(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.

Image via Gadling

Betabeat received an email this morning from Grant Martin, Editor-in-Chief at the travel site Gadling, alerting us that Jerry Guo, the notorious Newsweek writer and startup scammer, had a troubled history with AOL as well. From Mr. Martin's email:

Jerry was a blogger for Gadling for a couple of years and then was removed in November of 2008. Curiously, his bio photo on Gadling was of him holding a panda.

Jerry was terminated because he
was taking old, past published posts and tucking them into the recent (but out of sight) queue so that our payment system would automatically sweep through and double pay him.

That same week we found out that he was trying to farm out blog posts for our site for $5 each on elance. Still have the screenshot on that one.

Jerry's tenure at Gadling was full of him trying to work our system, squeeze us for more money and earn free travel. I'm glad that he's gone, but I wish that I had been more proactive in reaching out to his other/future editors.

In talking with editors at Newsweek and The Atlantic for this story, Betabeat often heard the same refrain. Typically editors regretted not doing more to out Mr. Guo as a bad seed, but felt it was wiser to sweep things under the rug and protect their own publication. This allowed Mr. Guo to hop from one big name to the next. Since 2008 he has written for the NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs.

Check Out Our Slideshow of Jerry Guo's Adventures Around the World>>

From Flickr user Robert Scoble

Tom Formesky bills himself as the first journalist to leave a major newspaper to make a living as full time blogger. Today he penned a lengthy post about the need for neutral coverage of tech start-ups, admonishing without ever directly naming TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington, who has decided to begin investing in the companies he covers, again. 

The way Formesky sees it, this is an issue that effects the greater good of society. "If its rival startup has a financial connection with an editor or reporter, then it doesn’t matter if it has a better product, or a better technology, and that means it might never receive the media coverage it deserves. It might not succeed at all. And that’s a loss. It’s a potentially a large loss for the world, too, if the startup has an important technology that could be widely applied."

The truth is almost all the blog style coverage of start-ups has been conflicted from the beginning. Arrington was an investor before he was a blogger, stopped for a while, and has now started up again. Business Insider is funded by folks like Kevin Ryan and RRE, who have financial interests across dozens of companies on both coasts. GigaOm raises funds from True Ventures, where blog founder Om Malik is a partner. Betabeat has backing from Jared and Josh Kushner, who invest in start-ups through Thrive Capital.

The situation is further complicated by competitions like TechCrunch Disrupt, which create a feedback loop of hype, funding and coverage.

The truth is that the biggest and most important investors don't make their decisions based on what they read on blogs. And while a mention on TechCrunch might drive early subscriptions to a service, no amount of coverage will be enough to build a business on top of. Twitter had plenty of doubters at all the top tech blogs when it first launched. And esoteric companies like Palantir are reaching billion dollar valuations without much press.

It's worth pointing out that Arrington only offered his most recent disclosure after pressure from rival blogger/reporter Kara Swisher. That doesn't speak well to his personal ethics. Luckily modern readers are well aware that blogs mix opinion with reporting. In the battle between consumer facing services in crowded markets, good coverage can certainly be an edge, but great ideas and execution are what counts in the end.