*Could be tech-lash part seven. But I'm saving that term for attacks on the majors. This piece merely makes one slighting comment about Google.
*This article about problems with driverless cars looks contrarian; I'm not sure it is. Making urban spaces safe for cheap robots may be what the issue is mostly about. The title is rather silly because "cities" were already radically "destroyed" for the sake of analog cars, but this framing of the problem feels like it's groping toward some real-world consequences of autonomous machine transportation.
*We need a better term of art for these devices, by the way. "Robocars," self driving cars, autonomous cars, I've seen about ten of these halting coinages, and none of them have caught on. Also, I'm not at all sure that the majority of such devices will look at all like "cars," because a rolling suitcase or a little wheeled delivery pod makes a lot more economic sense in many use-cases for a "driverless car." Robot vehicles that can move people and modest little robot package-delivery services may be entirely different market segments.
Special report
Behind the mostly fake "battle" about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?
The battle over the design and control of urban infrastructure pits two distinct ideas against each other. One narrative of "networked urbanism" envisages the city driven by data analytics and networks controlled in part by machines. In this "smart city", technological solutionism is rampant, with everything connected and automated. This is Googleville: a posthuman urban laboratory.
You might expect the car makers to be happy with this as a future, but even here, car ownership and use may fall. Networked urbanism can be dressed up as faster, smarter and greener but it is still pushing the corporate panopticon into our streets and lives....
