Who Owns Autonomy?
There's an unseemly rush by manufacturers toward building self-driving vehicles. This rush is thus far ignoring what I consider to be major concerns about the technology.
Much of the current expert analysis of the technology focuses on the data privacy issues involved. After all, do you really want private corporations knowing every trip you take by car and then selling that data to marketers? Or giving it to the government for warrantless tracking of your activities?
However, I view privacy as a secondary issue. More important to me is who owns autonomy and who controls the inputs.
Who Owns It?
Each manufacturer is writing their own algorithms, creating their own systems, and collecting their own data. There are currently no standards bodies creating rules that govern the software driving autonomous vehicles. There is currently little or no government regulation.
Why is this important? Consider this -- GM develops a pothole algorithm that protects you from those nasty road hazards. Meanwhile, Tesla develops a Bambi algorithm that keeps your self-driving SUV from squishing deer. Will they share these algorithms? Or as profit-seeking entities, will they use them as selling features? Perhaps Consumer Reports will publish an annual ranking of autonomous algorithms.
Who Controls Inputs
If you've ever driven through a small town, you've likely seen or experienced the joy of speed traps. They're major sources of municipal revenue. Presumably, autonomous vehicles will detect speed limit transmitters that broadcast from traffic signs or are embedded in the roadway.
But who will watch the watchers? Will small towns be able to game the system by setting arbitrary and random speed limits? Will autonomous vehicles strictly obey all external inputs or will passengers be allowed to override them?
Furthermore, do the answers change if you own the vehicle versus riding in a corporate ride-share vehicle? Can a corporation force you to take routes that maximize their profits? Can a police department hijack your vehicle to bring you to court for a traffic fine, or force your self-driving car to pull over for a roadside search if you're driving while black?
More Questions Than Answers
Self-driving cars are a promise of the 1950s, just like flying cars, personal jetpacks, and on-demand weather control. I get it that companies are always looking for The Next Big Thing. Self-driving cars may be it. But that doesn't mean we can ignore the groundwork needed to ensure they serve us instead of the other way around.
Comments
It Is Almost as If Human Agency Has Been Patented, Right? nt
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Roadnet - not Skynet
Just like Henry Ford didn't anticipate drive-ins and back seat gymnastics, there will be many unintended consequences to AIs on wheels. And since cars are perhaps the central theme of American life, the disruption will be vast.
In the 60's, I read a book called "The Insolent Chariots"; I mainly remember the author citing a study that showed that modern Americans would rather lose their house than their car. Now I try to picture the intersection of this obsession with the culture of surveillance and data herding. What is more central to American life than our insolent chariots? Whew. This should be the basis of a new cyberpunk literature. Autopunk? Cybertrunk? (I know, "groan")
For your edification, I looked this book up, reviews of a typically bad 1966 sf potboiler. I don't remember much about it except I had fun reading it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1708440.The_Four_Day_Weekend
Edit: returning to the theme in my subject line, all of these little AIs in each car will be communicating with each other, for collision avoidance, passing, traffic control, etc. These will comprise distributed nodes of a greater, overarching emergent AI. Reminds me of an old Arthur C. Clarke story about the switching nodes of the world telephone network achieving critical mass and developing consciousness.
Companies will own their own little flavor of individual AI ("Our pedestrian-avoidance algorithm is better than theirs!"), but there will have to be a standard communication protocol, and the emergent AI will ride on top of that protocol.
I imagine one day
they'll have some type of sensors on the roads that will regulate the speed of any vehicle to the limit, stop it on some sensor, etc. And these greedy idiots now will most likely opt not to share technology, if that can be helped but they may eventually be forced to standardize things for our owners.
My car is 15 years old and if I have my way it's the last car I will buy. I do not want any more transmitters of location than the thing most likely already has. And those screens in cars drive me nuts, don't want one. I would still do maps if possible and hate using the google nav but will if I have to.
