Reader's Corner No. 73: The Future of Autonomous Vehicles, Postmodern Architecture for Showrooms, and Using Flexbox in Your Stylesheet

We are really excited about this week's edition of Reader's Corner! Today's articles span a variety of interesting topics, such as the future of autonomous driving technology, a fascinating review of how  Best Products (a retired showroom retail store company) challenged the "big box" store archetype in the 1970's with postmodern architecture, and a neat tutorial on using the CSS Flexible Box Layout.

Will My Grandsons Ever Drive a Car?

Source: Siemens USA Newsroom

Takeaway: The future of automotive technology has been an interesting topic of discussion and debate for some time now. Back in one of my 400 level Marketing classes in University some time ago, my teacher polled the class with the question "how many of you would switch to a self-driving car if they became available in the near future?" Interestingly enough, less than 10% of people said they would trust their lives with self-driving automotive technology. This surprised me, it appeared that most people rated themselves as more competent, with the ability to react quicker and make better ethical decisions in the moment than a computer ever could. Whether we are witnessing some derivative of the Dunning-Krueger effect in this particular situation or not, Barbara Humpton notes that the future of autonomous driving is actually inevitable. People will have to adapt to it whether they want to or not. She then brings up that in order for self-driving cars to operate effectively there will need to be some form of Connected Vehicle communication, which means that each computer needs to be sharing its data and communicating not only with the computer in the opposite lane–but with pedestrians, crosswalks, signals, and public transportation services. As much as I enjoy driving, I am still interested and remain open-minded to the notion of switching to autonomous driving technology in the future.

Side note: MIT released a neat tool called the "Moral Machine" back in 2016 as a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as AV. The Moral Machine game lets you make the calls in the famous “trolley problem” and see analytics about your ethics; meaning it will tell you any biases you may unknowingly have towards letting different types of people live or die. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already!

Tags: #AV, #Future, #Technology

Site Specific: Postmodern ‘Best Products’ Showrooms Deconstruct Consumerism

Source: 99% Invisible

Takeaway: It’s hard for me to believe these buildings were real. They were definitely built during a different time. Today it’s hard to imagine a modern business signing off on such experimental, expensive architecture.

Tags: #Architecture

Flexbox and Writing Modes

Source: Smashing Magazine

Takeaway: Learn something new each day: Flexbox direction is based on the written language used. So if a website is in English, the flex-start is on the left. If it's in Arabic, flex-start begins on the right. Which explains why the value for flex-direction is flex-start instead of flex-left or flex-right.

Tags: #Flexbox, #WrittenLanguage

Heard of any cool developments in technology? Please tell us about them!