Today a co-worker and I were riding in his new vehicle when suddenly an alarm went off and the car started to slow. My friend didn’t think much of it, but it completely took me by surprise. Turns out he wasn’t slowing down as quickly as the car wanted him to, and it activated the collision avoidance system. That means that the car started to apply the brakes on its own without any intervention of the driver, even though we weren’t in any danger of colliding.

I’m of two minds about this type of automation. On one hand it’s very cool how the car can prevent a simple rear-end collision, as these are very common collisions, and often completely avoidable. Yet on the other hand it’s a bit scary that we’re slowly giving away little bits of our control of driving to automated systems. Frankly, I’d rather we had a system of completely autonomous cars than little bits of control that may or may not be on every car.

I’m actually looking forward to the day when we can just sit down in our transportation, tell it where to go, and then sit back and enjoy the ride. For now, I guess we’ll just have to live with small steps when we can.