A new generation of cars keeps an eye on you… to make sure you keep an eye on the road. A tiny camera on the dashboard monitors every blink of the driver's eyes to make sure they're not drowsy or distracted. It tracks the exact position and tilt of their face, the direction of gaze, eyelid activity, the rate and duration of every blink, how dilated their pupils are, how open their eyes are, whether their mouth is open, and more. Using AI and computer vision, it is constantly watching out for signs of cell phone usage, seatbelt-wearing and smoking, and checking that the driver is actually focused on the road. If they're not, it calls them out on it.

Car systems that use increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) could keep you safer by monitoring your driving, but some experts say AI isn't ready to replace human drivers. Toyota is developing a system called Guardian that uses a dashboard camera to check to see if a driver falls asleep. It's part of a growing movement to increase automation in vehicles, but some experts say we're a long way off from cars that are safe enough to fully drive themselves. "I've been a bit of a skeptic of full automation in terms of the timelines," MIT professor John Leonard, who is working on Guardian, said at a recent MIT Mobility Forum, according to the news release. "[It] is going to take a lot longer to have this sort of ubiquitous robo taxi fleet, whereby, you know, a teenager today would never need a driver's license or never need to have a real human Uber driver because all cars would drive themselves autonomously."