SXSW was the site of the world premiere of Autonomy, a documentary exploring self-driving cars and what this technology means to society.
Autonomy documentary at SXSW digs into questions about self-driving cars SXSW was the site of the world premiere of Autonomy, a documentary exploring self-driving cars and what this technology means to society.
Teena Maddox:	Tell me about the film, Alex.
Alex Horwitz:	Autonomy is a feature documentary that explores self-driving cars, how we got where we are, the state of the tech now, but more importantly, questions about where it might go. It's not just a movie for car fans or for tech heads, it's really a mass audience kind of film. I think we're on the verge of a very big societal shift. I think that the development of self-driving technology is really gonna change things in fundamental ways about how we move through the world, how we interact with each other. I think it concerns all of us, so it's really a movie about getting everybody to pay attention to something I think is coming our way and giving them the questions that they need to be asking of themselves, each other, and other companies that make these things for us.
Teena Maddox:	What question do you get asked the most about autonomous vehicles?
Alex Horwitz:	The thing I get asked the most often is, "How scary are they? Are they really gonna kill us?" Some variation on that. I'm happy to report that getting in most of these machines, and I got into some consumer driver assistance cars and also some more heavily-automated research vehicles in the course of making the movie, getting into them is a very mundane experience. It's not a crazy roller coaster ride. It's just sort of another version of a thing we know, which is getting in something that takes you somewhere.
Teena Maddox:	In the making of the film, what surprised you most about autonomous vehicles?
Alex Horwitz:	I was so surprised by how far back the technology went and when it started. I had a sort of passing layman tech nerd's understanding that Google or DARPA, the Defense Department's advanced research initiatives, that they were starting stuff in like the late '90s into the early 2000s and that's where this came from and then the Google boom happened and now there's all this market competition. The idea for this goes back to da Vinci, who had ideas for a self-propelled cart, and the earliest reality of it was in the late '70s. The early '80s were the first actually functioning self-driving cars. There were precursors, too. Remote control full-size cars in the '20s and future highway systems were like a car was following an invisible track, so it looked driverless but wasn't actually.
Teena Maddox:	How do you think autonomy will change the future?
Alex Horwitz:	Well, this technology... I mean, the short answer is I don't know exactly how it will change the future, and I think anybody who gives you a definite version, they say, "It's gonna happen just like this and on such and such a date'', I think they can't possibly know that. Most of the people who have an idea are gonna have to be wrong because they have all these competing ideas about it. I think it's gonna play out very slowly over a long period of time. I think it's very likely that in the very near future you'll be on a trip somewhere and you'll be on a shuttle bus between terminals at an airport and you'll go, "Uh-oh, nobody's driving this thing", and then the next car you buy will have a lot of driver-assistant features. I think it's baby steps like that.