Jason Goecke has provided us with a little glimpse of the future, that's actually possible right now. The California developer hacked together a way to command his Tesla Model S to pull itself out of his garage using his Amazon Echo.
You can see a demonstration of Goecke telling his Echo to "Ask Kitt to pull the car out of the garage" in the video below. As Alexa confirms the command, we can see the Model S starting up, the garage door opens and then the Tesla drives itself down the driveway, all while a drone gives us a second view from outside the garage.
Goecke explains that this was accomplished by writing a few bits of code that is all cloud-based.
"I am using the Amazon Echo's Alex Skill Kit to trigger on a keyword ('ask KITT') and send the resulting event to AWS Lambda," he writes on Teslarati. "Lambda then executes my code where I use the Tesla Golang library I recently published. The Golang code on Lambda then calls the unofficial Tesla API which in turns triggers the car to take action. In this case, to open the garage door via Homelink and drive on out using the Summon capability."
Tesla made it possible earlier this year via an over-the-air update for all Tesla owners to summon their Model S on private property.
While Amazon has officially opened its voice-operated Alexa platform to developers, Tesla has not yet put out its own API for developers. Unofficial ones like the one Goecke used are available for Tesla owners to tinker at their own risk.
Source: Teslarati
Until we have fully assessed all the potential dangers that autonomous vehicles pose for us - even if it only entails applications like this one - it should not be possible to move them without a driver at the controls. Two tons, or thereabouts, moving even very slowly can kill. The slower it does so, the more horrific the death.
Before Messrs Musk, Goecke and those like them develop any more apps like this, I hope they have considered all the dangers involved.