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If a small tree branch pokes out onto a highway and there’s no incoming traffic, we’d simply drift a little into the opposite lane and drive around it. But an automated car might come to a full stop, as it dutifully observes traffic laws that prohibit crossing a double-yellow line. This unexpected move would avoid bumping the object in front, but then cause a crash with the human drivers behind it.
Interesting problem for contemporary ethics, the problem of driverless cars. Philosophers should join engineers and lawmakers to make this idea a mainstream reality.
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Parikh is Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. He oversees the hardware and software that underpins the world’s most popular social network, and if that notification doesn’t appear within seconds, it’s his job to find out why. The trouble is that the Facebook infrastructure now spans four data centers in four separate parts of the world, tens of thousands of computer servers, and more software tools than you could list without taking a deep breath in the middle of it all. The cause of that missing notification is buried somewhere inside one of the largest operations on the net.
Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook, a profile of Jay Parikh who runs one of the most complex Internet infrastructure in the world.