I'm not on a shared computer. I think the New York Times website is just insane sometimes. I experienced some issues with it a while back, but I'd forgotten about that. Anyway...
The thing that amazes me about it is this. For a while now I've been saying that we'd eventually have cars that drive themselves, but that because initially people would be scared off by liability concerns or would be averse to the idea because they're used to being in control, cultural considerations would hold back the technological development, and self-driving cars would have to sort of emerge stepwise over the next several decades. I would even have said that it really already started with automatic transmission and cruise control (which are old news by now) initially taking things that had been manipulated solely be the driver of the car in the past and making them automated. So with recent developments like collision detection and computer-controlled parking, I thought we were seeing more steps on the road to fully self-driving cars. And then Google goes and makes what's practically a proof of concept just as a sort of side project. Not something they're actively pushing for or even trying to generate profit from yet, but something they wanted to invest in. Yeah, I get that I won't be seeing these cars on the street tomorrow or next week or even next year. But still, this is impressive.