Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to
the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. They
have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles,
cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle
with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and
flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are
their own damn fault.
A case in point: The driver in the lane to my right. He’s twisted halfway around in his seat, taking a picture
of the Lexus that I’m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski. Both cars are heading south
on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour, yet the man takes his time. He holds
his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so. Then he snaps the picture,
checks it onscreen, and taps out a lengthy text message with his thumbs. By the time he puts his hands back
on the wheel and glances up at the road, half a minute has passed.
Levandowski shakes his head. He’s used to this sort of thing. His Lexus is what you might call a custom
model. It’s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G.P.S.
It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work. Levandowski used to tell
people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an
élite team of ghost hunters. But nowadays the vehicle is clearly marked: “Self-Driving Car.”
Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal
commute. He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o’clock, waves goodbye to his fiancée and
their son, and drives to his office in Mountain View, forty-three miles away. The ride takes him over
surface streets and freeways, old salt flats and pine-green foothills, across the gusty blue of San
Francisco Bay, and down into the heart of Silicon Valley. In rush-hour traffic, it can take two hours,
but Levandowski doesn’t mind. He thinks of it as research. While other drivers are gawking at him, he
is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car’s sensor logs, analyzing traffic flow, and flagging
any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is when there’s roadwork or an accident ahead
and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning
appears on his dashboard screen: “In one mile, prepare to resume manual control.”
Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company’s semi-secret lab for experimental technology.
He turned thirty-three last March but still has the spindly build and nerdy good nature of the kids in my
high-school science club. He wears black frame glasses and oversized neon sneakers, has a long,
loping stride—he’s six feet seven—and is given to excitable talk on fantastical themes. Cybernetic
dolphins! Self-harvesting farms! Like a lot of his colleagues in Mountain View, Levandowski is equal
parts idealist and voracious capitalist. He wants to fix the world and make a fortune doing it. He comes
by these impulses honestly: his mother is a French diplomat, his father an American businessman.
Although Levandowski spent most of his childhood in Brussels, his English has no accent aside from a
certain absence of inflection—the bright, electric chatter of a processor in overdrive. “My fiancée is a
dancer in her soul,” he told me. “I’m a robot.”
What separates Levandowski from the nerds I knew is this: his wacky ideas tend to come true. “I only
do cool shit,” he says. As a freshman at Berkeley, he launched an intranet service out of his basement
that earned him fifty thousand dollars a year. As a sophomore, he won a national robotics competition
with a machine made out of Legos that could sort Monopoly money—a fair analogy for what he’s been
doing for Google lately. He was one of the principal architects of Street View and the Google Maps
database, but those were just warmups. “The Wright Brothers era is over,” Levandowski assured me,
as the Lexus took us across the Dumbarton Bridge. “This is more like Charles Lindbergh’s plane. And
we’re trying to make it as robust and reliable as a 747.”
Not everyone finds this prospect appealing. As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago,
“Hands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company?
We’ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.” Levandowski understands
the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do. “People think that we’re going to pry
the steering wheel from their cold, dead hands,” he told me, but they have it exactly wrong. Someday
soon, he believes, a self-driving car will save your life.
The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction: this year’s model of last century’s make. It
belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs and rocket ships, transporter beams and cities
beneath the sea, of a predicted future still well beyond our technology. In 1939, at the World’s Fair in
New York, visitors stood in lines up to two miles long to see the General Motors Futurama exhibit.
Inside, a conveyor belt carried them high above a miniature landscape, spread out beneath a glass dome.
Its suburbs and skyscrapers were laced together by superhighways full of radio-guided cars. “Does it
seem strange? Unbelievable?” the announcer asked. “Remember, this is the world of 1960.”

Not quite. Skyscrapers and superhighways made the deadline, but driverless cars still putter along in
prototype. Human beings, as it turns out, aren’t easy to improve upon. For every accident they cause,
they avoid a thousand others. They can weave through tight traffic and anticipate danger, gauge
distance, direction, pace, and momentum. Americans drive nearly three trillion miles a year, I was told
by Ron Medford, a former deputy administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
who now works for Google. It’s no wonder that we have thirty-two thousand fatalities along the way,
he said. It’s a wonder the number is so low.
Levandowski keeps a collection of vintage illustrations and newsreels on his laptop, just to remind him
of all the failed schemes and fizzled technologies of the past. When he showed them to me one night at
his house, his face wore a crooked grin, like a father watching his son strike out in Little League. From
1957: A sedan cruises down a highway, guided by circuits in the road, while a family plays dominoes
inside. “No traffic jam . . . no collisions . . . no driver fatigue.” From 1977: Engineers huddle around
a driverless Ford on a test track. “Cars like this one may be on the nation’s roads by the year 2000!”
