OK, so I didn’t go into full weep-mode when I watched the video for Google’s new self-driving car prototype as a handful of old and young people and visually impaired people “drove” the car for the first time, but I did get choked up. It was the sort of lump in your throat feeling when you are witnessing something meaningful. It’s that physical reaction to seeing something and thinking, “Alright this is kind of a big deal.”

These kinds of projects make me happy to be alive. We live in such an exciting time of exciting change. I’m just grateful to be a witness to it and I hope to be an active part of it.

I’ve loved cars since I was a kid driving my matchbox cars all over the carpet and linoleum floors in my home. Cars have remained largely unchanged for about a century but I have a feeling that the next 100 years of the auto industry are going to see massive and rapid evolution of individual and group mobility.

There’s something wonderful about this funky little Google prototype. It has no steering wheel, only an on button, off button and a computer screen showing navigation. It’s wildly ambitious and naive and a total moonshot and those are all things that make it magnificent. I’m glad to see people investing years and lots of money into something that isn’t going to be practical for a decade. The long view approach is refreshing. It’s not something that very many people have the courage to do but these long-view-inventors are shaping the future for our unborn children and their children.

This seems like a glimpse into the future and I believe the future is going to be fucking amazing. I imagine a world where 1.2 million people are not dying in car accidents every year. What if we could reduce that by 1%? Or even 0.1%? I hope that generations in the future look back at this era as a time when humans finally started to figure out how to move around this earth more efficiently and without killing ourselves or our environment.

Enjoy this video of Google’s new self-driving car prototype. Don’t be cynical either. There are plenty of reasons why this will never work. But if we don’t have hope for a better future then what else do we have?