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I took my first ride in a self-driving car nearly a decade ago.
Like most people who experience this brave new world, I felt a deep sense of awe that machines had mastered a skill that once belonged solely to humans.
Over the next 10 years, first at Wired Magazine, now at The New York Times, I covered the high-speed race to bring self-driving cars into the lives of everyday Americans.
And during that time it became increasingly clear to me that although self-driving cars were shockingly nimble — indeed awe-inspiring — they could not yet match the power of the human brain.
My years of reporting culminated with an article my colleagues and I published last week about how driverless cars get help from humans.
In April, my fellow reporter Yiwen Lu and I visited a command center in Foster City, Calif., operated by Zoox, a self-driving car company owned by the tech giant Amazon.
Like other robot taxis, the company’s self-driving vehicles sometimes struggle to drive themselves, so they get help from human technicians sitting in a spacious room in the command center.
If a Zoox car is unable to navigate a construction zone it has not seen before, for instance, a technician at the command center receives an alert.
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Almost ten years ago, I experienced my first ride in an autonomous vehicle. I was deeply in awe that machines had mastered a skill that was previously exclusive to humans, as are most people who encounter this brave new world.
Then I realized that I was a journalist.
Over the next ten years, I covered the fast-moving race to bring self-driving cars to the general public, first at Wired Magazine and now at The New York Times. And throughout that time, it became more and more obvious to me that while autonomous vehicles were remarkably quick and even breathtaking, they could not yet match the capacity of the human brain. They’re still unable to.
My years of reporting culminated last week in a piece my colleagues and I published about how humans assist driverless cars.
The article demonstrates, with the help of multimedia experts Jason Henry, Ben Laffin, and Rebecca Lieberman, that modern robot taxis still rely on the common sense of people like you and me even though they don’t have drivers behind the wheel—some even don’t have steering wheels.
My colleague Yiwen Lu and I went to a Foster City, California, command center in April. run by the tech behemoth Amazon’s self-driving car company Zoox. Like other robot taxis, the company’s self-driving cars occasionally have trouble getting around on their own. To help them out, human technicians are seated in a large room in the command center.
Occasionally, a technician provides assistance to a robot taxi located hundreds of miles away.
A technician at the command center receives an alert, for example, if a Zoox car is unable to navigate a construction zone it has never been in before. The car is then given a new route to follow around the construction zone by using the computer mouse to draw a line across a digital road map displayed on a computer screen.
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