I knew what the initialism means. What did you mean by it?

My description was more accurate.

Per a 1998 study, 50.7% percent of Americans are introverts. http://introvertzone.com/ratio...

Just one correction, not related to your point:

What Google actually sells is an advertising service, which is made more effective by using information in two ways, first to attract viewers, and second to decide which of the viewers is likely to be interested in which ads. The phrase "selling information" sounds like they're providing information to a party who gives them money in return, which isn't what Google does.

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There are a lot more than you probably think. I'm one, and I work with many others. The median age is probably in the mid 30s, though.

I haven't been on line. I'm still connected only with my phone. https://plus.google.com/111463...

The point is that it's clearly not the driver (because there isn't one), which means it's between the maker of the vehicle and whoever else is involved when the judge and jury allocates liability. Not to mention the fact that if Google says "we'll pay" it will never get to court because everyone else involved will say "Okay". It only goes to court when the parties are all arguing they're NOT liable. Google has said up front that if the facts say the self-driving car caused the accident, then Google will pay rather than fight.

It's actually not about most contraception, just the "morning after" pill, which arguably closer to abortion than to contraception.

Well, for one, search was such a massive improvement over Yahoo (hand-curated bookmark lists) and other search engines like Lycos and Altavista that it immediately and totally buried all of its competition.

Rather than addressing the others on a point by point basis, let me just ask if you can name another company that went from nothing to hundreds of millions of daily users in little more than a decade. Hundreds of millions of daily users in multiple product spaces. You don't do that through small, incremental improvements over what came before.

Well, all of the cars tooling around Mountain View without anyone driving are pretty good evidence.

A few years of close-up observation as an employee of Google.

No, it's different. At least it's different from any place I've seen in 25+ years in the industry, which included lots of consulting, during which I saw a lot more corporate cultures than most who don't take the consulting route.

Indeed. Which doesn't mean the progress-seeking attitude is common.

Who said I thought it was terrible? I think it's fantastic.

I have a feeling you seriously misunderstood my post. That may have been my fault.

I don't think that's accurate, since Google has said they believe the maker of an automated vehicle control system should be liable for any damages caused by its malfunctions. I think they do have quite a bit of confidence in their technology, though, and in the ability of the data stream it generates to clarify fault and liability.

I'm sure it edges safely away and slows, just what any cautious driver would do. Actually a human driver may overreact, but the computer won't, since it has vastly higher reaction speeds and more precise measurements, so it will respond faster, but in control. Also, it always knows exactly what is on the other side of it, so it knows how far it can safely move aside.

At present the LIDAR units are expensive. Not because there's anything about them inherently expensive, though, but because they're low-volume items normally only sold to militaries. When production is scaled up, they won't be particularly expensive. Plus, the most expensive parts are the electronics which are inside the car, not the spinning emitter on top.

Google is not planning to have a non-autonomous mode, and has committed to assuming liability for damages caused should the car malfunction.

Actually, Google is arrogant. The company culture deliberately and intentionally breeds a brand of arrogance, always encouraging its people to look for revolutionary rather than incremental changes, to bring 10X or 100X improvements, and works to convince them that they can succeed. Everyone is fully cognizant of the fact that if you swing for the fences you'll miss most of the time, but they figure that's okay because the successes will make up for it. And, of course, the Google-X crew is the elite of Google, people who have previously had fantastic success, built products used on a daily basis by hundreds of millions of people. So have Detroit automakers, of course, but they've built up slowly over the course of a century, while Google is still shy of its 17th birthday.

For that matter, although we've talked about it enough for the last two or three years to make it seem less insane, there's a good argument that even attempting to solve a problem as hard as a fully automated car requires tremendous arrogance. Except that they actually seem to be succeeding, which I guess changes it from arrogance to confidence.

So, I'd say it's kind of a given that when the old-breed, "we've been doing this for generations" brand of arrogance meets the upstart "we've literally changed the world in a little over a decade" brand of arrogance, sparks are going to fly. And the fact that the upstarts have working technology to do what the old breed still isn't sure is possible isn't going to help one bit.

From a cultural perspective, Tesla seems like a much easier fit. That said, if Google and Detroit can find a way to work together, the disparity of backgrounds and cultures should actually make the results much better. But that's a big, big "if".

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but on phones, not cars, and I definitely don't speak for Google.)