Comment by goosejuice
4 days ago
I suspect machine readable practices will become standard as AI is incorporated more into society.
A good example is autonomous driving and local laws / context. "No turn on red. School days 7am-9am".
So you need: where am I, when are school days for this specific school, and what datetime it is. You could attempt to gather that through search. Though more realistically I think the municipality will make the laws require less context, or some machine readable (e.g. qrcode) transfer of information will be on the sign. If they don't there's going to be a lot of rule breaking.
Very strong "reverse centaur" vibes here, in the sense of humans becoming servants to machines, instead of vice versa. Not that I think making things more machine-readable is a waste of time, but you have to keep in mind the amount of human time sacrificed.
Well, it wouldn't even be the first time.
We've completely redesigned society around cars - making the most human populated environments largely worse for humans along the way.
Universal sidewalks (not really needed with slow moving traffic like horses and carts - though nice even back then), traffic lights, stop signs, street crossing, interchanges, etc.
As a cyclist, I’m with you 100%. Unfortunately we’re probably going to do it again with self-driving cars, with segregated lanes, special markers, etc.
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Those particular signs are just stupid. The street should be redesigned with traffic calming, narrowing and chicanes so that speeding is not possible.
Slapping on a sign is ineffective
Maybe for new schools. Old schools don't have the luxury of being able to force adjacent road design changes in most cases. Also. I've frequently seen the school zones extended out in several directions away from the school to make heavily trafficked intersections feeding towards the school safer. Safer for pedestrian and motorist alike. The real world is generally never so black and white. We have to deal with that gray nuance all the time.
Of course they can. Streets get redesigned all the time. They get repaved every couple decades at worst.
I’m saying this because it seemed silly to me to be dreaming up some weird system of QR codes or LLM readable speed limits instead of simply making the street follow best practices which change how humans drive for the better _today_.
Completely agree
That seems anachronistic, form over function. Machines should be able to access an API that returns “signs” for their given location. These signs don’t need any real world presence and can be updated instantly.
Also see this happening, what does that mean for business specifications? Does it become close to code syntax itself?