Month: December 2018

Self-driving cars – or Autos, as I hope we’ll call them – passed several important milestones in 2018, and they will pass several more in 2019. The big one came at the end of the year, on 5th December: Google’s Autos spin-out Waymo launched the world’s first commercial self-driving taxi service, open to citizens in Phoenix, Arizona, who are not employees of the company, and not bound by confidentiality agreements. This service, branded Waymo One, was an extension of the company’s EasyRider programme, which was launched back in April. In that programme, selected members of the public who were willing...

As usual, I made some forecasts this time last year about how AI would change, and how it would change us. It’s time to look back and see how those forecasts for 2018 panned out. The result: a 50% success rate, by my reckoning. Better than the previous year, but lots of room for improvement. Here are the forecasts, with my verdicts in italics. 1. Non-tech companies will work hard to deploy AI – and to be seen to be doing so. One consequence will be the growth of “insights-as-a-service”, where external consultants are hired to apply machine learning to...