The Future is Now

Driverless cars have been in the news lately, even I have seen them, and I don't watch a lot of news. It is my understanding that they are ready to roll, and efforts are being made to make them street legal. Some states already allow them on the road, but they require a human to be on board for safety reasons. Some state legislatures are considering removing the human requirement, but I don't know if any of them have passed a law to that effect yet. I'm pretty sure that driverless cars need to see the painted lines on the road that delineate traffic lanes, so I doubt that they would work on unpaved or snow covered roads. Some of the newer regular car models offer automatic braking systems and even automatic parallel parking. They also have an alarm that warns you if you start drifting out of your lane but, again, there have to be lane markings for that to work. I think they also warn you if you are following the car ahead of you too close, or if the guy behind you is following you too close. That must employ optics, and I don't know how well they work in a snowstorm or under dusty or muddy conditions. The driverless cars have similar technology but, instead of warning the driver, they make the necessary corrections automatically.

When I was school bus driver, there was some speculation among my colleagues about if we would ever be replaced by driverless busses. Most of us agreed that it was only a matter of time until the technology was developed. The hardest part would be finding a way to keep the kids under control, and I proposed a solution to that. We already had cameras on our busses to monitor the kids' behavior. All we would need to do is put in some kind of program that would deliver a mild electrical shock to unruly passengers. Well the first warning would be mild, but it would be incrementally increased for subsequent infractions.

As Ken mentioned, a computer is run by a flow of electrons. Doesn't the human brain work the same way? The only difference is that our brains are composed of living tissue, which can repair itself under certain circumstances by cellular mitosis. Computers and other machines can't do that, at least not yet.