Despite the sci-fi trappings, the concept isn’t that far-fetched: Google Ventures is already a multimillion-dollar investor in Uber. “We look to Google and Google Ventures for the strategic connectivity to their product initiatives alongside the expertise that comes with evangelizing new technology with governments and regulatory bodies around the world,” read Uber’s posting on the matter. All that corporate-speak aside, it’s clear that executives at both companies are interested in exploring where their respective strategies overlap—and that raises the prospect of a future in which self-driving cars from a plethora of companies execute a variety of tasks, from taxiing people to delivering goods.
In theory, this is good for society: fleets of sensor-studded vehicles send tons of data back to Google and other technology companies, which analyze that information and use it to make the vehicles safer and more efficient—a virtuous cycle, to be sure, but one that also poses risks for a certain segment of society.
As everybody knows by now, computers married with industrial processes have yielded spectacular results for the world, at least from a cost-of-labor standpoint. A computer-guided robot can perform the same precise action over and over and over and over, contributing to the creation of perfectly formed products. Automated assembly lines churn out hundreds or even thousands of units of whatever per day, without fatigue and relatively few big errors. These manufacturing techniques were refined over the course of decades, and gradually improved with the addition of increasingly sophisticated hardware and software—another virtuous cycle.
Read full article here: http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/googles-self-driving-car-is-more-disruptive-than-you-think/
Read full article here: http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/googles-self-driving-car-is-more-disruptive-than-you-think/