That slightly racist car game

Walking to the car last night after Jason’s humiliation at badminton I was reminded again of a little game that I invented on Friday. A game that after some time I affectionately named “Jerry, Jap or Yank”. The game itself was created as I waited for an every 5 minutes bus (I stood there for 37 minutes in the end) outside Cambridge train station.

After some time of generally starring at nothing it dawned on me that nothing seemed to be driving past me except VWs and Audis. Upon this realisation it then become somewhat of a personal challenge to then try and spot cars that went past that were not of German construction (or at least design). This itself became quite a difficult game as by and large the vast majority of traffic traveling into the train station cul-de-sac are private hire taxis in nature. This meant that almost every thing going past was a VW Passat, large Audi (A6-esque) or Mercedes van-taxi conversion. Less often were BMWs or Skodas, but then these are both still German in design.

The only frequent cars that were excluded from the German rule turned out to be Ford Mondeos (yank) or Toyota Corelloas (Japanese representation). Far less often were London Taxi cabs (the largest remaining British car manufacturer) and Frog cars (Peugeot 4007 and Citroen C5). And in last place was the strange entry by the Koreans, with the Kia van type 7-seater thing.

So my only conclusion that I can take away from the modestly racistly named game is that Cambridge only seem to buy Jerry or Jap cars. Big ol’ diesel ones at that. Very strange from a very proud, old, “green” city like Cambridge. But more importantly, are there only 11 cars in the world now?

What distinguishes you from other developers?

I've built data pipelines across 3 continents at petabyte scales, for over 15 years. But the data doesn't matter if we don't solve the human problems first - an AI solution that nobody uses is worthless.

Are the robots going to kill us all?

Not any time soon. At least not in the way that you've got imagined thanks to the Terminator movies. Sure somebody with a DARPA grant is always going to strap a knife/gun/flamethrower on the side of a robot - but just like in Dr.Who - right now, that robot will struggle to even get out of the room, let alone up some stairs.

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A year ago, the whole world was convinced that AI was going to steal their job. Now, the reality is that most people are thinking 'I wish this POC at work would go a bit faster to scan these PDFs'.

When am I going to get my self-driving car?

Humans are complicated. If we invented driving today - there's NO WAY IN HELL we'd let humans do it. They get distracted. They text their friends. They drink. They make mistakes. But the reality is, all of our streets, cities (and even legal systems) have been built around these limitations. It would be surprisingly easy to build self-driving cars if there were no humans on the road. But today no one wants to take liability. If a self-driving company kills someone, who's responsible? The manufacturer? The insurance company? The software developer?