What is driving the NEXT generation of autonomous vehicles? How are scientists upping the innovation rate? Why are AVs utterly inevitable, everywhere? How will they transform industries, cities and even economies?

To get a deep sense of where we are headed, I checked in with Paul Newman, a trailblazer in robotics and autonomous systems. Paul is BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford University, Founder of the Oxford Robotics Institute, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IEEE in honor of his outstanding contributions to robot navigation, and Founder of Oxa (formerly Oxbotica) a mobile autonomy company involved in commercial deployments around the world.

Paul is a BIG thinker about the future of AVs!

We discuss:

• How “driving many somewhere’s” leads to a future of “driving autonomously everywhere,” and how this builds assurances that AVs are robust and safe in each and every context.
• Paul’s ‘universal autonomy’ approach, building an AV ‘operating system’ spanning many platforms, and partnering with industrial users and original vehicle manufacturers in joint ventures with shared IP – greatly accelerating the innovation process.
• Oxa’s varied deployments across shuttle-buses, airports, mines, buses, delivery vans and more.
• AI supervising AI, and how a multi-level approach with a ‘higher order’ layer making over-riding decisions when a decision is not safe enough, not only massively improves safety, but also makes it possible to innovate faster.
• The big gains being made in AI teaching, and how ‘adversarial learning’ is accelerating and scaling teaching by generating tens of thousands of scenarios to train and test other AIs.
• The future of vehicle-to-vehicle data sharing, the obligation to share data, and the big questions to be tackled on how much to share.
• How AVs will re-shape industrial ecosystems, and transport networks, and cities, in all kinds of big ways (just wait until you hear his comparison with reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone!)

Mostly, we talk about OPPORTUNITY.

What I love best about Paul is he is profoundly optimistic about the potential for AVs to drive huge positive change.

We are only at the beginning of the AV revolution. Do you consider widescale AV deployments inevitable? I do. Listen to Paul and understand why.

Enjoy!

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As always, additional commentary and the full transcript will be on the Future Bites page soon. More on my work as a Futurist Speaker, and why I do what I do, at www.brucemccabe.com