Hey, Everyone!
First and foremost, here is the video that inspired me to write this post. :D
For those of you who don't know who Geohot is, he is the man that started the jailbreaking trend of the iPhone. I remember when I was in junior high school and I started hearing about a piece of software called Blackra1n. Using this software allowed my iPhone to have the application called Cydia installed on it. Then, Cydia allowed me to download other pieces of software onto my iPhone that allowed me to customize it in ways that Apple did not intend for it to be customized. For those of you who know what Blackra1n is or what jailbreaking is, you know how much fun it was to download apps and do other fun things with Cydia.
Now that jailbreaking iPhones is starting to be a thing of the past, Geohot is now working on an amazing project called Comma.ai! Comma.ai is a startup project, founded by Geohot, that involves transforming almost any modern day car into a self-driving vehicle. You may be wondering, how is this possible? According to Geohot, all you need is a smartphone and a modern-day car. On the smartphone, you download software that Geohot and his team have created and then you connect the phone to the car's pre-built sensory system. What he is saying is that there is no longer a need to buy an expensive luxury vehicle that has self-driving capabilities. Instead, he wants to help people convert their already owned vehicles into self-driving machines. Crazy, right?
What I love about Geohot is that he has always been a man for the people. Ever since he was sued by Sony because he was successfully able to jailbreak a PlayStation 3, he always posed the question, "is something you buy truly yours?" He asks this question because although he purchased the PlayStation 3, Sony sued him for tampering with the software installed on the gaming device. If he bought the device, shouldn't he have the right do whatever he wants with the device? This question comes up again since he is now working on cars. Since you technically buy a vehicle, you should be allowed to do anything you wish to the vehicle. So why not convert your car into a self-driving car with a few extra parts that come out to be less than $1,000?
Another thing that I love about Geohot is that he is making the software of Comma.ai open-source. He literally says in the video above that you can go ahead and download the software and build your own device if you'd like to. The reference he keeps making is that instead of being a company that is trying to get a big slice of the pie, he wants to make a huge pie. This is something that I think is very noble of him since his intentions are not in becoming extremely wealthy. Instead, he wants to advance the connection between man and technology through the use of AI, machine learning, and the crowd-sourcing of data.
I am excited to see what the future holds. There is just so much innovation happening all over the world that you can never really predict what the next 5 years will look like. But with people like Geohot leading the charge, it looks bright, in my opinion.
Would you install love to see Comma.ai's technology in your car? Let me know!