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
WHY IT MATTERS: this is a very geeky interview with Elon Musk on autopilot and the future of self-driving cars. Thoughtful, structured and informative it brings to light a very strong point: the value of a car lies in its capacity to self drive and every Tesla has this feature already builtin. Basically it means that cars will soon cross the threshold of autonomy, opening a whole new era for personal transportation. But more importantly I believe for businesses that rely on delivery logistics: ecommerce of course but also groceries, medical supplies, etc.