Dumb driver crashes into smart bus

It wasn’t the dinosaurs’ fault that a meteorite massive enough and fast enough to throw up, on impact, a cloud of dust large enough to blacken the sky for days on end hit the earth. But the faultless dinosaur it was that went extinct, not the meteorite.

When accidents happen, the more vulnerable get the worst of it. So it proved, when a driverless shuttle on a test run in downtown Las Vegas got hit by a truck that was backing out, and whose driver was at fault.

Is there nothing called justice, and no remedy for the unfair bigotry of the big bending the fender of the small, leaving the small to bear the burden of adjustment?

Back in the Jurassic Age, there were no humans (believe it or not, not even Steven Spielberg), and so no human notions like justice or guilt. Tyrannosaurus simply was king.

The situation is, believe it or not, different in Las Vegas. The police determined that the truck driver was at fault. The shuttle is free to continue its sojourn.

Happily enough, this tallied with the views of the passengers on the shuttle, who were jolted, but refused to bolt. The driverless experiment should go ahead, a passenger was quoted as saying.

Even if perfect technology is undone by dumb human error, humans are smart enough to give technology another chance. Humans are survivors, unlike their Jurassic predecessors.