Day: 12 September 2018
99 Things That Robots Were Supposed to Be Doing by Now
As a small footnote to the previous post, this is precisely what the title describes – predictions of all shapes, sizes and times about what robots should be doing, but aren’t. The inexorable path of technology doesn’t always lead where we like to think it does.
Self-Driving Cars Are Not the Future
If you fall into the trap of thinking that technology-driven change is about the technology, you risk missing something important. No new technology arrives in a pristine environment, there are always complex interactions with the existing social, political, cultural, economic, environmental and no doubt other contexts. This post is a polemic challenging the inevitability – and practicality – of self-driving cars, drawing very much on that perspective.
The result is something which is interesting and entertaining in its own right, but which also makes a wider point. Just as it’s not technology that’s disrupting our jobs, it’s not technology which determines how self-driving cars disrupt our travel patterns and land use. And over and over again, the hard bit of predicting the future is not the technology but the sociology,