Driverless Cars: The Early Concepts

I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with how Stuff Works, and I heart radio and I love all things tech and I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was planning a suite of episodes about driverless cars, including the history of developing them, the challenges we face in implementing them, the potential benefits that autonomous vehicles could have, and how long it might be before we see truly driverless cars deployed on a wide scale basis, also whether

or not they'll hit the road before they're ready. Now, today, we're going to start that journey by talking about a time when the idea of driverless cars was mostly science fiction. Also, I think it's important to understand that the development of self driving cars is not a linear your story with a solid narrative. It's not a leads to be leads to see a lot of people have worked on developing the technology independently, sometimes from very different perspectives and philosophies,

but all heading towards a common goal. These projects can sometimes overlap each other in time without having any direct connection between them, so you could have independent studies happening throughout the world. So I'm just gonna cover some of the big, really important ones, but just no, there were a lot of people working on this at various times

throughout our history. I'm gonna stick as close to a chronological timeline as I can, but it will involve jumping around a little bit in time, just because otherwise I'd be saying, meanwhile, blah blah blah was happening, and then so and so was doing this, and it was just turned into a really hackneyed kind of like radio mystery. I don't want that to happen. So picking a starting point is actually pretty darned tricky too, because the technology

of autonomous cars spans lots of different fields. You could go into all sorts of technologies and talk about the development and how the evolution of those technologies eventually found their way into autonomous cars, and if I dug too deep in that rabbit hole, this series would last maybe thirty episodes. We'd be talking about the development of the automobile, we'd be talking about development of cameras. I kind of

like how Wired did it? In a piece that was published in twenty sixteen titled quote a brief history of autonomous vehicle technology end quote. And as that name suggests, that article went beyond self driving cars, and the first item on that list actually dates all the way back to fifteen hundred or thereabouts, and a famous turtle named Leonardo. I'm sorry, tari Is tar is telling me that's the throng. Leonardo. Leonardo was not actually a turtle, but apparently some sort

of renowned renaissance artist and proto scientists. Okay, Leonardo da Vinci. Okay, all right, I was was way off base there, Thanks Harry. Anyway, the story of his invention comes to us courtesy of the Codex Atlanticus, Folio eight twelve r, in which da Vinci describes the creation of a cart that would use springs and gears. The springs would store energy, and the gears and the cogs would drive the wheels and steering mechanisms, so that this cart, once wound up and quote unquote programmed,

could travel and steer on its own power. So you would change these settings around, and that would allow the cart to not just travel across a distance, but also turn left or right, depending upon the settings that you had selected. I imagine this was largely done through various gears that once it hit a certain point of its revolution, it would engage the steering mechanism, But honestly, I don't

know the full details. Uh If da Vinci ever built one of these for real z s. The working model did not survive the passage of time, but modern enthusiasts have attempted to recreate this self driving cart, which we now believe was intended for use in theatrical productions. It wasn't meant to do practical work on like manual labor or anything like that. It was meant to be part of a show that you would have this cart go across, perhaps as an effect, maybe it's carrying some sort of

piece of scenery or an actor or something. But Da Vinci's drawings and designs, we're not step by step instructions, and so any recreation of this invention has to be done with a healthy dose of interpretation on the part of the builders. They have to start kind of filling in the gaps and making, you know, best guesses. But some people, such as the staff at Wired, point to this as an early example of a vehicle that can

drive itself. Though to be fair, da Vinci's design required some humans to pre set the device so that it would do what it was supposed to do. So you couldn't just, you know, tell the cart I need you to cross upstage left. You would actually have to quote unquote program it. Now, no discussion about the early days of driver less cars would be complete without acknowledging the

accomplishments of someone known as Francis P. Houdina. He is credited in various articles as being an electrical engineer for the Army, and once he left the service, he founded a company called the Houdina Radio Control Company. I'll have more to say about Francis in a second, but let's get to the heart of the matter as far as autonomous cars go. Back in ninet, the Houdina Radio Control

Company engaged in a major publicity stunt. It happened on July when a car dubbed the Lendrick in Wonder, though sometimes it is credited as the American Wonder, roamed the streets of New York City without a driver behind the wheel. In fact, there was no one in the car whatsoever.

There was someone standing on the sideboard of the car, the running board so they were perched on the outside where they could reach in and grab the wheel, but no one was actually sitting in the driver's seat Ellie, and no one was apparently in control, at least not directly behind the wheel. But as the name of the company would indicate the line, Rick in Wonder was a radio controlled car like a toy r C Cards, just instead of being a toy, it was a full sized automobile.

