Technology is only as good as our understanding of it. When it comes to self-driving cars, words can kill. Automation ≠ autonomy, and the hype cycle conflating them is responsible for the gulf between expectations and reality, in which lives and millions of dollars will be lost until morality and common sense intersect with language. Reilly Brennan, founding general partner of Trucks Venture Capital and a lecturer at Stanford, joins the Autonocast—a podcast founded by automotive tech columnist, author and endurance driving record-holder Alex Roy, TechCrunch transportation reporter Kirsten Korosec, and Ed Niedermeyer, a mobility technology reporter and author of LUDICROUS, an upcoming book on the tragic hero tale of Tesla—to talk about why these words matter.

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