Kai-Fu Lee: Autonomous Vehicle Infrastructure

00:00:00.000 | (gentle music)

00:00:02.580 | - Do you think on the autonomous vehicle space,

00:00:10.400 | it's possible to solve the problem of full autonomy

00:00:16.340 | without significant investment in infrastructure?

00:00:19.240 | - Well, that's really hard to speculate.

00:00:22.600 | I think it's not a yes, no question,

00:00:25.160 | but how long does it take question?

00:00:28.120 | 15 years, 30 years, 45 years.

00:00:31.360 | Clearly with infrastructure augmentation,

00:00:35.160 | whether it's road, city, or whole city planning,

00:00:38.500 | building a new city,

00:00:39.680 | I'm sure that will accelerate the day of the L5.

00:00:44.520 | I'm not knowledgeable enough,

00:00:47.480 | and it's hard to predict even when we're knowledgeable

00:00:50.120 | because a lot of it is speculative.

00:00:52.260 | But in the US, I don't think people would consider

00:00:56.640 | building a new city the size of Chicago

00:00:59.440 | to make it the AI/autonomous city.

00:01:02.120 | There are smaller ones being built, I'm aware of that.

00:01:05.080 | But is infrastructure spend really impossible

00:01:08.200 | for US or Western countries?

00:01:09.900 | I don't think so.

00:01:11.920 | The US highway system was built.

00:01:15.120 | Was that during President Eisenhower or Kennedy?

00:01:18.160 | Eisenhower, yeah.

00:01:19.360 | So maybe historians can study

00:01:23.440 | how did President Eisenhower get the resources

00:01:26.480 | to build this massive infrastructure

00:01:28.980 | that surely gave US a tremendous amount of prosperity

00:01:33.760 | over the next decade, if not century.

00:01:52.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Kai-Fu Lee: Autonomous Vehicle Infrastructure | AI Podcast Clips