I wasn’t looking for pearls of autonomous-car wisdom when I turned on
a recent episode of the Recode Decode podcast, and I certainly wasn’t expecting them from Ashton Kutcher. Yes, that Ashton Kutcher, the
dude who couldn’t find his car.
To be fair, despite having played one on TV and in movies, Kutcher is no dunce. After his acting career took off, he began making some pretty smart investments in tech and continues to do so. In his words, this has allowed him be “the dumbest person in the room” when that room is full of really smart people. He is now a partner in his own venture capital firm, so he’s paying attention to the changing tech landscape.
In the car sphere, Kutcher is an investor in Uber as well as Tesla (he and his wife Mila Kunis have been spotted in a Model X), and he says he’s a big fan of self-driving cars. Toward the end of his wide-ranging conversation with
Recode Decode host Kara Swisher, Kutcher outlines in very simple terms his argument for autonomous vehicles. “When one person gets in a car accident and they’re driving, the person that learned the lesson might be dead. When a self-driving car gets into an accident – which will happen – every car gets smarter.” The car discussion starts at 52:27.
To me, this is the best distillation of the pro-autonomous argument. There are definitely a lot of hurdles to get over before the theory becomes reality, and “every car gets smarter” might be an overstatement, but I’m ready for the change. It didn’t take an actor-turned-investor to sway me, but, somewhat surprisingly, I find myself in complete agreement with him.
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