Autonomous car success will depend on infrastructure 
A new report in Wired discusses how the real key to future success for autonomous vehicles could come down to upgrading current infrastructure, particularly roads. Roads globally will need improvements such as new paint, reflectors, and/or other markers to help autonomous vehicles stay their correct course. Another example given is that traffic management at construction sites will need to involve electronic beacons to direct traffic because the cars will not be able to respond to hand signals from construction workers.

Autonomous vehicles will join human drivers on our roads sooner than most people think. At Baidu, we plan to put commercial, self-driving cars on the roads by 2018. But the way to make them safe is not to make them act just like human driven cars---in fact, the limitations of today's technology mean that’s not feasible. Instead, we should make modest changes to our infrastructure, program these cars to behave as predictably as possible, and teach the public new ways to interact with them.

These changes can accommodate autonomous cars’ weaknesses, like their inability to interpret a construction worker’s hand gestures, and take advantage of their strengths: their unending vigilance, their lack of blind spots. The faster the better: Car crashes kill 1.3 million people every year. Safe autonomous cars will save many lives, and make transportation affordable and more convenient. But neither automakers nor technology companies can realize this vision alone. It will take the efforts of a community.

WIRED Opinion About Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, runs Baidu Research, which includes the Institute of Deep Learning, the Big Data Lab and the Silicon Valley AI Lab. Yuanqing Lin is the Director of Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning.

We’ve made this kind of shift before. The 19th century rise of the railroad gave citizens a faster and safer mode of transportation than the horse, and transformed society. But we had to learn how to behave around trains. Today we are saddened if a pet dog runs onto a railway track and is killed. Yet we do not blame the train for this accident, because we understand it is the nature of the machine to run on its tracks. We accommodated that nature by developing new ways to behave around trains---such as not standing on the tracks---along with new infrastructure like railway crossings with distinctive lights and bells to keep people out of danger.

Train travel today is far safer than horseback travel. In the future, computer driven cars will be far safer than human driven cars. But just as trains are different than horses, we should recognize that computer driven cars are different from human driven cars, and find novel ways to safely incorporate them into our lives.

Key Differences

Today's autonomous cars are inferior to human drivers in important ways:

If a construction worker uses hand gestures to tell a car to either go or to stop, no autonomous car today can reliably make the right decision.

When the sun is immediately behind a traffic light, most cameras won't be able to recognize the color of the signal through the glare.

If we see a truck with a “Makes Wide Turns” sign, we know how to adjust our driving accordingly. If we see children distracted by the ice cream truck across the street, we know to slow down, as they may dash toward it. Today’s computers aren’t nearly as skilled at interpreting complex situations like these.

Autonomous vehicles also have advantages over humans: