Brace yourself for self-driving strollers
“Cocaine is God’s way of saying that you’re making too much money,” Robin Williams once joked. God also might have a few choice words to say about a new $3,300 self-driving stroller unveiled at the CES tech show in Las Vegas. The Ella smart stroller uses artificial intelligence to navigate and is filled with bells and whistles like a white noise machine and an automatic parking brake. It’s the Tesla of strollers, basically.
You don’t need to be a technology expert to know that self-driving technology is still in a very early stage and is riddled with issues. Tesla’s driver assistant system, for example, has been accused of running over child dummies (Tesla has rejected this claim and called it “defamatory”.) Would you really trust a self-driving stroller with your precious cargo? Well, here’s the thing: the stroller is only self-driving when it’s empty. It’s designed to be used when you’re carrying your kid in the park, for example, and don’t have a spare hand to push the stroller. Which means the self-driving tech is perfectly safe for your own child and only a potential danger to other people’s kids! Ever notice how a lot of technology seems to be like that? Convenience and personal safety is purchased at the expense of public safety. People drive around in enormous SUVs which pose a danger to pedestrians, for example, but which promise to keep their own kids safe.
Forget all the potential safety issues for a moment, though – is there really a market for $3,300 self-driving strollers? The depressing answer is: yes, very much so. Strollers aren’t just transportation tools, after all, they have become status symbols. Bugaboos used to be the “it” stroller; now upmarket neighbourhoods are full of $1,900 UppaBaby travel systems. Maybe in a few years the Ella will have usurped the UppaBaby as the bougie buggy of choice.
If people want to spend a small fortune on a stroller that’s up to them. The bigger issue here is the way in which pregnancy and parenthood have been thoroughly commodified. It wasn’t always like this: “As recently as the early 20th century, marketing targeted at children and mothers was seen as a kind of profane violation of the sanctity of the home,” Amanda Parrish Morgan notes in an essay for JSTOR. Now, however, you become a prime target for marketers the moment you get a positive pregnancy test. If you want to be a good parent and keep your kids safe, advertisers insinuate, then you need to shell out on $300 baby cameras that monitor your kids’ breathing and $300 smart socks that track your little one’s heart rate and $3,300 self-driving strollers. While some of these products do make parenting easier, kitting your kid out in tracking devices can also make you more paranoid.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former Facebook executive once lamented. Ultimately, this sums up the biggest issue that I have with the fancy new Ella stroller. The people behind the device, graduates of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sandbox innovation programme, are clearly very bright. Imagine if they put their brain power towards solving real problems instead of making life marginally more convenient for the super-rich?
Elon Musk cuts fertility benefits at Twitter
This is the guy, let me remind you, who has fathered multiple children through fertility technology like IVF. This is the guy who keeps going on about how everyone should have loads of kids and who has tweeted that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” The risk of civilization crumbling, however, hasn’t stopped him from slashing fertility benefits at Twitter in half.
Fox News host says it’s time to tell the homeless ‘you don’t get to live with us’
Greg Gutfeld also said that being homeless is like “glamping”.
Finally, some good news for abortion rights in America
Pharmacies in the US can now sell the abortion pill mifepristone for the first time. As Moira Donegan writes, this change is massively overdue. Since mifepristone was approved for use in America in 2000 (it had been in use in Europe since the 1980s), “the drug has been subject to intense, labyrinthine and medically unnecessary bureaucratic restrictions.” Still, better late than never.
I now (unwillingly) know more than I have ever wanted to know about Prince Harry’s penis
Harry’s memoir appears to be full of facts about his “todger” which seems odd for someone who supposedly wants privacy. Let me clear that I’m not a royalist, I’m just a little tired of Harry and Meghan being treated like brave revolutionaries. As Nesrine Malik has pointed out in a superb article: “The couple’s essential charge, that a status based on bloodline superiority was not distributed equally to them, cannot be credibly stretched to encompass any wider anti-racism – or anti-anything, really – politics … As far as the royal family are concerned, they don’t want a coup: they want their cut.”
Bedouin fisherwomen swim against a male tide
About 400 Bedouin fisherwomen in central Oman fish for invertebrates –a trade passed down from their mothers. “But the increasing commercialisation of Oman’s industrial fisheries – which are male-dominated – is pushing the women’s trade into decline,” the Guardian reports.
Finland defence minister to take two months’ paternity leave amid Nato bid
“Children are only little for a moment, and I want to remember it in more than just photographs,” he wrote on Twitter. I hope he inspires more men to do the same.
Women in India are dropping out of the workforce, even as the economy grows
“So this is one of India’s challenges as it overtakes China as the world’s most populous country,” Lauren Frayer notes at NPR News. “[N]ot only to create jobs for all of its workers but to create the conditions that will allow its female workers to take them.”
The week in potatoarchy
Scientists have finally answered the question we’ve all been lying awake at night asking ourselves: what kind of stones are best for skimming? I’ve always assumed the flatter the better, but bulk appears to win out. “Try and throw a stone that looks like a potato,” a mathematician told the Guardian. “You can get some fun things happening with heavier stones.” The more you know!