Circuits connecting to motors would control the movements of the gearshift, the accelerator, the brakes, the steering wheel. Actual control of the vehicle came from an apparatus inside a following car, So you'd have a car operated by a regular human driver sitting in the driver's seat. In the passenger seat would be the operator for the radio controlled car that would travel in front of them. So the car was not truly driverless because the driver did exist. It's just

the driver was in another vehicle. While researching this episode, I found a New York Times article that described the event, and it doesn't sound like it was a complete success.

From that article, these are quotes. A loose housing around the shaft to the steering wheel in the radio car caused the uncertain course as the procession got underway, as John Alexander of the Houdina Company, riding in the second car, applied the radio waves the directing apparatus attached to the shaft, and the other automobile failed to grasp it prop really.

As a result, the radio car careened from left to right down Broadway, around Columbus Circle and south on Fifth Avenue, almost running down two trucks and a milk wagon, which took to the curbs for safety. At Street, Houdina lunged for the steering wheel, but could not prevent the car from crashing into the fender of an automobile filled with cameramen. It was at Fort Street that a crash into a

fire engine was barely averted. The police advised Judina to postpone his experiments, but after the car had been driven up Broadway, it was once more operated by radio along Central Park drives. And uh, here's that bit about Francis Judina I was mentioning earlier. You may have noticed that the name bears some passing resemblance to that of Harry Houdini,

who was alive at that same time. He was the famous escape artist and magician Now, according to the story, and there are at least some court documents to back this up, the post office was sometimes in the habit of delivering some of the mail meant for the Houdina Company to Houdini the magician, including bills, and Houdini was not crazy about getting the bills from some other company and he felt that it was encroaching upon his name.

So he marched on over to the Houdina Radio Company headquarters and a scuffle broke out after he started raising a fuss. The head of the office, a guy named George Young, filed charges against Houdini for disorderly conduct, but on the day that Houdini was to appear in court, Young failed to show up, and so all charges were dismissed. Now there's a guy named Dean Carnegie who posted a few years ago that he had been contacted by the son of the person who called himself Francis Houdina, and

that Judina was a pseudonym. And further, he says that the son of Houdina revealed that this scuffle was all just a publicity stunt, that Houdini had thought it up and they had all worked on it together. I do find it odd to have gone through all this trouble to take on a pseudonym, establish a company, create a demonstration of a radio controlled car, and all in an effort to set up a big PR stunt with a magician.

It seems to me like that's an awful lot of trouble to go through before you get to a point where you can hold this PR stunt. But I guess if someone was going to do it, it would be Houdini. I am highly skeptical that it was in fact a publicity stunt, only because, as I say, it's an awful lot of trouble to go through in order to do it, and it wouldn't necessarily bring good publicity, I would imagine. I just thought I would share the story because when

I was doing the research, it kept popping up. Now, this Houdina radio controlled vehicle was not the only one of its kind. There were some other people who also built full size radio controlled apparatus for cars. There were a few in the twenties and thirties, and in general people would start calling these phantom cars because they appeared to be driven by an invisible phantom, but all of

them were actually controlled by a remote driver. Those controls might not resemble those of a typical automobile, but they would end up controlling motors that would affect the automobiles regular operations, and according to various accounts, some of these would be controlled by follow cars, sometimes by someone on the street, sometimes by someone following in a low flying aircraft.

It all just depends upon the account. In nineteen thirty nine, at the New York World's Fair, General Motors presented an exhibit called Future Rama And it was not a and aimated series by Matt Graining. It was something else. It was a vision of the far off future of nineteen sixty and the General Motors exhibit was a ride. Essentially, visitors would get on these cars, these chair cars, and be pulled through this exhibit, where there was an enormous

scale model. One part of this vision, which encompassed lots of different thoughts about the future, was the Motorway of the future, and the vision included a sort of driver assist system in cars. They described an electro magnetic breaking system that would engage if one car were to get too close to the car ahead of it, and cars would be traveling down lanes that would have raised walls

on either side, sort of like guiding slots. So it sounded like GM was pretty sure cars would still be under the control of human beings even in the far off future world of nineteen six team, but there would be some automated elements that would find their way into vehicle operation. And these days we would say that that vision of the future was pretty much on the money, except for the part about it being nine, because it

took a little longer than that. Norman bell Getz, who designed this exhibit for General Motors, described a couple of possible methods for controlling traffic in the future using radio waves, and in one he envisioned a system that would include numerous broadcast towers along the side of the road, and

