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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

Make ubiquitous computing a reality (Raspberry PI is a step in this direction).

Make personal analytics useful (something like http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/09/stephen-wolfram-reveals-t..., but in a way that is actually useful to normal people).

Link the offline and online into one seamless reality (google glass)

If I had to dream about the future and what it should be we're aiming for, it'd be joint universal augmented network access. I want to live in a world like this one --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denno_Coil

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Add Google self-driving car to that list. Reducing alcohol and speed related deaths to zero within our lifetime, getting rid of car parks (fleets of autonomous vehicles move onto the next customer), cheaper delivery of any physical product currently delivered by road, reduced CO2 emissions (cars know when they need servicing), more productive workforces- you can sleep during your commute, the list of benefits is mind boggling. I would love a kit that I could snap onto my car today that could do this (laws notwithstanding). It's going to be a massive game changer for societies.

Subways/trains do this! You don't need self-driving cars to make this world a reality!

Subways/trains don't collect you from the front door of your house and deliver you to the exact spot that you want to go to.

Conceptually, I think this is similar to the last-mile broadband problem[1] - it's not economical to lay fiber to the customer's home unless the customer lives in an urban/reasonably densely populated area. Similarly, if you want to go from transport hub to transport hub (bus/rail station, airport etc.) that's no problem, but getting from the transport hub to your home ranges from expensive and awkward to impossible, depending on how far you live from the transport hub.

Self-driving cars solve this problem. Who cares if you have a 100 mile commute, if you can snooze all the way? Just order the car for a set time every morning to allow enough time for the drive and go back to sleep on the way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile

More particularly, subways drive up real-estate values, thus pushing people out of areas served by subways -- unless you convince the government to spread subway access universally throughout the entire sufficiently-populated area.

Compare Europe and New York's Tri-State-Area to Boston or BART.

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