S. Korea Wants to Take Self-Driving AI From Test Roads to the Real World

Ah, marvellous. South Korea's science and technology ministers have gathered — because nothing says 'road safety' like a meeting of people whose idea of a crash test is a poorly formatted Excel chart — and approved a 'testing and commercialization road map' for autonomous-driving AI. The plan calls for increasing the scale and geographic reach of trials, which is a polite way of saying they want to let self-driving cars loose on the same roads where Korean drivers treat lane markings as decorative urban art. You know the real world has won the moment a minister says 'scale and geographic reach' instead of 'we'll test it until it stops trying to merge into a bus.'

And what a beautiful road map it is: a document that presumably contains lots of arrows and boxes but not the one thing every Korean pedestrian actually cares about — how the AI handles a jaywalker in Gangnam at 11pm. The ministers have decided that the path to commercialization runs straight through expanding trials from a few controlled test roads to, eventually, everywhere. This is as if the government said, 'The parachute worked fine on the tower; now let's try it from a plane with the instruction booklet written in Martian.' The article doesn't mention any new safety regulations, of course — because why let standards get in the way of a good road map?

Still, one must admire the sheer optimism of a nation that looks at the chaos of Seoul traffic and thinks, 'Yes, let's increase the scale of AI trials here.' The bright side: when the AI eventually takes over, it will have had the most thorough training in defensive driving known to humankind — assuming it survives its own road test. The science and technology ministers have done their bit; now it's up to the self-driving cars to prove they can navigate a world where 'test road' is just the name of a road, not a promise. And here's to the insurance industry, which is about to have an absolute field day.