The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.

Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.

– John Markoff, N.Y. Times.

OK, a lot of stuff here. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m pretty much terrified of Google, for a variety of reasons. Their corporate mantra, after all, says, “Don’t Be Evil,” which suggests they’ve at least considered being evil. So I’m a little concerned to hear they’re testing debatably legal robot cars in secret on the streets of San Francisco. Believe me, the last thing we want is Google partnering with the machines this early in the game.

Second, I happen to love driving, but I’ve endured the particularly harrowing trek from New York to D.C. enough times to have considered at length the possibility of a self-driving car.

And it strikes me that it’s not really worth putting one on the road unless it is absolutely foolproof and requires almost no human interaction beyond initial directional programming. It will be far too tempting to sleep, eat, text, drink — whatever — in a self-driving car, so it seems like the first step is entirely eliminating the need for an alert driver. Especially since once we all get used to having our cars drive themselves — and new drivers come of age never knowing any different — our skills behind the wheel will atrophy.

My friend Charlie and I once envisioned some sort of motorized track along the side of interstates — sort of a glorified version of the car-wash thing — to let drivers coast along at 40 mph or so while they snoozed in their seats overnight. But then we never came up with a good plan for how you get on or off that thing, or how to avoid the inevitable pileups at the end.