Skip to main content

03 | The bumpy history of driverless cars and their AI brains

Broadcast 
Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
A colourful autonomous taxi with no driver speeds through the streets of San Francisco.
A Waymo autonomous taxi drives along a street in San Francisco.(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

When you think about a driverless car future, perhaps your mind goes to being driven around, watching movies from the backseat and drinking martinis.

For over a decade, perfect driverless cars have seemed only a few years away. But in reality, they were nowhere close.

Now, driverless cars are finally being rolled out in some cities.

But (like humans) they're crashing and causing chaos.

So are driverless cars finally here? Or is teaching a car to drive simply too difficult?

Guests:

Alex Purtill, San Francisco resident, brother of James Purtill

Todd Jochem, former Carnegie Mellon University robotics researcher who developed some of the world's first driverless vehicles

Sebastian Thrun, Waymo co-founder and one of the inventors of driverless cars

Rodney Brooks, world-renowned Australian roboticist who lives in San Francisco, former head of the MIT computer science lab

EDITOR'S NOTE (13 NOV 2023): A previous version of the audio for this episode incorrectly referred to Tesla instead of Uber. The audio has been corrected. We apologise for the error. 

Credits

Broadcast 
Artificial Intelligence, Travel Health and Safety, Business and Industry Regulation, Inventions
QR code image for downloading the ABC listen app

Discover more podcasts

Download the ABC listen app to hear more of your favourite podcasts