Artificial Intelligence Now

Chapter 19. Creating Autonomous Vehicle Systems

Shaoshan Liu

We are at the beginning of the future of autonomous driving. What is the landscape and how will it unfold? Let’s consult history to help us predict.

Information technology took off in the 1960s, when Fairchild Semiconductors and Intel laid the foundation by producing silicon microprocessors (hence Silicon Valley). Microprocessor technologies greatly improved industrial productivity; the general public had limited access to it. In the 1980s, with the Xerox Alto, Apple Lisa, and later Microsoft Windows, using the graphical user interface (GUI), the second layer was laid, and the vision of having a “personal” computer became a possibility.

With virtually everyone having access to computing power in the 2000s, Google laid the third layer, connecting people—indirectly, with information.

Beginning with Facebook in 2004, social networking sites laid the fourth layer of information technology by allowing people to directly connect with one another, effectively moving human society to the World Wide Web.

As the population of internet-savvy people reached a significant scale, the emergence of Airbnb in 2008, followed by Uber in 2009, and others, laid the fifth layer by providing direct internet commerce services.

Each new layer of information technology, with its added refinements, improved popular access and demand (Figure 19-1). Note that for most internet commerce sites, where they provide access to service providers through ...