Driverless Taxis By 2017?

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Here’s the latest on the driverless car front:

General Motors Co. and Lyft Inc. within a year will begin testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric taxis on public roads, a move central to the companies’ joint efforts to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the battle to reshape the auto industry.

This is all in addition to a whole bunch of companies claiming they’ll have fully autonomous vehicles commercially available by 2020. If this really happens, it’s impressive as hell. I’m a longtime optimist on artificial intelligence, but even I figured it would take until 2025 for truly driverless cars to become a reality. Will I have to pull in my prediction of 2040 for full-on strong AI too? Maybe. The next few decades are going to be very interesting indeed.