WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr Musk. I accepted, with full control of questions I could ask and choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. This was an insightful discussion on various aspects of Tesla Autopilot that I hope catalyzes further nuanced conversation on the future of AI-assisted driving. Starts at 2:35. The full outline of the video is as follows:
0:00 Introduction
2:35 Start of conversation: Autopilot motivation
4:01 Display the vehicle's perception of the driving scene
7:11 Algorithms, data, and hardware development
10:23 Edge cases and common cases in driving
12:18 Navigate on Autopilot
13:57 Hardware and software path toward fully autonomy
17:08 Driver supervision of Autopilot
20:13 Human side of Tesla Autopilot (driver functional vigilance)
23:13 Driver monitoring
24:30 Operational design domain
26:57 Securing Autopilot against adversarial machine learning
28:29 Narrow AI and artificial general intelligence
30:10 Physics view of love
31:53 First question for an artificial general intelligence system

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots. Nuro has raised more than $1 billion.

Service performance has improved recently for most CPG companies. But getting goods from plant to shelf involves more hurdles and more complexity than ever before.

The experts predict that AI will outperform humans in the next 10 years in tasks such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high school essays (by 2026), and driving trucks (by 2027).
But many other tasks will take much longer for machines to master. AI won’t be better than humans at working in retail until 2031, able to write a bestselling book until 2049, or capable of working as a surgeon until 2053.

Now there’s Robomart, which wants to bring the groceries, baked goods and prepared foods of the supermarket aisle to your doorstep with a white-labeled service for wholesalers and big box retailers.

Dave Mercer has been driving trucks across America since 1986. He has hauled ice cream to Nevada, burgers to Oregon, and trailers to Baltimore. “It can be a rough life,” he says. “You’re away from…