The man who invented the self-driving car (in 1986)

The other drivers wouldn't have noticed anything unusual as the two sleek limousines with German license plates joined the traffic on France's Autoroute 1. But what they were witnessing -- on that sunny, fall day in 1994 -- was something many of them would have dismissed as just plain crazy. It had taken a few phone calls from the German car lobby to get the French authorities to give the go-ahead. But here they were: two gray Mercedes 500 SELs, accelerating up to 130 kilometers per hour, changing lanes and reacting to other cars -- autonomously, with an onboard computer system controlling the steering wheel, the gas pedal and the brakes. Decades before Google, Tesla and Uber got into the self-driving car business, a team of German engineers led by a scientist named Ernst Dickmanns had developed a car that could navigate French commuter traffic on its own. The story of Dickmann's invention, and how it came to be all but forgotten, is a neat illustration how technology sometimes progresses: not in small steady steps, but in booms and busts, in unlikely advances and inevitable retreats --"one step forward and three steps back," as one AI researcher put it. It's also a warning of sorts, about the expectations we place on artificial intelligence and the limits of some of the data-driven approaches being used today.