There are many people who if they could would not worry about driving the vehicle to work or to visit as the vehicle would drive itself. The driverless vehicles may come to that, but the reason why people have put money and resources towards doing it is war. In the middle east, a convoy of trucks is moving supplies from one place to another and  an IED explodes hurting or killing a solider. Would it be great, if the trucks were driven by robots so no one is injured? The generals who ran the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA wondered could it be done? Universities which have a program in robotics stepped up to see if it could be done. The answer turned out to be yes it can be done, but the downturn of the economy put everything on hold.

In the book Autonomy – The Quest to build the Driverless Car by Lawrence Burns and Christopher Shulgan published by HarperCollins, NY, 2018 the quest for DARPA included who wants to be involved – the race defies prevailing technology, and many hold that the challenge prize is unwinnable in our time. The date was 2003.

If you consider, the tools that society did not have from google maps to increasingly small chips, yet we had people to rise to meet the challenges they faced. It took years of trial and error to come close to doing what the military wanted, but then the race was  stopped. In the aftermath of the race, the people who run Google were interested and they asked one of the top designers who said driverless cars were too far in the future, what is a technical reason for it can not be done? Not a societal reason, but a technical one?  The designer could not think of one and the folks at Google started the new phase. Have a driverless car drive in California over 100,000 miles.

From this exercise came Google maps and the use of GPS, which helps society and Google. As one can image everytime you drive there are things to react to, through all types of climate conditions and driving conditions. Ensuring the programming of the car to drive safely is a continuing challenge, but possible.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the American dream is about finding people who believe something could be better. It takes research and development, it takes money and it takes people for all types of reasons see the benefits. Often most of us do see the benefits for example most driverless cars will tend to be electric – to build an electric vehicle fewer parts than an internal combustion engine vehicle. If sales increased to millions of units sold, that changes many aspects of the economy. There is always good with the bad.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.