Welcome to the humanization of self-driving cars

Can you love a self-driving car if it loves you back? 

It's a question that nagged at me as I considered the prevailing automotive trends at CES 2017: autonomy and artificial intelligence. These two cold and slightly abstract ideas sound worlds away from humanity. Cars that drive themselves are robots, and artificial intelligence is the opposite of your soft brain matter.

Which led me to a third, somewhat hidden, yet critically important car trend: Making all this technology seem less scary and more human.

The humanization of AI and autonomy can seem like a slightly desperate attempt to win over an unwilling public since people believe, irrationally, that self-driving cars are less safe than human drivers and that artificial intelligence will someday result in the singularity that kills us all. Read more...