Member-only story
Sometimes, new technology can feel like going round in circles
Last month, a passenger in a Phoenix Waymo self-driving taxi found himself trapped in the vehicle after it arrived at the city’s airport, from where he was due to take a flight to Los Angeles. But instead of pulling up in the car park, .
, the passenger, who works in the tech sector, managed to contact Waymo’s automated AI-managed customer service and the vehicle finally came to a halt. The passenger made his flight, but later posted that while he was not charged for the ride, .
As more and more of our daily lives are management by algorithms, we can expect to find ourselves in these ghosts in the machine situations from time to time. More worryingly, an article in IEEE Spectrum shows just , which suggests that wrongdoers will likely pull anything from pranks to serious accidents.
Is this part of the price we must pay for technological progress? Some of us will answer “technology is not my friend”, but this carries the inherent risk of being relegated to the sidelines and becoming the archetypal grumpy old man or woman. And trust me, regardless of your age, this is NOT where you want to be.
