Exponential Technology and the Self-Driving Car‏

Exponential Technology and the Self-Driving Car‏

On a crisp autumn day, two sleek Mercedes sedans smoothly joined the flow of traffic on French Autoroute 1 near Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. For hours the two vehicles drove along the highway in heavy traffic, passing other cars when necessary. Although no obvious signs distinguished them as unique, close observation would reveal that both were autonomous vehicles, driving themselves with human-level competency.

Self-driving vehicle technology is now beginning to establish itself in the market. Major automakers like Volkswagen have been quietly shipping driverless technologies in new production vehicles. Tesla Motors nears completion on a promised software update that will enable autopilot mode. But the two Mercedes in question – VAMP and VITA-2 – are not current production models, nor are they current research vehicles. Today they sit in a museum in Bonn, Germany, because the above drive happened in 1994 – over 20 years ago. We will use the surprisingly old story of the development of the self-driving car to illustrate an often-overlooked aspect of the development of enormously successful technologies – they can take a long time to become an “overnight success.” Such exponential technologies reach a point where they suddenly burst forth into the public eye. We call this point the “knee of the curve,” where the exponential goes from doubling small numbers to produce more small numbers, to doubling more substantial numbers that quickly become huge. Public attention understandably focuses on the breakout and scaling of advanced technologies. But reaching the breakout point requires building the necessary base, which can take a long time – much longer than people often realize.

Read more : https://www.singularityweblog.com/exponential-technology-self-driving-car%E2%80%8F/