Driverless Cars Not So Good When Facing Natural Disasters Like Earthquakes And Hurricanes

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

Earthquakes are a happening.

Living in Southern California means that it is best to be prepared for the possibility of earthquakes. Some say we are the earthquake capital of the country, though this is a debatable assertion.

For my colleagues along the Atlantic, we tend to trade barbs about earthquakes versus hurricanes.

Which is better or worse, the earth shaking or a torrent of wind, rain, and floods?

In the case of earthquakes, we have the famous Richter scale as a measure of an earthquake and it handily provides a mathematical means to quantity the nature of the earthquake, doing so by using the seismograph and analyzing the amplitude of the waves detected. The moment an earthquake hits, people are instantly wondering what Richter score it is. There’s even at times a bit of bravado about having experienced a higher Richter score than someone else has.

Perhaps less well-known is the hurricane metric which is referred to as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (SSHWS), which most people don’t know the name of the metric but they likely know about the categories of hurricanes that it depicts. The least impactful hurricane gets into…