8 This Car Won't Drive Itself

The unreasonably effective data-driven approach works well enough for electronic search, for simple translation, and for simple navigation. Given enough training data, algorithms indeed will do a good job at a variety of mundane tasks, and human ingenuity usually fills in the blanks. With search, most of us by now have learned how to use increasingly complex or specific search terms (or at least synonyms) to find the specific web pages we're looking for when using a search box. Machine translation between languages is better than ever. It's still not as good as human translation, but human brains are magnificent at figuring out the meaning of garbled sentences. A stilted, awkward translation of a web page is usually all the casual web surfer needs. GPS systems that provide directions from point A to point B are terribly handy. They don't always give the best directions to the airport, if you ask any professional taxi or ride-share driver, but they will get you there and they will mostly show the traffic on the route for sufficiently busy areas.