- By Dan Veaner
- Opinions
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The first reported that Google CEO Sergey Brin announced a driverless car prototype Tuesday at the Re/code Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The new prototype has no steering wheel or driver pedals. It just has an on/off switch. The two-seater looks like a combination of a Volkswagen Beetle and a happy face, evidently to make a car with no driver seem non-threatening and safe, and warm and fuzzy.
This video shows Google's driverless car prototype in action |
The second article chronicled German researchers who are building a plane controlled by brain waves. It showed a picture of a pilot wearing a crazy looking hood with wires and sensors. In simulator tests seven subjects with varying levels of flying experience, including one with none, were able to control the simulator with accuracy needed to pass a modern pilot's licence test.
The third article was about a Star-Trek-like universal translator, developed by Microsoft and Skype. 'Skype Translator' can translate German and English in real time, allowing two people to speak and hear each other in their own languages. The companies say more languages will be added, and a beta app will be released for Windows 8 before the end of 2014.
Who would have thought twenty years ago that smart phones would exist except on the wrist of Dick Tracy? Yet many of us carry these tiny computers everywhere we go. We call them phones, but that is only one of the thousands of things they can be. I just got a thermometer that plugs into my phone and not only takes accurate readings orally, anally or under an arm, but stores the readings in a profile to track my health.
A robotically tuning guitar? How do you tuna fish? |
This stuff is now, and it is part of every crevice of our lives. For example I just read Gibson has come out with guitars that tune themselves robotically. And there is an egg tray on the market that will wirelessly tell you via your smart phone, whether you are out of eggs, and whether any of the remaining eggs have gone bad. And these mind-controlled exoskeletons that are helping paralyzed people walk and run.
If you doubt the extent to which our lives are changing, have a look at this video of children trying to figure out how a rotary phone (which we had when I was a kid). They can't believe that people actually talked to each other on phones (no texting) and that you had to go to your house in order to actually use the phone. It's cute, but it's also a bit depressing.
Nobody talks about whether all these advances are better. In general I would say that my smart phone has made my life better in many ways, but the phone part is not one of them. When my family had a hard wired rotary phone in the days when AT&T was the only phone company, you could always hear the person on the other end of the line and understand what they were saying. How is typing short messages on a minuscule virtual keyboard a better way to communicate than just holding a thing to your head and talking and listening? Yet we need texting, because cell phone connections are often so lousy you can't tell what the other person is saying. And nobody is talking about ET's heart attack when he got his phone bill for that famous call home.
Google is lauding driverless car technology as safer than relying on human drivers. I dunno... I can imagine a pretty radical pileup if a car's computer freezes or reboots itself on Interstate 90. Or if the passenger crosses his or her legs while enjoying the latest jackie Collins novel and accidentally kicks the on/off switch. Some critics are already arguing that if drivers need to take over from the computer for some reason they will have forgotten how to drive from being out of practice.
Still these new innovations can't be all bad. After all, ten years ago who would have said Lansing would have its own local online newspaper?
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