Lots of people have been making cracks about our sadly flying-car free future, or wondering how soon we will all be driving emissions free electric vehicles. But few people have been asking when we will all be driving our future cars… WITH OUR MINDS!

I love how god damned smug our technician/driver looks. He knows that at this moment, he is the Lord of all the Nerd. He’s driving a car with his THOUGHTS. He is experiencing a level of smugness normally reserved only for stage magicians and movie psychics.

Can’t you just picture Mentok the Mind-taker getting all sullen and jealous? “Oh please, I’ve been doing that for YEARS. Sure, you can crudely control a car with your computer whatzits…. but can you do THIS? WeeeeOOOOooooEEEee… *ZAP*!” Car turns into a fixed wing jump plane and takes off into the sky. “Hah! Nobody beats the Kid! MIND TAKER!”

Of course, it’s still a highly experimental technology and anyone with a pinch of imagination can easily imagine all kinds of things going wrong with a brain controlled car. The most likely users for this technology in the future will be people with serious health issues that would prevent them from controlling a car by any of the currently existing means.

And besides, who wants to control their car with their mind, when the car can just use its own?

Check out this video of what Google’s entry into the self-driving car race can do on a closed course.

Not freaking bad! That rig pulls off all kinds of fancy turns and sharp maneuvers just like a real stunt driver. And you can tell the nerds are very pleased with themselves. Think about it, they have made a computer that can drive. That is like the ultimate remote controlled car project. I bet the guys at Mythbusters would love to be able to program their doomed vehicles as deftly as Google’s.

Of course, then a lot of presumably very expensive software and hardware would go kerblooey along with the cars, so… maybe not. At least, not YET.

All that fancy driving is only tangentially relevant to the real world task of driving on the real roads, streets, and highways of the world, filled with pedestrians, weather, other vehicles with “meat” drivers, and all the inherent unpredictability that anything involving us crazy naked beach apes necessarily involves. The challenge of driving exactly like a human being would (or, mostly likely, far better, as computers have light speed reflexes and don’t drink, talk on cell phones, or put on makeup while driving) is a staggeringly complex one, and I am extremely pleased at the progress being made in that direction. It’s a field I am quite interested in, and yet… ever since I was old enough to really grasp what a complicated problem the autonomous vehicle represents, I assumed that it would simply not be something that got solved in my lifetime. The problem seemed intractably complex.

What I suspect has happened is that processor speed has covered a lot the problem and made more sophisticated solutions superfluous. You don’t need to program in something analogous to the way a human being anticipates and fluidly adjusts to situations if your computer can correct the car’s course millions of times per second. It’s one of those situations where it takes a great deal of digital granularity to begin to approach the smoothness and precision of analog. Like with mp3s. It takes a lot of samples per second in order to produce music that sounds as good as a CD, let alone a live performer.

But what if, no matter if you are using your own meat brain to drive the car or letting a cooler and more precise computer brain do the job, the unthinkable happens, you get in a horrible accident, and it takes out several of your very important and dearly beloved internal organs. What then?

No problem, just print out a new one!

The worlds of tissue engineering and 3D printing/rapid prototyping are merging, and the progress that has been made in the last year along is mind-blowing. Already, he is printing models which replicate the entire exterior structure of an organ. This, just two years after he figured out that you could put human cells into an inkjet printer and print out something vaguely like actual tissue.

Imagine the future where there are absolutely no organ shortages because anything can be printed on demand. A bladder. A kidney. A heart.

Or for that matter, a steak. Once we can print off something as complex and precise and mission-critical as a human organ, printing off animal tissue will be child’s play. Kobe beef, Beluga caviar, you name it, fresh off the printer, already cooked to perfection.

The future is such a trip!