A law firm hired by the General Motors' self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company's response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise's license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco. The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California's Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic--dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm, Quinn Emanuel's, version of events, as well as its recommendations. The investigators found that when Cruise played a video of the crash taken from its autonomous vehicle for government officials, it did not "verbally point out" the vehicle's pullover maneuver.

With the advent of self driving cars, the future of transportation is looking very different than it did even just a few years ago. These cars have the potential to revolutionize the way we get around, making travel safer, more efficient, and more accessible for everyone. In this article, we'll explore how self driving cars are changing the landscape of transportation and what the future may hold for this technology. Self driving cars are the future of transportation. They are cars that drive themselves, using sensors and artificial intelligence to navigate the world around them.

AI ethics has a love-hate relationship with the famous or infamous uncanny valley, which can be particularly explored via the advent of AI-based self-driving cars.

Can AI learn ethical precepts on its own? Aristotle famously stated that educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. You could interpret that insightful remark to suggest that learning about ethics and moral behavior is keenly vital for humankind. In the classic nature versus nurture debate, one must ask how much of our ethical mores are instinctively native while how much is learned over the course of our living days. Toddlers are observant of fellow humans and presumably glean their ethical foundations based on what they see and hear. The same can be said of teenagers. For open-minded adults, they too will continue to adjust and progress in their ethical thinking as a result of experiencing the everyday world. Of course, explicitly teaching someone about ethics is also par for the course. People are bound to learn about ethical ways via attending classes on the topic or perhaps by going to events and practices of interest to them. Ethical values can be plainly identified and shared as a means to aid others in formulating their own structure of ethics. In addition, ethics might be subtly hidden within stories or other instructional modes that ultimately carry a message of what ethical behavior consists of. That's how humans seem to imbue ethics. I realize such a question might seem oddish. We certainly expect humans to incorporate ethics and walk through life with some semblance of a moral code. It is a simple and obvious fact.

When driving, mind your own business or help other drivers, that's the question to be pondered. That's also a common refrain and refers to the notion of being helpful to others, even though they might be complete strangers and you do not know them at all. Which of those two catchphrases or words of wisdom would you choose? You probably make daily decisions about those two possibilities. There are situations and settings wherein you opt to mind your own business. At times, it might be quite tempting to step into the middle of something, but you weigh the pros and cons of doing so, and then at times move along and do not get into the fray. On the other hand, there are times that you decide it is best to jump into the swimming pool, as it were, and get engaged. Let's turn this somewhat conceptual or philosophical discussion into something very grounded and real. I was driving my car the other day and had come up to an intersection to make a left turn.

Considering the rather unique use case for self-driving cars entailing a pregnant wife giving birth ... [ ] while in a moving car and with her husband at the wheel (and he catches the baby). Please find a comfortable and cozy place to relish this heartwarming account. A worried husband was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital in their car when all of a sudden the baby seemingly decided it was time to arrive into this world. The woman began to give birth to the newborn girl, doing so while in the passenger seat next to her frantically driving hubby. Amazingly, the woman maneuvered in her seat to face backward, had her back propped against the dashboard, with her knees pressing against the seat she was just in, and voila gave birth to the eager newborn. As a astonishing double dose of amazing, the husband reached out with one hand (keeping the other hand on the steering wheel) and managed to catch the baby during the birthing process. And, yes, all of this took place while the car was zipping along on the highway as the pair were stridently trying to reach the hospital for a more conventional birthing process. The husband afterward noted that his wife was quite composed throughout the in-car experience. We might also provide some accolades for the husband in his double-duty role as a frenzied driver and birthing assistant. The baby girl, named Rebecca by her doting parents, happily is doing quite fine and all is well.

People are increasingly getting onto those banned no-fly types of lists, which could happen with ... [ ] self-driving cars too. People keep getting banned for doing the darndest and seemingly dumbest of acts. Oftentimes getting banned for the rest of their entire life. You might have heard or seen the recent brouhaha in major league baseball when a spectator in Yankee Stadium seated above leftfield opted to throw a baseball down onto the field that then struck the Boston Red Sox player Alex Verdugo in the back. He was not hurt, but you can imagine the personal dismay and shock at suddenly and unexpectedly having a projectile strike him from behind, seemingly out of nowhere. Turns out that Alex had earlier tossed the same baseball up into the stands as a memento for a young Red Sox cheering attendee. By some boorish grabbing, it had ended up in the hands of a New York Yankees fan. Next, after some hysterical urging by other frenetic Yankees to toss it back, the young man did so. Whether this act of defiance was intentionally devised to smack the left-fielder is still unclear and it could have been a happenstance rather than a purposeful aim.

There's an old proverb that dates back to at least the year 1670 and declares that sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. A more modern and altogether familiar version is the assertion that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. That's a saying that we all know well. In today's world, this ostensibly suggests that something applicable in one instance is likely applicable in another (consult your favored online dictionary for further elaboration). I often highlight cutting-edge technology bringing about AI-based true self-driving cars. I like to highlight foundational R&D work taking place in research labs that are focused on creating autonomous vehicles. The thing is, a lot of the autonomous tech will also end up in human-driven cars too. Many assume that the tech devised to aid AI-based autonomous driving would solely be used by autonomous driving vehicles.

Maybe you're seeing a place where cars float through the sky, food comes in the shape of little pills and the only color available seems to be silver. This well-known image of life in a futuristic city tends to be ingrained in our minds. But as we keep improving on our increasingly advanced technologies, a different vision is starting to take form. It's no secret that the car industry is in love with the idea of autonomous vehicles. And it isn't hard to understand why – a car driving by itself feels like something straight out of science fiction.

On 18 September, the European Commission published an independent expert report that looks at some of the outstanding safety and ethical issues around connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). We spoke to three experts involved in the report about what steps they think still need to be taken to make CAVs safe, what challenges still need to be overcome, and how we can prepare for a future in which both computer-driven and human-driven cars are on our roads. CAVs need to be able to understand the limitations of their human driver, and vice versa, says Marieke Martens, a professor in automated vehicles and human interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. In other words, the human driver needs to be ready to take control of the car in certain situations, such as dealing with roadworks, while the car also needs to be able to monitor the capacity of the human in the car. "We (need) systems that can predict and understand what people can do," she said, adding that under certain conditions these systems could decide when it's better to take control or alert the driver.