The Google Self Driving Car Project
The Google Self Driving Car Project
Just in case you have not heard about this new technology here is a brief description of the new Google Self Driving Cars.
Google in an effort to automate even more aspects of daily life have been developing “Self Driving Cars”. At the moment they are still in development and programing phase but it looks like they are making genuine progress. It is interesting that this could one day in my lifetime become a global reality. Imagine how this might free people who are restricted with an inability to drive like blind people, elderly or those who have any type of condition or disease that does not allow them to drive. I myself love driving so I would likely miss it but for those who don’t like driving or can’t for any reason this would be a wonderful solution.
At the moment it seems that they have a few of these vehicles on the road for testing and programing. There are so many variables when you are talking about driving. Would it handle all these variables better than a human? That’s a great question, in this video below you will see some of the processes and programing ideas that are leading the way in the Google Self Driving Car Project. I imagine that it would be much easier to predict things if there were no human drivers on the road and all the vehicles were being operated under the same program as errors made by people would be hard to predict.
Here is a brief 2 min video on how things are progressing as of 2014. It’s worth a look if you’re into seeing the logistics of how it handles certain situations.
When it comes to the never-ending snowball of technology there should be skepticism on anything that removes “you” the brain behind the operation and replaces your thought with that of a computer. You have to realize however that 90% of driving deaths are at the fault of the human operator. Anyone would be interested in technology that could make our roads 90% safer. Most people would want to be very certain that the technology could be trusted. Would you have a manual override? How would it handle a blown tire on a busy highway? I would like to think that I might make a better decision under pressure than a computer but would I? How good are these programs?
There are so many questions that Google Self-Driving Cars will face but if they could reduce road injuries or fatalities by 90% how could you say no?