It's the privacy thing for me and the control. The idea that my car could be hacked into while I'm driving it does bug me but hell, they'll probably figure a way to make that mandatory as they'll just say older vehicles are no longer road worthy if they can't hack them. As for our autonomy, I'm not sure how much we really own of it anymore, at all.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
Insurance companies want people to
install black boxes to record their driving habits - and who knows what else. I pay extra to opt out of that surveillance. I have a low-end car that doesn't even have power windows, but there is still plenty of digital circuitry in it. The "Panopticar" (copyright 2018 [grin]) is ubiquitous.
Maybe we should trade in for those old classic Cuban cars. Will analog cars have a comeback, like vinyl?
Hmm. A late thought: cars are vulnerable not only to hacking, but to EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks. I always wanted a mini-EMP device which would be triggered by loud bass "music".
Not sure it's related but thinking of journo Michael Hastings
Remember reading a few things years ago after he was killed in a suspicious car accident that didn't square.
Most famously Hastings had written a blistering piece in Rolling Stone on Gen. McCrystal that led to him resigning. At the time of the crash he was working on a piece on the Deep State. Just days before he died he was expressing great concern and paranoia for things happening that he thought were part of his being hunted.
I don't have time to look into it all; it's a rabbit hole of so much. But here's one thing:
This CSPAN panel of colleagues for some reason won't play (and shows a transcript feature but that doesn't work either).
But the thought then by more than a few was that his brand new Mercedes (or BMW or whatever) had been sabotaged to malfunction in order to cause him to crash.
And, like so many controversial deaths one can think of (i.e. the Las Vegas mass murder gun spree, Seth Rich's shady official cause of death even though he wasn't robbed of anything, etc) - there was no real follow up or interest from the MSM.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Karen Silkwood
Going back a ways.
Autonomy can replace brute force.
The Speed Limit Will Be a Moot Point. There Is No Point in
trying to impose controls over AI, a cop will ALWAYS be sitting in your car.
Nothing has been thought through by the public. I recently watched a creepy "conspiracy" video that ran through NASA's 2025 Future of War which I read back in 2001 along with Joint Vision 2020, A Clean Break: a Strategy for Securing the Realm, and Rebuilding America's Defenses.
Let me tell you, it was FAR more creepy today than it was back then. It was Sci-Fi back then, now it is our burgeoning reality if you've got a functioning brain-mind. Otherwise, it's still sci-fi and "conspiracy".
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
The civil liberty implications alarm me.
Will a self-driving car refuse to take you to a protest march the government deems subversive? If you're accused of a crime, will the vehicle lock its doors and deliver you to a police station? If you're a poor person driving through a rich neighborhood, will you be profiled?
Oh yes, I didn't fully articulate
the many horrors, just the easy ones from my own perspective, but all of that will be possible and once something is possible we all know what happens. Our owners know things are going to get uglier and they'll need more and more control. The longer they can make it look like "innovation" and a "really cool thing" and keep people from really thinking about it the better. They still want that support from "consumers" but they'll know they can use these things for complete control once they feel they have to. I imagine the really sick ones love the irony of making people welcome their own trap too.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
"Sorry, illegitimate destination"
Yeah, they could be used to divert participation. Lock the doors and take you right to the police station? Talk about kettling!
Gives new meaning to "Access denied".
From Germany, so many U.S. news sources now come up as error 451
“Resource / page not available for legal reasons.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451
Why would governments and corporations refrain from building out into the physical world this ability to neutralize anyone and anything they don’t wish to deal with?
I see that a lot
Increasingly, I can't read American newspapers thru Tor, and at least once I couldn't read a Euro source thru Firefox. Europe has chosen to enforce privacy laws, which pisses off American techlords. I guess it interferes with their business model. Money talks.
This is a topic worthy of an essay to itself; it's a bit OT for this one.
Some things I hadn't thought about
but first some things that will certainly be good:
The almost elimination of traffic accidents, with an attendant reduction in injuries, deaths, and hopefully insurance costs.
