Karl Iagnemma Quotes

"It's funny how life works. You end up sometimes back where you started."

"Uniformity is the friend of scalability."

"When you contribute to an open-source or a shared solution, and there's a liability issue that arises from the use of that solution, how will this be tracked back to individual contributors?"

"It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition."

"I grew up in Michigan, in the Detroit area, so cars are sort of in my DNA."

"We hope to get to the place where there are thousands of Peugeot cars on the road running nuTonomy software."

"You put a car on the road which may be driving by the letter of the law, but compared to the surrounding road users, it's acting very conservatively. This can lead to situations where the autonomous car is a bit of a fish out of water."

"Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way, and the reality is that autonomous vehicles in the future may have to do the same thing if they don't want to be the source of bottlenecks."

"When a driverless car looks out on the world, it's not able to distinguish the age of a pedestrian or the number of occupants in a car."

"Even if we wanted to imbue an autonomous vehicle with an ethical engine, we don't have the technical capability today to do so."

"All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It's not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn't develop this technology."

"Everybody likes driving through scenic, winding roads. It's hard to find people who like sitting in traffic in cities."

"Building cars is highly specialized, it's hard, and it's capital intensive."

"The AV ecosystem is constantly evolving, and no single winner will be crowned."

"Partnerships remain critical to nuTonomy's success, and our aim is to work with groups with whom we share strategic aims and core values. These are partners that are transparent, innovative, and are focused on putting autonomous fleets on the road."

"If you're a large organization, you may welcome a bit of regulation to keep the small guys out."

"Singapore is likely to be the world's first market for self-driving cars. Commercial services around self-driving vehicles will likely be in Singapore before they are anywhere else in the world."

"For self-driving cars in particular, there are lots of dimensions of this technology beyond just impact on labour. There is a massive potential improvement in public health."

"If you develop a technology that only works in a single city, where it's kind of optimized for a specific city, that's not really that exciting."

"In Singapore, drivers generally obey the rules, but the attitude around pedestrians is actually quite different. It's culturally different. People drive safely, but it's not the same deference shown to pedestrians."

"Writing, for me at least, takes a lot of concentrated work and effort. It takes dedication and the willingness to do the work even when that feeling of inspiration isn't there at all."

"When I first started writing, I didn't write about scientists at all. I think I wanted a break from that part of my world."

"I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations."

"To the extent that trolley problem scenarios exist in the real world, AVs will make them rarer, not more frequent."

"Conflating thought experiments with reality could slow the deployment of AVs that are reliably safer than human drivers."

"We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks."

"Everything that's transported over ground, whether it's people or parcels, will be impacted by autonomous vehicle technology."

"It's challenging to drive in a way that's human-like."

"There's so much rich interaction with drivers that we take for granted. It seems like a mundane thing, but it turns out to be a really big deal."

"From a technology and economic perspective, it's vastly more likely that autonomy will be used for mobility services."