Blog Post 2

I have recently realized a very obvious connection between a reoccurring theme in The Circle and autonomous driving (my topic for the final project).  The common theme is the apparent desire for acceleration within each of the industries. In The Circle, we are introduced to the company at a time when it seemed to already be far more advanced than any other company in that world or in ours that we live in today. They have not only taken over several companies that we consider at the top of our social media craze like Facebook and SnapChat, but also have begun having control in other major realms of life like healthcare. This control only grows, and grows very quickly, throughout Mae’s short time at The Circle. At first, I got the vibe that they were doing this for the betterment of society by providing tools to make everyone’s life easier and basically perfect. But towards the middle and end of the book, I began to think of how crazy this monopoly is and that allowing everyone access to everything is actually pretty crazy and dangerous. I have not finished the book so they are still saying that “the circle is almost complete” and it has not taken very long at all for them to get close to this point of “completeness”. It seems as if the leaders of the company are rushing this status of having complete transparency, which what I think they mean by “completeness”. Why should the acceleration of the company to “complete” be so urgent? In my experience, rushing any kind of project usually leads to many small errors that take longer to find when it’s on a larger scale. This is how I see the book possibly ending, with the “completeness” causing chaos because it is not ready because of how accelerated the process was. This concept from The Circle connects very closely with Elon Musk and how he wants Tesla to be the first company to have a fully autonomous vehicle. Tesla has not been one of the primary faces in autonomous driving until recently and he is already pushing to complete this incredible feat by the end of the year. To put this in perspective, Google has been working towards a fully autonomous vehicle since 2009 and do not think they will have it figured out until 2021 at the earliest.  Tesla has shocked the world with its one-of-a-kind cars but this seems like this kind of project should not have a true deadline. There are so many things that have to be taken into consideration before these vehicles could actually be used in our society. First off, which I mentioned briefly in my other post, is how our infrastructure will not be ready for this car change. Part of the genius behind autonomous driving is that all the vehicles will be able to communicate with one another, which will make driving way more efficient because the cars will know when the other has to make a lane change or the exact distance that it has to begin braking before a red light. If autonomous cars are on the road with our standard ones, they won’t be able to communicate and that could potentially cause more accidents since everything won’t be connected in one day. I suppose Musk could still come out with the first autonomous vehicle but it would not have much use in today’s society so by the time our infrastructure is ready for this change, the technology will probably need to be different. Another thing to understand is that the economy might not be good enough for a ton of people to make the switch from regular cars to autonomous ones. I think companies attempting for autonomous driving should start trying to figure out how they can incorporate into the vehicles we drive today in order to make the transition faster and cheaper.