Free Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff

navigation and a variety of humanoid robot projects. His expertise was in motion planning, figuring out how to teach machines to navigate in the real world. He was bitten by the robot car bug as part of Red Whittaker’s DARPA Grand Challenge team, and when key members of that group began to disappear into a secret Google project code-named Chauffeur, he jumped at the chance.
    Late one night they were testing the robotic Prius in Carmel, one of the not-quite-urban driving areas they were focusing on closely. They were testing the system late at night because they were anxious to build detailed maps with centimeter accuracy, and it was easier to get baseline maps of the streets when no one was around. After passing through town several times with their distinctive lidar prominently displayed, Kuffner was sitting in the driver’s seat when the Prius was pulled over by a local policeman suspicious about the robot’s repeated passes.
    “What is this?” he asked, pointing to the roof.
    Kuffner, like all of the Google drivers, had been given strict instructions how to respond to this inevitable confrontation. He reached behind him and handed a prewritten document to the officer. The police officer’s eyes widened as he read it. Then he grew increasingly excited and kept the Google engineers chatting late into the night about the future of transportation.
    The incident did not lead to public disclosure, but once I discovered the cars in the company’s parking lots while reporting for the New York Times, the Google car engineers relented and offered me a ride.
    From a backseat vantage point it was immediately clear that in the space of just three years, Google had made a significant leap past the cars of the Grand Challenge. The Google Prius replicated much of the original DARPA technology, but with more polish. Engaging the autopilot made a whooshing Star Trek sound. Technically, the ride was a remarkable tour de force. A test drive began with the car casually gliding away from Google’s campus on Mountain View city streets. Within a few blocks, the car had stopped at both stop signs and stoplights and then merged onto rush-hour traffic on the 101 freeway. At the next exit the car then drove itself off the freeway onto a flyover overpass that curved gracefully over the 101. What was most striking to the first-time passenger was the car’s ability to steer around the curve exactly as a human being might. There was absolutely nothing robotic about AI’s driving behavior.
    When the New York Times published the story, the Google car struck Detroit like a thunderbolt. The automobile industry had been adding computer technology and sensors to cars at a maddeningly slow pace. Even though cruise control had been standard for decades, intelligent cruise control—using sensors to keep pace with traffic automatically—was still basically an exotic feature in 2010. A number of automobile manufacturers had outposts in Silicon Valley, but in the wake of the publicity surrounding the Google car, the remaining carmakers rushed to build labs close by. Nobody wanted to see a repeat of what happened to personal computer hardware makers when Microsoft Windows became an industry standard and hardware manufacturers found that their products were increasingly low-margin commodities while much of the profit in the industry flowed to Microsoft. The automotive industry now realized that it was facing the same threat.
    At the same time, the popular reaction to the Google car was mixed. There had long been a rich science-fiction tradition of Jetsons -like futuristic robot cars. They had even been the stuff of TV series like Knight Rider, a 1980s show featuring a crime fighter assisted by an artificially intelligent car. There was also a dark-side vision of automated driving, perhaps best expressed in Daniel Suarez’s 2009 sci-fi thriller Daemon, in which AI-controlled cars not only drove themselves, but ran people down as well. Still, the general