On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Google is building a car that can drive itself. The search company’s small fleet of self-driving cars—guided by roof-mounted sensors and a battalion of cloud-connected servers—has driven more than 140,000 miles with minimal human intervention. The cars can obey traffic signs, merge on to the freeway, and avoid pedestrians and bicyclists. I was stunned by the news; two years ago, I interviewed several auto-safety engineers about the potential for self-driving cars, and they all told me that the technology was decades away. Google told the Times that its cars are still an experiment, and the company hasn’t decided to turn the tech into a commercial product. The tech still has kinks—Google’s cars don’t know how to obey traffic cops’ hand signals, for instance. Still, self-driving automobiles appear to be on the way to revolutionizing modern transportation. Google’s technology could make cars safer, more efficient, and a lot more pleasant. Indeed, it’s fascinating to think about how automated driving will change how we spend our time in the car. Americans squander nearly an hour each workday commuting. That’s exactly why legislating concentration seems like a futile approach. Working from the road has become a hallmark of the American economy—we’re all being pressed to be more productive, and the many hours each week we’re trapped in our cars seem like the perfect time to get something done. Many industries (like freight companies and plumbing outfits) require workers to be tied in to the central office using onboard computers, and even office workers feel the push to stay connected while on the road. What’s more, research suggests that while both teenagers and adults (PDF) know the dangers of texting while driving, we’re all overconfident about our own abilities to multitask on the road—you think it’s dangerous for me to look at my phone while I’m driving, but you’re pretty sure you can handle it. (And texting laws are so spottily enforced that you’re pretty sure that you can get away with it, too.) Read more at www.slate.com

Despite this nation’s rise as a technology titan with some of the best engineering minds in the world, its full economic potential is stifled by potholed roads, collapsing bridges, rickety railroads and a power grid so unreliable that many modern office buildings run their own diesel generators to make sure the lights and computers stay on. It is not for want of money. The Indian government aims to spend $500 billion on infrastructure by 2012 and twice that amount in the following five years. The problem is a dearth of engineers — or at least of civil engineers with the skill and expertise to make sure those ambitious projects are done on time and to specification. Civil engineering was once an elite occupation in India, not only during the British colonial era of carving roads and laying train tracks, but long after independence as part of the civil service. These days, though, India’s best and brightest know there is more money and prestige in writing software for foreign customers than in building roads for their nation. Read more at www.nytimes.com

ONLY three times in my life have I been so scared that I trembled — legs quivering, hands jittering, heart out of control. The first was at 12, when I watched “The Exorcist” before I should have. The second was at 41, when, on the kind of dare to which middle-aged men seem peculiarly vulnerable, I got into a canvas harness and prepared to jump some 250 feet into a gorge in Zambia.

The third was a few months ago, on Staten Island, when I was asked by an examiner for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull out of a parking spot and drive toward a nearby stoplight.

A humdrum task, you say? Undeserving of horror? You’ve never met the examiner. And you don’t yet understand what a crazy-making path I’d traveled to that fraught and climactic point — to the possibility that, at 45, I just might be able to drive legally again.

This is a cautionary tale. Like too many harried New Yorkers without cars or much cause to use them, I let my driver’s license expire — in October 2006. Then, in an unlucky development the next May, I was pick-pocketed. The double whammy of an expired license that I could not physically produce meant I could no longer right the situation with a written exam and a vision check. I was effectively 16 again, on the hook for a five-hour class and the dreaded road test, which I came to fear I’d never reach, given the labyrinth of civil-service incompetence, bureaucratic nonsense and simple misfortune I had tumbled into. Kafka could have had a field day with me. Read more at www.nytimes.com