Dear Lily,

Hello! My name is Wil, and I've been friends with your mom for 14 years! That's twice your age! I heard you like rainbows, so I put a rainbow burst in the background.

I live in Mountain View, California! Where is Mountain View? Here is a cool map. Mountain View is in between San Jose and San Francisco. Slide the map around! Can you zoom out to see where Michigan is? How long would it take to walk to Mountain View?

Mountain View is also where Google headquarters is. It is one of many tech companies in the area. Google is known for making the search engine you use to find information on the web. What cool stuff have you searched for on the web? What sort of information can't you find on the web?

Lots of engineers work there to make many cool and useful pieces of technology for people to use. Google makes products like Gmail, Android Phones, Youtube, and many more. Their campus looks like this.

They even make maps with satellite images, so you can see what the ground actually looks like in the picture above.

Why do you suppose Google makes so many products?

A future product Google is working on are self-driving cars, called Waymo. I walk by them every day to the train station.

They are super cute! The car drives itself using a new artificial intelligence algorithm called Deep Learning. Notice it has a black dome on top. That's the LiDAR sensor the car uses to see the road around it. Cool. 👍

Inside the car, there's no steering wheel! I see the cars in my neighborhood all the time. Here is a video of the self-driving car on the road!

In the near future, you can just call for a car for automatically take you to where you want to go! You won't need your mom to drive you to dance practice.

As self-driving cars get better at driving, some people are worried they won't have jobs driving cars anymore, like taxi drivers and truck drivers. What should people do if their job can be better done by robots?

Well, that's one of the many things going on in my neighborhood. Hope you're having a good time in Michigan! I'll come visit again when I get a chance!

Wil