For some reason, scientists in Israel are engaged in teaching goldfish to “drive”. The fish have been slippery, somewhat stinky, and enthusiastic; and have used their natural abilities to be surprisingly successful.
Israel has a plethora of scientists; with most of them hopefully working on cures for cancer, covid and maybe haemorrhoids, and other things which are at least as important as what random fish seem to be up to.
When given a reward though, goldfish have shown that they can steer a robotic vehicle towards a coloured target. Like us, some are much better at this than others.
In the “fish trials”, two participants; Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley were the “stars”. We have reached out, but up to now, Jane Austin’s people have claimed that she is unavailable for comment. It appears that even centuries later, some people can’t get over themselves.
When pressed for a useful application of this work, scientists identified the problem that Tesla has had with their self driving cars. In their preliminary trials, there have been a number of accidents, and at least one death. So, the Israelis say, why not put a high achieving goldfish behind the wheel?
Though it’s close, tests show that goldfish have an average attention span longer than the human attention span, at 8 seconds versus 7. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of this, as I ran out of time.
Goldfish can’t blink, so eyes are constantly on the road. Not only that, but with an eye on either side of the head, neither side of the road can hide from surveillance.
Goldfish have long been slighted as the species with the 3 second memory. ( a castle!, a castle!, a castle! ) But it turns out that this is a bad rap.
Their memories have been shown to last up to 5 months. That’s lots of time for a driving fish to become familiar with your neighbourhood, the surrounding restaurants, bars and houses of ill repute. They may also be able to distinctly remember you and your mistress walking by naked on your way to the fridge.
Though goldfish can live up to 40 years before being unceremoniously flushed down the toilet, it has been predicted that five years before this, those that drive may tend to get into “their lane” miles and miles before they need to, leave the wrong turn signal light on much of the time, engage the emergency brake as a matter of course, and drive less than half of the posted speed limit.
As the notion of the application of goldfish to the driving of cars has started to unravel, scientists have begun to come clean.
Though having untrammelled vision to both the left and the right, goldfish have a huge blind spot directly ahead, in the very direction the car is travelling. Reluctantly, it has been admitted that this could be a problem.
Other bad news is that tests have shown that goldfish will turn abruptly towards any castle-like domicile, then drive around it and around it and around it and around it…….
