Guest Post by Eric Peters
What does it mean when people talk about self-driving cars? We really ought to be talking about programmed cars.
And about who does the programming.
The “self-driving” car doesn’t decide for itself how fast it goes or what route it takes – at least, it won’t until it becomes an autonomous thinking machine, an artificial intelligence. We are not quite there yet.
So, in the meanwhile, who decides?
And it is a who – a flesh-and-blood someone (or someones). Guess what? It’s not you. This whole “self driving” car thing is about taking you out of the driver’s seat. And putting someone else in control of “your” car.
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That part stays the same. Nominal ownership. You will make the payments, pay the taxes and fees. You will still be responsible for all of that.
But who will control the car? And how will they control it?
The “who” will be the same people who already control the roads: The people who are the government. Clovers. Authoritarian Control Freaks. The same people who make the laws about how fast you’re allowed to drive, when (and whether) you’re allowed to pass, make a right on red or a U turn . . . every last little thing.
They will control your “self-driving” car.
And when they do, not only will you not be allowed to proceed at a speed faster than they decree – or make a U turn or a right on red . . . or do anything they do not want you to do- it will be impossible to do so.
The car – controlled by them – will not do your bidding.
It will do theirs.
Can you imagine? I can – and it makes my teeth ache.
People have this idea that the “self driving” future will be fast and free. A techno-Libertopia of high-speed and high-efficiency. Cars zipping along at triple digit speeds in tight formation, travel times cut down to a fraction of what they are now.
In fact it will be the opposite.
It will be Least Common Denominator . . . universalized and encoded in the electro-mechanical DNA of “your” car. No longer will you bee free to mash the gas and thread the needle through a Clover Cluster, chuckling to yourself as you watch them recede in the rearview. There will be no “speeding,” no right on red.
You – that is, your car – will drive at exactly the pace of the Clover Cluster.
A slow pace.
No more burnouts; no more drifting. Nothing “aggressive.”
Acceleration will be metered in accordance with the Fear Factor of the Clover Cluster. Think of your mother-in-law.
Of your grandmother. In her ’87 Buick Le Sabre, hunched over the over the wheel, perpetually riding the brakes.
It will have to be one size fits all. Because the programming must be. No more wiggle room; no more driving the way you prefer. No more driving faster – or harder – than they allow.
Individuals vary, but the Clover Hive is just that – a hive. Napoleon chose it as the symbol of his authoritarian state for good reason. Everyone the same and expected to do the same, except the Queen. The analogy is excellent, too, because the people dictating programming policy will almost certainly be “moms” and others of the female persuasion – who esteem saaaaaaaafety above everything and for whom velocity is the sine qua non of not-safe.
It will be like taking the bus – only worse. The bus driver was still an autonomous individual; he had the option to exercise initiative; he could even do something technically illegal – but reasonable and even necessary to deal with a situation that would otherwise mean just sitting there, Because It’s The Law.
Imagine how it will be in your programmed-by-others car. Traffic has come to a dead stop because of an accident up ahead. You could drive on the shoulder – briefly – to reach that exit a few hundred yards away.
But the programmed-by-others car will veto that. It is, after all, illegal to drive on the shoulder – and the car’s programming won’t will permit the law to be violated. Leaving aside the Cloverific adulation of The Law, the lawyers would never allow it.
Can you imagine?
Well, your honor, I knew it wasn’t legal to drive on the shoulder but I was just the passenger.
Shrug.
So the cars will be programmed to never do anything that isn’t “safe” – as well as punctiliously, exactly legal. And what is legal will be strictly in accordance with what your near-sighted, fearful mother-in-law would approve of. What the termagants who control the levers and billy clubs of government decide is “safe.”
To believe otherwise, you must believe that in this one instance, the government will not use technology to further control us. That it will set us free, expand our liberty.
The one upside – maybe – is that we’ll be able to get soused before the trip and just pass out. Tell the car to wake us up when we get there.
Whenever that turns out to be.
Weed will be manditory by then, so it will just be safer for everyone.
Theres this drive my wife and I have to make a couple times a year. Gps says 7.5 hours. I do it in 7. Wife has done it in as little as 5.5 because once we started timing it she looks to beat her best times, like a race.
No more reckless driving that endangers everyone else on the road?
My god, man, deliberate reckless endangerment of others is a Constitutional right.
I’m skeptical autonomous vehicles will be on the road anytime soon. I don’t trust the rear view camera in my car. I turn and look not willing to ‘trust’ that camera can ‘see’ what my eyes can and that is just backing out of a parking spot. I would be freaked out letting a car ‘steer’ itself at even 25 mph.
If you stop and think about it commercial airliner autopilots have been capable of ‘flying’ an airplane for some years and human control could be asserted from the ground if need be but you try and get people to fly on an airplane with no pilot in the cockpit even though ‘pilot error’ is the cause of most accidents.
I thought that the autopilot was only capable of sustaining level flight, and couldn’t be relied upon to make course corrections, etc. Anyway, pilot error findings are so prevalent because individual pilots are expendable, while design flaws, manufacturing defects and maintenance negligence cost corporations huge amounts of money and disrupt their commerce.
To blame the pilot, fire him (or sully his memory if he dies in the crash) pay the settlements and move on is much more cost effective for airlines and airframe manufacturers.
Welcome to Boreville.
