If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination … I think that the 20th century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway. Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction.

machines tend to be designed for the lowest possible risk and the least casualties

self-driving car

The Tesla accident in May, researchers say, was not a failure of computer vision. But it underscored the limitations of the science in applications like driverless cars despite remarkable progress in recent years, fueled by digital data, computer firepower and software inspired by the human brain.