Alex Davies tells the dramatic, colorful story of the quest to develop driverless cars-and the fierce competition between Google, Uber, and other companies in a race to revolutionize our lives.
The self-driving car has been one of the most vaunted technological breakthroughs of recent years. But early promises that these autonomous vehicles would soon be on the roads have proven premature. Alex Davies follows the twists and turns of this story from its origins to today.
The story starts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was charged with developing a land-based equivalent to the drone, a vehicle that could operate in war zones without risking human lives. DARPA issued a series of three "Grand Challenges" that attracted visionaries, many of them students and amateurs, who took the technology from Jetsons-style fantasy to near-reality. The young stars of the Challenges soon connected with Silicon Valley giants Google and Uber, intent on delivering a new way of driving to the civilian world.
Soon the automakers joined the quest, some on their own, others in partnership with the tech titans. But as road testing progressed, it became clear that the challenges of driving a car without human assistance were more formidable than anticipated.
Davies profiles the industry's key players from the early enthusiasm of the DARPA days to their growing awareness that while this spin on artificial intelligence isn't yet ready for rush-hour traffic, driverless cars are poised to remake how the world moves. Driven explores this exciting quest to transform transportation and change our lives.
Phenomenal Look At Emerging Tech. I'll be upfront here: I am an experienced programmer that has been coding professionally since around the time covered more towards the middle of this book, when the push for the Autonomous Car was leaving DARPA and beginning to be pushed more by private industry. While I've never worked in anything remotely similar to this particular type of programming (my own work usually involves some form of web application, even when automating business processing), I thus have a degree of insight into the challenges from at least that side of the house.
And y'all, this book covers the history of this particular tech and its challenges in stunning clarity, as one might expect from a WIRED reporter. This is a fascinating subject filled with... shall we say, "colorful"... characters and outrageous stunts, and Davies paints them all in 8k, warts and all. For this to be a debut book is even more remarkable, as Davies puts together a long form narrative structure that rivals the clarity of even far more seasoned science book writers. Very much recommended.
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