PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tags cars & google

Peart wrote the lyrics in 1981, and appears to correctly predict the inventions of Google Earth and Street View (“the eyes”). This will become even more prescient in the next decade or two, as the products continue their inevitable evolution toward watching our every move in real time. (Initially for consumer data-tracking purposes, but later co-opted by law enforcement.)

Google's self-driving cars can tour you around the streets of Mountain View, California.  I know this. I rode in one this week. I saw the car's human operator take his hands from the wheel and the computer assume control. "Autodriving," said a woman's voice, and just like that, the car was operating autonomously, changing lanes, obeying traffic lights, monitoring cyclists and pedestrians, making lefts. Even the way the car accelerated out of turns felt right. 

When we first started Street View as an experimental project, we packed several computers into the back of an SUV, stuck cameras, lasers, and a GPS device on top, and drove around collecting our first imagery. Since Street View launched for five U.S. cities in May 2007, we've expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to include locations on all seven continents. We then moved to a van for a brief period, before switching to a fleet of cars that would allow us to scale the project throughout the US and around the world. We went from a rack of computers to one small computer per car, and then set to work refining our camera system to capture higher-resolution panoramic views. After several iterations of the car and camera technology, the latest car has 15 lenses taking 360 degrees of photos. It also has motion sensors to track its position, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system, and lasers to capture 3D data to determine distances within the Street View imagery.