MACHINE LEARNING: Why AI Makes It Hard to Prove That Self-Driving Cars Are Safe.

Traditionally, he says, engineers write computer code to meet requirements and then perform tests to check that it met them.

But with machine learning, which lets a computer grasp complexity—for example, processing images taken at different hours of the day, yet still identifying important objects in a scene like crosswalks and stop signs—the process is not so straightforward. According to Koopman, “The [difficult thing about] machine learning is that you don’t know how to write the requirements.”

How do you prove that human drivers are safe?