The Future of Autonomous Cars

The prospect of a future with self-driving cars begs two categories of questions: How will they work in the real world? And can we trust them to be good and safe? Autonomous cars will not arrive overnight, and we will spend the next decade or more reengineering roads and cities to make self-driving cars work. As infrastructure evolves, the design of cars will also gradually evolve, giving way to a plurality of forms for different purposes. One thing all cars will have in common, though, is a capacity for massive bandwidth, connecting them to other vehicles and devices, connecting riders to work and entertainment, and, most importantly, allowing them to drive safely. But bandwidth is only one aspect of safety in autonomous cars. The more significant part is implanting them with a codified set of moral ethics. If-then programming is a foundational engineering task, so the implanting part is easy, but we must first establish the values, priorities, and responsibility sharing we want to see reflected in autonomou