Transformation Is Coming

Because of this new technology, cities and even the countryside will change, autonomous vehicle pioneers tell us in Chapter 3, Vision One – Transportation Automates. Soon you will tell your glasses, "Hey, I need a ride," and you'll see your ride arrive. Sounds like Uber or Lyft, right? Look closer, there isn't a driver inside. Now think of the cost and the other advantages of that. Economists see that such a system could be a fraction of the cost, and could do many other things as well: "Hey car, can you go pick up my laundry and then dinner for our family?" The problem with such a world is that it is probable, many tell us, that we'll see much more traffic near cities as we use transportation to do new things, like pick up our laundry. This is why Elon Musk came up with the Boring Company to build tunnels under cities. We show some other solutions pioneers have come up with, including special roads for these vehicles and new kinds of flying vehicles that will whisk commuters into city centers, passing above all that new traffic.

Transportation soon will include more than just cars and trucks, too. Already, lots of companies are experimenting with new kinds of robots that will deliver products much more efficiently and, in a world where viruses are a new threat, without human hands touching them either. We talk with a company that is already rolling out such robots on college campuses and elsewhere.

Autonomous cars might look like they are rolling around the real world, but often they are developed by rolling them around inside a simulation. Simulations are how engineers are able to test out AI systems and come up with new ways to train the AIs. After all, you don't want to wreck 500 cars just to come up with how to handle someone running a red light, do you? If you walk around the simulations built by Nvidia and others, they look like real streets, with real-looking and acting traffic, pedestrians, and even rainwater and puddles after rain. This technology has many new uses other than training robots and autonomous vehicles, though. The technology inside is a radically different form of computing than was used to make Microsoft Windows for the past few decades, too.

Here, new AI systems fuse dozens of sensor and camera readings together and then look for patterns inside. Some of the cars rolling around Silicon Valley and other cities, like Phoenix, Arizona, have more than 20 cameras, along with half a dozen spinning laser sensors that see the world in very high-definition 3D.

Is that a stop sign or a yield sign? Humans are good at that kind of pattern recognition, but computers needed to evolve to do it, and we dig into how these systems work for autonomous cars and what else this kind of technology could be used for―maybe for playing new kinds of games or visiting new kinds of virtual amusement parks where virtual actors interact with you? How will such things be possible? Well, let's start with the huge amount of bandwidth that will soon appear as 5G rolls out and new devices show up on our faces and in our pockets to connect us to these new Spatial Computing systems. Yes, 5G can support these new kinds of games, but it also can tell cars behind you that there's a new hazard in the road that needs to be avoided.