Autonomous Vehicles

MakeFive.com

You have probably heard about the Google driverless cars or the Audi that raced up Pikes Peak without a driver. 
Autonomous vehicle technology is one of my current obsessions. I have been following it for a while and strongly feel that it is the future. AVs will solve our congestion and public travel problems better than anything else. We are not going to erase individualism and freedom from American culture. And since this is not China, we can't re-purpose the millions of acres of private land that it would take to build a modern national mass transit system. AVs can turn the existing national highway infrastructure into an efficient people moving system that fits the American lifestyle.



That being said, Wired has an excellent series on the topic worth checking out. Here is a sample:

We are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement on a busy public highway—a stunning demonstration of just how quickly, and dramatically, the horizon of possibility is expanding. “This car can do 75 mph,” Urmson says. “It can track pedestrians and cyclists. It understands traffic lights. It can merge at highway speeds.” In short, after almost a hundred years in which driving has remained essentially unchanged, it has been completely transformed in just the past half decade.

 P.S. This paragraph reminded me of P.W. Singer's book Wired for War in which he describes Accelerating Change:

Historic data shows exponential patterns beyond just Moore's Law... the annual number of "important discoveries" as determined by the Patent Office has doubled every twenty years since 1750...in antiquity... it would take a Greek hoplite and five hundred of his buddies to cover an area the size of a football field...by the time of the American Civil War weapons had gained such power, distance, and lethality that roughly twenty soldiers would fight in that same space... by World War I, it was just two soldiers... by World War II, a single soldier occupied roughly five football fields... in Iraq in 2008, the ratio of personnel to territory was roughly 780 football fields per one U.S. soldier. (p112)

The wheel first appeared in Sumer around 8500 B.C. but it took roughly three thousand years for the wheel to be commonly used... By the eithteenth century, communication and transportation had sped up to the point that it took only just under a century for the steam engine to become similarly widespread... The internet took roughly a decade to be widely adopted... and now... an invention is shared across the world in nanoseconds. (p114)

The current rates of doubling mean that we experienced more technological change in the 1990s than in the entire ninety years beforehand. (p115)