Elaine Herzberg

7 results back to index

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

On 18 March 2018, in Tempe, Arizona, a driverless car owned by Uber hit and killed a 49-year-old pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, while in driverless mode. As is typically the way with accidents of this kind, there were a number of contributory causes. The car was travelling faster than the automatic emergency braking system could handle, so by the time the car recognized that emergency braking was required, it was too late to be able to do anything about it. Although the car’s sensors recognized that there was an ‘obstacle’ (the victim, Elaine Herzberg) which called for emergency braking, the software seems to have been designed to avoid doing this (suggesting some confusion, or at least, a rather strange set of priorities, in the mind of the programmers).

…

But, most importantly, the ‘safety driver’ in the car, whose main purpose was to intervene in incidents like this, appears to have been watching TV on her smartphone, paying little attention to the outside environment. It may well be that she was too confident in the car’s driverless abilities as well. The tragic death of Elaine Herzberg was entirely avoidable: but the failure was human, not technological. It seems depressingly inevitable that there will be many more tragedies like these before we see practical, mass-market driverless cars. We need to do everything we reasonably can to anticipate and avoid such tragedies. But they will occur in any case; and when they do, we need to learn the lessons from them.

…

The disengagement report must indicate how many miles the relevant car from which company drove in driverless mode, and how many disengagements occurred during these tests. A disengagement is a situation in which a person had to intervene to take over control of the car – what should have occurred in the case of Elaine Herzberg. A disengagement doesn’t necessarily mean that the person had to intervene to avoid an accident – far less a fatality – but nevertheless this data gives an indication of how well the technology is performing. The fewer disengagements per autonomous mile driven the better. In 2017, 20 companies filed disengagement reports with the State of California.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

“State lawmakers gave Floridians the power to tax themselves to fix transportation, and when Tallahassee Republicans disagree with how voters use that power, they fight tooth and nail in court to avenge their political defeats,” he said.36 Chapter 8 Pedestrian Safety on the Technological Frontier Just outside downtown Tempe, Arizona, along a wide, dusty highway, there is a small memorial to the victim of the most famous pedestrian-vehicle crash in history. Two wooden crosses and some flowers stand alongside Mill Avenue, where the dense brick buildings of downtown Tempe thin out into desert and parking lots. Here is where Elaine Herzberg, a forty-nine-year-old homeless woman, was killed by a computer-piloted Uber car on March 18, 2018. She was the first pedestrian ever killed by a self-driving car. That night around 10 p.m., Herzberg had been walking her bike across the street in a dark location about 360 feet from a crosswalk.

…

The red Hyper-brand bike she was riding—the kind you can buy for one hundred dollars at Walmart—was loaded with plastic bags containing her belongings, which might help explain why the laser-based sensor system (or LiDAR, for light detection and ranging) in the Volvo SUV did not immediately recognize her as either a bicyclist or a pedestrian. Normally when a pedestrian is killed, investigators have to resort to unreliable witnesses and guesswork to reconstruct what happened—if anyone even bothers—but this was not an ordinary pedestrian death. The death of Elaine Herzberg was an international media event. The last moments of her life were recorded by a camera and turned over to police and federal investigators and then viewed by people all over the world. In this, the rarest of cases, everyone could see exactly what happened. The video footage, shot in black and white from the dashboard camera, shows the SUV proceeding down the dark desert highway.

…

A 2018 New York Times article highlighted a number of vigilante “attacks” on robot cars by enraged residents armed with sticks and knives. A Chandler, Arizona, man told the New York Times, for instance, “I don’t want to be their real-world mistake.”7 Autonomous vehicle testing does raise a lot of ethical questions. Arizonans—people like Elaine Herzberg—did not explicitly consent to have a potentially life-threatening technology beta-tested on them and their families. In other fields—pharmaceuticals, for example—companies are forbidden from testing potentially lethal new products on patients without their explicit consent. Self-driving car companies, meanwhile, are expected to police themselves.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

The engineers had built in a one-second delay, so it did not start slowing until two milliseconds before it collided with the woman. By that time, Vasquez had looked up. She saw what was about to happen but could not stop the vehicle from plowing into the woman at nearly forty miles an hour. The bicyclist died at the hospital sometime later. Her name was Elaine Herzberg, and she was the first pedestrian reported to be killed by an autonomous vehicle. It is easy for a society conditioned to do so to place the blame for the crash on Herzberg. There was no crosswalk where she stepped out, a test found drugs in her system, and she is no longer around to defend herself.

…

Anyone hoping to fix the problems with the existing transportation system and the broader urban landscape that has evolved out of it must dig deeper into the roots of those problems instead of mistakenly believing that adding new technological solutions will address them. In the years following the death of Elaine Herzberg, there have also been concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Autopilot system. It was pitched as a fully self-driving system by Musk, but it is more of an assortment of assisted driving technologies like those that are present in many other vehicles, especially high-end cars and SUVs. As a result, a court in Munich ruled that Tesla could not even call the system “Autopilot” in Germany because it misled consumers about its real capabilities.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Ford’s AVs, cruising around the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the summer of 2017, couldn’t even detect a crosswalk unless the intersection was equipped with a special signaling device. When an Uber AV became the first to fatally strike a pedestrian, in Tempe, Arizona, in the summer of 2018, a leading legal expert on AVs speculated that the company’s software probably “classified [Elaine Herzberg] as something other than a stationary object.” And a growing body of evidence indicates that computer-vision algorithms, like the ones employed in Tesla vehicles, may also be better at identifying whites than nonwhites. AV makers would love to see communities shift gears, from spending money on signs that make streets more legible for people, to rendering streets readable to self-driving machines instead.

