The AI advance that helps computers recognize cats will also allow our cars to drive themselves

When the Google self-driving-car project began about a decade ago, the company made a strategic decision to build its technology on expensive lidar and detailed mapping. Even today, Google's self- driving technology still relies on those two pillars. While that approach is great up to a point--we have good algorithms for using lidar and camera data to localize a car on the map--it's still not good enough. Driving on complicated, ever-changing streets involves perception and decision-making skills that are inherently uncertain (see "Your Driverless Ride Is Arriving"). Now an artificial-intelligence technology called deep learning is being used to address the problem.