Friday, 30 May 2014

Google’s driverless cars


Although, a concept of driverless cars has been known for many decades, it has never been come true until now.  

According to ‘Where Google trains its drivers not to drive’, today Google announced plans to start building its own self-driving cars with a cute smiling look.

I like that Google decided to put a steering wheel and pedals in its cars because of a safety reason. In an emergency, technology may not be able to figure out a right move as good as humans.

Many old movies about future have scenes that cars speak with passenger and automatically drive. For example, in The 6th day, a movie from year 2000 about human clones starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, there are many scenes that show the auto drive car.  

There are many supports that technologies in movies and TV series have led to technologies in the real world. Star Trek is an obvious example. In 1960s, mobile phones are used in the Star Trek 30 years before they were well known. In addition, a universal translator and video conference technologies are presented in the series before someone
invented them. Google glass, which is first released in the market last month, also has the same concept as a glass that Star Trek introduced decades ago. For more examples, let’s look at Back to the future II, a movie in 1989 telling a story of its main characters traveled in time to October 2015. There were many technologies in the film that became real such as digital camera focusing on subject, making payment and unlocking a door with finger print screening, and using voice order to control devices.   

It is reasonable that when the technologies were presented on screen, a lot of people wanted them to be real and tried to invent them. I believe that in the near future, I will see a computer showing results in the air which can be controlled by touching the unreal screen in the air, as there were in Iron man and Minority report.

What technology do you want it to become a reality?       
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Reference

Stewart, Jack (2014, May 28). Where Google trains its drivers not to drive. BBC Future. Retrieved May 30, 2014 from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140527-inside-googles-robot-car-lab
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1 comment:

  1. Peter.AUA2 June 2014 at 20:25

    I'm looking forward to driverless cars. They will prompt me to start not driving all over again.

    I expect them to solve the traffic jam problems. They can function as vast numbers of taxis, where the nearest available one is called up by a tap on a smart phone app. We can all have a personal vehicle when we need it, for as long as we need, with no need to permanently own a car. And cheap, if governments don't interfere to control and push prices up to unjustly benefit monopolists.

    To make driverless taxis more attractive, most lanes on every road can be set aside for them, leaving those who, for some reason (what?) want to stick with their own personal car, to chug along in jams as before.

    Actually, I suspect that the excellent safety record of driverless cars when compared to human controlled cars, will make insurance much more expensive for human drivers, and governments will be pressured to make human driving illegal in most situations, unless it's restricted to areas where everyone is doing the same - the lanes on the road set aside for old fashioned self-driving by accident prone human beings.

    But I can't imagine the future beyond about the next five years - our technology is evolving so quickly these days.

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