Google Now Controls Your Car

A recent article on TechCrunch and other news sites has sparked my need to write another blog post.

Credit NY Times

Google, the Internet search engine and Internet hog, has released information pertaining to a car that can drive itself.

Before presenting some facts. Let me share my opinion.  I find a self driving car to be a good and bad thing.  Here are the good things.  I can finally text, eat, shave, put on makeup, change clothes, read and surf the Internet while driving. KEWL! All those previous distractions that previously killed people not paying attention to driving can now be done.  The bad part of this is that it is just another cue telling us how lazy we have become.  Almost every aspect of things these days can be automated or done over the Internet.  We become too reliable on these things working and when they don’t work we freak out.

Imagine this scenario: We are sitting in a car.  Not just any car, but one that can drive itself.  Okay, so, I am leaning back, I got my Justin Beiber blasting from my iPod and I’m talking on the phone to a friend.  I pay no attention to the road because I have put in a destination in the GPS and Google is taking me there.  Out of the blue, the car starts freaking out.  It reminds me of those movies where the main character is in a helicopter and alarms and huge red lights go off because something is wrong.  Imagine this in a car.  A car you have no control over.  Before you have time to turn the car to manual, you are already off the road, crashed into another car or dead.  It happens so quickly.  And whats to say that if everyone gets these fancy self driving cars, the speed limits might go up because most accidents could be prevented.  So, imagine again that we are losing control of the car, we have no time to react and we rear-end the car in front of us going 100 miles per hour, then the car behind us slams into our rear-end.  See the chain reaction?

This could end up being a great thing or a terrible mistake.  Don’t get me wrong.  It would be SO EPIC to have a car that drives itself.  But, personally, I HATE seeing us become too reliable on technology to do everything for us, right?  I see it every day.  I work in the technology field, and I rely on networks being up, sites being up and backup being consistent.  But…nothing can be up 100%.  And these cars are no exception.

Alright, are you tired of me ranting yet?  My hands hurt from typing. So, here, let me copy and paste some stuff from the Google Blog about these cars.

Credit TechCrunch

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. The work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History.

So. There you have it.  Google has unmanned cars. Will you jump on board and get one when they come out?

Man…what will they think of next?