The odds were favorable. Still, a gun to the head is a gun to the head.
The gun was removed from its holster quickly. The man, as he put it against my head, explained, “This gun holds one-hundred bullets. It is loaded with only three.” He spoke with a casual confidence about my favorable odds.
But at that moment the odds didn’t matter at all: I was terrified of that gun. It was holding bullets and the trigger would be pulled.
Google test drove its robotic car 140,000 miles—at least 1,000 of them autonomously—on California highways before we found out. I say we but really I mean they, as in the government who, no doubt, will one day decide whether robots are allowed to wait in line at the DMV alongside humans or not.
The government got a clue after a reporter inquired about the top-secret project and Google fessed up. Google then hired a lobbyist to nudge Nevada into becoming the first state to allow autonomous vehicles onto its roads. For their likely* law-breaking treks in California no punishment did they receive.
He’s still in the box he came in, sitting on the same shelf we sat him on days after his death. Always an unceremonious bunch, the idea of spreading his ashes seemed stilted, yet chucking his last remains seemed, even for us, too flippant. So on the shelf he went, among the few souvenirs, keepsakes and mementos that evidence my family’s time in yesterdays.
publishless 