AI is both liberating and enslaving us
Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping across a busy road in Tempe, Arizona in 2018 when she was struck by a hybrid electric Volvo SUV at 40mph. At the time of the accident, the woman in the driver’s seat was watching a talent show on her phone. The SUV had been fitted with an autonomous driving system consisting of neural networks that integrated image recognisers. The reason Herzberg died was because what she was doing did not compute. The autonomous driving system recalibrated the car’s trajectory to avoid the bicycle, which it took to be travelling along the road, only to collide with Herzberg, who was walking