so cars would maintain contact with these broadcast towers. But another version, he suggested the possibility of an electrical conductor embedded in the road itself for direct control, and that would be a method that a lot of different people would look into over the next few years. Today we would say that such an enormous system is probably unlikely because of the huge investment it would require an infrastructure

that would come along with it. But back in the nineteen thirties, the US highway system was still developing, it was still being built across the country, so it's probably seen as more of a possibility. After all, we were already connecting distant parts of the country to each other, so couldn't we just go to the extra effort to

wire all of that in some way. I have more to say about this version of autonomous cars and how that evolved into what we think of as an autonomous car today, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In nineteen thirty six, a magazine called Modern Mechanics published an article about a different method for autonomous control of a vehicle. This version would include building cars that had special photo cells on them to detect

specific frequencies of light. The car it self would project this light. It would have a projector of some sort on the front of the car, and then in the road itself would be steel mirrors that could reflect the light back at the car, and the photocells would pick up that light. The article pointed out that cars were already approaching the limits of human reflexes. This idea that

we were starting to drive faster than we could react. Um, I guess, uh you know, good old uh Jack of the Pork Shop Express would say he never, he never drives faster than he can see. But we know that human reflexes have their limits. So this article mainly focused on the link between the photo cells and the steering

mechanism for the car. That leaves a lot of questions unanswered, such as how the car would accelerate or break, would there still be a human responsible for those operations, and the only thing that would be taken off the plate of the human driver is steering the car. One also wonders exactly how any one car would deal with the

presence of other cars on the road that are similarly outfitted. Right, So if you have a whole bunch of cars that use this technology and it's dependent upon light being reflected back at them, what happens when you start getting the signals from one car picked up by another, or what happens if you're driving on a really sunny day or in really bad weather like fog or rain. But the point is people were already thinking about alternatives to radio

controls even in the thirties. In nineteen fifty three, Arthur mac Barrett created what he called a driverless vehicle he mounted a wire in the ceiling of a warehouse, and he had a specially outfitted vehicle. In this case, it was a towing tractor that could follow that wire, and in later versions he would bury the wire within the floor of a facility. And he called this system the

guide O Matic. Now this was not meant for cars necessarily, but it was based on similar principles to some of the more sci fi ideas that were proposed in the nineteen thirties. So we started seeing it actually being put to use in the fifties, and in fact, this kind of system is still used to this day, but obviously with a much more sophisticated equipment than what was available

in the fifties. In Disney Studios produced a segment titled Magic Highway USA as part of The Wonderful World of Disney, and the piece included some humorous gags about what the future of driving could be, just based off jokes really, but after that was a more measured look, a more thoughtful look at the future of driving. Still had some pretty far out ideas in it. Now it did include some practical stuff that has in fact come to pass.

For example, the idea that signage is going to need to be larger and simpler so that motorists traveling at great speed can read and understand the road signs in general. That did come to pass. It also predicted a road system that would be able to retain heat to keep it dry even in snowstorms. That has not happened. It does sound a lot like some of the smart road systems that were being peddled no no pun intended around

a few years ago. You may remember those the smart highways that we're supposed to be made up of photo cells, solar cells essentially, and they could soak up light, generate electricity, and even be warmed so that snow and ice woulden form on them. Those have not really panned out so well,

at least not in any widespread application. However, some of the other bits in that magic Highway section included predictions similar to GPS and rear mounted cameras on cars, so we do have those, although the one that was proposed in the piece was more of a full time rear view camera, so instead of having a rear view mirror, you would have a rear view screen that you would consistently looked to for information about what's going on. Behind

the car. Some of the other predictions did not pan out in any way, shape or form, such as tunneling by atomic energy. Yeah, the actual special suggested that we use an enormous like atomic ray cannon essentially that would melt a hole through the side of a mountain when we needed to build a tunnel for a highway. That

clearly has not happened. But the special then goes on to suggest that in the future will get in our family vehicles and with a push of a few buttons, which in the specials depicted as physical slighter controls kind of like you would see on a on a stereo or a soundboard, we would select our destination and an electronic system incorporating the vehicle and the road itself, so it would be a system that has both internal components in the car and external components in the environment would

take care of everything else. So again this vision hinges on that sort of smart highway concept, the idea that a lot of this work is being done by the infrastr ructure, not just the vehicle. Disney was just one

company to promote this kind of idea. America's Electric Light and Power companies ran an advertisement in the Saturday Evening post in the nineteen fifties with an illustration that showed the stereotypical nineteen fifties American family depicted as it was at that time in the medium, which is to say it was a white upper class or upper middle class at least family. There was a father, mother's son, and daughter,

