Video: “Look, Ma, No Hands!”

This week, in the Tech Issue of the magazine, Burkhard Bilger writes about Anthony Levandowski, an engineer at Google X, the software giant’s secret space for testing new products, and his development of the driverless car. Bilger writes, “The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction: this year’s model of last century’s make. It belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs and rocket ships, transporter beams and cities beneath the sea, of a predicted future still well beyond our technology.” Some of the clips in the above video are those that Levandowski replays for himself, a reminder of previous engineers’ attempts to create driverless vehicles. During the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, Levandowski said, of his self-driving motorcycle, “The thrill is seeing something that everybody who you know told you it could not be done work.”