Via Paul Constant, #Romneyzingers. My favorites so far are “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what your country will bring on the Chinese market.” and “Excuse me sir, but I PAID for this election“….
The New Yorker ran a Benjamin Netanyahu Caption Contest. Number three’s pretty good, but I think we could’ve done better.
And at the Atlantic, Conor Alexis C. Madrigal speculates on how “Driverless Cars Would Reshape Automobiles *and* the Transit System“:
When I’ve thought about driverless cars, which if you believe Sergey Brin, will be available within “several years,” I’ve tended to think of them as a drop-in replacement for our current automobiles…
But maybe that’s not what would happen at all. Changes in transportation technology have tended to be accompanied by changes to transportation systems, too. Long-time technologist Brad Templeton argues that this will, in fact, be the case. And he’s even got an idea of what the big shift might be. We could enter the age of the “whistlecar.” If one can hire a cheap specialized ‘robotaxi’ (or whistlecar) on demand when one has a special automotive need,” Templeton writes, “car users can elect to purchase a vehicle only for their most common needs, rather than trying to meet almost all of them — or to not purchase at all.”
This vision is kind of stunning: imagine the Kiva Systems logistics robots that now speed around major warehouses, but for people. Transportation-as-a-service models could really take off in a world of hyperoptimized robotaxis. Not only would the robotaxis be built differently from normal cars, but people’s private vehicles (if they had one) would change as they realized how they could use the new system more effectively….
Templeton’s theorizing could also answer some of the critiques from transit-oriented environmentalists who see driverless cars as perpetuating the doomed auto-heavy American system. Don’t think about the driverless car as a fossil-fuel powered car replacement; think of it as one mode of a radically more efficient system: what could you do now within a system that now has free-floating semi-autonomous people transporters? …
Apart from rude japes and futuristic speculation, what’s on the agenda for the end of the weekend?
Sunday Evening Open Thread: RobocontrolPost + Comments (233)