The elimination of speed traps. Autonomous cars will have to be programed to obey all traffic laws at all times, therefore communities will be forced to post all uncommon restrictions. Also, the concept of "prima facie" will be overturned. Now the cop is assumed to always tell the truth (explaining how in my case a cop was able to tell the court that "Potrero Hill", a neighborhood in San Francisco housing a notoriously violent housing project, was "perfectly flat, undeveloped land with an unobstructed line of sight of over 1/4 mile." Soon the car will have to be assumed to always be obeying the law. Not only no more bogus tickets, no more tickets at all.
OTOH, someone will always know where you went, when you went there, and can sell the information - to telemarketers, to your wife, to the police. The NSA already has the ability to do this, but they have to chose their target and they cannot do this retroactively without effort.
The benefits will appear much more clearly beneficial and direct, making abuses much more frequent and insidious.
On to Biden since 1973
New & improved speed trap.
The big question is where the sensors and transmitters will be placed. Let's say they're put where existing speed limit signs are today to cover a zone of X distance. (That's cheaper than embedding continuous limits in the road.) I can envision a two lane in each direction road where a sneaky town puts different limits on each lane at the entrance to town. When your car moves into the slower lane, you earn a ticket for exceeding the limit. In other words, it won't be hard to game the system for those motivated by profit.
Any town that does something like that
will be sued - successfully - within days. And besides, who do you write the ticket to? The passenger? The registered owner? (which will be a major corporation, which is why the lawsuit will be swift and successful)The onboard computer?
I'm not calling you paranoid, but when it comes the corruption will not be in a way that you are predicting, or that anyone now can predict.
On to Biden since 1973
Hmm...
Detroit Free Press: GM partner's self-driving car gets a ticket from San Francisco cop
Well...
Very few speed traps have been successfully challenged in court. And courts rarely reach a decision in days.
Also, you're neglecting contract law. Self-driving car services will have contracts that govern the transaction. Just like with rental cars, the renter will be responsible for tickets due to the renter's direct or indirect action, such as speeding or parking in a no-parking zone. Contract term will govern overrides and unapproved usage of the vehicle, and the contract will specify arbitration and prohibit court cases, just like the vast majority of car rental and credit card and other contracts currently do.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness about this. However, I don't
know how I can help ensure anything that the auto industry does.
Those companies, like all other corporations, have a legal duty to maximize profits for their shareholders. This never seems to require cutting corners on compensation of directors and officers, but it does seem to require cutting corners on what the consumer gets, even if deaths are known to result from lack of a relatively inexpensive fix. We have already seen this.
It seems the only language they speak is $$$$. Short of simply not buying this kind of product, I don't know what we do.
Cubans someone managed to make even planned obsolesence vehicles manufactured during the not so fabulous Fifties last until now, despite daily use on some not so smooth roads. Maybe we can learn from them.
hopefully it will be a while... like after I die.
Though it is hard to imagine something worse than some road warriors out there now...
I just saw this recently: Steve Wozniak on self-driving cars: thumbs down
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/11/apple-co-founder-claims-self-d...
I suspect he would be a better source than the folks selling them? It all seems like pipe dreams to me. Easy to dream, very hard to do. I suspect capitalism being what it is though will just figure the human losses on the way a cost of doing business. Like bad drugs.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein
I'm usually autonomous on my bicycle...
And as I get older, I will probably put a battery on it. And, yes, I know I'm lucky to live in a place with a relatively short commute to work and most folks don't and won't have that.
But also take a look at the video by Tony Seba on Maggie's Openthread; on the immediate future of the internal combustion engine, batteries, EV's and self driving vehicles. The future might be here earlier than we would have guessed.
As for me, hopefully the programmers of self driving cars will put into their algorithm that you don't *have* to pass a bicyclist even though they are riding above the speed limit and there is a red stop light a half-block ahead. To many drivers pull around, cross the double line with oncoming traffic, just to pass, and only to brake hard 5 seconds later...Grrr.
All good questions
Geeks can not fathom the joy and wonder of road trips.
