A Driver-Less future awaits?

I told you So!

Sorry about that. However, twenty-five years ago I celebrated my 50th birthday by writing a full page article for a newspaper that covered the first fifty years of my life.  In hindsight it was an interesting thing to do because over that first fifty years there were monmentous things that had happened, including the start of World War Two and the Franco dictatorship here in Spain in the year of my birth. I feel a little arkward about that connection, but I really had nothing to do with either event.

Without doubt, the greatest thing to have happened during the first fifty years was the coming  of the computer and the digital age. That changed everything in a bloodless coup that continues to this day, and will affect life far into the future. I ended my essay by making a few predictions about the future, one of which was that the day was coming when we would no longer have to actually drive our cars. That was based on the fact that there were so many lives being lost on the roads, usually because somebody failed to do what they should have, or did something that they should not, that something had to be done to take the responsibility out of the hands of humans. In other words, humans were the principal problem, or so I thought.

Google has taken up that challenge and have advanced the science to such a degree that laws are being passed in anticipation of the day when it will all be so common place not to do the driving ourselves. However, at the time I made the prediction it did cross my mind to wonder just how could that possibly work in reality. I can imagine programming one's car to drive us between our homes and our place of work, or to other principal destinations. In real life that's not how we live. Now, I get in my car, and sometimes even I have no real idea of where I will go. Now I have the flexibility of changing my mind on a moment's notice, and driving to the exact location.

I think that perhaps the easy part of engineering a self drive car, especially one without steering wheel, may already have been done. Now how do we continue to move about with the degree of freedom we have become accostumed to?

Congratulations to Google, of all people for their advance in this field. I do wonder why it is Google rather than an auto manufacturer that is leading the way. Could it be that auto manufacturers know all too well about recalls for faults that in some cases have led to deaths, even though the vehicle was under the control of a human. I can see an experience that will go well, just so long as nothing will fail in the operating system. Assuming they got it right to begin with, we all know that as machines age they being to crash, just like my computer does when it has a mind to. But to have my machine crash while it's on my table is one thing.

We are taking another quantum step into a very brave new world. Who knows what awaits us?


Copyright (c) 2014  Eugene Carmichael