What are driverless cars?
In doing research for artificial intelligence, I discovered something I have always been interested in, driverless cars. I have always thought to myself: why do cars have to have drivers? With all the new technology, cars should be able to drive on their own. Driverless cars are cars that use electronic sensors, navigation, and moving plans to drive themselves. In 1977, the Japanese Tsukaba Mechanical Engineering Lab began to work with the first driverless cars, which are also referred to as autonomous vehicles. The first autonomous vehicle could reach up to twenty miles per hour. During the 1980’s, Ernst Dickmann and his team created a robot van that went up to sixty miles per hour on non-traffic streets. In 1994, an impressive feat was accomplished by driverless cars. Three driverless cars traveled at one-hundred thirty kilometers per hour for 621 miles in Paris, during a lot of traffic. The controversy over the use of driverless cars is if they will be able to function as well as humans, meaning they need to be AI-complete. Many worry that they will be too dangerous because the cars do not have commonsense or affective computing. Stanford recently created Junior, which is the driverless car they will be entering in this year’s DARPA Urban Challenge. Junior is equipped with LIDAR systems (shine lights and find reflections to discover distance), GPS system, and tons of sensors to help the car function properly on its own.
Sensors
Junior
Should transgenic art be called transgenic science?
While researching transgenic art, I found myself asking: Why is this called art? I mean, a glowing bunny is pretty, but I think of it more as a scientific experiment than an art form. To me, trangenic artists are more transgenic scientists. Transgenic art is the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or artificial genes to an organism, in order to create a completely new species. I can say that whatever the scientist envisions as the new species might be considered an artwork, but the whole process seems more science involved. For example, when a Princeton University scientist gave a mouse an extra brain receptor gene, it was able to go through mazes better. Even though this is incredible, I do not see it as an art project. Also, take the Eduardo Kac GFP K-9 project into account. This project will create a dog that will look bright green while in UV-light. I guess this could be considered a work of art, but I think of it more as an awesome science project. I think that transgenic art would be better if it was more focused on creating species that had more useful abilities; the movie “Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves” greatly exemplified this when they were experimenting with a product that would make night road-workers glow at night.
GFP K-9 Project
Links:
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/autos/0702/gallery.future_safety/index.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18908/?a=f
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car
