The first self-driving car will debut in three years, but will you want to buy one?

Right now, you can head over to a local Volvo dealership and test drive a 2017 Volvo S90. With the push of a button, drivers can watch the car take over steering to stay within a lane, slow itself down in rush-hour traffic and accelerate — up to 80 mph — on the highway. It’s the first Volvo to include the second-generation Pilot Assist as a standard feature.

But, even equipped with radar and a 360-degree camera that can distinguish humans from deer, bicyclists and other cars, the $47,000 S90 sedan is not an autonomous vehicle. A driver must be in the seat and frequently touch the steering wheel. Otherwise, the car slows down.

Continue reading… “The first self-driving car will debut in three years, but will you want to buy one?”

Germany is reserving part of autobahn for driverless car testing

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Germany’s Transportation Ministry spokesman Ingo Strater told reporters yesterday that plans call for a driverless-car pilot project on a portion of the A9 autobahn, the north-south artery that connects Munich and Berlin.  Though tests have already been done on driverless cars in the U.S. and Germany, the project would be one of the first to equip a stretch of public highway specifically for that purpose. Continue reading… “Germany is reserving part of autobahn for driverless car testing”

101 Endangered Jobs by 2030

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Futurist Thomas Frey: Business owners today are actively deciding whether their next hire should be a person or a machine. After all, machines can work in the dark and don’t come with decades of HR case law requiring time off for holidays, personal illness, excessive overtime, chronic stress or anxiety.

 

Continue reading… “101 Endangered Jobs by 2030”

Google X’s vision of the future

Thomas Edison

Larry Page, CEO and co-founder of Google, wants to be more like Thomas Edison than Nikola Tesla. “If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody,” he recently told Fortune. “You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.” Edison did that with practical incandescent light, the phonograph, the movie camera, and hundreds of other inventions. Tesla had his grandiose successes, too, but a shrewd businessman he was not. “He couldn’t commercialize anything,” Page added. “He could barely fund his own research.”

 

 

Continue reading… “Google X’s vision of the future”

Pilotless aircraft could be flying before cars go driverless

The Jetstream mission is part of a project to develop the technologies and procedures that will allow large commercial aircraft to operate routinely and safely without pilots.

A twin-engined Jetstream will take off from Warton Aerodrome in Lancashire, England, and head north towards Scotland within the next few weeks. Like any other flight, the small commuter airliner will respond to instructions from air-traffic controllers, navigate a path and take care to avoid other aircraft. But the pilot flying the aircraft will not be in the cockpit: he will have his feet firmly on the ground in a control room back at Warton.

 

 

Continue reading… “Pilotless aircraft could be flying before cars go driverless”

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