ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the machine therapy system developed by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the US military, which has proved surprisingly effective at diagnosing soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. Self-driving cars have come a long way since 2004, when the Humvee Sandstorm got stuck on a rock seven miles into the first DARPA Grand Challenge. The case for introducing self-driving cars, vans, buses and lorries is simple and overwhelming: around the world, human drivers kill 1.2 million people a year, and injure a further 20–50 million. The automotive industry's initial response to the implicit challenge from Google and others was slow and piecemeal. Machine-driven cars will be more efficient consumers of road space than human drivers. The horrendous death and injury toll imposed by human drivers is sufficient, together with the liberation from the boredom and the waste of time caused by commuting.
