Karl Iagnemma

“It's funny how life works. You end up sometimes back where you started.”

“I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.”

“When a driverless car looks out on the world, it's not able to distinguish the age of a pedestrian or the number of occupants in a car.”

“When you contribute to an open-source or a shared solution, and there's a liability issue that arises from the use of that solution, how will this be tracked back to individual contributors?”

“I love driving through Western Massachusetts, out through the Berkshires, when the road is empty and it's a nice day. I don't like driving home on Memorial Drive at 5:45 or 6:45 at night when it's crowded and stressful. I think that's true of most people, and the goal of automated driving is to take the stressful part of driving out of the task.”

“Even if trolley problems were a realistic concern for AVs, it is not clear what, if anything, regulators or companies developing AVs should do about them. The trolley problem is an intensely debated thought experiment precisely because there isn't a consensus on what should be done.”

“Even if we wanted to imbue an autonomous vehicle with an ethical engine, we don't have the technical capability today to do so.”

“Uniformity is the friend of scalability.”

“My parents encouraged me to be creative by being creative and interesting people themselves, and by making it clear how highly they valued creativity in others.”

“We want to develop a technology that's globally applicable, that's not customized for a specific city or a specific country. The only way to do that is to be able to test every day in a diversity of environments.”

“Everything that's transported over ground, whether it's people or parcels, will be impacted by autonomous vehicle technology.”

“Everybody likes driving through scenic, winding roads. It's hard to find people who like sitting in traffic in cities.”

“Cities like New Delhi for example, where traffic is dense and it's a more fluid driving environment, that's hard for self-driving technology to deal with.”

“Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way, and the reality is that autonomous vehicles in the future may have to do the same thing if they don't want to be the source of bottlenecks.”

“All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It's not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn't develop this technology.”

“We hope to get to the place where there are thousands of Peugeot cars on the road running nuTonomy software.”

“From a societal aspect, when you are impatient behind a driverless car and there's no one to listen to your beeping horn, what are people going to do? How are they going to take out their aggression?”

“We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks.”

“The fundamental problem here is that humans and automation approach the driving task differently.”

“You put a car on the road which may be driving by the letter of the law, but compared to the surrounding road users, it's acting very conservatively. This can lead to situations where the autonomous car is a bit of a fish out of water.”