Bertrand D'souza

With the advent of autonomous cars, will legislation allow people to ever pilot their own cars

Is Skynet self-aware? Well, I can say that a part of it did wake up on July 11 in Barcelona, Spain. Or at least that's the day we found out about it. I was there to see it happen, right there on a stage after a dozen dance performers and a glitzy light and sound extravaganza had blown our minds. Then Audi rolled out the new A8, and announced to the world that it was the first series production level-3 autonomous car. A car that drove by itself, because it could think. Without human intervention. Without anyone's hands on the steering wheel. Without having to be told what to do next! Artificial intelligence had come alive in the most visual form we know, a car!

Rewind my clock to just a few days before in Boxberg in Germany, where I met a young developer who along with a team had created a conceptual autonomous truck. It was a magnificent thing. Dubbed the Vision X, it had one amazing feature that allowed it to hook up with other trucks in a continuous chain, enabling the driver to travel handsfree. Only the truck at the lead would power the chain and the rest would conserve their energy. Like the Audi A8, it used the Internet of Things (IoT) cloud to perform a seamless job. It was safe, followed instructions to the 'T' and would never lose its way.