I think Eric is jumping the gun here. Self driving cars are more of a “push the stock up” kind of thing than reality. At the center of these cars are Neural Networks, which are extremely good at finding patterns. The ad’s at the side of this page you are reading was determined by a neural network. Back in the 1980’s, my masters degree was in neural networks. They have come a long way since then by adding more layers of “neurons”, but they are still a pattern matcher, not human cognition. Can you imagine hundreds of cars bumper to bumper going 85 MPH down a California freeway. One little unsettling visual situation would be a nightmare of a crash. More to Eric’s point, you avoid this by spacing the cars and going slower. If you thought the two hour commute was bad, can you imagine the commute if you decrease the bandwidth of cars crossing a line in half. Ouch! Now there is the issue of your car being hooked up to the internet and the basic function of the car being enabled/disabled. This is happening now, if you don’t pay your car payment!
These vehicles will be mandated to obey all traffic laws and speed limits without exception. So they will be slow and unimaginative…But if the government wants you dead, they will obey that too….
Look how fast things like cell phones went from novelties for the rich and businesses to common and almost essential features of everyday life.
Then went from phones to small all purpose computers and information devices that can access almost anyone and anything in the world and provide as much or more information about anything that can be known as the human mind is capable of absorbing.
Technology advances at an exponential rate now days.
Besides, The Simpsons predicted it with Homers discovery that trucks drove themselves and the driver just went along for the ride. If The Simpsons predicted it, it will happen.
anon- Yup…just like 9/11.
I’d guess there will will be worse things about self-driving cars than an inability to endanger people by driving like an asshole. I’m more worried about where the car will choose to take me (the Soylent Green factory) or the fact that the government will know everywhere I’ve ever gone.
If you have a cell phone you carry with you, they already do.
I leave the cell behind whenever I kill a guy.
In this new bland world, a car that has no “instructions” will be marveled like a Maybach in a parking lot. Conversations will go something like this “Oh wow, you have a car with a steering wheel and pedal? I remember when I had one, ah for the old days when I could pass and change lanes at a high speed.” Like everything else that has been dumbed down for the stupids, this too will become a world of Prius driving liberals dreams. Hold on to your normal car as long as you can, because it will become as coveted as a gull wing Mercedes Benz in the days of the Prius driving soccer mom revolution….
It’s 2030…Elderly person with chronic and very expensive health problems is on the way to the hospital. The AI driving the vehicle evaluates the situation in terms of social welfare, and plows into a telephone pole. Welfare maximized!
Wait till that bugger takes you through the worst section of Detroit stopping at all the nicest of corners and you don’t get to leave till it says so.
I’m not interested in cars with lane departure warning, forward warning radar, automated braking or any other gizmo that that takes control of the car away from me. I will also never trust my person to a self driving car.
When I was a poor student, I had to take public transit to University. At that time I swore I would get my degree so I could get a good job so I could always have my own car and never be forced to take public transit again, and I’ve done that. I want to control when I come and go, and since governments at all levels have declared me, a producer, an enemy to be taxed and controlled, I’ve no interest in buying a car that they set all the rules for.
“Imagine how it will be in your programmed-by-others car. Traffic has come to a dead stop because of an accident up ahead. You could drive on the shoulder – briefly – to reach that exit a few hundred yards away.
But the programmed-by-others car will veto that. It is, after all, illegal to drive on the shoulder – and the car’s programming won’t will permit the law to be violated. Leaving aside the Cloverific adulation of The Law, the lawyers would never allow it.”
With autonomous cars, why would there be accidents?
Think about that last sentence Dave. After you’ve done that, stop and think about it again. Then, read it out loud to yourself. Now, think about it again. One more time…ok. Now stop being a dope!
How often does your computer crash? Do you think autonomous computers will ever fail? And not all cars will be autonomous, at least until the government bans people from driving non-autonomous cars, for public safety of course, cough cough.
I read an article years ago that in the future people will have personal agents (Electronic Agents) who will answer your phone and conduct your life while you stay in bed in a drug induced coma and are completely removed from the human experience.
I found that to be unbelievable at the time but now know several people who spend their life in bed in drug induced comas and rarely leave the house, they could use one of those electronic stand-ins. TPTB are not on our side are they?
I recommend you check out the Netflix series called Black Mirror. It offers some interesting perspectives on the future of technology. They take your first paragraph to the extreme in Season 2 episode 4 (I think).
Meso
I will try to watch that show, lately I have been trying to get away from the TV and internet. Strangely, I wanted to be less a bot and more a human.
I don’t/won’t take drugs so I actually have to deal with reality…bummer.
Maybe they will have a manettino switch and you can set your preference.
I think just the fact that minorities exist means it won’t be like the Jetsons. Well, unless you count the robot maid.
Human error is the problem here. Taking away the human error factor from the individual drivers and moving it to the car’s engineers and programers doesn’t strike me as a win.
All of the vehicle manufacturers need to have a self-driving car division if they want to get their hands on some of that Federal self-driving car cash. If self-driving cars are so wonderful and everyone is going to want one, then let the car companies pay to develop them. My main issue here is that Obama promised them over a million dollars a day for the next ten years https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/14/us-government-announces-4-billion-self-driving-car-program/. I’m not sure if Obama actually followed up on this one (I’m so thankful for his laziness) but once Trump sorts out some more important things, I hope he pulls the funding on this so we can see if self-driving cars will sink or swim.
While Eric voices legitimate fears, one problem exists with the theory that technology will make all cars self-driving in the near future. Because as self-driving car technology advances, computer hacking technology advances just as fast or faster.
If hackers can plant bots on everyone’s refrigerator to sent out spam, I’m pretty sure some future hacker will be able to access the self-driving car technology and cause the mother of all crashes on some LA freeway.
That little problem of hacking will probably keep humans behind the wheel for awhile.
That freeway pic – The Stepford Cars