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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3312 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

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A very minor news story that illustrated the sort of unexpected cultural problems that might come to the way of fully autonomous vehicles on the streets in the future: it's election time in Finland, and the way that the Finnish electoral system works is that each candidate is assigned a number (could be '3', could be '53', could be '137' - there's a lot of candidates in Finnish elections, as there's a lot of parties and the biggest electoral district elects 37 MPs, meaning all the parties that can will run at least that number), and the way you vote for them is writing the candidate number on the ballot and then dropping it in the box. This means that displaying your candidate number prominently is important for candidates in advertising. So there's suddenly a lot of posters on the streets with big numbers in them... and the adaptive cruise control features in newer vehicles are suddenly interpreting them as speed limits.

Of course, when you have human drivers in charge, it's simple enough for them to just turn the cruise control off. One might imagine that autonomous vehicles would have bigger issues.

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