Hearne: Future Vision Gets Reality Check 

There’s a fine line between Big Brother and George Jetson….

Millions of Baby Boomers grew up delighting in the antics of Fred Flintstone and his feet powered cars, but at the same time with their eyes pointed toward a future of the flying cars in The Jetsons.

Because back in those early days of space travel and men on the moon, anything seemed possible. Society had scaled the heights with technological wonders such as microwave ovens, cordless telephones and home delivered pizza. Could individual rocket packs and driverless cars be far behind?

Of course not!

Then again, here we are in 2016 where futuristic things like fracking, drones and terrorism are part and parcel of our daily lives, and yet floating cars and teleportation are nowhere to be seen.

Pretty much all we have to show for the past 30 years in that regard are Star Trek reruns and movies. Until now.

Ah, but thanks to Google (aka Alphabet) driverless cars appear poised to leave human error behind the wheel of a car in the rearview mirror.

At least that the way things appeared to be going until a Google piloted, driverless Lexus SUV slammed into a bus outside San Francisco.

And while it was only a fender bender – after all, the driverless Lexus wasn’t under-the-influence or anything of that nature – the particulars of the crash point to the age-old problem; human error.

Here’s how it went down (on Valentine’s Day, no less):

According to the DMV, the self-driving Googlemobile was trucking along in Mountain View, California when it plowed into a municipal bus at 2 mph.

Seems the Lexus needed to change lanes to avoid some sandbags and anticipated that the bus driver would slow down.

Which was pretty much exactly what the bus driver did – assumed and anticipated that the Googlemobile would back off. Neither of course did.

So who was at fault?

For the first time in over a dozen crashes, Google was the guilty party.

Proving, to the delight no doubt of the Fred Flintstone set, that the human element is still the way of the world.

Despite the concerted efforts of computer companies like Apple and Google.

There’s more.

Regarding those other accidents that were reportedly not Google’s fault, the majority of them were the result of people rear ending the Google cars at slow speeds at intersections where they anticipated the Google cars would have moved ahead but didn’t.

OK, we all know that in car insurance parlance,that  pretty much any rear end accident is considered to be the fault of the rear ender, no the rear ended.

And that’s fair.

However, a pattern is a pattern, so what does it say about the Googlemobiles if they appear to be causing to at least some extent the same sort of accidents over-and-over?

As for Google, it admitted its error in the bus crash and said that its computer had made the wrong decision.

Imagine that, the illustrious computer company placing the blame for its computer driven accident on – wait for it – human error!