Driverless Cars Scare People. Toyota Thinks It Has a Better Idea. – Slate Magazine

Rather than build self-driving cars, Toyota’s stated goal is to build “intelligent” cars that augment rather than usurp their human drivers. The cars of the future, Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory told me, could function as “guardian angels” that quietly keep tabs on what we’re doing behind the wheel—and step in to save us when we screw up. For instance, they might learn to anticipate obstacles in the roadway, like a children’s ball bouncing into the street, and brake automatically to avoid them. Or they might sense when we’re growing tired behind the wheel and alert us before we fall asleep.