Tag Archives: self-driving cars

Breaking news: a self-driving car “nearly crashes”

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On the day this computer-driven car “nearly crashed”, how many cars driven by human beings actually crashed? How many human beings were killed or horribly injured? How many of these people killed or horribly injured were children? I am not asking the media to suppress news of the imperfection of computer-controlled vehicles, just to provide some context. And I think the context will show that even today’s imperfect technology is able to drastically reduce human lives lost and suffering compared to the status quo. And the technology will continue to improve.

so what’s new with Tesla?

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Following up on my electric vehicle discussion lately, here is an article from TheWeek on Tesla. Basically, other companies have entered the field and are catching up on the electric vehicle technology itself, causing prices to drop and Tesla’s profit margin to drop along with it. Tesla’s plan has been to stay one step ahead with the shift to self-driving vehicles, particularly taxis, and this is coming along a bit slower than imagined. Their battery division also doing well.

I’m not a huge fan of Elon Musk himself, but I have always felt that he is playing by the rules of market competition and innovation, rather than trying to buy political influence, suppress competition, and fleece consumers/taxpayers as so many of our “capitalist” industries are doing these days.

June 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.

Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.

self-driving cars are here

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The self-driving car hype bubble inflated and burst a decade or so ago. As tends to happen, the technology disappeared from headlines but continued to slowly progress in the background, and now seems poised to burst onto the commercial scene in a big way.

The key mistake I’ve noticed people making is they don’t seem to realize that autonomous taxis are no longer a hypothetical future technology. They exist, and you can ride in them. Waymo has been operating in San Francisco and Phoenix for a while now and is expanding soon to Austin and to a sort of awkward-to-describe-accurately swathe of Los Angeles County.

Matthew Iglesias

Iglesias says that self-driving cars have been largely excluded from freeways to date and this has limited their appeal in a business sense, but this will gradually change. Driverless trucks and buses will eventually be huge too, although organized labor will fight these tooth and nail as long as it can.

I’ll share a few more thoughts:

  • Motor vehicles kill around 40,000 people in the U.S. per year and 1.35 million people globally. There is a double standard where we accept this carnage and yet a small handful of self-driving vehicle crashes or even just nuisances are hyped in the media. Self-driving cars will save a lot of lives and property damage. Amoral insurance companies will surely care about this even if nobody else does.
  • Enormous swaths of land are configured the way they are because of cars. It’s not just all the streets and roads, it is all the parking and driveways. Most cars are parked most of the time. And it is not just the physical space those cars need that adds up to a large portion of our landscape, it is the physical space needed for human drivers to maneuver those cars into and out of parking, keep a six-foot-wide vehicle safely within a 12-foot-wide lane, and the spacing needed between cars traveling at high speed due to slow human reaction times. We also want the convenience of parking close to our homes, businesses, and schools to minimize walking. All this will change. Robot cars will be able to park themselves in tight spaces in out of the way places. This will also solve the electric vehicle charging infrastructure problem in cities. They will be able to drop us off and pick us up at our doors on command, which solves the convenience problem. They will be able to space tightly together at high speed. So, they will just take up a lot less space. This may even happen relatively fast. Then humans beings will just sit there and stare at all the space for a long time, maybe decades, but gradually and eventually we will change design standards and zoning codes so that all that space can be repurposed to other things.

automatic speed regulators

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Automatic speed regulators on private vehicles – YES PLEASE. This is an idea that will save lives, and its time has come. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

The article suggests limiting speeds to 100 mph, but come on! Why not limit them to the local posted limit? Or if saving lives that way is too interventionist for “‘Merica”, then install the technology and let insurance companies massively penalize people who choose to turn it off. This could be a middle ground between self-driving cars and people who insist on the preventable mass murder of letting human beings continue operating deadly highway vehicles on city streets, once it is no longer necessary.

December 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful story: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

cars = freedom?

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I don’t know how many regular readers of this blog exist, but if there are some, you know I am not a huge fan of cars. They ruin our urban areas, pollute our air and water, kill and injure us and our children, and make us fat and sick and sociopathic. Beyond that, I knew about traffic stops. The U.S. and U.S. states do not just issue you an ID card at birth. Generally speaking, your driver’s license is your most official government issued ID for most people, and there are enough hurdles to getting one that disadvantaged people (poor, homeless, unemployed, transient, undocumented, disabled, addicted, mentally ill, too old, too young, too busy, the list goes on…) often don’t have them. Those people still use cars to get around in many cases, because that is the only way to get around in many of our communities, and then when they get pulled over in a routine traffic stop they are in trouble. Especially if they already have a warrant or some past legal trouble, which the disadvantaged quite often do.

