Should your robot driver kill you to save a child’s life? – PC & Tech Authority – Interesting little ethical conundrum that I hadn’t thought about with regards to self-driving cars. Is it a matter of users having a “setting” in the car for “Save me at all costs”? Or, as Rodd more cynically put it, would there be a premium upgrade for the software that includes self-preservation if you pay enough?

Diversity of Various Tech Companies By the Numbers – Pixel Envy – Interesting reading. I was trying to come up with comparable stats for our technology team. It depends greatly on what you define as a “technical role”. Do project/iteration managers count? Ours have technical backgrounds and manage the team’s priorities on a daily basis, so I think they count. Do user experience experts and designers? Ours build prototypes, write design specs, and pair with programmers to tweak CSS. I think that counts. What about QA? They’re not writing code, but they’re sure as hell trying to break it and make it better. Again, in my book they count. Then you get to someone like me. Yeah, I’m management now. But I also talk at length about our technology in meetings, write technical reports, evaluate new technical solutions, and spend way too much time actually trying to debug technical problems for other people in the business. So yeah, I’d count me.

Add all those up and I think we’d come out towards the top of that list. Still way less than 25%, but not bad by comparison. Plenty of room to get better though.

How to Be Polite – The Message – Medium – This was lovely, and I liked it.