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Driverless cars need brain science

John Ball
4 min readNov 29, 2024

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since brain evolution WORKED hundreds of millions of years ago

Future driverless cars would be improved if animal-level skills were available, perhaps hardened by robots. Photo by YAROSLAV SAPRYKIN on Unsplash

Last time I wrote about how robotics needs to get to the level of animals because animals already have 90% of the functionality needed for autonomous cars. By using Patom theory, a model of brains based on neuroscience, new approaches to engineering can be tested.

Applying robotics technologies to the problems of autonomous cars would address the long tail of (insurmountable) problems.

Today I want to review the proposed levels of autonomous cars and compare them to a realistic model of the levels of robotics.

6 levels of autonomy

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has defined 6 levels of autonomous driving as follows:

  1. Level 0: no driving automation
  2. Level 1: driver assistance
  3. Level 2: partial driving automation
  4. Level 3: conditional driving automation
  5. Level 4: high driving automation
  6. Level 5: full driving automation

There is a description and chart on the FAIST site here (click).

It’s nice to see the numbers aligned with a computer scientist’s model — starting…

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John Ball
John Ball

Written by John Ball

I'm a cognitive scientist working on NLU (Natural Language Understanding) systems based on RRG (Role and Reference Grammar). A mouthful, I know!

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