No, this is not the Jetsons.
Google is actively working on, and testing on the roads, a car which drives itself. A human is always in the car, in case something goes wrong, but so far the cars have logged tens of thousands of hours.
So far, there has been only one accident: one of the Google cars was rear-ended. Google isn't hinting about its plans to monetize this.
Here are a few links with additional information:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370518,00.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/google-car/
Is this exciting? Does this creep you out?
I think it's cool. The ability to fuse several different technologies and collaborate across disciplines and come up with a working solution is pretty exciting. I hope 1) the research leads to some awesome future technologies and 2) some of the technologies worked out with this project can benefit us now.
ReplyDeleteThis is exciting. Let's be honest, we really take our own lives in our hands every time we get on the road nowadays. As much as we like to think we're good drivers, in general, we're not. Even a car that drove itself but has a 1% crash rate in a year is a better driver than a human.
ReplyDeleteBoth.
ReplyDeleteCool: Autopilot, more productive commutes, less traffic, better mpg due to less traffic, less road rage, etc.
Creepy: One more thing to get a virus/hacked/trojan'd/frozen/glitched, with a lot more at stake than a simple desktop computer.