May 18
The Trolley Problem is a long pondered ethical thought experiment; it is an intellectual exercise devised to highlight the moral conflicts that can arise in the making of decisions involving inescapable loss of life. Here is how Wikipedia presents it: A runaway trolley is barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up …
May 13
Amazon Review Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, by Peter D Norton 5 out of 5 stars By J. Adams, 9 May 2017 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase Fighting traffic is an instructive account of the social reconstruction of American cities that led to their domination by motordom the …
Apr 29
The Pathway to Driverless Cars and the Sacred Cow Problem Last Thursday (April 27, 2017) I was one of two speakers invited to lead the discussion at a National Infrastructure Commission roundtable on Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. The first speaker discussed the Readiness of the road network for connected and autonomous vehicles. My presentation was …
Aug 17
The promoters of driverless cars have demonstrated remarkable progress in their ability to program their vehicles to respond with extreme deference to pedestrians, cyclists, and cars with human drivers. Such programming confers sacred cow status on all road users not in self-driving vehicles. The developers of autonomous vehicles acknowledge the need for new road safety …
May 11
Risk, most dictionaries agree, involves exposure to the possibility of loss or injury. Perceptions of this possibility are embedded in culture and vary enormously over space and time. One frequently encounters the contention that it is important to distinguish between real, actual, objective risks and those that are merely perceived. But all risk is perceived. Risk …
Apr 19
Letter in Telegraph, 17 April2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/04/17/letters-for-all-its-faults-the-eu-is-a-bold-project-that-still-d/ Environmental groups failure over HS2 SIR It is now very clear indeed that the hugely expensive HS2 project is fundamentally flawed; yet it continues to make progress towards delivery in spite of compelling evidence justifying its cancellation. Its passage has been assisted by two important factors that are as …
Nov 23
Last March I took part in a conference devoted to the promotion of cycling in Madrid. My presentation, in essay form, has now been published by World Transport: Policy and Practice. Herewith the abstract This essay is a response to an invitation to provide an overview of the current state of cycling in Britain, …
Jul 25
Driverless Car Revolution: buy mobility not metal by Rutt Bridges Review for Amazon.co.uk **** 25 June, 2015 Highly recommended, but Mobility Not Metal is an impressively clear and comprehensive account of the potential of the driverless car revolution with a significant omission that we will come to shortly. It provides an intelligible description of both …
Jul 06
if a ball were to roll onto a road, a human might expect that a child could follow. Artificial intelligence cannot yet provide that level of inferential thinking. This quotation from 2012 has already been overtaken by the extraordinary progress in the development of self-driving cars. But programming a self-driving car to anticipate a child following …
Nov 11
Draft of essay commissioned for a special issue (June 2015) of the Mathematics Enthusiast entitled Risk: mathematical or otherwise. Still time to make changes so critical advice welcomed, especially from mathematicians. Abstract What role might mathematicians have to play in the management of risk? The idea of turning a risk, a possibility of loss or injury, into a calculated …