It’s also always bothered me that you give up your rights against search and seizure the minute you step into a car. Police can stop you and search your car and body on very little pretext in a way they would be unlikely to do if you were on foot (“stop and frisk” aside – another conversation, although it illustrates that police intrusiveness we routinely accept when we are in a motor vehicle can cause an uproar when we are not). Sobriety checkpoints also bother me – don’t get me wrong, drunk driving is very, very bad. But a random sobriety checkpoint subjects you to search and seizure on no pretext whatsoever other than the fact that you chose to get into a car, and if you have some previous legal trouble, or just a paperwork problem, suddenly you are in trouble you had no reason to expect. (The best solution to drunk driving is a walkable community.)

So that’s the disadvantaged portion of the population, who tend to get more disadvantaged over time because the deck is stacked against them. But what about the larger population as a whole? Well, this Freakonomics episode tells the story in a way I hadn’t fully considered:

  • Before cars, ordinary people and police just didn’t interact that much. Generally speaking, a search warrant was required for the police to stop and search someone. There weren’t as many police, they weren’t as heavily armed and they just weren’t that busy.
  • Once cars came on the scene and started killing and injuring people in large numbers, traffic laws were enacted. Police were told to enforce the traffic laws, and courts ruled repeatedly that the imminent danger posed by cars in real time overruled the need to obtain a warrant.
  • Add in guns, or really just the possibility of guns being present in any traffic stop, and you have even more violence on top of the deaths and injuries the cars are already causing – “The traffic stop is the most common encounter between individuals and the police, and it’s also the site of a lot of police violence and police shootings that we see in the news today.“
  • At this point, technology would allow us to handle most traffic violations as an administrative matter, with a picture of the violation and a ticket sent in the mail. The article likens this to tax collection and penalties. The police wouldn’t even be involved in most cases.

A couple more thoughts – First, there is a link between mounting fines and mass incarceration, so just imposing more fines on disadvantaged people and trying to collect them may not be the perfect answer. Second, this article doesn’t go into it, but there is also a critical role for safer street and intersection design, which can help a lot to reduce the number of violations, deaths, and injuries in the first place. And I already mentioned it, but the larger urban design and land use policy can reduce the need for driving and increase the number of people able to get around under their own power, which is good for the air, water, land, our bodies and our minds!

I still have some hope for computer-driven cars too. The hype has died down, which means the practical application will probably gradually creep up on us when we least expect it. A computer-driven vehicle should be able to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light, stay under the speed limit, stay out of the bike lane, and just generally avoid unpredictable behavior. And if it doesn’t, that is a malfunction rather than a crime, which it should be able to self-report to police and insurance companies and get corrected. Some people are still going to get hurt because there is no risk-free transportation system, but it should be far fewer than what we deal with now.

December 2020 in Review

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2020 is officially in the books!

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The “Map of Doom” identifies risks that should get the most attention, including antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology (also see below), and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues.

Most hopeful story: The Covid-19 vaccines are a modern “moonshot” – a massive government investment driving scientific and technological progress on a particular issue in a short time frame. Only unlike nuclear weapons and the actual original moonshot, this one is not military in nature. (We should be concerned about biological weapons, but let’s allow ourselves to enjoy this victory and take a quick trip to Disney Land before we start practicing for next season…) What should be our next moonshot, maybe fusion power?

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Lists of some key technologies that came to the fore in 2020 include (you guessed it) mRNA vaccines, genetically modified crops, a variety of new computer chips and machine learning algorithms, which seem to go hand in hand (and we are hearing more about “machine learning” than “artificial intelligence” these days), brain-computer interfaces, private rockets and moon landings and missions to Mars and mysterious signals and micro-satellites and UFOs, virtual and mixed reality, social media disinformation and work-from-home technologies. The wave of self-driving car hype seems to have peaked and receded, which probably means self-driving cars will probably arrive quietly in the next decade or so. I was surprised not to see cheap renewable energy on any lists that I came across, and I think it belongs there. At least one economist thinks we are on the cusp of a big technology-driven productivity pickup that has been gestating for a few decades.

Ford signals self-driving car’s “intent”

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Ford is trying a set of blinking lights to help pedestrians understand whether a self-driving car is likely to stop or run them over. Somewhat interesting, but really I think the legal responsibility needs to be on the car’s owner/programmer and not the pedestrian. If this saves a few lives by preventing a few otherwise unavoidable crashes it is a good thing. If it creates an excuse to blame the victim, it is a bad thing. In recent U.S. history at least, the situation between driver and pedestrian has almost always been the latter.

A back-and-forth white light means the car is yielding. When the car is about to go, the white light quickly blinks. Ford said it’s trying to find a way to communicate that doesn’t use text.

Once cars are machine-driven, any pedestrian-driver communication gets a lot harder. So how does a woman walking or a kid biking check in with a car to know it’s safe to cross the street?