New Training Model Helps Autonomous Cars See AI's Blind Spots

A new training model developed by MIT and Microsoft can help identify and correct an autonomous car's AI when it makes potentially deadly mistakes. Since their introduction several years ago, autonomous vehicles have slowly been making their way onto the road in greater and greater numbers, but the public remains wary of them despite the undeniable safety advantages they offer the public. Autonomous vehicle companies are fully aware of the public's skepticism. Every crash makes it more difficult to gain public trust and the fear is that if companies do not manage the autonomous vehicle roll-out properly, the backlash might close the door on self-driving car technology the way the Three Mile Island accident shut down the growth of nuclear power plants in the United States in the 1970's. Making autonomous vehicles safer than they already are means identifying those cases that programmers might never have thought of and that the AI will fail to respond to appropriately, but that a human driver will understand intuitively as a potentially dangerous situation.