Findings: In The Future, Smart People Will Let Cars Take Control

As the baby boomers cruise into their golden years, I have good news for them — and for everyone else in danger of being run over by these aging drivers. The boomers will not be driving like Mr. Magoo. An electronic chauffeur will conduct them on expressways, drop them at the mall entrance and then go park their cars.

What do you think the odds are of having a self-driving car as your chauffeur? Join the discussion.

"Move Over, the Robots Driving." Paul Saffo. Abcnews.com, Nov. 6, 2007. "The Design of Future Things."Donald A. Norman. (Basic Books, 2007) DARPA Grand Challenge. Viktor Koen

If you doubt this prediction, I dont blame you. The self-driving car ranks right up there with the personal hovercraft as the futurist vision that never comes true. In 1969, Disney unveiled Herbie the Love Bug; in 1940, Popular Mechanics promised a car that would chauffeur you across America in a single day to visit Aunt Lillian.

At the 1939 Worlds Fair, the crowds at the General Motors Futurama exhibit saw traffic speeding 100 miles per hour thanks to electronic help. Safe distance between cars is maintained by automatic radio control, a voice explained as visitors looked down on the vast diorama of the World of Tomorrow, complete with hangars for dirigibles and landing decks for autogyros.

Does it seem strange? Unbelievable? the announcer intoned. Remember, this is the world of 1960!

O.K., so they were a little off on the date. But today, finally, those electronically spaced cars are on the highway. You can buy cars with adaptive cruise-control that automatically slow down if the radar or laser detects you tailgating. Your car can warn you when you stray across lane markings, and these kinds of sensors are already being used experimentally in cars that drive themselves.

These smart cars still have their bugs, but engineers have made amazing progress the past several years. In 2004, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency held its first Grand Challenge for driverless cars, none made it more than seven miles. At Darpas next Grand Challenge, in 2005, five cars made it 132 miles to the finish. And then, last month, six cars completed a 60-mile course that was the grandest challenge yet because they had to deal with traffic along the way.

These empty cars drove themselves around an Air Force base in Southern California, finding parking spots, obeying stop signs, idling in traffic, yielding to other cars at intersections and merging into traffic at 30 m.p.h. There was one accident and a few near misses, but the cars engineers are so buoyed by the results that theyre hoping the next competition will be a high-speed race on a Grand Prix course.

Within five years, its totally feasible to build an autonomous car that will work reliably in several limited domains, says Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford and head of its racing team, which won the 2005 Darpa competition and finished second in last months. In five years he expects a car that could take over simple chores like breezing along an expressway, inching along in stop-and-go traffic, or parking in the lot at a mall or airport after dropping off the driver. In 20 years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning over these chores to a computer, but he acknowledges thats just an educated guess. While he doesnt doubt cars will be able to drive themselves, hes not sure how many humans will let them.

Some people wont ever want to yield control; others will worry that the first smart cars will be like the early versions of Windows. There will be many, many car-computer jokes involving the word crash.

But cars, unlike humans, will keep getting smarter. They will learn from their mistakes. They will not get distracted by cellphone calls. They will not drive drunk. Smart cars will never be infallible, but they dont have to be. They just have to be better than the drivers who now cause more than 90 percent of traffic accidents and kill a million of their fellow humans per year. Smart cars might make their debut in special lanes where each car has to enter through a checkpoint (at highway speeds) to make sure its systems are working properly. Drivers would be enticed with another promise of smart cars: no traffic jams.

When a freeway filled with human drivers is operating at full capacity, Dr. Thrun notes, the cars actually occupy less than 10 percent of the roads surface area. The rest is empty space between cars. Smart cars could be grouped more closely together, doubling or tripling the roads capacity, as engineers have demonstrated by running a platoon of driverless Buicks, spaced just 15 feet apart, at 65 m.p.h. down Interstate 15 near San Diego.

When that experiment was done, in 1997, it seemed an impractical idea because the cars were guided by magnets embedded in the road, and it was hard to imagine building such smart roads across the country. But since then, cars have gotten so much smarter that they can navigate old-fashioned dumb roads.

In the near future, guided not just by G.P.S. satellites but by high-precision internal maps and inertial sensors, theyll know their position so precisely that they wont even need lane markings for guidance. Theyll communicate with other smart cars on the road, enabling a swarm of closely spaced cars to move in unison (and react more quickly to problems than humans drivers could). A road system filled with these cars wouldnt even need traffic lights — the cars could just talk among themselves.

If, according to Moores Law, computing power keeps doubling every couple years, human drivers will soon be outclassed by computers just as chess players were. The only question will be how long it takes humans to adapt to these new chauffeurs. Some experts think smart cars wont become common before 2050, but Id bet on it happening sooner.

And even if humans stubbornly cling to the steering wheel, they could still end up sharing the road with smart cars. By around 2030, according to some believers in Moores Law, there will be computers more powerful than the human brain, leading to the emergence of superintelligent post-humans. If these beings do appear, I have no doubt how theyll get around. Theyd never be stupid enough to get in a car driven by a member of Mr. Magoos species.

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