Food and discussion begins at 12:30 pm. Everyone invited.

In 2005, a Stanford-designed vehicle called Stanley won the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132-mile autonomous vehicle race. The rapid progress of autonomous vehicle technology makes it increasingly likely that a young person entering the workforce today will have a car that can drive him or her to work before he retires. This talk, based on a three part series (Part I), (Part II), (Part III) at Ars Technica, offers a speculative tour of the self-driving future. Self-driving technologies could transform many aspects of human society, saving tens of thousands of lives, tens billions of hours of human time, and hundreds of billions of dollars of energy consumption. They could revolutionize urban planning, law enforcement, and the retail industry. They could also bring with them a number of new problems and controversies, including debates over liability and regulation, civil liberties, and the freedom to modify your own vehicle.

Timothy B. Lee is pursuing a PhD in computer science at Princeton, where he is a member of the Center for IT Policy. He is also a freelance writer and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He has written for numerous online and traditional publications, including Ars Technica, Slate, Reason, and the New York Times. He holds a BS in computer science from the University of Minnesota.