Karl Iagnemma

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.

Partnerships remain critical to nuTonomy's success, and our aim is to work with groups with whom we share strategic aims and core values. These are partners that are transparent, innovative, and are focused on putting autonomous fleets on the road.

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

We hope to get to the place where there are thousands of Peugeot cars on the road running nuTonomy software.

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?

It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition.

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.

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.

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.

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

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