Google will pay you $20/hour to sit in their self-driving car

OK, Google does expect you to “test” its self-driving car project, but when the car drives itself there’s not much else to do, right? Google has placed an ad looking for “vehicle safety specialists” to be contracted for one to two years of autonomous driving field work. The gig pays a pretty decent $20 an hour and you will be expected to work six- to eight-hour work days with potential for road trips as long as a month at a time.

Calling yourself a “vehicle safety specialist” when you haven’t designed any of the safety features of the vehicle and the algorithm does all the work is a little like calling yourself a pilot because you caught a plane once. But teasing from your friends aside, you would have access to some of the coolest technology around right now and ingratiate yourself at Mountain View. Having said that though, the jobs are in Arizona, not California.

You’ll be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement to keep Google’s top secret stuff top secret and you’ll need a clean driving history for all that non-driving you’ll be doing. You’ll have to be able to type at a blistering 40 words per minute and not have a history of sleeping at the wheel. You’ll be expected to provide concise feedback on the nothing that happens all day to Google engineers and you’ll be asked to take a bunch of car training courses, to help with the whole no driving part of the job.

Sadly, a criminal history is a no-no. The last thing Google needs is their self-driving cars being used as a getaway vehicle. If the autonomous vehicle hits anything, you’ll be expected to drag it off the road, kick sand over it and scrub the blood off the bumper. I may have just made that part up, but that’s the kind of wandering imagination you’ll develop while spending 40 hours per week sitting in a car that does all the driving itself. If you think this job could be a perfect fit for your fragile state of mind, take a look at the job ad here.

How long would it take you to go crazy in a self-driving car? How would you pass the time?