#23: The Internet of Bikes
There are countless unanswered questions about self-driving cars, but one of the most interesting is how they'll share the road with bikes: "Waymo’s cars are programmed to pass bikes in accordance to state laws, usually with three feet of clearance. And if they can’t do it, they’ll just wait." Like pedestrians, cyclists are especially vulnerable and thus require more conservative responses from cars, self-driving or otherwise; behaving less predictably than other groups, it's also not hard to imagine bikes inhibiting self-driving cars to an excessive degree.
One solution proposed by a Carnegie Mellon professor is for bikes to talk to cars, sharing their location with surrounding vehicles at all times. As elegant as that is, it reflects the risky attitude that software, having eaten so much of the world already, needs to keep eating more to keep its existing edifice standing. If the bike today is antifragile, in the Nassim Talebian sense, then wiring bikes to join an IoT ecosystem is a significant step toward fragility, even if that solution promises hypothetical benefits.
This example strikes me as particularly sinister because of its real safety implications. If cars expect bikes to announce themselves digitally, then presumably any bike that remains off the grid (which many will, barring substantial regulation) will remain invisible and thus unprotected. The modern era is already overrun with systems that create an inside and an outside, and then force everyone inside by impoverishing the outside. To deepen this division when our intentions are good would be a tragedy.
I wrote on the blog for the first time in a while, about Apple and technology that wishes people didn't exist. Check it out.
Reads:
Buy an Echo and automatically get added to Amazon's creepy social network.
Geoff Manaugh on hype and the Hyperloop's hypnotism.
The taxonomy of humans according to Twitter: A fascinating/hilarious project to build bots that expose how Twitter tags its users for advertising.
Until next time,
Drew