so that kind of stereotypical family. All four of those family members are inside a car that has sort of like that big glass bubble kind of approach, sort of what you would see in something like the Jetsons, and they're all facing inward toward each other. A couple of them are playing dominoes, they're having conversation. No one's having

to drive right, the car itself is doing it. And the ad talks about how the electric age will lead to automation and efficiency in all sorts of areas, including stuff like flat TV screens and vehicles control by quote electronic devices embedded in the road end quote. Now keep in mind again this is in the post World War two era. This is an era in which America's industry

was a key component of national identity. It was part of what people thought of when they were asked the question what is it to be American industry and innovation were very much, really important components of that identity. And these weren't just concepts. These weren't just artists and advertisers saying, let's come up with some sort of wild idea. There were engineers who were actively building cars and test roads

to work out the actual details. Joseph Bidwell and Lawrence Hofstad who were researchers with General motors outfitted in nineteen Chevrolet with pickup coils to work with a road that had embedded electrical wire in it. The coils were connected to motors that could adjust the cars steering so that can continue to follow the wire below, very much much like the guide Oh Manic that talked about earlier. Meanwhile, over at our c A another smarty pants was working

on this challenge. This would be Vladimir Zwarakin, which some of you people may know as one of the pioneers who played a really big part in the development of television. In fact, depending upon whom you ask, it was Warrikin, not farms Worth who was pioneer of TV. But honestly, it's a very complicated story, and I've talked about before on tech stuff so I'm not gonna go into it here,

but back to driverless cars. His concept included embedding circuits in the roads that would be able to sense vehicles magnetically, and his vision had the circuits identifying the speed and position of vehicles, which would provide information to a centralized system that could then send out instructions to specific cars in order to manage traffic. And his idea turned out

to be impractical for widespread deployment for autonomous cars. However, it did becomes sort of the foundation for car sensing loops that are under many intersections. They're used to help control traffic lights. Those loops that can detect if there's a vehicle on top of it through the electromagnetic effect and thus send a signal to the traffic lights that they should switch over soon so that they change the

direction of traffic. That's pretty cool. A key component in many of these concepts was that the system for control lay outside of the vehicle itself. It required some sort of larger centralized system to handle things, and the cars would respond to commands from that system. A car might have some components abort it to help with this, but for the most part, the important elements were external to the vehicle. So why was that? Why were we thinking

outside the car? Well, keep in mind that before we did not have transistors, so electronics were very large and bulky, and even the seven transistor was not a practical component that you would incorporate into a finished product. So it would be a few years before transistors would really play an important role in consumer technology, and mentorization was just getting started in the fifties and sixties, so computers were enormous machines that would take up at least a desk,

but sometimes an entire room. So driving, because it's such a complicated task, meant it wasn't really practical to create a fully autonomous car. The computer you would need to calculate all the different decisions that would be made in order to drive a vehicle would be bigger than the

car was. It made more sense to look outside the vehicle for the components that would be needed for a driverless automobile and send commands to a car that would be more like a dumb terminal would be for a supercomputer. Experts recognized the potential for autonomous systems. In particular, many engineers believed a good system would save lives and prevent injuries.

As we became accustomed to travel link at higher speeds, there was a legit fear that people were driving too quickly to be able to react safely in the event of an emergency. In nineteen sixty, Norbert Wiener, a mathematician at m I T. He's also known as the father of cybernetics, said, quote, by the time we are able to react to our senses and stop the car which we are driving, it may already have run head on

into a wall end quote. He was advocating for some sort of feedback system that could react in a fraction of the time humans can, And he had a point. Reaction times can average between a hundred fifty milliseconds to three hundred milliseconds, depending upon this stimuli, and that gets pretty darn fast, and a hundred fifty milliseconds it's not a lot of times, so that's a pretty fast reaction time. However, let's say that you're driving in a car that's going

sixty miles per hour or around kilometers per hour. That means you're traveling at eight ft per second. Even if your reflexes are on the fast side. That hundred fifty milliseconds. It means you travel thirteen ft before you'd even start to do anything, you would see something happened to you, and by the time you were able to start touching the break, you've all already traveled thirteen feet. Also, if you're traveling sixty you're in a vehicle. The vehicle has

