Month: February 2024

by JanieM

Preface: I’ve had a draft of this post rolling around in my head for a while. I picked some photos to go with it, then let it sit around some more. It’s just a little slice of life, and probably relevant to a number of us, but it also feels incredibly trivial in the light of wars, assassinations, the ongoing attempted destruction of American democracy, climate change, and anything else you’d like to add from the headlines. Then again, vaguely nodding toward the serenity prayer, life is quiet in my corner of the world right now, so on a day to day basis this is just one of the things I think about.

Open thread.

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My to-do list includes several projects that are, in effect, endless, including the one where I try to get rid of all kinds of stuff I don’t need anymore. (Or never did.)

Some people tackle a project and don’t stop until it’s finished. Not me. I chip away at things and get them done eventually, but the very nebulousness and lack of urgency of this task makes the chipping away even more desultory than usual. I putter in my attic in spring and fall, when it’s not too hot or too cold up there. I purge no longer needed financial records once a year. I take boxes to the Goodwill now and then – mostly clothes and books.

Okay, mostly books.

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by JanieM

Rebecca Solnit has a long essay in the London Review of Books called In the Shadow of Silicon Valley. It opens with a meditation on driverless cars:

I’ve become somewhat used to driverless cars in the years they’ve been training on the city’s streets, first with back-up human drivers, and then without. They are here despite opposition from city officials, including the fire chief, and San Francisco recently sued the California state bureau that gave companies licence to use the streets as their laboratory. Firefighters have reported driverless cars attempting to park on firehoses; last June one such car prevented emergency vehicles from reaching victims of a shooting; the vehicles are apparently unequipped to assess these situations and respond by stopping. Direct communication isn’t an option: the only way to get a driverless car to do anything is to contact the company in charge of it.

In early October, a driverless car owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, hit a woman who’d just been struck by another car, and in the course of performing what was described as a rote ‘pullover manoeuvre’ dragged her twenty feet, mangling her badly and leaving her trapped under its wheels. The device was unable to detect that it was on top of a human and would not respond to rescuers, who had to lift the car off her. Cruise withdrew its 950 driverless vehicles, but Waymo, a company launched by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continues to send its cars onto the streets.

Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross the street outside the terminals. There’s no one in a driverless car to make eye contact with, to see you wave or hear you shout or signal back. The cars do use their turn signals – but they don’t always turn when they signal.

Solnit's point about driving being a cooperative social activity is one I’ve never seen made before, yet it’s (semi-consciously) central to my own thinking about driving. For too many people driving is more like a competitive cage match than a cooperative problem-solving enterprise, but even then it’s a matter of humans participating with other humans. The cooperative use of cars is central to the whole notion of public roadways, and I have never seen the lack of it brought up before in discussions of the “wonders” of driverless vehicles.

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