After New York, every other town is Pittsburgh, said W C Fields, instantly conferring an unwanted immortality on the steel town that hides behind a mountain and is so proud of its original raison d’etre that you can stand on one of the steel bridges across the Allegheny or Monongehela river and see eight others just the same, but we won’t be quite so keen to make that trip through the tunnels that link the city to the rest of America for fear of what we might meet on a dark night: the Daily Mail says the artificial intelligence gurus at Carnegie-Mellon University have allowed a van fitted with a robot vision system to drive itself down a Pittsburgh street might be safer to steer clear of Pennsylvania altogether – for their next trick, they want to set a van with satellite navigation sensors loose to find its way clear cross the state.
