Driverless cars show the limits of today's AI

IN MARCH Starsky Robotics, a self-driving lorry firm based in San Francisco, closed down. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, its founder, gave several reasons for its failure. Investors' interest was already cooling, owing to a run of poorly performing tech-sector IPOs and a recession in the trucking business. His firm's focus on safety, he wrote, did not go down well with impatient funders, who preferred to see a steady stream of whizzy new features. But the biggest problem was that the technology was simply not up to the job.