Everybody likes driving through scenic, winding roads. It's hard to find people who like sitting in traffic in cities.

All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It's not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn't develop this technology.

Building cars is highly specialized, it's hard, and it's capital intensive.

If you're a large organization, you may welcome a bit of regulation to keep the small guys out.

Singapore is likely to be the world's first market for self-driving cars. Commercial services around self-driving vehicles will likely be in Singapore before they are anywhere else in the world.

If you develop a technology that only works in a single city, where it's kind of optimized for a specific city, that's not really that exciting.

In Singapore, drivers generally obey the rules, but the attitude around pedestrians is actually quite different. It's culturally different. People drive safely, but it's not the same deference shown to pedestrians.

Writing, for me at least, takes a lot of concentrated work and effort. It takes dedication and the willingness to do the work even when that feeling of inspiration isn't there at all.

You have to force yourself to give up and to move onto something else. That's the way you grow as a writer, by trying new things and tackling new subjects. But it's difficult. There's part of you that doesn't want to give up because you realize that, in some way, you're surrendering.

When I first started writing, I didn't write about scientists at all. I think I wanted a break from that part of my world.

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

Conflating thought experiments with reality could slow the deployment of AVs that are reliably safer than human drivers.

We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks.

It's challenging to drive in a way that's human-like.

There's so much rich interaction with drivers that we take for granted. It seems like a mundane thing, but it turns out to be a really big deal.

It's a cultural question. Will people want to share cars?

Cities like New Delhi for example, where traffic is dense and it's a more fluid driving environment, that's hard for self-driving technology to deal with.

We want to develop a technology that's globally applicable, that's not customized for a specific city or a specific country. The only way to do that is to be able to test every day in a diversity of environments.

It's important for automated cars to be able to drive in a human-like fashion - and that does mean adapting to the driving patterns around you.

From a societal aspect, when you are impatient behind a driverless car and there's no one to listen to your beeping horn, what are people going to do? How are they going to take out their aggression?

Surveys show that while many people are open to the idea of an autonomous vehicle driving them to work, far fewer are willing to let one drive their child to soccer practice.

In the automotive domain, generally speaking, when you look at consortium models, the groups that have leading technology are less incentivized to contribute to the consortia.

When you contribute to an open-source or a shared solution, and there's a liability issue that arises from the use of that solution, how will this be tracked back to individual contributors?

My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It's always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.

I usually have a general idea of where the story is going, but I try to avoid planning in too much detail. The best endings are those that emerge only after I've thought long and hard about the various ways the story might end. Then I choose the ending that seems surprising yet somehow inevitable.

The thing about stories is that they almost always find their way onto the page, even if it takes a while.

My parents encouraged me to be creative by being creative and interesting people themselves, and by making it clear how highly they valued creativity in others.

Our first iteration of driverless cars kind of drove like trolleys on a track. This uncanny notion threw people off.

The fundamental problem here is that humans and automation approach the driving task differently.

There's a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads. When you take lightweight vehicles and granular soils of varying composition, it's a very complex modeling process.