On 7 November, the International Telecommunications Union announced the formation of a focus group called AI for Autonomous and Assisted Driving. It’s aim: to develop performance standards for artificial intelligence (AI) systems that control self-driving cars. (The ITU has come a long way since its 1865 founding as the International Telegraph Union, with a mandate to standardize the operations of telegraph services.)

ITU intends the standards to be “an equivalent of a Turing Test for AI on our roads,” says focus group chairman Bryn Balcombe of the Autonomous Drivers Alliance. A computer passes a Turing Test if it can fool a person into thinking it’s a human. The AI test is vital, he says, to assure that human drivers and the AI behind self-driving cars understand each other and predict each other’s behaviors and risks.
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