Every day, America's roads fill up with texting drivers, drivers jabbering on their cell phones, drunk drivers, inconsiderate drivers, drivers with a lead foot, drivers with poor eye sight, road-rage drivers, inexperienced drivers, lousy "what's a blind spot?" drivers, drivers inspired by games like Grand Theft Auto, drivers putting on makeup, drivers who fall asleep, daydreaming drivers.
There are terrible, tragic consequences to all this human error. A commuter train in New York, whose driver claimed to be in a daze, derails after taking a curve at 82 miles per hour in a 30 miles-per-hour zone, killing four people. A speeding teenager in a quiet San Francisco Bay Area suburb loses control and plows into a family on a street corner near where I used to live, killing a father and his nine-year-old daughter. There seems to be an epidemic of irresponsible bus drivers texting and crashing.
Cars kill around 32,000 people and injure 2.2 million in the United States every year. Isn't it time to take human hands off the wheel?
Driverless cars coming down the pike
Google is trying to make it happen with its driverless car program. Google's small fleet of driverless cars currently on public roads has a pretty good track record: collectively, 500,000 miles without crashing, whereas the average human drivers gets into an accident in the same amount of miles. Driverless cars are coming, as this new Spock vs. old Spock car commercial shows.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon