Where is Google taking us?

Tim Adams was invited to hang out at Google's California HQ, where some of the world's brightest minds are working on innovations, such as driverless cars, that will transform our lives. But is society ready to go along for the ride?

Whatever happened to wonder? The most unnerving thing about sitting in the back of a driverless car is how quickly you get used to it. After 10 minutes cruising Californian streets in the rear seat of one of Google's "autonomous" Lexus 4x4s, the "look, no hands!" miracle of the Google "driver" in the front already feels old hat. Approaching a complicated four-way junction, every nearby moving or stationary object - lorries, wheelie bins, birds, trees, pedestrians - mapped and colour-coded instant-by-instant on the car's computer console, I find myself thinking not, "Look out!" but rather, "Speed up!"

The car, one of 24 that have now done a collective million miles on the roads around Google's campus in the city of Mountain View, and further afield on freeways, and even out in San Francisco, behaves - not surprisingly - somewhat like a cautious learner driver. Its sensors, bolt-on radar and lasers and cameras, are twitchily hyperactive. They can monitor unexpected movements two football pitches away. Now they are calculating from memory what the dad and his toddler passenger on a bike on the right are likely to do next, now processing the probabilities that the car approaching the stop sign at some speed is actually going to stop.