A couple of blogs ago the idea of becoming educated about the topic was a valuable first step in understanding and if then motivated, promoting the value of the coming technology roughly known as self-driving vehicles. Then this blog hinted tha there would be a “google” oriented entry. Well this is it.
Let’s get one thing on the table right from the beginning—-I Love Google and you can go there by entering http://www.google.com or by telling your phone to search google for or in some cases just by saying “hey google.” That my friends is fabulous! Wait for it…..here it comes…EXCEPT….
If you set up a google alert expecting to learn a great deal about the status of self-driving technology and hope to understand the variety of activities going on…. Google Alerts and searches aren't going to get you there. Why?
There are three main reasons:
First if you pick up a daily alert there is likely to be at least three stories about the same topic that appear in three media sources… but are either by the same writer or written from the same template or news release. This is nothing new in our “syndicate” dominated news era, but reader be ware.
Second the stories tend to be pretty one-sided on the negative side. Why? Well who wants to read a daily account of automated vehicles successfully traveling another twenty miles today and read it day after day and week after week? Nobody really wants to read this type of story and yet if you want “news” that addresses the concerns over safety at least one of these stories should make the Google feed every day. After all…. at latest count self-driven vehicles have traveled over a Billion that’s Billion with a B and there have been only four fatalities Now what does that mean? Well you probably don’t really know the whole story based on that number either. “Miles traveled per fatality” isn’t a stat you are probably familiar with. It’s kind of like talking about an amp or a kilowatt. For all most people know it takes 9 amps for a trained monkey to ride a bicycle 3 blocks. By the way given the huge amount we drive in this country and around the world without killing each other is pretty impressive, however, self-driving vehicles are winning the battle of that stat by a three to one ratio. Yes AVs even in their infancies are safer than we are when it comes to driving but that’s not something that gets into Google on a very regular basis.
Three: In this industry the spectrum is too large for Google——what? you ask? too large for Google? Well right now it is… There is the engineering aspect of the vehicles, the variety of brands becoming involved, the computer software aspects, the sensors, the safety advocates on both sides of the hurry up and slow down sides, and then there is the legal stuff… I mean we have national traffic regulations, state laws on licensing and testing, idiosyncratic insurance laws in every state, and legislative processes that rival the variety of craft beers you can purchase at a good liquor outlet.
So…if not Google where do we get educated….. well it appears the emerging PAVE campaign Partners for Autonomous VehicleEducation might be a good source. Several states are or already have issued the “state of autonomous vehicles” reports much like Michigan’s that is probably on the verge of obsolete by now. In the end you are going to have to work to stay educated or focus on a small slice of this for a while. However, if you ask people fair questions about the things they are doing they will usually give you a fair answer. So dig in…. but not just with your Google shovel..
There is a world of cool things happening in this news space…. go out and enjoy the exploration!
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