Adam Blatner

My son got a new car with a lot of “bells and whistles,” new gadgets. He writes: “Alas, it lacks the latest Telepathic Soul-Connection (TSC) technology. So it’s not so great.  It doesn’t do the driving for you.” But he says he is relatively sure we will be able to buy self-driving cars within 10-15 years. They’re already very good and have driven millions of miles. The only accidents they have been in are when humans hit them. He writes, “Of course, I’m already frustrated because I can’t figure out how to get the car to read my incoming text messages to me. I think there’s a way.”

He says, “There is actually a way now to have your Facebook newsfeed and photos come up on the screen on the dashboard while you drive. I am not making this up. I will not enable that, except perhaps to take a picture of it. Can you imagine?
* You can press a button and say "call Adam Blatner" out loud and it will dial the phone wirelessly and call you, or say "play radio station 92.5 FM" and it will switch to that station.
* If you’re backing up in a parking lot and a car is coming from the left or right, it will beep at you.
* Adaptive cruise control: You can tell it how far you want to stay from the car in front of you and it will adjust the gas or breaks to try to maintain that distance (both on highway and even in stop-and-go rush hour traffic)
* Grenade launcher and parachute (okay, not really)
* Lane departure warning (if you’re on the highway late at night and sleepy it will alert you if you start to drift toward the edge of your lane)
* Unlock the door and start the car keeping the key in your pocket (it just senses that it is close)
* Auto rain-detecting wiper blades.
Wow! Newfangled stuff just gets even more fangled!