…

Reising, “Legible London,” SEGD, November 26, 2009, https://segd.org/legible-london. 230people burn calories and spend at local shops: Lilli Matson, “Wayfinding and Walking in London,” Transport for London, May 2013, http://www.impacts.org/euroconference/vienna2013/presentations/London%20Walking%20-%20Vienna%20May%202013.pdf. 230“[The city] is seen in all lights and weathers”: Lynch, The Image of the City, 1. 231“the preprogrammed route was mapped”: Tim Faulkner, “Driverless Little Roady Shuttle Hits a Few Speed Bumps,” ecoRI News, August 3, 2019, https://www.ecori.org/transportation/2019/8/2/little-roady-shuttle-reaches-milestone-hits-speedbumps. 231couldn’t even detect a crosswalk: Ryan Stanton, “Can Self-Driving Pizza Delivery Cars Follow Ann Arbor’s Crosswalk Law?” Ann Arbor, MLive, October 6, 2017, https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/10/can_ self-driving_pizza_deliver.html. 231“classified [Elaine Herzberg] as something other”: Ryan Felton, “Video Shows Driver in Autonomous Uber Was Looking Down Moments before Fatal Crash,” Jalopnik, March 21, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver-in-fatal-autonomous-uber-crash-was-l-1823970417. 231computer-vision algorithms: Katyanna Quach, “Racist Self-Driving Scare Debunked, inside AI Black Boxes, Google Helps Folks Go with TensorFlow,” The Register, March 10, 2019, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/10/ai_ roundup_080319/. 231marking of pavement to help orient drivers: Bill Loomis, “1900–1930: The Years of Driving Dangerously,” Detroit News, April 26, 2015, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2015/04/26/auto-traffic-history-detroit/26312107/. 232dinged for excessive idling: Andrew Small, “CityLab Daily: The Race to Code the Curb,” CityLab, April 2, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/authors/andrew-small/. 233“cities need to invest in the mapping in ways”: Kevin Webb (@kvnwebb), “We’re building smart ways to encode information like curb regulation,” Twitter, November 30, 2018, 1:41 a.m., https://twitter.com/kvnweb/status/1068485225607585798. 234“an exponential runaway beyond”: Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center and Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html. 234John von Neumann had raised: John Brockman, Possible Minds (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 8. 234“AI enthusiasts have been making claims”: Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” 234“I have set the date 2045”: Christianna Reddy, “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045,” Futurism, October 5, 2017, https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/. 235“machine learning” to disguise the true nature: Chris Smith et al., “The History of Artificial Intelligence,” University of Washington, December 2006, https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/his tory-ai.pdf. 235“a deep level of understanding”: Rodney Brooks, “Post: [For&AI] The Origins of Artificial Intelligence,” Robots, AI, and Other Stuff (blog), April 27, 2018, https://rodneybrooks.com/forai-the-origins-of-artificial-intelligence/. 235“Contemporary neural networks do well on challenges”: Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” New York University, accessed January 22, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.00631.pdf. 236“If . . . driverless cars should also disappoint”: Marcus, “Deep Learning.” 236Frey tallied his predictions of the jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Disengagements are to be welcomed if they occur when the car realizes that it cannot handle the situation. AVs that misunderstand their surroundings and then fail to disengage can be deadly. That happened on March 18, 2018, when an Uber AV, being tested in Tempe, Arizona, struck and killed a pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, as she wheeled her bicycle across a four-lane road. Although it was dark, the car’s radar and lidar detected her six seconds before the crash. But the perception system got confused: it classified her as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and finally as a bicycle, whose path it could not predict.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Uber and Lyft, the taxi companies, had invested heavily in trying to develop the technology, on the basis that getting rid of the drivers was probably their best hope of becoming seriously profitable. But Uber abandoned its project in 2020 after spending $1 billion on it, selling its unit to a firm called Aurora. Lyft sold its own unit in 2021. An accident that killed a pedestrian probably pushed Uber to give up. Elaine Herzberg, a forty-nine-year-old, was wheeling a bicycle laden with shopping bags across the road when Uber’s adapted-Volvo plowed into her. Investigators allege that the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, who was meant to be monitoring the vehicle, had been streaming an episode of The Voice, the reality TV show, at the moment of the crash.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Consider two examples from recent history: when a driverless Uber killed a pedestrian in Arizona while driving at night; and in Hawaii when, during a routine drill, a hapless employee sent a nuclear missile warning that reached tens of thousands of people. Uber had been testing its self-driving cars on the open road for a few years until the night of March 18, 2018, when, in Tempe, Arizona, one of them, driving forty miles per hour, killed Elaine Herzberg while she was crossing the street.23 A week later, the Tempe chief of police said she suspected that Uber was not at fault.24 The day after that, I saw a headline on my phone that read, “Woman Killed by Driverless Car Likely Homeless.” The inference wasn’t subtle: Maybe it was her fault, the homeless being who they are.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Reliance on Newtonian mechanics did not make the troublesome perihelion of Mercury go away; it was still there, nagging at Einstein, two hundred years after Newton. In human affairs, however, this danger is very real. In the National Transportation Safety Board review of the self-driving Uber car that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018, the analysis reveals that the “system never classified her as a pedestrian . . . because she was crossing . . . without a crosswalk; the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians.”39 We must take caution that we do not find ourselves in a world where our systems do not allow what they cannot imagine—where they, in effect, enforce the limits of their own understanding.