The leader of one of the world's largest automobile producers expects that cars will soon drive themselves and sync to the world around them -- but don't count out the human behind the wheel just yet. Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive and chairman of an alliance that includes Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, said Thursday that humans will remain involved in the operation of vehicles for the foreseeable future, even as cars with self-driving technology enter the market in the next five years. You will push a button to activate the car's autonomous driving feature, he said, but it will encounter everyday scenarios it cannot compute and that require human assistance. "Artificial intelligence is still way below the creativity of the human brain," Ghosn said. Imagine a self-driving car coming upon a broken-down vehicle in the road, but there is a solid line to either side of it, Ghosn said.

The leader of one of the world's largest automobile producers expects that cars will soon drive themselves and sync to the world around them - but don't count out the human behind the wheel just yet. Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive and chairman of an alliance that includes Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, said Thursday that humans will remain involved in the operation of vehicles for the foreseeable future, even as cars with self-driving technology enter the market in the next five years. You will push a button to activate the car's autonomous driving feature, he said, but it will encounter everyday scenarios it cannot compute and that require human assistance. "Artificial intelligence is still way below the creativity of the human brain," Ghosn said. Imagine a self-driving car coming upon a broken-down vehicle in the road, but there is a solid line to either side of it, Ghosn said.

It's not exactly autonomous, but it works. Nissan believes the fastest way to get driverless cars on the road is to give them remote human support – and it's using NASA technology to do it. Nissan demonstrated its Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) platform at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, which incorporates a degree of teleoperation into the autonomous car system. Although vehicles will be able to drive themselves most of the time, human "mobility managers" can remotely take control in unexpected situations. "Autonomy systems are not simple, it is a very hard problem," says Maarten Sierhuis, director of Nissan's Research Center in Sunnyvale, California.

Nissan is the latest in a now long line of automobile companies to go public with plans -- sketchy as they may be -- for autonomous cars. The Japanese company will begin testing driverless cars in Japan and put them into commercial operation by 2020, according to Carlos Ghosn, who spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday. He is chairman and chief executive of Nissan, chairman and CEO of Renault and chairman of Mitsubushi. The only substantial difference between Nissan's announced plans and those of Ford, FCA, General Motors, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and several other companies is a plan to put "humans in the loop" based on technology developed at NASA. The director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley, Maarten Sierhuis, said human "mobility managers" will intervene if an autonomous car encounters a situation it can't handle, like having to cross a double yellow line when a lane is blocked.