Every year, more than a million people
in the world die in road traffic accidents.
And many of those fatalities are caused by us,
by the mistakes we make as drivers.
But there's a solution.
Okay we're ready.
Okay, engaging.
And it's to relinquish
control of the wheel to a computer.
We've dreamed about it for decades,
and now we finally have the technology to get us very close.
The rest is up to these two.
They're teaching autonomous cars how to drive.
My name is Daniela Landey.
My name is Steven Lin.
And we're autonomous vehicle operators.
Daniela and Steven work for
a start-up called Aurora,
and they're part of a team of about two dozen specialists
who drive the company's fleet of self-driving cars
on the roads of Pittsburgh, Palo Alto,
and here in San Francisco.
Aurora's software learns from their expert example,
so to get this job, they had to
be excellent drivers to start with.
And to become even better,
they then went through six weeks of training.
Today, I'm here at the Sonoma Raceway
to experience just a small part of that training
and to see if I have what it takes to do this job
before I hop in the back
of a self-driving vehicle myself.
Nobody actually, in my opinion, knows how to drive a car.
You all drove here today,
so I'm not, don't, I'm not bashing you, right.
But do you know how to handle a car
when a car does something out of the ordinary?
That's what today's all about.
All right, let's go have fun.
Among the first drills was emergency braking.
All right, Daniela, come on down.
Since Steven and Daniela have already
completed this kind of training,
they're here today to brush up on what they already know.
Excellent.
And to show me how it's done.
Good job!
All right, next car, full throttle all the way to me,
don't brake early.
Full throttle, go, go, go, go, keep going
guide the brake.
Go, go, go, go, go, stop
And then it was time for a series
of high speed lane changes.
Godspeed.
Imagine you are forced to suddenly swerve on the highway
to avoid an obstacle?
Get that brake timing down.
Release, release, release, there ya go, awesome.
All right, here go, 50 right lane.
50, right.
50, right lane, that's not 50.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go
And turn.
And for an especially tricky challenge,
the instructors had us recover from a skid.
Show off.
Oh, oop, Oh my God! Ah!
Let's just say it's a good thing
no self driving car will be learning from me anytime soon.
The next week I went to go see Daniela and Steven
at their office in San Francisco.
Come on in, welcome.
Founded in 2017, by engineers
from the early autonomous vehicle projects
at Google, Tesla, and Uber,
Aurora is developing technology to power self driving cars.
And so far, it's signed deals with automakers
including Volkswagen and Hyundai.
Daniela and Steven have invited me here
to be the very first reporter to sit in the back
of one of their self driving cars.
It says ready up here.
Ready?
We are ready.
Okay, we're engaging.
Now we are in auto.
Oh, whoa.
Yep.
Tracking the car ahead, stopping.
So the car right now is stopping on its own?
It's stopping on its own, its thinking,
its making decisions.
This is really cool,
getting to see what the car sees.
[Steven And Daniela] Yeah.
What are these yellow boxes?
The yellow box right there is,
that's a bicyclist. That's a cyclist,
oh cool.
So the car recognizes that this is a bicyclist
and if you see these kinda blue boxes,
that means the vehicle recognizes it as a vehicle.
And the red boxes are pedestrians?
Pedestrians, exact, you're hired.
Aurora does a lot of its testing virtually
within the safety of a simulation.
But to teach the system how to react
to all the crazy things that happen in a city
as nuts as San Francisco,
you need to take it out in real life.
What's the biggest misconception
your friends have about your job?
That we just sit behind a wheel and do nothing.
Auroroa's operators take turns
as pilots and copilots of the cars.
Today, Daniela is the pilot.
I'm looking at everything, I'm thinking about everything,
planning for everything.
If the car decides to bail out in the middle
of the intersection, what am I gonna do?
See how her hands are ever so slightly
touching the wheel?
Her foot hovering just above the brake?
She's ready to take over in a fraction of a second,
whenever she or the car senses she needs to.
And that's a bailout.
Oh.
And I took over.
The car saw something that was not accurate
and it gives me control.
As Daniela's copilot today,
Steven's job is to keep an eye on his laptop
that shows what the car see.
Getting a false positive
on the left, flickering.
He alerts Daniela to the things
she might not see with the naked eye
and prepares her for what the self-driving system
is about to do next.
It's gonna want a left lane change.
Okay.
As the copilot, Steven is also taking notes
on when Daniela needs to intervene.
Later on the engineers will pour over this data,
so they can figure out what went wrong.
This is all part of the painstaking process
of teaching a computer how to drive.
It's brain, it's a little baby brain that learns--
That you are nurturing, step by step.
Um, hm, yeah, I call all of them my baby robots.
I swear, because we're teaching them.
Each operator at Aurora has responsibilities
outside the car, too.
Steven assigns operators to drive the routes
that engineers needs them to drive.
And Daniela liaises with the team that builds the maps
the vehicles rely on.
Because driverless technology is so new,
operators come from all kinds of backgrounds.
And the job doesn't require a special degree,
or prior industry experience.
Daniela was a surgeon in Mexico
and worked for the fire service
after she move to the states.
And Steven was a military police sergeant in the army.
Operators at Aurora earn about $30-$40 an hour.
And as full time employees their benefits
include health care, equity,
and fitting of the tech company stereotype, free lunch.
You know you guys are teaching cars how to drive
and if you're successful that is going
to replace a lot of jobs out there,
Uber drivers for example.
That's millions of jobs, how do you think about that?
We've had interactions where people tell us
you're taking jobs away from people,
but what I like to say is,
imagine you're living in a world
where you don't have to worry about drunk drivers,
you don't have to worry about people
who are texting on their phones, and, you know,
just being reckless.
Yeah, we might lose some cab driver jobs
But will it save millions of lives?
Right.
In the long run.
In the future, our cars aren't going
to need the kind of intensive teaching
that Steven and Daniela are doing now.
But when it comes to the most high stakes
life or death responsibilities
that we'll soon entrust to computers,
we're gonna want human experts
to be vetting those capabilities for a very long time.
We're still gonna be testing, for perhaps new features,
new avenues, new ways to use self-driving technology
in other type of vehicles, so I don't believe
this job will disappear anytime soon.