Self Driving Cars and ethics

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

In recent months we have seen articles about self driving cars and ethics. The question the research asks is whether to kill, a group of people, the driver of the car or others. The question is perfectly logical if you have never driven a car. If you have never driven a car then you believe that accidents may be unavoidable.

So these guys posed these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out what they thought. The participants were given scenarios in which one or more pedestrians could be saved if a car were to swerve into a barrier, killing its occupant or a pedestrian.

source

When you learn to drive in Switzerland you need to spend a number of hours being made aware of the dangers of the road. During these lessons you learn about where to look, about how to gauge people’s age, attention and intention. You are trained to look at their eyes and their body language, to anticipate their actions.

Road awareness also progresses to road conditions. Is it raining, is it snowing, are you in the middle of a drought and other such questions. The reason these questions are asked is that the stopping distance, risk of skidding and other dangers increase.

We also find that their are zones where cars are meant to be particularly attentive and may be asked to drive slower. Schools, pedestrian zones and other areas expect drivers to slow down and be able to stop instantly in case there is the need.

In light of everything that we are expected to consider as human drivers it makes sense to provide autonomous cars with the same knowledge and intelligence. If there has been a drought for six months and rain is falling then the car’s software should anticipate the longer stopping distances and the chance of skidding. The car should slow down.

When they decide on the ethics of self driving cars they should spend time writing code that is friendly and safe to cyclists using the roads. The software should be written to slow down and wait for a safe place to overtake. The software should be written to overtake from a safe distance. The same is true of cars near horses and other animals. You don’t want self driving cars to scare animals.

As a driver it is expected of me to anticipate all dangers and threats to life. It is for me to decide to drive at or below the speed limit. It is for me to assess the risk of someone crossing the road, of someone turning left on a roundabout and more. If I was to make a mistake that would cost someone their life then it would be my fault, according to insurance because i had failed to adapt to the situation. Self driving cars should be programmed to anticipate all problems and issues and be held to the same standard as humans.

These problems cannot be ignored, say the team: “As we are about to endow millions of vehicles with autonomy, taking algorithmic morality seriously has never been more urgent.”

Self driving cars should in no circumstance cause death. They should never face the decision. If they face the decision then the programmers have not spent enough time consulting with drivers, emergency services and road safety professionals. Death should be eliminated from the equation.

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Village Photography

Byrichard

On Google Plus, one of my muses, I saw that instead of Street photography someone suggested Village photography. I like the idea because villages are such an integral part of my life.

Life in villages is a privileged one. Every time we go for a walk we cross people we do not know and say hello. We walk from field to field and along paths. We see which crops have been planted and which ones are being harvested. We see frequent horses and dog walkers. We also see families. We hear the sound of rifle practices at the local gun range. The practice is for military service most of the time.

We also have fountains and old buildings. We hear the church bell every half hour and hour. We see the fountains with wooden chalet to protect from the cold in winter.

Villages are seasonal. In summer the sounds of children playing, of fireworks and of barbecues can be heard. In Autumn the sound of wind blowers can be heard. In Winter we see lights on as the neighbours prepare their evening meal.

In the mornings we see parents bring their children to school before the bell rings and they head in to their classes to sit and wait impatiently for the school day to be over so that they may go out on adventures.

That’s why village photography captivates my imagination. I know villages well. I appreciate them. I look forward to looking at images from the past, and preserving today for future generations.

(CR)apple and authorisation issues.

Byrichard

No doubt you remember that my laptop motherboard died. The effects are still being felt today. When you have applications, and when you have several computers you authorise them in order to have access to the same applications and music on more than one machine.

This works fine most of the time. You can easily authorise and de-authorise a machine depending on necessity. The problem is when you have hardware failure though. As hardware fails so the device number changes. Itunes thinks it’s on a new machine and all the permissions are gone.

That’s the problem I’m having. Over 129 applications have just been removed from the ipod touch as a result of having five machines authorised with my itunes account. There’s not much I can do to change this situation.

What I love about this situation is that it’s another reason not to use an iphone. Why would I buy a device which relies on another device in order to function. If the N97 crashes I don’t need to rely on this computer to sync things, if my n95 crashes same lack of concern. Same with the e51 and other devices.

With anything apple though as soon as five machines are authorised if you have a hardware failure you’re stuck.

Apple have to resolve this issue because everyone has access to more than five apple computers, either through friends or through machines of their own.

If I need to use a wifi connection to sync my ipod then I might as well have any generic device. I am one step closer to going back to using Linux for personal computing, windows for work and apple for nothing but editing.

Macbook pro monitor still dead.

Byrichard

Over a week later my laptop is still dead. It’s the same flaw as two weeks ago. I took it to technicians who did absolutely nothing for my laptop. They didn’t even run a diagnostic test to see that anything was wrong. Now I’m still without a laptop and I don’t have time to deal with incompetent people.

I need someone to recommend some competent people to check my laptop. Think it’s the screen that’s dead… just head the skype sound… What can I do to fix a dead monitor?

The Pleasure of Slow Motion

Byrichard

Last weekend I watched hours worth of
slow motion videos because I enjoy them. I also watched them because I was fighting one of the worst colds I’ve had in years. Slow motion videos are great because what is invisible to the eye, and hard to see in normal speed videos becomes boringly long when watched in slow motion. 


An event that would have taken a few hundredths of a second now takes seconds or even minutes to occur. We’re familiar with the photos of bullets going through apples from our childhood and we’re familiar with the footage of
slow motion rocket launches but have you seen the
saturn five launch where just the ignition sequence takes sixteen minutes? 





The video above shows the action in such slow motion that you can see everything that happens in a way that a live broadcast never could. Eight minutes from ignition to the moment the rocket leaves the shot. 





In this
video you see a nuclear blast for the first milliseconds. You can see the shape of the charge and the imperfections. It provides you with a different understanding of how these reactions occur. 





In the video above you see paint being flung from a drill in slow motion. The paint is flung upwards and sideways. You also see the drill as it oscillates up and down as well as from side to side. In
realtime you would just see a spray of paint but you would miss the intricacies of the globules of paint and how they move.  





In another
video you see how syringes of ink look as they spread in an aquarium of water. In slow motion you see the ink take on a velvet quality as it spreads within the water. It’s great to watch the first time you see such fluid behaviours. 





In another video, you can watch what happens when a drop of water falls into a body of water, how it goes down into the water, bounces back out and then hits another drop. Such motion is really interesting to watch. In real-time, we’re speaking of hundredths of a second but in slow motion, we’re speaking about seconds of motion.





In the video above we see how surface tension and bubbles of water interact. You start from a single drop of water that falls from a surface, bounces on the top of water multiple times and as it bounces halves and then halves again several times before finally disappearing into the water. This is behaviour that you would never notice with the naked eye but thanks to slow motion cameras you see it. 


When you watch the first slow-motion videos you don’t know what to expect but as you watch dozens, or even hundreds of events so you begin to understand how the world works at the nanosecond timescale. They’re worth watching
because your understanding of science and events increases. 

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