Five years ago, I was invited to test one of Google’s prototype driverless cars on the streets near the company’s headquarters in California. The car, alive with tech and sensors, navigated the traffic faultlessly and, sitting passively inside it, I could see only a couple of reasons why, by 2020, the vehicles wouldn’t be everywhere.
One stubborn problem was the insurer’s question of who would be liable in the event of an “autonomous car” being involved in an accident. That came closer to being resolved last week with a framework government legal report suggesting, logically, that responsibility for all motoring offences, even fatal accidents, should transfer from the driver (now the “user-in-charge”) to the car-maker or its software.
What the report did not resolve, though, was another potential difficulty that had struck me. Given that the cars had no choice but to stop if they detected unusual movement in front of them, and were predictably perfect at it, what was to prevent pedestrians continually walking into the road knowing the algorithm was on their side? Wouldn’t cars be stranded in a permanent limbo of giving way?
When I raised this with the driverless gurus at Google, high on their “rational mobility solutions”, they looked puzzled. Why would anyone step out like that?
“Have you ever met a British teenager?” I wondered.
We are not a muse
In the current issue of the London Review of Books, the artist Celia Paul reviews the second volume of William Feaver’s life of Lucian Freud. In it, Feaver catalogues the changing cast of young “neurotics” who became the ageing Freud’s lovers.
Paul, now 61, who had a son with Freud at 25 before he lost interest in her, was one of those women. I spoke to her about that one-sided relationship last year. If there was one description of her she liked less than “muse”, it was “in her own right”, as in “she is now a painter in her own right”. In her LRB piece, Paul writes poignantly of how female artists – Gwen John was another – become footnotes in the biographies of the controlling men who “discovered” them. It is a “cellar life”, Paul writes. Quite rightly, she believes coming up for air is long overdue.
Last rites
Most presidents use their farewell months to grant clemency to prison inmates with dubious sentences. Donald Trump, never knowingly unsociopathic, appears determined rather to make the Christmas period the most lethal of a presidency that, since federal executions were restored in July, has killed more prisoners than any for 50 years. Execution orders on five inmates are being rushed through before he quits the White House in January.
The urgency reminded me of a sentiment of the US justice campaigner Bryan Stevenson, who has overturned the unsafe convictions of dozens of prisoners on death row. “The question is never whether these people deserve to die for what they have done,” he said. “The question is whether, given our history, we deserve to kill them.”
Christmas miracle
My mum and dad, both well into their 80s, were among the fortunate first recipients of the initial dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine last Wednesday. After they’d had the jab, they were told to wait for 15 minutes to make sure there were no immediate side-effects in a makeshift marquee in the clinic’s car park. “Is that where the drinks are?” my mum joked, characteristically, to the nurse. Certainly, after our year of prohibitions, it felt like a rare – hopefully increasingly familiar – champagne moment.
