Autonocast

Jessie Singer's new book There Are No Accidents has made a big splash in the road safety community and far beyond, by interrogating a word that makes most people nod and move on: "accident." On this week's episode, Singer joins Alex, Kirsten and Ed to discuss how she became fascinated with the word, the realities she discovered behind its bland façade, and what it all means.

Ed's latest essay in the New York Times, calling into question the big batteries that have made EVs so popular among American consumers (who can afford them), sparks a wide-ranging discussion in this week's episode. From battery supply chains to American consumer preferences, and from road trips to home charging, almost every aspect of electrification comes together in this fascinating conversation.

Sometimes you just need to let it out and rant a bit, and this week Alex, Kirsten and Ed are each feeling the need to screed. Unsurprisingly a lot of this week's ranting is about Tesla, but the gang also found room in their harts to get ranty about other topics as well. So skip the blood pressure medication, eat something spicy and get ready to breath a little fire as we get fed up with things that really need to change in the mobility tech space.

The gang is back with another classic discussion episode, riffing on the latest and most important news from the mobility technology space. There's just one rule this time: no talking about Tesla. We'll be focusing on that topic next time around.

With the AV sector entering another round of turmoil, we are joined by two founders who lost their startups during previous periods of turmoil but have come back to the driving automation space. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, who previously appeared on The Autonocast following the failure of Starsky Robotics is back to discuss Polymath Robotics, his new "plug and play" off-road autonomy company. He is joined by Josh Hartung, formerly of Polysync and now the founder of Sygnal, which is Polymath's partner on the hardware side. Together they provide unique perspective on the ever-evolving driving automation space.

Safety is one of the words that comes up most often in discussions about autonomous vehicles, but not many people really understand what the word even means in this complex context. Nat Beuse, VP of Safety at Aurora not only has "the s word" in his job title, its a topic he's thought about and worked on for decades. He joins this week's show for a wide-ranging discussion of safety, public trust, and autonomous vehicles.

Sam Anthony made his first appearance on The Autonocast in 2018, when we discussed his pedestrian intent/prediction startup Perceptive Automata in episode #98. He returns to the show for his first interview since the collapse of that company to reflect on his experience as a founder in the space, his concerns about the sector more broadly, and much more.

Bibhrajit Halder has been a part of the autonomous driving technology space since the days of the DARPA Challenges, working on Caterpillar's early automated mining trucks before working at Ford, Apple and elsewhere. Now the founder and CEO of SafeAI, Halder is back in the mining and heavy construction space and he joins the show to share his perspective on the state of autonomous heavy equipment and its similarities and differences with the more widely-followed robotaxi space.

The gang is back together, and finally has the time to discuss NHTSA's release of ADAS and ADS crash data. We discuss the data, what it does and doesn't mean, and explore the challenges and paths forward for automated driving regulation.

With the internet abuzz over the firing of a Google engineer who came to believe that a company chatbot is sentient, AI expert and deep learning skeptic Gary Marcus joins Alex and Ed to discuss the state of artificial intelligence. From LaMDA's alleged sentience and the problems with the Turing Test to Gary's proposed bet with Elon Musk and AI's role in autonomous driving, this wide-ranging conversation explores some of the most interesting topics in technology.