Subsuming the dawning reality

There is a popular quote circling the web “ Life was much simpler when Apple and BlackBerry were just fruits.” Was it? An era where even the most redundant things, like sending a letter, took up a chunk of time. A world where heart diseases and pneumonia remained one of the top reasons of people’s death. Nowadays, technology has made it’s presence felt everywhere. Mankind went from taking the first flight in 1903 to kissing the moon in 1969, all within 60 yrs. From medicine to sciences to architecture, there is not a single field that is left untouched by technology. It has given mankind such substantial powers which one could have never thought of up until few years ago.

One of the most promising and prospective areas to be graced by technology is the transportation sector, especially personal transportation. First, Uber revolutionized the personal cab booking sector and the became one of the most ultimate startups of the world, valued today at $17 billion! Then, Google took the game up a notch by introducing driverless cars in 2012! And it plans to make these driverless cars available to the general public by 2020, which is less than half a decade away. Now, Tesla is game too, with introduction of Model S, the semi automatic car, is not far behind in this driverless car race.

But some questions still remain. Would consumers actually want to cede control of their vehicles? Can autonomous cars be truly safe in a world of variable driving conditions and human error? And what could it all mean for the future of the auto sector? Accordingly to a recent study carried out by Business Insider , in about 2 years, you’ll be chauffeured around in driverless cars on highways.

A recent survey by statista suggested that around 56% of the people surveyed in India are very likely to try out a self driven car. On the verge of being a superpower, India’s chances look good to make an autonomous vehicle transportation network feasible and widely adopted among the low-automated geographical regions by the end of next decade.

Two broad reasons why right now is the perfect time for driverless cars is, one, the artificial intelligence — specifically deep learning — has improved significantly, and two, the technology needed to build driverless vehicles continues to get cheaper and become more accessible. Deep learning is the ability for machines to use algorithms to analyze data and solve problems. And recently, deep learning algorithms have become very accurate. You’ll be able to tell your car “take me home,” go here, go there, anything, and it’ll just do it. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, in a recent interview, said that “ I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of a narrow form of AI, and not something I think is very difficult to do.”

So to sum up, driverless cars are coming, and are less than half a decade away. Right now it takes up less than 1% of the total cars on road. But with giants like Tesla and Google planning to make it mainstream transportation units in the next 20 years, days are not far where one day people may outlaw driving cars, because you can’t have a human driving a two- ton death machine. Are you prepared to embrace the impending reality?