Autonomous Cars and Amara's Law

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." -- Roy Amara, Institute for the Future

Ten years ago, as a student, I had an internship at a Minneapolis research lab working on driverless car technology. We built a little battery-powered car that could drive around our office park using laser scanners and cameras with vision software. The lab had big plans to sell the technology to the Army so they could move goods on dangerous roads in Iraq without risking a driver's life. But driverless cars were deemed too dangerous even for use in a war zone, and they scrapped the project soon after my internship was up.

On Tuesday, I was in Pittsburgh with coworkers. We summoned an Uber. By chance, the car that arrived was from Uber's Advanced Technology Center, where more than 400 brilliant engineers are working on autonomous cars today. We used an iPad to tell our driverless Uber to take us 10 minutes through city traffic. It was a dark and rainy night with poor visibility, and at one point an oncoming car took an illegal left turn at a green light while we had right of way. Our car performed admirably, smoothly braking to avoid an accident.

There are only a handful of these cars on the road today, and they each have an Uber employee in the driver's seat just in case human intervention is needed. But ten years ago, we only had prototypes which weren't even considered safe enough for military use. Where will we be in 2027?