After attending the1964 World’s Fair, the science-fiction
author Isaac Asimov wrote an essay in The New York Times imagining a visit to the World’s Fair
50 years in the future, in 2014. Among his predictions: “Much effort will be
put into the designing of vehicles with ‘robot-brains’—vehicles that can be set
for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without
interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.”
Asimov got some of the details wrong
(he thought the cars would ride suspended on compressed air), but most of his
prediction proved accurate: much effort is, indeed, now being put into the
design of robot cars, thanks largely to Google. Earlier this year, the company
revealed a prototype of a fully driverless car, an adorable machine without a
steering wheel or pedals that tooled around its campus in Mountain View,
California.
Google’s
achievement draws on the ideas of computer scientists, roboticists, and
automotive engineers who have been working on autonomous vehicles for decades.
And the goal is not just to realize our science-fiction dreams: driverless cars
might alleviate congestion, ease demand for parking, and reduce crashes, one of
the leading causes of death .
Still, the
Google car offers lessons about how science fiction can become fact. In a
sense, Google’s self-driving car is more of a parts-assembly project than it is
a dramatic new vision for human transport. The company’s real breakthrough was
bringing together researchers and the existing technologies that underlie their
effort—computer vision, digital mapping, and more. Perhaps this is what Asimov
overlooked in his vision of 2014: the future is less about technologies
themselves than it is about the organizations with the means and the will to
put them into practice.
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