Yesterday, Tesla Motors CEO and general future-tech proponent Elon Musk said some surprising things about the future of self-driving cars—namely, that human drivers could someday be outlawed.
As is often the case when Musk goes off-the-cuff, he took to Twitter later the same day to clarify what he meant.
But Musk’s full onstage conversation with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was packed with interesting insights into the future of self-driving cars. Our friends at Gizmodo were there in the audience, and have fully transcribed the interview, part of the 2015 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California.
We’ve put some of the most interesting quotes below, but for the full scope of the conversation, you should head over to Gizmodo and read for yourself.
Because if we’re facing a potential future where every new car drives itself, it’s helpful to at least know what we’ll be up against.
“I think [autonomous driving]‘s just going to become normal. Like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just come to the floor that you’re at, you just press the button.”
“It’ll be an order of magnitude safer than a person. In fact, in the distant future, I think [...] people may outlaw driving cars, because it’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”
“If you can count on not having an accident, you can get rid of a huge amount of the crash structure and the airbags.”
“Autonomy is really about what level of reliability and safety do you want. Even with the current sensor suite, we could make the car go fully autonomous, but not to a level of reliability that would be safe in, say, a complex urban environment where [...] children are playing.”
“I almost view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what to do, and we’ll be there in a few years.”
“From the point at which a car is definitely safer than a person, there’s at least another two or three years after that before regulators allow it to be the case. They all want to see a large amount of statistical proof that it’s not merely as safe as a person, but much safer.”
“I don’t think it’s the case that right now [current autonomous tech] can be a substitute for people. But there will be in a few years.”
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Musk went into even more detail, answering some of the most often-asked questions about hacking into the computers that would control an autonomous car, and the role of Artificial Intelligence in the future of our everyday lives. Read it all here.
This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com.
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