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As a little kid back in the 1960s, one of my favorite cartoons was The Jetsons. They had all the coolest robotic stuff to make their lives easier… Rosie the maid, the conveyor belt dog walker and especially the flying automated cars. As an adult, I see that same cartoon as a dark harbinger of our future. It should come to no one’s surprise that Congress believes that we cannot think for ourselves. In their eyes, we cannot be trusted with our own safety. In their minds, we are the unwashed masses that need constant direction and ever-present supervision. They say that it is for our own good, and we have seen it coming all along. It’s name is Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and it wants your motorcycle off the road. Former Senator Bob Letourneau had this to say when I forwarded a link to an article about Google & ITS to the MRF Reps mailing list: “We certainly talked about that at a MRF Board meeting over ten years ago when ITS was first introduced, Wayne Curtin warned the Feds that they would have to take motorcycles under consideration during development. MRF was one of the first organizations to step up and speak to this issue. I guess we are now a lot closer to reality...” What Bob was commenting on is this recent headline - Google Unveils Driverless Car Tech. A company that started out making the results of your web searches more relevant is upping the ante, and they’re holding all the cards. Instead of finding results for your search on “spark plug gap on 2002 Harley Evo engine”, they are geek-deep in self-driving car technology. In fact, a full ten percent of the folks employed by the search engine giant are dedicated to the building of autonomous vehicles. These driverless cars, completely controlled by computers, are said to be for the betterment of highway safety and traffic decongestion. The car operates with a $75,000 laser spinning around on its roof that generates a 360º, three dimensional model of the space around the vehicle and compares that information to known maps. It can then use that data in a manner that gives it omnipotence of every road and traffic light, but it also recognizes the position of every other car on the road as well as pedestrians. This all happens regardless of weather or time of day. The Google robot car recently completed a one thousand mile trek through complex city traffic and highway conditions. Nevada’s legislature recently passed legislation requiring their state Department of Motor Vehicles to create the rules that will govern these robot cars. Google has high hopes that the federal government and even other countries will follow Nevada’a lead and do the same. This scenario begs the question… what if you have outstanding parking tickets and the cops detect that you have entered one of these driverless cars? Will you then be locked in and chauffeured downtown to address your grievous crimes? Didn’t these geniuses ever see 2001: A SpaceOdyssey? I seem to remember that the primary focus of that flick was about an all-controlling computer gone rogue. Or, even better yet… don’t they remember George Jetson flying around the electric dog walker?
