 Jun 2024

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian  · 5 Oct 2020  · 625pp  · 167,349 words

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI

by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson  · 15 Jan 2018  · 523pp  · 61,179 words

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff  · 24 Aug 2015  · 413pp  · 119,587 words

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 29 Aug 2018  · 389pp  · 119,487 words

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors

by Edward Niedermeyer  · 14 Sep 2019  · 328pp  · 90,677 words

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

by Klaus Schwab  · 11 Jan 2016  · 179pp  · 43,441 words

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work

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A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

by Tom Standage  · 16 Aug 2021  · 290pp  · 85,847 words

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

by Joseph Menn  · 3 Jun 2019  · 302pp  · 85,877 words

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson  · 11 Sep 2023  · 562pp  · 201,502 words

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change

by Dieter Helm  · 2 Sep 2020  · 304pp  · 90,084 words

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines

by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby  · 23 May 2016  · 347pp  · 97,721 words

Robot Futures

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The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism

by Calum Chace  · 17 Jul 2016  · 477pp  · 75,408 words

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson  · 26 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 117,093 words

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by Gene Sperling  · 14 Sep 2020  · 667pp  · 149,811 words

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything

by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith  · 16 Oct 2017  · 398pp  · 105,032 words

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age

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