EDITORIAL: Of moose and artificial intelligence

I know nothing more about artificial intelligence (AI) than what I read and what learned people tell me. I know it's supposed to bring new sophistication to all manner of processes and technologies, including automated driving. So, when a driverless robotaxi operated by GM's Cruise plowed into a road section of freshly poured cement in San Francisco, it raised questions about recently beleaguered Cruise. My mind wandered to AI, which many AV compute “stacks” are touted to leverage in abundance. Driving into wet cement isn't intelligent.

Did somebody need to train the vehicle's AV stack specifically to recognize wet cement? If that's how it works, I'd prefer not to bet my life on whether some fairly oddball happenstance (is the term ‘edge case’ not cool anymore?) had been accounted for in that particular version of the AD system's algorithm running that particular day.