People should, very much, be concerned. There are a lot of questions we should be asking about self-driving cars (Will they be privately or publicly owned? Both? Will nonautonomous vehicles be banned? When? How will we secure them from hacking and viruses and malware and plain old-fashioned bugs? How can we preserve our location privacy? How will they operate in disaster and evacuation scenarios? How will they be insured? And purely in terms of Google, if it isn’t getting into the manufacturing business, and given that it doesn’t operate purely altruistically, how does it intend to turn a profit off of this highly expensive research project it has embarked on? What will it track? What will it monitor? What will it do inside those cute little cars?), because autonomous vehicles will become a pervasive technology and we should always interrogate things that will transform our society before, rather than after, the fact. Mat Honan at BuzzFeed
This is a long story — but good read — about the self-driving car and its possible adoption by society. Right now the self-driving car is just a lab experiment. A pet project that is increasingly becoming big. IT WILL BE the next big thing. But it will be THROUGH a SLOW revolution, one that grows on us slowly because while the technology is “almost” there (and almost might be a long distance away), society isn’t. What we’ll probably see is a generational transformation, where slowly technology will trickle down from these projects and will be adopted by everyday cars (that by then will be very futuristic!).