a pretty hefty mass. You've got a lot of inertia to deal with. Two, You're not gonna stop on a dime. It's gonna take you time and therefore distance to stop. So the thought was if we could build out vehicles that could react for us much more quickly than we ourselves can react, and that these vehicles could monitor conditions that surround the car at all times, not just what's happening at whatever you happen to be focusing on at that moment. Wouldn't that be great? And we will revisit

that idea and a couple of episodes. When we start talking about the arguments for autonomous cars, we'll also talk about the arguments against them. I've got a lot more to say about these early concepts and autonomous cars, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. You know it would be great if our cars could watch after us. But the researchers, engineers, and mechanics of the sixties, we're running into huge design challenges and progress

was pretty slow. Money for autonomous systems was running low as well, as the automotive industry began to dedicate funds toward developing technology that would help mitigate human error. So, in other words, the tech to take human error out of the equation, that is, to make driverless cars was really complicated and beyond our ability to to realize at that time. So instead companies shifted to, well, human error

is going to happen. We can't take it out of the equation, so let's figure out how to have human error make the least negative impact possible. So for that reason we saw money instead being dedicated to the development of other technologies, stuff like seat belts, airbags, anti lock brake systems, and it would stay that way throughout the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. It really wasn't until the nineteen eighties that we started seeing serious work and experimentation

in driverless systems going again. For land based vehicles. Keep in mind, we had had things like you know, automated pilots for a long time, that was a relatively simple problem to solve compared to cars. Cars continued to be a difficult problem. Now. One of the engineers who did very important work in the nineteen eighties was a guy

named Ernst Dickman's from Germany. He ran a lab at bundes Verre University in Munich, Germany, and he started out as an aerospace engineer, so super smart guy, but he had ambitions to work on creating a way for vehicles to be able to see their surroundings and then react to them. His work would provide the foundation for tons

of innovation in dynamic computer vision. So in the nineteen eighties, he and his research team took a van that was manufactured by Mercedes Benz and began to customize it for driverless operation. Now, according to Dickmans, the university sort of just let him do this because he had a reputation of being brilliant, so they said, well, he's a smart guy, let him do what he does. So his team refitted this van with various systems that would be able to

control steering, acceleration, breaking. They also outfitted the vehicle with a computer system to process information and then sensors and cameras to gather information. So you have the sensors and cameras that bring in data, send it to a computer. The computer processes of the data and then sends commands to the various control systems to change the behavior of the vehicle. That's your basic concept behind the modern autonomous car.

So they incorporate technology that could detect the steering angle, break pressure, temperature, acceleration in both latitudinal and longitudinal directions and more. Uh. The camera was actually a pair of cameras mounted on swivels that could move along two axes in order to focus on specific points within the field of view. And they called the experiment v A M O R s V mores with a big V, big M,

big R. So alternating caps and lower case. Sticking a camera on a car is one thing, right, anyone can really do that. Teaching a computer to interpret images from that camera is another thing. Entirely and in the nineteen eighties and normally would take a computer several minutes to analyze a single image in any meaningful way, and even that was fairly limited compared to what we can do today. So to be useful in the driving scenario needed something

dramatically better than that. A computer would have to analyze many images per second, like ten images per second, not one image every ten minutes. So how do you fix that problem? That's an enormous challenge. Well, Dickmon's solution was to limit what the car was actually looking at, and so he took human eyesight as kind of a source of inspiration. You see, we're only really able to focus on a relatively small part of our vision. Everything else that's in our field of view is there, but it's

not really in focus. So we concentrate on whatever we have deemed to be important at that moment. It might be traffic ahead of us, or an incoming soccer ball kicked at our heads, or whatever it may be. So Dickmon's thought, hey, if I limit what the computer system is focused on and I let it ignore everything else, then I limit the amount of data that needs to

be processed and everything speeds up as a result. So he focused on finding shortcuts, such as programming the computer to only really look at stuff like road markings and to ignore other things. His work was dedicated to creating an early driverless system that could function on an empty stretch of road in the early days, so it wasn't really important to worry about other things that your average driver would have to worry about, like other vehicles or obstacles.

