Tesla gets more headlines than Waymo, but Google’s robotaxi division is the one to beat in the slog that has become the race to develop self-driving cars. Even Waymo’s prototypes only offer rides in select areas, though, and it’s unlikely they’ll become ubiquitous in the foreseeable future. That hasn’t kept Google from wanting access to your car, though, and its latest patent would take things a step further by monitoring your driving and taking over if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, Motor1 reports.
Basically, the new system would keep an eye on all of the driver-assistance and safety systems to figure out how well someone is driving. If the system decides they’re a bad driver, it would then be able to take a series of escalating actions. So, for example, if you wanted to make an unsafe lane change, it might yell at you and flash warning lights. It could also hypothetically let other drivers know if your car is out of control for some reason. And if it decides it’s necessary, the system could just take control and lock you out until it decides to let you drive again.
That’s certainly going to upset a lot of people who don’t want machines restricting their freedoms, but at least on paper, there are plenty of positives. After all, if a driver had a medical emergency behind the wheel, the car could keep them from crashing into other people. Drunk drivers would cause fewer wrecks. Generally speaking, road safety would probably improve, and road deaths would go down. Just don’t let your car ever learn you use Firefox or DuckDuckGo.
Of course, there’s also a third option other than leaving the roads full of unsafe drivers or letting a tech company decide who’s safe enough to drive. It would lower road deaths dramatically and also be as close to anonymous as possible. People concerned about moving around freely would only have to worry about their phones, watches, and other personal electronic devices tracking their movements. Unfortunately for us, it’s public transportation, and that’s tantamount to communism in the U.S., so good luck making that happen in the foreseeable future. Nice things are only for every other developed country in the world.
