The New Aesthetic

“It’s a Monday, midday, and we are heading north on California Highway 85 in a Google autonomous vehicle. In October 2010, when The New York Times reported that Google had built a fleet of self-driving cars that had already collectively traversed some 140,000 miles of California asphalt, it came as a shock, a terrestrial Sputnik. Now the cars, with their whirling rooftop laser arrays, are as familiar in the Bay Area as the company’s camera-crowned Street View vehicles. Indeed, the two are often confused, which is presumably why the words “self-driving car” have recently been plastered on this one’s driver-side door.”

“If Urmson’s team is taking a Googly approach to the auto industry, it’s also taking a Googly approach to driving. The company, Urmson notes, “is really all about processing big data,” and the road is just another data set to be mined. So Google isn’t teaching its computers how to drive. It’s collecting data—its cars have driven 200,000 miles in total, recording everything they see—and letting its algorithms figure out the rules on their own.”

“As we start to drive, a screen mounted in the center console depicts a heat map of the street in front of us, as if the Predator were striding through Silicon Valley sprawl.”

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here | Magazine