EuroWire January 2018

Transatlantic cable

Another source of suffering in a city devoid of stop lights – indeed of all major street signs – might be a sense of disorientation. Mr Thompson took note of some concern that the Global Positioning System (GPS) has already eroded our knowledge of our surroundings: studies have found that reliance on devices impairs intuition of where we are and how to navigate on our own. † He said: “If robots rule the roads, we might get where we’re going a lot more quickly – but end up not knowing precisely where we are.”

Critics suggest that a more compelling factor may be concern that the poles mar the image of the community and depress property values. † Whatever their main motivation, the residents of Stone Harbor are clearly committed to ridding themselves of the hated steel poles. The issue of the potential alterations to the transmission infrastructure has already seen one mayor ousted and replaced by a more biddable one. Mott Associates is receiving a $10,000 fee for its study. It was also given a free tip about expectations. The hope, wrote Mr Conti, “is that [Mott’s] independent analysis will come back with estimates financially viable for the borough.”

Trade

In pulling back from the multilateral position that defined its presence in Asia for decades, the USA creates a vacuum

Automotive

In the coming age of self-driving cars, the absence of stop lights could induce ‘mild terror’ in motorists

“Instead of offering concessions, both the United States’ historical allies, Japan and South Korea, as well as China, its most serious Pacific rival, signalled that they had taken Trump at his word: his ‘America First’ policy means the United States will become less and less a player in the fastest-growing and most dynamic region in the world.” Thus did Don Lee of the Los Angeles Times sum up the net result of Donald Trump’s first Asia trip, during which leaders from Tokyo to Seoul to Beijing feted the American president with full ceremonial honours. For 11 days in November, they listened politely to his demands and just as politely ignored them, entering into no serious negotiations and making no significant concessions. As frankly acknowledged by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Mr Trump’s insistence that his Asian counterparts accept what he considers fairer trade terms and that they buy more American goods seems barely to have registered with his hosts. Referring to the USA trade deficit with China, Mr Tillerson told reporters in Beijing: “In the grand scheme of a $300- to $500-billion trade deficit, the things that have been achieved thus far are pretty small.” That is not to say that important matters did not go forward in the course of Mr Trump’s Asia tour, just that they did so irrespective of the United States. Trade ministers among the TPP-11 – the remaining signatories to the Trans-Pacific Trade agreement, abandoned by the USA – said at a meeting in Vietnam on 9 th November that they had agreed on how to revise the agreement to proceed without Washington. (Former President Barack Obama was unable to get the TPP through Congress in 2016, and President Trump officially withdrew the USA from any participation shortly after he took office. Before the USA withdrawal, the 12 nations in the multilateral Pacific Rim trade pact would together have accounted for 40 per cent of the global economy.) China and Japan to the fore “When you sit out the game, the rest of the world moves on,” Deborah Elms, executive director of Singapore-based Asian Trade Centre, a research and consulting firm, told the LA Times , pointing out that Asian nations are enthusiastically cutting trade deals among themselves and with European countries. (“Trump’s Asia Trip Shows US at Risk of Being Sidelined in the Region’s Economic Future,” 9 th November)

The recent tech and design issue of the New York Times featured a symposium on “life after driving.” Clive Thompson’s contribution, Cities Without Signs, invited consideration of the disappearance of street signage – “the iconography of the automobile age.” According to Mr Thompson, who is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, the traffic light might be the first item in that iconographic world to be transformed, or vanish altogether. Robots, he wrote, “won’t need signs to optimise the way they move through urban landscapes.” (“Full Tilt: When 100 Percent of Cars Are Autonomous,” 12 th November) In a computer simulation by an urban-transportation expert, each crossroads has an “intersection manager,” a computer that senses approaching traffic and is in wireless communication with the oncoming cars. When each self-driving car is perhaps 300 yards away, it sends a request to the intersection manager — to turn right, say; or to move on through. The intersection manager then does an instant calculation and routes that vehicle most efficiently. The result is described as “a ballet of cars whizzing and weaving past one another in the intersection.” But, crucially, many fewer cars than in today’s intersections come to a complete halt. Citing Peter Stone, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert at the University of Texas at Austin, who confirmed that delay times at intersections will shrink remarkably, Mr Thompson asserted that this could significantly speed up traffic throughout an entire city. He also noted that safety would be enhanced in an autonomous intersection. Currently, 43 per cent of car crashes in the United States occur at intersections. Dr Stone claims that robot vehicles would crash only in the event of mechanical error. Additionally, with fewer idling vehicles and jackrabbit stops and starts, the intersection of the future could produce 20 to 50 per cent less carbon dioxide than it does today. † For the human passenger, though, Mr Thompson suggested that, at least in the early stages, a robotised intersection might be mildly terrifying — “like flying through a crowded asteroid belt.” Dr Stone concurred. Some people, he said, will need the window darkened “so they don’t freak out.”

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January 2018