Pete's Blog

This is too important to pass up linking to.

Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.

The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

And listen to how good it sounds:

Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption.

Don't be fooled, there is a "but," though.

But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today's personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.

The advantages above are compelling. But consider what would happen if all these robo-cars were networked together. You could near perfect estimates of when you would arrive at your destination because the route would be plugged in and the system would be aware of the intersection of the routes which other vehicles would be taking with your route. (It would only be "near perfect" because presumably other cars would leave after your departure modifying travel time.)

Either way, very cool.