How AI is paving the way for fully autonomous cars

You’d be forgiven for thinking that fully autonomous cars were just around the corner. In some respects, of course, they are. Partial automation – along the lines of Tesla’s much-publicised Autopilot – is set to become commonplace on premium cars over the next few years. Even when it comes to higher levels of autonomy, much of the required hardware is already available.

It’s all so tantalisingly close. And yet there is a huge amount of work – not to mention a good deal of legal and administrative wrangling – to be done before we can safely switch our cars over to autonomous mode and go to sleep.

To cross that threshold, autonomous cars have to truly comprehend their environment. They need to be able to identify potential hazards, anticipate the actions of others and make decisions of their own. The key to this ability is artificial intelligence, with systems such as neural networks promising to take us into a brave new world of machines that think for themselves.