The artificial passenger can analyse speech for signs of sleepiness and is programmed to ask startling questions to provoke drivers in wakefulness. If all else fails the dashboard will squirt cold water into the face of a driver to keep them concentrating on the road ahead.
Doesn't that seem great! Uh huh. I, for one, am certain that if I was nodding off at the wheel, a blast of cold water would wake me up immediately. But then I'd yelp and careen across the road until I figured out what the hell just happened. And I'm not even a bad driver.
Other possible actions include changing radio station, or telling jokes in a bid to jerk a drowsing driver into wakefulness.
Ok, changing the radio station isn't bad. Especially if it has the ability to find the most annoying radio station in the area. And in places where you're likely to fall asleep at the wheel (I'm thinking along I-5 in the middle of CA's farmland here), that's likely to involve country/western music or religious harangues. Either one would be enough to wake me up and flail madly at the radio. But I don't know if jokes, no matter how bad, would "jerk" me into wakefulness. Maybe if they involved puns. That would probably do it.
And who wants to bet that the lads at IBM at least thought of using electrical shocks? And probably tested the concept, probably on each other ("AAAHHHH! My pants are on fire!"). It's probably a good thing that I don't work at IBM.
Ok, let's look at what all this amazingly smart dashboard can do if with its little camera it determines that you're falling asleep:
Is it just me, or does it sound like the lads at IBM are working on some sort of clown-based technology? If they only added "Hits you in the face with a cream pie," they'd have a perfect clown simulator. I'm sure they'd be a huge demand for such a product, at least among the five or six people on earth who like clowns. As opposed to the rest of us, who know better.
So, what's my point? I'm getting to it. We've got two guys at IBM designing a "smart dashboard" for your car. A device that is actually a very clever clown simulator. Clowns, as all right-thinking people know, are terrifying manifestations of pure evil, and must be destroyed. Why, it's sheer folly to want to put an AI clown into a car! Who could conceive of such a twisted plan? It certainly sounds like a plot dreamed up by a mad sci...oh, did I not mention that the people working on this invention are scientists? Oh yes. Those accursed Mad Scientists are at it again.
Time to add IBM to Mad Scientist Watch. If you don't think so, just wait until they come to add a clown to your car! Then you'll be singing a different tune. A jaunty, happy, circus tune! You know the one: DOOT doot DOO doo DOO doo DOOT doot DOO doot...