"Following news the search giant has been quietly testing driverless cars, futurist Paul Saffo reveals what Google has in mind—and how soon you’ll be riding shotgun with a robot. Just when we think Google has run out of surprises, we learn from John Markoff at The New York Times that a small team of Google engineers has been quietly running robots on our highways. Not just one or two robots sneaking a few miles down a lonely country road late at night, but eight autonomous vehicles traveling more than 140,000 miles in the last year on everything from freeways to traffic-clogged downtown districts. I have viewed the route maps for several of these trips and can attest to the fact that Google’s car-bots have confidently traversed roads that would leave many drivers white-knuckled, from San Francisco’s pretzel-twisty Lombard Street to Big Sur’s narrow, cliff-hugging Highway One."
Read on.
