Google Holds the Key to Autonomous Cars

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http://www.trunews.com/article/google-siblings-carcraft-may-lead-to-autonomous-cars

Recently, The Atlantic got a behind-the-scenes look at Waymo, a sister company to Google that is developing autonomous cars, and its new simulation software called “Carcraft.” Originally developed as a way to “play back” real-life driving scenarios, Carcraft is now a means to continuously test them:

>At any time, there are now 25,000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios ... In 2016, they logged 2.5 billion virtual miles versus a little over 3 million miles by Google’s IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads. And crucially, the virtual miles focus on what Waymo people invariably call “interesting” miles in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter miles. The simulations are part of an intricate process that Waymo has developed. They’ve tightly interwoven the millions of miles their cars have traveled on public roads with a “structured testing” program they conduct at a secret base in the Central Valley they call Castle.

The report concludes that developing Waymo’s artificial intelligence “humans to sync with the cars,” whereby it ultimately gains an understanding of what it means to be a human, and perhaps vice versa:

>A memory of a roundabout in Austin becomes a piece of Castle becomes a self-driving car data log becomes a Carcraft scenario becomes a web of simulations becomes new software that finally heads back out on a physical self-driving car to that roundabout in Texas. Even within the polygon abstraction of the simulation the AI uses to know the world, there are traces of human dreams, fragments of recollections, feelings of drivers. And these components are not mistakes or a human stain to be scrubbed off, but necessary pieces of the system that could revolutionize transportation.