Back from the Embodied AI Workshop! And TIL (today I learned, though not the today of the blogging every day post) that “home again, home again, jiggity jig” isn’t originally just a throw-away line from J.F. Sebastian’s autonomous creations in Blade Runner, but actually is a centuries-old nursery rhyme called “To Market, To Market”: https://poets.org/poem/market-market
To market,
To market,
To buy a fat pig.
Home again,
Home again,
Jiggity jig.
I may be a carnivore, but I find the treatment of animals in a lot of older literature … disturbing. Regardless, I’m home again, and since another year has passed, that means there’s a different car from the Clemson autonomous driving team on display in the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport:
On the theme of dubious autonomous creatures, I’ve said it before, but now I’ll say it here: an autonomous vehicle without a physical steering wheel is a bug, just waiting to turn your car into a one-ton paperweight when the software inevitably bricks. Send an engineer out with a gamepad controller all you want: sooner or later you’ll need a tow in an awkward situation (say, for example, an underground parking garage in Palo Alto which is too windy for a tow truck to get into … yes, I do have personal experience with this, why do you ask?) requiring your new paperweight to be serviced in place.
Pull up your pants, turn your ballcap forward, and install a steering wheel.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A fountain in the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, and the aforementioned self-driving car. I don’t think it had a steering wheel, front or back, but perhaps that was just the angle I could see in.
