Magstripe is dead but let’s not lose sleep over it

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Forget sheep, count beeps instead.

Unwilling insomniacs in San Francisco were recently treated to a midnight chorus of car horns performed for their unsolicited nocturnal entertainment from a nearby Waymo car park. The Google subsidiary’s driverless cars were rolling in for the night, got stuck in a jam of their own making and began honking at each other… autonomously.

Now that’s progress.

Waymo issued a fix so that its flocks of self-beeping vehicles no longer bleat all night, and hopefully there will be fewer bleary eyed humans on the road the following morning – a very real danger to life and limb, about which I suspect Waymo really couldn’t give a toss.

It is a sound reminder that you and I are unwilling, unpaid and (in this case) sleep-deprived beta-testers in tech businesses’ lust for money, sorry, I mean “commitment to innovation”.

One can learn a lot from Waymo’s world view. A couple of years ago, one of its self-driving trucks was undergoing a human-monitored test when another (regular) lorry veered into its lane, forcing the Waymo truck off the road and semi-autonomously self-crashing into the barriers. A statement from the company at the time noted “this collision was caused by a human driver of another vehicle”.

While true as a statement, this remains questionable as an explanation. Up to that point, the need to stay clear of other road vehicles – which I am sure you agree are all driven by maniacs – was generally regarded as an intrinsic element of what is known as “driving”. Just keeping between nicely painted road markings isn’t really enough.