Get ready to sit back and enjoy the ride

Ever wish you had a personal chauffeur? Maybe you've been sitting in traffic and wished that someone else were at the wheel and you could relax and watch YouTube videos? Well, the dream may be closer than ever before.

At this time, most auto manufacturers offer sophisticated driver aids, whether it be intelligent cruise control, lane keep assist, or the like. We got our early taste of this a few years back when Lexus ran an ad on TV where their car parked itself without any input from the driver. This technology has only advanced from there. In fact, many experts believe that the levels of autonomy in current cars could get to the point where they literally drive themselves. This is already available in some models from Mercedes Benz, BMW, and Tesla, to name a few where the car takes charge and the driver can take their hands off the wheel. It's truly amazing.

The other aspect of this trend of development that certain experts have focused on are the inevitable impacts that self driving cars will have on our society and economy. The feeling is that the trend in cars will shift away from individual ownership and towards more of an on demand model, ala Uber (sans the driver). If we have a bunch of cars out there driving themsleves, networked together, then theoretically there should be few to no accidents, no moving violations, and consequently, no casualties.This would definitely change the whole auto insurance industry. And if all cars are on demand with no drivers, that pretty much eliminates taxis (or at least the taxi drivers). Of course in this scheme, since people would not end up owning their own cars, the auto industry would end up selling fewer cars, and mostly to these ride on demand services.

All this makes me curious. While I find all these developments to be interesting, I can't help but wonder why all these car companies are jumping over each other to develop these technologies, essentially engineering the demise of their industry?

And what is to be for those select few of us who actually enjoy driving? Will there be a place on the road for human operated vehicles? How will all these autonomous vehicles react to cars that are operated on instinct rather than algorithms?

Only time will tell if these technologies will truly have these profound impacts on our world, at least in the short term. In the meantime, we should all try to enjoy the ride, from behind the wheel, while we still can.

One of many curses of the mobile phone

"What? No you go ahead..."

I find myself saying that a lot when talking on my cell phone. I seem to constantly find myself talking over the other person. Does that make me a rude person? I've always figured it was a flaw of my own, poor cell phone cadence exacerbated by the lack of face to face contact. But maybe not.

I did a little research and there is a possibly a technological explanation for my rudeness. Turns out there is a slight delay on cell phones, not present in landlines. This is referred to as latency. While the continued improvement of communication technology has decreased the effect quite a bit, it's still there. Evidently it's also slightly worse on CDMA networks (like Verizon, my carrier) than GSM networks (at&t and the like). Now mind you, this delay is measured in milliseconds, but somehow it's still enough to set off conversational rhythm so as to have people talk over each other. And if you have two people talking, both on cell phones, is the delay doubled?

I didn't go into it that deeply. I just wanted to relieve some of the guilt of talking over friends, family, and associates. From now on, I'll just blame the latency for my bad manners.

Anyone else experience this phenomenon?