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Smart Car, Or Dumb Idea?
Lee writes: "this article on BBC News (& This longer one on New Scientist, with a nice diagram) talks about an 'artificial passenger' being developed by IBM. It's built into the dashboard of your vehicle and will talk to you, tell you jokes, and monitor your responses ... why? To keep you from falling asleep at the wheel,and adding yourself to the 30% of road traffic accidents caused by falling asleep at the wheel. Some of the countermeasures are entertaining, but there's no mention of electrocution. Damn!"
I can just see loading Eliza into this for laughs.
The irony is that an Eliza-like program might actually be a decent enough conversationalist for these purposes.
I can't believe this...no one seems to understand the costly effects of sleep deprivation. The article doesn't even point out that people shouldn't be so stupid as to drive when drowsy. Here's a clue. Take two, they're small!
Sleep deprivation, that results in drowsiness during repetitive activities as driving and assembly line work, is one of the leading causes of car accidents at night. Mix in a small amount of alcohol, and you have a potentially lethal situation, even when you're very much under the legal blood alcohol limit. Alcohol + sleep debt = ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL.
The problem is, people are too stupid to realize they are sleep deprived. Here's a clue:
1) Complaints that they are always tired (then don't drive at night. Are they stupid? YES!).
2) Do the Stanford sleep test...hold a spoon or loud toy out over the floor while sitting down. Have a timer or clock nearby. Close your eyes. If you fall asleep, you will hear the object hit the floor. If it fell 5 minutes or less after your eyes were closed, you have serious sleep deprivation and probably shouldn't be driving for long periods AT ALL. USE COMMON SENSE FOLKS! If you fall asleep and don't hear anything, you are in serious trouble.
3) Get plenty of sleep. Some people need eight hours of sleep a night, others need more or less. Also, sleep debt is CUMULATIVE. If you require 8 hours of sleep a night, but have only slept 4 hours a night for a week, then you have 4*7=28 hours of sleep debt. The more sleep debt you have, the fast you drop the object in point 2 above. I believe there is a sleep debt maximum (40 hours debt?) but the research is inconclusive.
This should be common sense folks...but unfortunately the media lacks the vision to let the public know these simple facts.
References, easily looked up at Amazon.com:
The Promise of Sleep, by William C. Dement.
The Sleep Thieves, by Stanley Coren
*sigh* It only takes a few minutes to learn all this, folks. Anyone want to buy a book on Hell and Handbaskets?
There are systems designed to detect truck drivers falling asleep at the wheel. An overview is available. I've always wanted to have these on programmer's workstations, with a systemt that tags lines of code based on fatigue level. The correlation with bugs would be interesting.
One reason, of course, was that if you dozed off at all and the plane left straight-and-level you were guaranteed to be completely alert when you woke up, seconds later.
Another reason is that much of the military equipment churned out for the war wasn't of the highest possible quality. The US won WWII with our massive industrial base, and in the heat of things some corners were cut. So yeah, during night flying pilots could use their instruments to tell them they were going up, down, or sideways -- but the coffee never lied.
"We all say so, so it must be true!"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I can see it now...
"It looks like you're trying to take a left turn. Do you need help? If you have right of way, click here. If you do not have right of way, click here. If you aren't sure, click here. If the light is red..."
2) Mother mode: "Slow down!"
3) Wife mode: "Let's just ask that guy there and where _______ is."
4) Mother-in-law mode: "He's trying to kill us! I know it! My husband, god rest his soul, knew how to drive and it wasn't like this! You kids these days don't think about anyone but yourselves."
5) Little sister mode 1: "The mall is thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat way!
6) Little sister mode 2: "Let me off at the corner. I'd just die if my friends saw me getting a ride with you!"
7) Your driving teacher: "Hands at 10 & 2! Pay attention! This ain't worth a teacher's salary..."
Does anyone care to speculate on the lame jokes this thing might tell? [1] .
Will you be the first to hack your buddy's wheels to scream "COP!!!!" at 1:30a.m.?
woof.
[1] It won't be anything good like "What's the difference between a tire and 365 blowjobs? The tire is a Goodyear; 365 blowjobs is a very good year."
Mass transit isn't as safe as you'd think.
Cars kill fewer people at once.
I guess if something happens while you are on some mass transit you can at least expect it to be on the world news (small comfort).
>It's a pitty that the US government so heavily subsidizes automobiles and gives other forms of transit the shaft
As a Canadian who has been to the states often enough to understand mass transit in both countries, I quickly realised that mass transit ONLY works in huge cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta, Detriot, New York, for example. And since a large amount of the population in both countries lives in cities where ANYTHING and EVERYTHING (especially work) takes a minimum of a 15 minute drive (often 1/2 hour) mass transit is NOT a viable choice. I refuse to wait an hour (each way) to get my groceries by bus. Heck, where I live I have to drive 20 minutes just to pick up groceries, and I'm only 5 minutes out of a city of 300,000. This is normal in a not-so-big-but-growing city.
Rail: Won't work because you'd have to stop for 3 minutes every 3 rail minutes to pick people up, due to urban sprawl. It will take twice as long to get to the destination (assuming traffic on the roads isn't bad -- and in the smaller cities it usually isn't).
Bus: A better idea, but still much too slow. The amount of buses needed to take so few people ends up pumping more crap into the air than the individual cars, from what I see now.
Supersonic Transport: Great for going to other cities. But that isn't really the problem, is it?
Subway: Not unless your city population is in the millions. The price is just way too high.
Basically, these ideas work well for most other developed countries because their population in most cities is high enough to support them. The United States, and Canada (especially) don't have enough population density to make these ideas work.
I think if you want to solve the problems of the under 1/2 million population cities you need to pack people in more tightly and fix the roads so that people can get where they need to go quickly. Oh, and you need to encourage more really local business (like a 5 minute walk local), rather than have patches of houses, and (far away) patches of stores.
Just my 2 cents.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Brilliance. (sigh)
does this qualify me to drive in the carpool lane?
But what I really need when I'm driving late night stretches is a virtual backseat driver. "You're going too fast! Stop tailgating that semi truck! Shouldn't we pull over? I have to pee! Why did you buy that expensive CD player instead of upgrading my CPU?"
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Notice the prototype picture has the wheel on the incorrect, right side of the dash-board... so you can bet it's all British humor. That'll put you to sleep if anything, or even prompt you to drive off the road on purpose and kill yourself.
Why don't they just play sound from a porno clip or something. That'll keep you up.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37