Beware all utopian dreams,
which in essence are promises that some aspect of human life can be made perfect, if only we'd collectively relinquish our personal autonomy to one central power, details to be either trusted to that power, or to be damned. Militarism is built on it. Human history is peppered with such schemes, each connected with it's own humanitarian disaster. The Third Reich, Communism, Pol Pot and PNAC pop into my mind.
On a small scale, self-driving vehicles are just as utopian in concept - blissfully unaware of the complexities of life that throw the most perfected plans off track. There can be no algorithm for avoiding deer-car collisions until an algorithm completely tracking the thoughts of deer is created. It must know why it is more often than a city-bound data programmer could understand, that it is the deer that panics and runs into the car. It must know why our Canadian fishing guide advised us that, should a moose jump out in front of our vehicle, we should hit it, as more people die on the roadside rocks and in the swamps while avoiding the moose. The are millions more such complexities, and random chances, involved in just driving a car anywhere and everywhere, which cannot be fully programmed.
Micro or macro, Utopians are dangerous to us all.
"If I sit silently, I have sinned." - Mossadegh
Avoiding deer.
Growing up in Michigan and then living in Virginia, I learned that many accidents caused by deer crossing the road in front of your car can be avoided by turning your headlights off. This eliminates the deer's tendency to freeze in place. That saved me several times. An algorithm could handle that piece of the problem.
I can't imagine an algorithm
that would efficiently handle an event I survived.
I was stuck behind a loaded NASCAR trailer doing 15 mph under the limit on a one-lane each way US highway (not expressway), with a long line of cars building up. I waited patiently until I had clear view for over half a mile (hilly terrain), then accelerated to pass. THREE deer immediately walked out from the left in front of me. I couldn't return to my lane, the cars had filled it in immediately. I wrecked my brakes slowing down, but I couldn't stop -- a fuel tanker was now speeding from the opposite direction. I went onto a short narrow shoulder (curb began a little further on) facing the wrong way, while the truck and the line of cars passed. Shaking.
An AI would have very fast reaction times, faster than mine, but it would have to be trained to respond to a triple threat and choose to break traffic laws to survive. With chessmaster-grade computers already in existence, I'm sure it could be done, but just imagine the training required...
Now, maybe if the NASCAR trailer had been under autonomy it would have behaved differently, or maybe the following cars might not have pressed so closely. But that's in the realm of supposition.
In your situation...
Deciding when and how to pass safely is possibly one of the most complex problems facing driverless cars. Complicated by deer and other random sudden obstacles. I think the most likely solution in the short term for your exact situation would be that the algorithm in your car just accepts the delay and doesn't pass.
Yep
And that's what I did for about 10 miles. Thing was, there was a long line of other cars blocked by this blockhead, and I was the only one in position to pass, so I felt pressure to start. But I think the auto would do just that, since it wouldn't feel that pressure. The tricky part was to choose to do a normally illegal maneuver, facing the wrong way. Sometimes the right thing is technically the wrong thing.
An algorithm should also
be included to assess that one deer has already safely crossed, and stop or considerably slow the car anyway. It's the next deer waiting in the brush to re-join its group that may panic and run into the road, and possibly into the car, and which you may not see with your headlights off.
These contingencies, each requiring yet another algorithm, could go on and on for about ever. At some point, one algorithm would be fighting another algorithm. It may then freeze, just like a human, or a deer. I'm sort of glad I won't get to field test it in my lifetime.
"If I sit silently, I have sinned." - Mossadegh
The answer of course is Johnny Cab
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
Here's one solution
Just keep an old fashioned car in addition to your self-driving car. When you want to go cruising and enjoying the scenery or go somewhere that you know the data collectors wouldn't care about, enjoy your self-driving car. When you need to do something that you'd rather not have recorded, or you need to make a break for it, use your old Honda.
Beware the bullshit factories.
Good suggestion.
At some point, non-compliant vehicles will be outlawed, but that'll likely take decades.