Autonomous driving could be here in two years
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The world could see the commercial use of autonomous driving within the next two years, said the Chief Executive Officer of Zendrive, on the last day of the World Government Summit 2017 in Dubai.
Speaking on a panel about the potential future advancements of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Jonathan Matus, said that the world can also expect big delivery of autonomous driving in the trucking industry within the next five to seven years. Zendrive uses driving analytics to provide insights for safe driving.
“In the next seven years, we are going to see massive volumes of miles driven by humans replaced by autonomous driving,” he said. “It is most likely that the onset of the autonomous trucking industry comes much faster than the auto taxi everyone is talking about.”
Matus added that solving the problems of autonomous driving are complex and can be categorised into two streams – driving on urban streets and driving on highways.
“It turns out that driving on highways is much simpler than driving inside a city,” he said.
He went on to discuss the three key factors what would determine the rapid deployment of autonomous driving within the trucking industry, the first of which is financial gain.
“A recent study conducted by Morgan Stanley reveals that the deployment of autonomous driving technology will result in savings of up to USD 168 billion,” he said. “Another factor to consider is solving the technical problems of differentiating between highway and city driving.”
The final issue was what he called the human parameter and popular resistance to such a move, given that the trucking industry is one of the largest employers in the world.
However, the Leading AI Journalist at Wired Magazine, Cade Medtz, has a more conservative view on the global deployment of autonomous vehicles. “It is a complicated situation and all it takes is one extremely serious accident to set the industry back years.”