The robot cars are already here and they’re not ready

Turns out, driverless cars don’t like fireworks. On the Fourth of July, a hundred thousand people poured out of San Francisco’s fireworks show at once. Robotaxis in the area went haywire. Some froze in intersections. Others drove over live fireworks. And it made us think of an earlier conversation we’d had with NYU professor Gary Marcus about what happens when machines trained on a predictable world encounter the real one.

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