Comment I told you no big phones! (Score 1) 421
Yours Posthumously,
Steve Jobs
Actually no. The reason Google's cars do this is because they (for now) drive in California. The driver's handbook in California explicitly states that you should at all times keep up with traffic, even if it means exceeding the speed limit a little bit, so that all cars are driving at roughly the same speed. You won't get a speeding ticket, because you are following the law. Presumably, in other areas, the car will be reprogrammed with knowledge of that area's driving rules, and will or won't do this as appropriate.
Wow, is that true? I drive in Cali, I guess I should know that but it's been so long since I looked at the handbook. On my last speeding ticket, I did tell the cop that I was merely traveling equal to traffic, and he shot me a look like I was an idiot. If I knew that tidbit, I might have tried to fight the ticket.
Maybe the difference would be small, but it's much more probable that the impact of that tiny change, and its accumulated consequences century after century, billions of generations of bacteria later, would have changed everything.
Not really, for the same reason that killing one mosquito generally won't make any difference,
Two types of analysis:
Macro view: Killing a few mosquitoes won't affect overall dynamic equilibrium, the next few millennia are more or less the same as viewed from 30,000 ft.
Micro view: Killing a few mosquitos prevented malaria from spreading to the Berg clan, who became more powerful and wiped out the Valley clan, completely rewriting history for a particular territory of a particular mammal.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood