"Rather than take passengers from their own door to the destination of their choosing — the ease of travel that self-driving cars appear to promise — these autonomous pods simply carry passengers from one specific, set point to another.
The pod currently being trialed is named Harry. It clearly necessitated a name because it's adorable. With bug-eye windows, a smile on its front nose, and blue-green colors, it looks like a land-based robotic dolphin. Harry maxes out at 10 MPH and is limited to the pavements, not yet braving car-and-bike-filled roads. And while the shuttle is fully autonomous, with a camera watching up to 100 meters ahead, there's a “technician” on board to stop it if something goes awry.
This isn't a car. It's a bus — not that there's anything wrong with that."
^ this model is infinitely more exciting to me than individual autonomous cars. Honestly, I don't want a car, I want to avoid that life as much as possible, having to care for and manage this vehicle that spend the vast majority of its time parked somewhere. (and can we talk about the disaster of finding parking spots??).
And when you think about it, public transportation is kind of a miracle of human collaboration, the idea that we realize that people need to get from place to place and so what if we all paid a little bit and there was always something around to take us around?
And there is every reason why driving should be a specialized skill. It's SO dangerous, it requires a ton of training to be a legitimately safe driver and that's under contexts of highly standardized driving conditions - try driving on the other side of the street, or with different traffic laws; I think we've learned the rules, not the skills. These are expensive, complex machines that have somehow become ubiquitous - the the point at which the standardized government ID is our license to operate these machines <-- this blows my mind all the time (how did this happen???).
No comments:
Post a Comment