By: Robert Hof
January 26, 2016
Silicon Valley would just as soon government butt out, and nowhere is that more apparent today than in self-driving cars. Google GOOGL +0% and others have raked the California Department of Motor Vehicles over proposed regulations that would require autonomous cars to have a human driver in them.
But one developer of autonomous cars says that while that particular proposal isn’t so great, government has to have a big role in the development and rollout of what could be a fundamental change in transportation.
Andrew Ng, a former Google researcher, Stanford professor and now Silicon Valley-based chief scientist at the Chinese Internet giant Baidu , told an artificial intelligence conference in San Francisco today that autonomous car developers must work closely with government or face potentially catastrophic setbacks in their vision.