In an article for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, provides tips for adult children planning to have difficult conversations with their parents about such topics as driving and housing. “Hanging up the keys or leaving the family home often places two sets of critical values at odds – freedom versus safety,” writes Coughlin.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, writes for Forbes about how people planning for retirement must factor in the cost of transportation as they age. “Transportation is often taken for granted but it is critical to living well at any age,” Coughlin notes.
In an article for Axios, Prof. Carlo Rati writes about how developments in automated vehicles and smart infrastructure could be used to help make cities safer. “Developing technology for AVs to communicate with other vehicles as well as infrastructure like streets, traffic lights and road signs could both improve safety and decrease congestion,” writes Ratti.
New Yorker contributor Caroline Lester writes about the Moral Machine, an online platform developed by MIT researchers to crowdsource public opinion on the ethical issues posed by autonomous vehicles.
Fast Company reporter Jeremy Deaton highlights Prof. Jessika Trancik’s research showing that electric vehicles are often cheaper than comparable gas-powered vehicles. “The reason is that the lower fuel costs of EVs relative to gasoline-fueled cars compensate for the higher vehicle costs of EVs,” Trancik explains.
Writing for Forbes, research engineer Bryan Reimer examines how success can be measured as automated vehicles are introduced to our transportation system. “While automation may be the future,” writes Reimer, “the enabling technologies we are seeing today are pieces of a complex puzzle being assembled to build a picture of how automation will change the future of how we live and move.”
Fast Company reporter Katharine Schwab writes that researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have developed a new interactive tool, called Escape, that allows users to map flight costs to any destination in the world. Escape’s “design is meant to help narrow down countless destinations as you plan your next getaway.”
Writing for the Financial Times, research scientist Ashley Nunes explores the cost of providing support and safety personnel for Waymo’s driverless taxi service. “Technology does not purge the need for human labour but rather changes the type of labour required,” writes Nunes. “Put another way, unless something changes, driverless will not mean humanless.”
Prof. John Sterman speaks with Marco Werman of PRI’s The World about the future of the American car market. According to Sterman, “the U.S. still has the opportunity, if the federal policies were aligned with our long-term interests, to have a major role in the new car and transportation and mobility industry that’s taking shape.”
This Quartz video highlights how MIT researchers are developing a self-driving boat system that can navigate waterways and can transform into different structures to move cargo, trash or build a temporary bridge. “The boats find the best path between preprogrammed locations, while using GPS, laser sensors, and cameras to avoid hitting anything,” explains Michael Tabb.
In an article for Forbes, research engineer Bryan Reimer ponders how the integration of self-driving vehicles into our transportation system will evolve. “As we strive to automate, risks must be appropriately balanced with the benefits, much like how they are when it comes to the use of lifesaving drugs with known side effects,” concludes Reimer.
Katharine Schwab of Fast Company writes about the Media Lab’s Moral Machine project, which surveyed people about their feelings on the ethical dilemmas posed by driverless vehicles. Because the results vary based on region and economic inequality, the researchers believe “self-driving car makers and politicians will need to take all of these variations into account when formulating decision-making systems and building regulations,” Schwab notes.
Lucas Laursen writes for Fortune that a global survey created by MIT researchers uncovered different regional attitudes about how autonomous vehicles should handle unavoidable collisions. Global carmakers, Laursen writes, “will need to use the findings at the very least to adapt how they sell their increasingly autonomous cars, if not how the cars actually operate.”
MIT researchers created an online game to determine how people around the world think autonomous vehicles should handle moral dilemmas, reports Laurel Wamsley for NPR. “Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms,” the researchers explain, “and to the policymakers that will regulate them.”
BBC News reporter Chris Fox writes that MIT researchers surveyed people about how an autonomous vehicle should operate when presented with different ethical dilemmas. Fox explains that the researchers hope their findings will “spark a ‘global conversation’ about the moral decisions self-driving vehicles will have to make.”