It's hard to tell which Google project the world is more excited about--Google Glass(es) or Google's self-driving cars--but this frequent car-driver, anyway, can't wait for the latter.
(The Glasses sound cool, too, don't get me wrong.)
Google is making great progress with these cars: The cars have now been driven more than 300,000 miles, and there have been no accidents with a car under the computer's control. (There was a widely publicized fender-bender in 2011, when one of the Google cars crunched into the car ahead of it, but the human driver was driving.)
One of the insights that people often quickly have when they ride in these cars, according to people who have ridden in them, is that it's obvious the computer can be a vastly better driver than a human ever could be. With lasers and radar for eyes, the computer can monitor an extraordinary number of inputs and react much more quickly to surprises than a human ever could.
I have always assumed that there would be much excitement around the self-driving cars right up until the time that one killed someone. At that point, I assumed, the years of litigation and liability arguments would make the technology so expensive as to be impractical for normal use....
No comments:
Post a Comment