Toastmasters: Prepared Speech — Self-Driving Cars

Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash

Joke

“If Apple came out with a self-driving car, would it have Windows?”

Definition

Self-driving cars can also be called autonomous cars. They are supposed to be self-aware and capable of making their own choices. You could say hey Jarvis, take me to work. It should theoretically follow orders and take you to the right place. Now it would be funny if it takes you to the beach instead.

Question

Now that we know what the intention of autonomous cars is. You may be questioning its existence. Sai, why do we need autonomous cars in the first place, what good do they do?

Purpose

We need autonomous cars because government data identifies that driver behavior or error makes up 94 percent of crashes. Autonomous cars are here to help reduce driver error.

Current day thinking

Now you may be like okay that’s a great thing to do. But Sai, why do I hear in the news for example — a self-driving car automatically stopped on the highway which caused 8 cars to crash behind it? There is a stat that 400 car crashes in the last 11 months were caused by vehicles with partially automated driver assist systems. 273 of them were Teslas.

Here is the problem

If the purpose of autonomous cars is to reduce the number of driver errors. Why is it making errors? The answer is that algorithms that make decisions are not up to the level yet and it will take some time. It will take longer because our roads are super complicated and every driver on the road is different. Now we are asking a computer to make millisecond decisions — a computer that has no personality, and is tough to learn human behavior/language. It will do as well as the data it was trained with.

Ending

There is a quote that says We don’t claim that the cars are going to be perfect. Our goal is to beat human drivers.” — Sergey Brin

My opinion on autonomous vehicles is that it's too early to depend on the tech. While we do see a future where this is highly possible, the training model needs to be continually developed and needs heavy testing before public release.

Feedback Received

• Started off with a nice joke.
• Confident
• Calm composed
• Good camera setting
• Pristine Speech
• Practice recording through the phone — listen to your own speech
• Add vocal variety
• There were some places you were a loss for words