Automobile Drivers Are Not Rational Players! Is Photoshop?
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
I now commute by bicycle, partly because it’s fun, but primarily to limit my greenhouse gas emissions.
I’ve only recently started thinking about the fact that I always change out of lanes when I can’t keep pace with the prevailing speed of traffic. However, if I see a red light or a stopped car ahead, I typically have continued on in that lane with the understanding that I’m not reducing overall traffic throughput.
Unfortunately, this seems to preoccupy many automobile drivers behind me. They apparently cannot bear to be going any slower than physically possible. They will often elect to switch out of their lane (or switch partially out of their lane), speed up, pass me, switch back, and then slam their breaks on when they realize they are about to smash into the right side of a garbage truck.
I presume that they didn’t notice anything beyond my bicycle intruding on their fundamental human right to (briefly) change their position with respect to the positions of other objects at a large rate.
Aside from being dangerous, these irrational drivers are wasting fuel. So from now on, I resolve to switch out of my lane if I can’t keep pace with the car behind me, regardless of overall traffic throughput.
I am intrigued by all these little, split-second decisions our minds make, often without conscious direction. For example, I have gotten really good at catching fumbled objects. I marvel at it because I know how hard it would be to teach a computer the same trick.
Earlier this year, I read Jeff Hawkins’s interesting book On Intelligence. Hawkins believes that the ability to recognize patterns and sudden departures from them is central to intelligent action. He goes into great detail describing the sophistication of sensory perception. Hawkins further believes that our minds accomplish this through the application of an as-yet undiscovered, high-level, invariant mechanism.
What if Hawkins is right about the centrality of patterns, but not about the mechanism? What if intelligence is little more than the ruthless application of a zillion simple edge-detection and flood-fill algorithms?
Perhaps I will start treating Photoshop with a little more respect.