{"id":177887,"date":"2019-05-12T18:26:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-12T23:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/12\/in-the-annals-of-stupidity\/"},"modified":"2019-05-12T18:26:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-12T23:26:00","slug":"in-the-annals-of-stupidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/12\/in-the-annals-of-stupidity\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Annals of Stupidity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/wtf45n2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/wtf45n2.jpg\" style=\"cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;\" width=\"350\" \/><\/a>The idea that we should <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2018\/01\/17\/destroying_the_city_to_save_the_robocar\/\">reconfigure cities to accommodate the limitations of robot cars<\/a> is stupid.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s History Schmistory stupid:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Special report Behind the mostly fake &#8220;battle&#8221; about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed? <\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n<p>But the driverless car has to deal with pedestrians, as Christian Wolmar <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2018\/01\/11\/christian_wolmar_interview_self_driving_cars\/\">discussed<\/a> at The Register last week: &#8220;The open spaces that cities like to encourage would end as the barricades go up. And foot movement would need to be enforced with Singapore-style authoritarianism.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The randomness of the environment such as children or wildlife cannot be dealt with by today&#8217;s technology,&#8221; admits Volvo&#8217;s director of autonomous driving, Markus Rothoff. The driverless car <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2017-10-10\/it-s-no-use-honking-the-robot-at-the-wheel-can-t-hear-you\">can&#8217;t hear you scream<\/a>. Tests are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thesociologicalreview.com\/blog\/street-tests-of-driverless-cars-experiments-in-co-existence-or-displacement.html\">not being conducted<\/a> in real pedestrian-congested conditions. <\/p>\n<p>The cheat is: just get rid of the people around cars, so you don&#8217;t need to solve these problems.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When people talk about the future of self-driving cars in the foreseeable future,&nbsp; this is what they mean.<\/p>\n<p>If this sounds far fetched, I will remind you that there is a recent historical precedent:&nbsp; In the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, they restructured the city, and criminalized what had been ordinary walking:&nbsp; They called it &#8220;Jaywalking&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Do not underestimate the willingness of people who profit from driverless cars to restrict the rest of us, and to place the costs on society as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>They have done it before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The idea that we should reconfigure cities to accommodate the limitations of robot cars is stupid. It&#8217;s History Schmistory stupid: Special report Behind the mostly fake &#8220;battle&#8221; about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[618,675,606,471],"class_list":["post-177887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-planning","tag-sociology","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}