Levandowski shook his head. “We didn’t come up with this idea,” he said. “We just got lucky that the
computers and sensors were ready for us.”
Almost from the beginning, the field divided into two rival camps: smart roads and smart cars. General
Motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen-fifties. Its Firebird III concept car—shaped like
a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit—was designed to run on a test track
embedded with an electrical cable, like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable,
a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal and followed it around the curve. Engineers at
Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets, alternating their polarity in
binary patterns to send messages to the car—“Slow down, sharp curve ahead.” Systems like these
were fairly simple and reliable, but they had a chicken-and-egg problem. To be useful, they had to
be built on a large scale; to be built on a large scale, they had to be useful. “We don’t have the
money to fix potholes,” Levandowski says. “Why would we invest in putting wires in the road?”
Smart cars were more flexible but also more complex. They needed sensors to guide them,
computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer
named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van
with video cameras and processors, then programmed it to follow lane lines. Soon it was
steering itself around a track. By 1995, Dickmanns’s car was able to drive on the Autobahn
from Munich to Odense, Denmark, going up to a hundred miles at a stretch without assistance.
Surely the driverless age was at hand! Not yet. Smart cars were just clever enough to get
drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were strictly controlled
environments. The instant more variables were added—a pedestrian, say, or a traffic cop
their programming faltered. Ninety-eight per cent of driving is just following the dotted line.
It’s the other two per cent that matters.
“There was no way, before 2000, to make something interesting,” the roboticist Sebastian
Thrun told me. “The sensors weren’t there, the computers weren’t there, and the mapping
wasn’t there. Radar was a device on a hilltop that cost two hundred million dollars. It wasn’t
something you could buy at Radio Shack.” Thrun, who is forty-six, is the founder of the
Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed
his first driving simulator at the age of twelve. Slender and tan, with clear blue eyes and a
smooth, seemingly boneless gait, he looks as if he just stepped off a dance floor in Ibiza.
And yet, like Levandowski, he has a gift for seeing things through a machine’s eyes—for
intuiting the logic by which it might apprehend the world.
When Thrun first arrived in the United States, in 1995, he took a job at the country’s
leading center for driverless-car research: Carnegie Mellon University. He went on to
build robots that explored mines in Virginia, guided visitors through the Smithsonian, and
chatted with patients at a nursing home. What he didn’t build was driverless cars.
Funding for private research in the field had dried up by then. And though Congress had
set a goal that a third of all ground combat vehicles be autonomous by 2015, little had
come of the effort. Every so often, Thrun recalls, military contractors, funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, would roll out their latest prototype.
“The demonstrations I saw mostly ended in crashes and breakdowns in the first half
mile,” he told me. “DARPA was funding people who weren’t solving the problem. But
they couldn’t tell if it was the technology or the people. So they did this crazy thing,
which was really visionary.”
They held a race.
The first DARPA Grand Challenge took place in the Mojave Desert on March 13,
2004. It offered a million-dollar prize for what seemed like a simple task: build a car
that can drive a hundred and forty-two miles without human intervention. Ernst
Dickmanns’s car had gone similar distances on the Autobahn, but always with a
driver in the seat to take over in the tricky stretches. The cars in the Grand
Challenge would be empty, and the road would be rough: from Barstow,
California, to Primm, Nevada. Instead of smooth curves and long straightaways,
it had rocky climbs and hairpin turns; instead of road signs and lane lines, G.P.S.
waypoints. “Today, we could do it in a few hours,” Thrun told me. “But at the time
it felt like going to the moon in sneakers.”

Levandowski first heard about it from his mother. She’d seen a notice for the race
when it was announced online, in 2002, and recalled that her son used to play with
remote-control cars as a boy, crashing them into things on his bedroom floor. Was
this so different? Levandowski was now a student at Berkeley, in the industrial-
ngineering department. When he wasn’t studying or rowing crew or winning Lego
competitions, he was casting about for cool new shit to build—for a profit, if possible.
“If he’s making money, it’s his confirmation that he’s creating value,” his friend Randy
Miller told me. “I remember, when we were in college, we were at his house one day,
and he told me that he’d rented out his bedroom. He’d put up a wall in his living room
and was sleeping on a couch in one half, next to a big server tower that he’d built.
I said, ‘Anthony, what the hell are you doing? You’ve got plenty of money. Why don’t
you get your own place?’ And he said, ‘No. Until I can move to a stateroom on a 747,
I want to live like this.’ ”
More.......http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/25/auto-correct?currentPage=all