Extreme Cold Era: Shelter Don't Keep Waste
Chapter 42: Autonomous Driving

Chapter 42: Chapter 42: Autonomous Driving

For Perfikot, recruiting Dr. Jones was actually a dispensable matter.

James had excellent capabilities, and the Empire Exploration Company he contacted was also very responsible for this task. The exploration team they assembled, though specialized in finding mineral resources, had robust survival skills and related exploration techniques, with extensive experience in exploring the New Continent, and had successfully discovered multiple mineral deposits.

With such a professional team, for Perfikot, having one more or less history professor did not make much difference.

Yet, Perfikot still chose to recruit Dr. Jones.

The reason was that Perfikot regarded Dr. Jones as the ’thousand gold buys horse bones’ kind of opportunity.

Simply put, the essence of her plan was still to preserve as much of the population as possible when the apocalypse arrived, allowing more people to survive.

Although Perfikot believed her plan was more reliable than the Crisis Response Committee’s, she also knew she couldn’t save everyone but could only rescue a small group from freezing to death in the blizzards.

So who were this small group of people?

Firstly, as the biggest sponsor of Perfikot’s plan, the Royal Family must be included; each and every one of them was on the salvation list.

Of course, there weren’t many formal members of the Royal Family, just a few dozen, and even if you included those without titles but with blood ties, it would be just a few hundred.

This part wouldn’t occupy too many resources, viewed as the Royal Family purchasing a ticket for themselves.

Perfikot didn’t need to worry much about this; the real concern was the list apart from the Royal Family.

The Royal Guards and Imperial Guard Knights could be added, as they were the force guarantee.

Besides these, those who could make it onto Perfikot’s salvation list were the social elites from various sectors.

What are elites? They are not those who consider themselves superior but, aside from a noble title and ancestral shade, are nothing but trash.

Real elites must at least have an outstanding professional skill or have made certain contributions in a particular field.

Take Alchemists, for example; according to Perfikot’s evaluation criteria, you would need to be at least of "United" rating to qualify as a candidate. Even "Licensed" ratings would be scrutinized for any deadwood.

As for others, Langton City had many universities; those with professor titles might have a place on her list.

In Perfikot’s view, those who mastered knowledge and technology were the real social elites, the essence of a civilization.

As for the rest? Without the inheritance of knowledge and technology, human civilization couldn’t even be discussed.

After all, you couldn’t expect a bunch of monkeys who couldn’t even read to carry on a civilization with a chronology of major historical events that could write a book on its own.

Moreover, this group of true human elites held in their hands the most precious wealth accumulated by human society over thousands of years.

Like in a movie Perfikot watched before her journey, where aliens came looking for leaders of humanity and ended up finding a bunch of politicians, who couldn’t actually represent humanity at all.

Those who could truly represent humanity, with enough vision and insight, were those truly smart minds, those who held knowledge.

It’s like expecting a politician who got into office by pandering to voters to really know how to lead a country towards strength. In democracies, the one elected is always the most charming, not the most capable.

So for Perfikot, in her plan, she didn’t want any politicians or nobles.

After all, don’t they already have the Crisis Response Committee’s plan to use? So they don’t need to take up places here.

Putting down the cheap coffee she had finished, Perfikot left the not-so-great coffee shop and returned to the carriage with the maid following behind her.

Today, the one by Perfikot’s side wasn’t her loyal old butler, but the Alchemy Puppet maid she usually kept in her laboratory.

"Beifa, head to the next place." Perfikot directed the Alchemy Puppet, who seemed no different from an ordinary maid, to whom she had already input the destination into Beifa’s memory storage before departure.

Receiving Perfikot’s order, the Alchemy Puppet named Beifa started the steam carriage and steered it towards the destination.

Watching Beifa drive, a thought inadvertently arose in Perfikot’s mind about whether she should modify this steam carriage and install a control system so that it could achieve autonomous driving.

After all, strictly speaking, it was indeed on autopilot now since Beifa wasn’t human.

Beifa’s ability to execute orders was due to a miniature differential engine in her body that could perform data storage and calculations.

As long as the commands were pre-edited, Beifa could read and execute them.

The principle of automated driving in a steam carriage was similar, with the only consideration being road identification and the possibility of hitting pedestrians.

Nonetheless, for Perfikot, this wasn’t a big issue; after all, this was an extraordinary world, and adding an auxiliary spell to the carriage to repel any pedestrians in its path wasn’t particularly difficult.

Additionally, she was a noble, an inheriting female Baron; was it even an issue to run over someone on the road?

If it were in her grandfather’s era decades ago, nobles riding horses and running over people didn’t require any responsibility.

The noble lord riding by, and you didn’t know to avoid them, was a deserved doom.

It was only in the past few decades, after the invention of the steam engine, that the Empire’s nobles had reined in some of their past barbaric practices, dressing in a civilized and elite manner, in turn enacting some rules as a form of protection for ordinary citizens.

Though essentially it was mostly due to not wanting to be stuck in traffic for hours just because a noble went out, the traffic regulations did indirectly protect the ordinary citizens on the roads.

At least, they wouldn’t directly be run over by rampaging carriages on the road, although if someone were hit according to regulations, financial compensation would suffice.

As Perfikot said, laws and rules are meant to protect the weak by restricting the strong, but this level of protection is elevated as society develops.

For the current Victor Empire, having a set of laws was already precious; expecting laws to voluntarily protect the weak? Wait another two hundred years!