We’ve all been there. You need to take care of business in the car — homework, an email, an imperative Instagram post. But the problem: You need to control the vehicle. We want the dream of the Jetson’s now. We want fully autonomous (level-5) self-driving cars. Thanks to the recent advancements in many key areas of autonomous driving this week, we may be a lot closer than we believe.

Artificial Intelligence: The Neural Network of Siri.

Apple is a company long known for their obsession over privacy and security. In an interview with Steven Levy of Backchannel, the Cupertino giant said they made changes to the Siri voice assistant during the summer of 2014, integrating deep neural networking into the voice assistant. According to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP of Internet Software and Services, “this was one of those things where the jump was so significant that you do the test again to make sure that somebody didn't drop a decimal place.” The question is: Did anyone even notice? I, for one, did not.

Though I have noticed improvements to Apple’s voice assistant throughout the years, I still consider Siri to have poor overall AI functionality when compared to other assistants like Google Now and Cortana. Although, this raises the question: Knowing that the Apple Car (codenamed Project Titan) is still years away, is Apple publicizing Siri’s not-so-new makeover as way to get feedback to improve her for a potential autonomous vehicle? Maybe, seeing as Barbra Streisand has already called CEO Tim Cook to do so.

Tesla & MIT Stepping Up the Battery Game!

Tesla announced upgraded battery packs for their Model S and Model X vehicles. The battery packs, which come with a storage capacity of 100kWh, promise to take a vehicle up to 315 miles on a single charge, up from 294 miles with the 90kWh battery pack on the Model S P100D version. The auto manufacturer, who is known for producing consumer-facing autonomous vehicles, notes battery performance to increase around 5% year-over-year.

Prior to Tesla’s announcement, SolidEnergy (a spinoff out of MIT’s Research Lab) announced it developed lithium-metal batteries which can deliver the same amount of energy as lithium-ion batteries in half the size. This essentially means lithium-metal batteries can carry double the juice when compared to an equivalent-sized lithium-ion battery. This works by using lithium metal for the anode (instead of carbon). Problems with overheating and toxic chemicals that plagued lithium-metal batteries have been resolved by coating the anode with a solid electrolyte that functions at room temperate. Imaging your Tesla going up 630 miles on a single charge? SolidEnergy says these tests have been performed in a lab, meaning a commercially-viable product may be years away. They should know by the end of 2016.

Self-Driving Ubers in Pittsburgh!

Uber announced earlier this month they would begin publicly testing self-driving vehicles through a non-exclusive partnership with Volvo. As of August 26, the autonomous vehicles were spotted on the streets of Pittsburgh. Although the vehicles control themselves, a human will reside in the driver’s seat to take charge at a moment’s notice. Ford also announced earlier this month that it plans to develop its own autonomous fleet of cars that may be sold to ride-sharing services (like Uber and Lyft) by 2021.

Unfortunately, The Trolley Problem Still Remains...

In a recent post on Medium, I described the core issue with autonomous driving: The Trolley Problem. At what point does a self-driving car decide who to kill if it cannot evade danger? How does it make that decision?

The work going into autonomous vehicles has advanced over the past few years and there is still more work to be done. As an avid “pro-techie” (so-to-speak), it seems rather trivial to play Devil’s Advocate by questioning if this marvelous feat of engineering & technology is something we should be rushing towards. Apple plans to unveil their alleged self-driving car by 2021. Ford and others have similar time frames to begin monetizing from level-5 autonomous vehicles. The technology is almost ready, but are we ready for the consequences?