Car-inspired holiday ornaments can be difficult to come by, especially if you want to keep your tree from looking like a jumbled, hodge-podge of hand-me-down plastic balls. Usually, if a car person wants to add some automotive flair to their tree, they find an ornament that looks like an engine or that red truck hauling a pine tree. But what if there was a car that looked like an ornament instead of an ornament that looked like a car?
Good news is that Google has already thought this through. Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving car project (I guess that was too much of a mouthful), is a self-driving automobile aimed at bringing about technology that can be used to remove all the joy from being in a car. Just kidding, sort of. Imagine having an ornament that can hang itself on the tree. That’s pretty wicked cool, man.
Waymo is a division of Alphabet, also known as Google, and is in the business of creating a safe and easy autonomous driving experience. This can be utilized from consumer to commercial enterprise and would likely revolutionize how we ship and receive goods. Costs over time could theoretically be drastically reduced as the technology becomes more widespread and implementable. On one hand it is incredibly exciting and on the other potentially terrifying.
Just think, though. One day, all those Amazon gifts you ordered and had wrapped could be delivered to your home by an autonomous vehicle and then placed on your front porch by a delivery drone piloted by Mark Zuckerberg from the Metaverse. I mean, it’s not like that experience would be any different for the end consumer than it is now. How often do you actually communicate with your Amazon delivery person?
If thinking about the future gives you a bit of anxiety, that is natural. The unknown is a scary place, and it is difficult to willingly set foot in. But remember, our ancestors also dealt with the possibility of a harsh and scary future, and civilization has done pretty well so far. If we can make it past the horrors of the mid-20th century, then I don’t think self-driving cars are anything to worry about. So put that weird-looking autonomous ornament on the tree and have a Happy Holiday.
