Robot Cars!

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Okay, so it's not a flying car, but robot cars (autonomous vehicles) are starting to appear on the near horizon in a couple of recent announcements. Mr. "summoning the demon" himself, Elon Musk, announced this week that Tesla will provide a software update this summer for its Model S sedans that will enable them to function in "autopilot" mode while on highways.  Google's "director of self-driving cars," Chris Urmson, projects that fully autonomous cars will be available to the public and on the roads within the next five years, in time to ensure his now 11-year-old son won't have to take a driver's test. These are very bold predictions, and are probably taking a good chunk of the population, perhaps the vast majority, by surprise. Urmson's declaration was made at session 3 of TED 2015, and was accompanied there by more than a little discussion around artificial intelligence and some of the complicated technological, philosophical and ethical issues and topics that have been the focused interests of this blog.

But even just taking the topic of the decidedly un-super artificial intelligence of self-driving cars, one can easily see current technological capability on a collision course with our ability to regulate its development and / or revise our norms and laws to even accomodate it, as a quick review of the New York Times article on Musk's announcement will demonstrate. If we're getting stumped in legally dealing with auto-cars and Amazon's wished-for delivery drones, how much more difficulty will our legal and ethical systems have with artificial super intelligence? Here we are in 2015, very much at the base of one of Kurzweil's exponential S-curves and already the issues seem overwhelming.

Personally, all this reminds me of a recurring nightmare I had as a child in which our hulking Chevy family station wagon (the kind with the vomit-inducing rear-facing seat) would take off by itself with me strapped in the back, panicked as the car mumbled non-sensically back to me in response to my pleas that it stop and let me out. So, strap yourself in, kiddos, it's going to be a bumpy ride, and there's a fair to middlin' chance no one's going to stop and let us get out. 

The good news is that the demon cars look a lot more comfortable and luxurious than my family's 1970s Chevy station wagon. But, I'd bet everything I have that they'll still make little kids vomit:

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Robb Moore

Robb Moore is a southwest Virginia native, lives in Richmond, Virginia and works in higher education administration, advancement and information systems. With an undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Richmond and a graduate degree in History of Religions from the University of Chicago, specializing in Tibetan and South Asian religious traditions, Robb’s motivating interests lie at the intersection of religion, spirituality, human development and technology.