Transportation (Annotated)

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Transportation is likely to be one of the first domains in which the general public will be asked to trust the reliability and safety of an AI system for a critical task. Autonomous transportation will soon be commonplace and, as most people's first experience with physically embodied AI systems, will strongly influence the public's perception of AI. Once the physical hardware is made sufficiently safe and robust, its introduction to daily life may happen so suddenly as to surprise the public, which will require time to adjust. As cars will become better drivers than people, city-dwellers will own fewer cars, live further from work, and spend time differently, leading to an entirely new urban organization. Further, in the typical North American city in 2030, changes won’t be limited to cars and trucks, but are likely to include flying vehicles and personal robots, and will raise social, ethical and policy issues.

A few key technologies have already catalyzed the widespread adoption of AI in transportation. Compared to 2000, the scale and diversity of data about personal and population-level transportation available today—enabled by the adoption of smartphones and decreased costs and improved accuracies for variety of sensors—is astounding. Without the availability of this data and connectivity, applications such as real-time sensing and prediction of traffic, route calculations, peer-to-peer ridesharing and self-driving cars would not be possible.