The Coming of Robot Cars

Thanks to DARPA-sponsored contests and new work at Google, robot cars are no longer science fiction; they're coming within a decade. Their implications are quite remarkable -- and not just for transportation, where they can offer a mere saving of millions of lives, billions of hours and trillions of dollars. Robocars can change how we live and work, change our cities, change manufacturing, housing. Crucially in today's world, they also have the potential to make serious inroads on our energy and emissions problems. The talk will discuss the merits and downsides of robocars, potential paths to get there, roadblocks along the way and what the world of robocars will be like. Brad Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. ClariNet publishes an online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers machines. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized conference on that network, and today the world's longest running blog. He has been a software company founder, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products. He is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute, and an advisor to BitTorrent, Inc. He is chair of Networks and Computers at Singularity University. He is also a consultant on Google's self-driving car team.