in the world die in road traffic accidents.

And many of those fatalities are caused by us,

by the mistakes we make as drivers.

But there's a solution.

Okay we're ready.

Okay, engaging.

And it's to relinquish

control of the wheel to a computer.

We've dreamed about it for decades,

and now we finally have the technology to get us very close.

The rest is up to these two.

They're teaching autonomous cars how to drive.

My name is Daniela Landey.

My name is Steven Lin.

And we're autonomous vehicle operators.

Daniela and Steven work for

a start-up called Aurora,

and they're part of a team of about two dozen specialists

who drive the company's fleet of self-driving cars

on the roads of Pittsburgh, Palo Alto,

and here in San Francisco.

Aurora's software learns from their expert example,

so to get this job, they had to

be excellent drivers to start with.

And to become even better,

they then went through six weeks of training.

Today, I'm here at the Sonoma Raceway

to experience just a small part of that training

and to see if I have what it takes to do this job

before I hop in the back

of a self-driving vehicle myself.

Nobody actually, in my opinion, knows how to drive a car.

You all drove here today,

so I'm not, don't, I'm not bashing you, right.

But do you know how to handle a car

when a car does something out of the ordinary?

That's what today's all about.

All right, let's go have fun.

Among the first drills was emergency braking.

All right, Daniela, come on down.

Since Steven and Daniela have already

completed this kind of training,

they're here today to brush up on what they already know.

Excellent.

And to show me how it's done.

Good job!

All right, next car, full throttle all the way to me,

don't brake early.

Full throttle, go, go, go, go, keep going

guide the brake.

Go, go, go, go, go, stop

And then it was time for a series

of high speed lane changes.

Godspeed.

Imagine you are forced to suddenly swerve on the highway

to avoid an obstacle?

Get that brake timing down.

Release, release, release, there ya go, awesome.

All right, here go, 50 right lane.

50, right.

50, right lane, that's not 50.

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go

And turn.

And for an especially tricky challenge,

the instructors had us recover from a skid.

Show off.

Oh, oop, Oh my God! Ah!

Let's just say it's a good thing

no self driving car will be learning from me anytime soon.

The next week I went to go see Daniela and Steven

at their office in San Francisco.

Come on in, welcome.

Founded in 2017, by engineers

from the early autonomous vehicle projects

at Google, Tesla, and Uber,

Aurora is developing technology to power self driving cars.

And so far, it's signed deals with automakers

including Volkswagen and Hyundai.

Daniela and Steven have invited me here

to be the very first reporter to sit in the back

of one of their self driving cars.

It says ready up here.

Ready?

We are ready.

Okay, we're engaging.

Now we are in auto.

Oh, whoa.

Yep.

Tracking the car ahead, stopping.

So the car right now is stopping on its own?

It's stopping on its own, its thinking,

its making decisions.

This is really cool,

getting to see what the car sees.

[Steven And Daniela] Yeah.

What are these yellow boxes?

The yellow box right there is,

that's a bicyclist. That's a cyclist,

oh cool.

So the car recognizes that this is a bicyclist

and if you see these kinda blue boxes,

that means the vehicle recognizes it as a vehicle.

And the red boxes are pedestrians?

Pedestrians, exact, you're hired.

Aurora does a lot of its testing virtually

within the safety of a simulation.

But to teach the system how to react

to all the crazy things that happen in a city

as nuts as San Francisco,

you need to take it out in real life.

What's the biggest misconception

your friends have about your job?

That we just sit behind a wheel and do nothing.

Auroroa's operators take turns

as pilots and copilots of the cars.

Today, Daniela is the pilot.

I'm looking at everything, I'm thinking about everything,

planning for everything.

If the car decides to bail out in the middle

of the intersection, what am I gonna do?

See how her hands are ever so slightly

touching the wheel?

Her foot hovering just above the brake?

She's ready to take over in a fraction of a second,

whenever she or the car senses she needs to.

And that's a bailout.

Oh.

And I took over.

The car saw something that was not accurate

and it gives me control.

As Daniela's copilot today,

Steven's job is to keep an eye on his laptop

that shows what the car see.

Getting a false positive

on the left, flickering.

He alerts Daniela to the things

she might not see with the naked eye

and prepares her for what the self-driving system

is about to do next.

It's gonna want a left lane change.

Okay.

As the copilot, Steven is also taking notes

on when Daniela needs to intervene.

Later on the engineers will pour over this data,

so they can figure out what went wrong.

This is all part of the painstaking process

of teaching a computer how to drive.

It's brain, it's a little baby brain that learns--

That you are nurturing, step by step.

Um, hm, yeah, I call all of them my baby robots.

I swear, because we're teaching them.

Each operator at Aurora has responsibilities

outside the car, too.

Steven assigns operators to drive the routes

that engineers needs them to drive.

And Daniela liaises with the team that builds the maps

the vehicles rely on.

Because driverless technology is so new,

operators come from all kinds of backgrounds.

And the job doesn't require a special degree,

or prior industry experience.

Daniela was a surgeon in Mexico

and worked for the fire service

after she move to the states.

And Steven was a military police sergeant in the army.

Operators at Aurora earn about $30-$40 an hour.

And as full time employees their benefits

include health care, equity,

and fitting of the tech company stereotype, free lunch.

You know you guys are teaching cars how to drive

and if you're successful that is going

to replace a lot of jobs out there,

Uber drivers for example.

That's millions of jobs, how do you think about that?

We've had interactions where people tell us

you're taking jobs away from people,

but what I like to say is,

imagine you're living in a world

where you don't have to worry about drunk drivers,

you don't have to worry about people

who are texting on their phones, and, you know,

just being reckless.

Yeah, we might lose some cab driver jobs

But will it save millions of lives?

Right.

In the long run.

In the future, our cars aren't going

to need the kind of intensive teaching

that Steven and Daniela are doing now.

But when it comes to the most high stakes

life or death responsibilities

that we'll soon entrust to computers,

we're gonna want human experts

to be vetting those capabilities for a very long time.

We're still gonna be testing, for perhaps new features,

new avenues, new ways to use self-driving technology

in other type of vehicles, so I don't believe

this job will disappear anytime soon.