Interviews: Ask Ray Kurzweil a question

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading authors, inventors, and futurists. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in the field of music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has given us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Comments

Autonomous ground vehicles

[kheldan]

Hi Ray,

On the subject of 'autonomous cars', I see many people here on Slashdot who think that they'll be designed with no manual controls for a human operator, and that you'll just give it instructions and off you go. I maintain that so-called 'autonomous vehicles' will always be designed with a full set of manual controls for a human operator, the ability to override the autonomous system without delay, and that furthermore human operators will always be required to be fully and completely educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured, because where the safety of human beings is concerned, the final 'backup system' must always be a human being, since any automated system can theoretically fail at any time. What is your opinion on this? Thanks for your time and consideration. :-)