Autonomy summary

Many of our great inventions are born out of frustration and despair – from early humans in the dark forest striking flints together to make fire, to scientists testing the modern vaccines that have prevented so much suffering. 

Larry Page’s dream of a world without people driving fossil-fuel-guzzling machines is no different. Page would become CEO of Google and the founder of its self-driving car project, Chauffeur. And it was a very personal sense of frustration that inspired him to dream. 

As the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, American soldiers often lost their lives to improvised explosive devices planted under the roads. Keen to avoid these deaths, US generals instead began to consider transporting supplies with automated vehicles. 

To this end, an arm of the US government, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, decided that they would stage an automated vehicle race that any American team could enter. With a prize of 1 million dollars, they hoped to accelerate innovation.

With professional computer scientists and amateurs both struggling to build robots that could travel long distances across the desert, many vital innovations were made.

The first one involves a German computer scientist named Sebastian Thrun, who was working on Stanford University’s entry into the competition. After studying for his PhD in Germany, he moved to Pittsburgh to work as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. While he was there, in the 1990s, he was involved in a project to develop a robot museum guide for Washington’s Smithsonian Museum.

Henry Ford’s standardization of automobile production in the early twentieth century heralded the era of personal car ownership. For many Americans, owning a car would become a statement of national identity and personal freedom. Without Ford and his innovations in automobile production, modern America wouldn’t be the same – geographically, technologically or culturally.

And, of course, the center of mass-produced automobiles in America was Detroit: a gritty, industrial powerhouse of a city.

By 2005, GM had invested in the research and development of alternative-propulsion vehicles in earnest. These prototypes generated electricity with their hydrogen-powered fuel cells – water vapor being their sole emission.

And it was at this time that the author, who was GM’s corporate president of research, experienced something of an epiphany, one that revealed to him the future of the entire automotive industry.

Ever seen the movie La La Land? The film begins with a scene familiar to many of us today: four lanes of traffic at a standstill on a stretch of freeway. Drivers lean out of their vehicles, bored and hot in the summer afternoon.

Future generations will watch this movie and wonder why everyone was trapped like that. The idea of being stuck in traffic for so long will seem alien to them. We’re on the cusp of a change that’ll make scenes like this a thing of the past.

Meet the Wilkersons. A family of four, with Mary and Thomas, parents of nine-year-old Tommy Jr. and eleven-year-old Tammy. They live in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, in the year 2031.

They’re eating breakfast before the daily commute to school and work. The children are playing virtual-reality computer games and texting friends, while their parents swipe through holographic newspapers.