He was just concentrating on how can I make a system that will reliably follow a road without having a driver behind the wheel. He was building the foundational blocks at that time. Dackmans also sped up the computation process by limiting the need for the computer to save images, so it was really just analyzing and responding to each

image and then conveniently kind of forgetting about them. His techniques paid off with some early demonstrations, but they relied heavily on predictable and reliable components like those road markings. But if the road road markings were obscured or if they were absent, then the car would start to drift out of its lane. It didn't know quote unquote where it was supposed to be, and it might just continue to wander on whatever steering direction it was in before

it lost track of the road markings. And we're talking about a five ton van that his team had been testing, so that's potentially a real danger now. To be fair, they were testing it on unoccupied stretches of road, so at least the potential for a catastrophe was severely limited. They worked on like the unopened stretches of the Autobahn, for example, so it was more safe than what I'm making it sound like, especially since this was new road, so that the times when the road markings were not

detectable were rare. Dickman's work would become a part of a huge project much bigger than just autonomous cars, called the Eureka Framework, and Eureka is still around today, but this was sort of a a European Union kind of thing before there was a European Union, so it Eureka is a pan European research and development funding organization. It's meant to make sure that European nations remain competitive with other countries, namely countries like Japan and the United States.

For several years, Dickman's and his team were working on refining this driverless car technology, and that culminated in demonstrations that happened in nine and n one happened in Paris, France.

Dickman's had a huge challenge ahead of him. Daimler, with whom he was working wanted his team to equip passenger cars Daimler passenger cars with this driverless technology, and they intended for the team to have one of these cars navigate a three lane highway in public traffic, being able to make automated changes of lane and everything while carrying real, live human passengers, and his team would only have a couple of years to accomplish this goal before this demo.

After a brief consideration, Dick Wan's agreed to this challenge and he got to work and in October, his team picked up several important people at the Charles de Gaulle Airport and took them to a highway and then flipped the automobiles, not literally, but they flipped them to autonomous mode. And both of the cars that were used in this demonstration still had human drivers sitting in the driver's seat. They still had their hands on the wheel, but they

weren't putting any pressure on the wheel. They weren't turning the wheel. They just had their hands there in case something should happen, so they would occasionally take their hands away from the wheel to show that the cars were in fact driving themselves and that they were just there for safety sake. His team took an altered vehicle on an autonomous trip from Bavaria to Denmark that's more than

one thousand miles or seventeen hundred kilometers. The car reached speeds of up to a hundred nine miles per hour or a hundred seventy five kilometers per hour, so pretty impressive for an autonomous car. Now, despite these remarkable achievements, the technology was still too primitive for widespread use. It depended heavily on predictable factors. Anything outside of that was more of a challenge, particularly obstacle detection. They didn't build it in to be consumer friendly, so you had these

large computer systems that were inside the vehicles themselves. So it was an exciting advancement in autonomous car technology, but it wasn't far enough along for consumer or practical use, and so the world would have to wait a bit longer for tech to evolve to give autonomous cars another go. And this is related to a concept called AI winter,

which is tied into the idea of hype cycles. And AI winter is named that way because it's considered to be the funding equivalent of a nuclear winter, and it describes the time when there's a growing reluctance to fund AI projects. Generally speaking, this is how the pattern tends

to play out. You get some super smart people making some cool advances in artificial intelligence, and those advances may one day have practical application in numerous technologies, but early on we're talking about truly experimental work that's exciting but not necessarily practical at the moment. However, word of that work gets around. Maybe the company sponsoring the research releases a big press release that implies breakthroughs are closer than

they really are. Maybe the media picks up the story and they run with it. Enthusiasm among the general populace grows, and funding gets easier to secure. But as time passes and it becomes clear that in reality, these sort of things take a lot of time, and they take a lot of work, and they take a lot of money to make progress in fields like artificial intelligence, then people

get less enchanted. Typically, starting with the media, you get these stories that are the equivalent of where's my flying car? And the narrative changes from think about how the cool, how cool the future is going to be too? Why isn't the future here already? So enthusiasm for the field drops, and then funding drops and that in turn sets back the field even further, which delays any other big breakthroughs

in the process. Eventually, this part of the cycle comes to an end if you're lucky, and then enthusiasm can begin to build again. AI has experienced several of these cycles, and we've also seen the same thing in other fields as well. Virtual reality is a field that leaps to mine.

Dickman's work was really exciting, and it had even survived one AI winter in the late nineteen eighties uh and got all the way through the mid nineties, But at that time the funding was really becoming scarce and his work had really gone about as far as it could go based upon the sophistication of technology at the time, and so it kind of came to an end, and

his pioneer work was largely forgotten for many years. In our next episode, we'll look at the resurgence of interest in autonomous cars and how the US Department of Defense got involved. But for now we're going to conclude this. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff, or you've got any stories you want to share about autonomous cars, or maybe there's some guests I should have on the show. Anything like that, let me know.

Send me an email. The addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can go to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's our website with all the information about the show. In other ways to get in touch with me, don't forget to go to our store over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com, wh