Too Many Decisions

I took a drive with my step son this afternoon.  He has an appointment with the driver's license examiner in little less than a month and needs more practice behind the wheel before he can solo and I get to see my car insurance rates rocket sky high.  It will be a good thing, though.  He's out of high school and ready to head to  the community college down the road.

I have a good feeling about Warren.  That's his name.  Warren.  Warren has every reason to be the angry young man.  He was close to his father, a man of declining health when I first met him.  Warren's dad died not long after Warren's mother and I got him settled into the 8th grade.  Warren was 13 - an awkward age to be certain - and he showed a certain amount belligerence to his situation which thankfully dissolved over time.  Warren is showing promise despite his young age.

Back to the drive.

While I was observing Warren driving this afternoon, I was struck by the number of decisions a person driving has to make when piloting a car at 60 miles per hour down a busy highway... and that's not even counting the various distractions on the side of the road.

Was I nervous sitting in the passenger seat, my life in the hands of a seventeen year old not related to me by blood?  Well, hell yes I was nervous.  Who wouldn't be?  On the other hand, though, we made it back in one piece with no tickets, no drama.

Just because I was nervous does not mean that Warren didn't do an excellent job.  "He done good," as we used to say in southern Ohio.  If he keeps the level head he seems to have on his shoulder, he'll do his mother and his step father proud.
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Something to note on practically the same page, Car and Driver magazine has a series of articles in their latest issue regarding advances in automotive technology in the past few years.  One of the technologies mentioned is the development of self-driving cars.  We're almost there, it seems.  C&D was telling of one system which is being worked on which almost has the capability of making the number of decisions a driver has to make to safely pilot an automobile from point A to point B without incident.

The working word here is almost.

Apparently the developers need to work on a couple of things.  For one, the system is still well short of what it would need to pilot a car for any appreciable distance.  For another, the system itself would run about $40k, and that's not counting the car it would be driving.  Still, there is that possibility that we would one day have a robotic chauffeur taking care of the task of driving for us.

Then what would teenagers have to look forward to as a rite of passage?
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Anyhoo, those are the thoughts running through my head as I look forward to a long drive over the next week to get to Pittsburgh and back.  There are billions upon billions of decisions which need to be made between now and when I get back.

Kind of astounding, isn't it?

Be Seeing You!

bdharrell