Autonomous Autos

Greetings,

9:20pm – I hope all is well for you as you read this post. This week I visited Huntsville, AL for a site visit of the NASA’s X-Ray and Cryogenic Facility (XRCF) At Marshall Space Flight Center. This facility will be used to conduct thermal vacuum testing of a NASA interplanetary mission I’m currently working on. A few minutes ago, I realized that there are only two more days left in October and I had not posted a blog, so here I am.

A few months ago, I finished reading a book called Neuromined: Triumphing over Technological Tyranny. In essence, “In Neuromined, data sovereignty advocate Robert Edward Grant and prolific tech author Michael Ashley team up to explore our crisis. Each chapter imagines a near-future dystopia via a riveting fictional tale (show) with a companion analysis (tell), connecting the story to our present reality.” It’s written in the same vain of another book I started reading but didn’t finished (yet), AI 2041 Ten Visions for Our Future. It would be interesting to see if the fictional stories in both books actually play out in the future.

In any event, if I recall correctly, chapter 7 spells out a story about how autonomous driving has become the law and the opposite will be met with legal action taken against anyone who is manually driving a vehicle. The way the story is told (I won’t provide a spoiler) turned out to be quite interesting as it closed out, but reminded me of where we are with autonomous driving to day, especially of the passenger type vs the industrial approaches taken by autonomous electric freight companies like Einride (who, incidentally sports a very impressive and aesthetically beautiful website).

I, for one, am still not interested in being driven around by an autonomous vehicle (though I have no qualms about the many commercial airline jets that fly me from point A to point B on autopilot, as least part of the way). It’s probably due to the fact that there is nothing to hit at 35,000 feet in the air versus on the ground. Waymo, for one, has made tremendous strides in autonomous driving, despite the recent (comical) scenarios, this past August, of the vehicles auto-congregating amongst themselves and honking at each other all hours of the night, as they return back to their assigned parking lot spaces. You can read one of the many stories about that here.

Autonomous driving has been touted as being safer than passsenger driving in many different instances. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of a recent post of a Bluesky user who described his dad’s enjoyment of his first autonomous trip in a Waymo vehicle. Shout out to Jazz and his dad, cool story. Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Nuro, etc..this kid is not ready yet.

How about you?

Be well,

Fresh!