Five years in the past, I used to be invited to check certainly one of Google’s prototype driverless vehicles on the streets close to the corporate’s headquarters in California. The automotive, alive with tech and sensors, navigated the site visitors faultlessly and, sitting passively inside it, I may see solely a few explanation why, by 2020, the automobiles wouldn’t be in every single place.
One cussed downside was the insurer’s query of who can be liable within the occasion of an “autonomous automotive” being concerned in an accident. That got here nearer to being resolved final week with a framework authorities authorized report suggesting, logically, that accountability for all motoring offences, even deadly accidents, ought to switch from the motive force (now the “user-in-charge”) to the car-maker or its software program.
What the report didn’t resolve, although, was one other potential problem that had struck me. On condition that the vehicles had no alternative however to cease in the event that they detected uncommon motion in entrance of them, and have been predictably good at it, what was to forestall pedestrians regularly strolling into the highway figuring out the algorithm was on their facet? Wouldn’t vehicles be stranded in a everlasting limbo of giving method?
After I raised this with the driverless gurus at Google, excessive on their “rational mobility options”, they appeared puzzled. Why would anybody step out like that?
“Have you ever ever met a British teenager?” I questioned.
We’re not a muse
Within the present difficulty of the London Evaluate of Books, the artist Celia Paul evaluations the second quantity of William Feaver’s lifetime of Lucian Freud. In it, Feaver catalogues the altering forged of younger “neurotics” who turned the ageing Freud’s lovers.
Paul, now 61, who had a son with Freud at 25 earlier than he misplaced curiosity in her, was a type of ladies. I spoke to her about that one-sided relationship final yr. If there was one description of her she preferred lower than “muse”, it was “in her personal proper”, as in “she is now a painter in her personal proper”. In her LRB piece, Paul writes poignantly of how feminine artists – Gwen John was one other – turn out to be footnotes within the biographies of the controlling males who “found” them. It’s a “cellar life”, Paul writes. Fairly rightly, she believes arising for air is lengthy overdue.
Final rites
Most presidents use their farewell months to grant clemency to jail inmates with doubtful sentences. Donald Trump, by no means knowingly unsociopathic, seems decided relatively to make the Christmas interval probably the most deadly of a presidency that, since federal executions have been restored in July, has killed extra prisoners than any for 50 years. Execution orders on 5 inmates are being rushed by means of earlier than he quits the White Home in January.
The urgency jogged my memory of a sentiment of the US justice campaigner Bryan Stevenson, who has overturned the unsafe convictions of dozens of prisoners on loss of life row. “The query isn’t whether or not these folks should die for what they’ve accomplished,” he stated. “The query is whether or not, given our historical past, we should kill them.”
Christmas miracle
My mum and pa, each properly into their 80s, have been among the many lucky first recipients of the preliminary dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine final Wednesday. After they’d had the jab, they have been informed to attend for quarter-hour to verify there have been no instant side-effects in a makeshift marquee within the clinic’s automotive park. “Is that the place the drinks are?” my mum joked, characteristically, to the nurse. Definitely, after our yr of prohibitions, it felt like a uncommon – hopefully more and more acquainted – champagne second.
