(Source: Steve Jurvetson via Wikipedia)

When will driverless cars arrive, delivering commuters from the responsibility for actually steering themselves to the office? The Wall Street Journal talked to experts at the SAE International World Congress in Detroit, and the consensus says that "fully autonomous vehicles might hit the streets in meaningful numbers" by 2025.

Or, as the Journal puts it: 

"At the dawn of the automobile age, driving a car wasn't so high status. Having a chauffeur was. Within a decade, the auto business could return full circle to the concept of motorists as mainly passengers."

Finally, Newt Gingrich's towering passions, driverless cars and Downton Abbey, come full circle.

Ms. Wojcicki (Photo: Flickr)

Back in 2011, Google introduced the world to driverless cars through a launch party at the TED conference. Esther Wojcicki, the mother of 23 and Me founder Anne Wojcicki and mother-in-law to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, was in attendance. Though being an in-law to a pair of tech geniuses undoubtedly has its quirks, Esther was rather unprepared for her first wild (driverless) ride.

In a video, dug up by Wired, Ms. Wojcicki sits in the passenger's seat of a driverless car while a Google engineer demonstrates it. A young woman in the backseat films as the car begins to navigate around cones. "It's going really fast!" exclaims Ms. Wojcicki. "Can you turn it off? Is it supposed to be doing that?"

To be fair, this is totally how we would act during our first driverless car experience. That shit looks freaky.

It's Newt! (Photo: Twitter)

Today, Newt Gingrich--as promised on his Twitter feed--devoted a whole installment of "Newt University" to the topic of driverless cars. The thirty-minute session was, essentially, a one-way Google Hangout with Mr. Gingrich talking your ear off about THE FUTURE.

"The game-changer, psychologically, is the Google driverless car," Mr. Gingrich informed his acolytes.

"These are the folks who brought us Google Maps, Google Search," and now the company is figuring out how to "take all this information technology and put it into a car that begins to be self aware, self informed and with a learning curve." Laser-guided mapping! Radar!

Meanwhile, actual car manufacturers are trying to create their own versions. "They don't want to be left behind by some internet-based company," he suggested, all down-home-like.

"How big a deal is this? We think it's going to shape almost everything."

For instance: Were you aware that 95 percent of car accidents are caused by human error? And if we could "begin to take the human factor out," suddenly we can build lighter, more fuel efficient cars because the machines would be way better drivers and we wouldn't have to worry so much about pesky safety features?

Mr. Gingrich got more and more excited as he outlined the nation-shaping implications of these machines. The former speaker outlined a gee-whiz future full of wonders like bumper-to-bumper driverless conveys (faster AND more fuel efficient!) and calendar apps that'll let you schedule the sedan to go pick up grandma at the airport and even the possibility of child safety locks that won't take the kids anywhere but pre-approved stops. See, there's something for advocates of family values, too.

Don't even get him started on ride-sharing.

"Make sure your local state legislators are adopting the kind of rules we need to have appropriate self-driving cars," Mr. Gingrich urged in closing.

Here ends your latest installment of Newt Gingrich Fantasizes About the Future.

(Photo: YouTube)

Though driverless cars are on the road (heh) to becoming legal in many states, it will definitely take some time for the American populace to adjust to the sight of a car functioning without someone in the driver's seat.

YouTube user MagicofRahat took advantage of that dissonance by creating a costume that looked just like his car's seat back and placed it over his body, giving the impression that his car was driving itself. Then he drove the car through a number of fast food drive-thrus and scared the crap out of the unsuspecting employees.

Our favorite is the girl who has the presence of mind to demand that her co-worker "Instagram that joint." Priorities!

(Source: Steve Jurvetson via Wikipedia)

Get ready for the day when you sip mimosas and curl your eyelashes as you commute, because the driverless car revolution is upon us. These futuristic machines are now legal in three states, and Google's working hell-for-leather to make them part of regular life. But, as this essay in the New Yorker points out, such a technology raises thorny implications.

When we turn our shiny metal death machines over to computers, how are they going to make the right decisions?

The advent of driverless cars isn't as simple as providing another option for those who prefer to sleep and ride. As NYU psych professor Gary Marcus writes:

Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.

Somebody'd better break the news to Bruce Springsteen.

But besides robbing speed devils of their chance to drive like Dale Earnhardt on the interstate, this gets complicated when you drag out the old Trolley Problem from Philosophy 101. The proverbial schoolbus full of children pulls out in front of your car; swerving means you're likely to be hurt. The computer has to decide. How's an algorithm supposed to parse an ethical quandary even college freshmen stumble over?  (If you're skeptical that this matters, read this New York piece about the spike in traffic deaths.)

That means we're going to have to develop machines that can not just operate on our ethical level, but can address these questions on their own:

What we really want are machines that can go a step further, endowed not only with the soundest codes of ethics that our best contemporary philosophers can devise, but also with the possibility of machines making their own moral progress, bringing them past our own limited early-twenty-first century idea of morality.

Ethical machines, no big thing, Google will probably have it solved next week. It's not like Sergey has anything else to do besides go skydiving.

Artist's rendering of the Indeed.com office right now. (Photo: CashCats.biz)

Somebody's ready to make it rain in Stamford: Indeed.com has been acquired by the Japanese company Recruit Co. Ltd., for a price reportedly in the $750 million to $1 billion range. [Business Insider]

The California bill allowing driverless cars on the road has now been signed. [New York Times]

Total Google Play downloads thus far: 25 billion. In celebration, all kinds of goodies are available for download at 25 cents a pop. [The Verge]

Apparently the CEO of Intel doesn't think Windows 8 is fully baked. [Bloomberg]

Even literal rocket scientists can't keep their passwords safe. [Ars Technica]

(Photo: The Star)

What's a thousand-pound steel monster controlled entirely by a computer, no human required? It's a driverless car! And it's one step closer to legally operating on public roads. The Singularity is nigh, friends.

According to Ars Technica, the California State Senate officially passed SB 1289, which--following the creation of standards and performance requirements by the DMV--would allow robot cars to hit the open road.

Writes Ars:

California legislators have sent a bill to the governor’s desk that could push forward the development of autonomous cars in the Golden State. The new bill requires the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt new regulations, including safety standards and “performance requirements” for new autonomous vehicles. Once those new rules are put in place, the bill “would permit autonomous vehicles to be operated or tested on the public roads in this state.”

We spent years driving up and down that stretch of freeway between Palo Alto and San Francisco, so we understand California's eagerness to pass this bill. Driverless cars can't possibly be any more dangerous than the drivers sitting in traffic on the 101 right now.