Self driving car in your future?

Self driving car with Googlers (l-r) Eric
Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin

What could be better than letting your car drive you effortlessly through rush hour traffic, while you doze, read the newspaper, or answer your email? Although a number of companies, including Google, are working on self driving cars, they're still far from being a commercial reality. Getting a computer to operate the car's controls is the easy part. What's hard is to get it to drive safely and with good judgment in heavy traffic and unpredictable road conditions.  The car has to "see" the road and interpret what it sees in real time. It has to read and understand traffic signs, know all the traffic laws, and judge the speed, direction and distance of other vehicles. It also has to know when to break traffic laws to avoid dangerous situations, such as driving at the speed limit when everyone else is far exceeding it. It has to recognize emergency vehicles such as police and fire, and know how to behave when a policeman signals it to pull over. Although computers can already perform some of the functions of driving, it looks like it will be a while before we can yield total control to the machine.