Engineering AVs to ‘play nice’ with humans

More than a decade after the DARPA Grand Challenge program demonstrated the technical viability of self-driving vehicles, the industry is now preparing its first commercial deployments of the technology at scale. While Waymo, GM Cruise, Aptiv and others begin to ramp-up automated ride-hailing services for paying passengers, unanswered questions remain. Many of them revolve around the “social” aspects of the technology.

Engineering is about taking the principles learned from science and applying them to solving real-world problems. But if the resulting technology requires people to change their behavior for it to work reliably, the engineers are doing it wrong.