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AI Rights

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Morituri:
That is ... I was going to say unfortunate but it's worse; that's appalling.  Those systems don't just smooth out traffic; they reduce traffic fatalities, including pedestrian and bicyclist casualties, by a huge amount.  If the council is overriding engineers on putting those in, then people are dying who don't have to die.

In the US, we see traffic-adapting elevators in most new buildings, but rarely retrofitted to existing ones except in office buildings where "time is money" to the people making the decisions. 

But the importance of it is orders of magnitude less.  People have to wait a minute or two extra a couple times a day, maybe, but nobody dies because of slow elevators, and elevators don't ever get completely gridlocked for days.

Storel:
Oh, I'm sure at least one person somewhere has died because of a slow elevator... perhaps on the way from the Emergency Room to the Operating Room?

JimC:

--- Quote from: Morituri on 15 Jan 2017, 13:19 ---Those systems don't just smooth out traffic; they reduce traffic fatalities,
--- End quote ---
In the UK at least reducing fatalities is AIUI a much higher priority than making the traffic flow better.

Morituri:
I would like to think the same is true in the US, but I know the line that the salespeople find most effective...  and it's about traffic flow.  "Saving lives" is just additional leverage that the city commissioners can use to get consumer advocates and so forth to go along with it.

Zebediah:
Under North Carolina law, the NC Department of Transportation must prioritize traffic flow over all other concerns - including pedestrian fatalities. Or so we were told in Durham when we tried to get some speed bumps installed on a busy street that happened to fall under the DOT's authority rather than the city's. This after a particularly grisly traffic accident where it took the police over a day to find all of the body.

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