Tech philosophers in America watch closely the attempts of highly-individualistic short-term investor-run truck companies to behave as much on shared infrastructure like trains as possible without realizing the societal benefits of a train
Nvidia boasts in the Sacramento Bee of a truck that was able to drive a load of butter across America
…the first coast-to-coast commercial freight trip made by a self-driving truck, according to the company’s press release. Plus.ai announced on Tuesday that its truck traveled from Tulare, California, to Quakertown carrying over 40,000 pounds of Land O’Lakes butter.
Mercury News says it took three days on two interstate routes (e.g. human life prohibited) and didn’t experience any problems.
The truck, which traveled on interstates 15 and 70 right before Thanksgiving, had to take scheduled breaks but drove mostly autonomously. There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said.
Indeed. The truck appears to have operated about as much like a train as one could get, although at much higher costs. If we had only invested a similar amount of money into startups to achieve a 250 mph service on upgraded tracks across America…
2800 miles at 250 mph is just 11 hours. Using electric line-of-sight delivery drones to load and unload the “last mile” from high-speed train stations at either end would even further expedite delivery time.
Trains = 12 hours or less and clean
Trucks = 24 hours or more + distributed environmental pollutants (fuel exhaust, tire wear, brake wear, wiper fluids…)
Trucks can’t improve their time much more because they start becoming more and more a threat to others trying to operate safely on the Interstate’s self-run collision avoidance systems. And it’s exactly the delta between operating speeds of vehicles on the same lines that generates the highest risks of disaster.
The absolute best whey going forward to skim time (yes, I said it) should be clear (it’s trains), although we’re talking long-term thinking here, which investors lurking around startups for 2-year 20% returns on their money have never been known to embrace.
Driverless trucks in this context are a form of future steampunk, like someone boasting today their coal-fired dirigible has upgraded to an auto-scooper so they no longer need to abduct children into forced labor.
Congratulations on being less of a selfish investor threat to others, I guess? Now maybe try adopting a socially conscious model instead.
A talk I was watching recently suggested researchers finally in 2019 had cracked how robots could efficiently act like a swarm. Their solution? Movement based entirely on a light sensor.
That sounded familiar to me so I went back to one of my old presentations on IoT/AI security and found a slide showing the same discovery claim from 1953. Way back then people used fancier terms than just swarm.
W. Grey Walter built jelly-fish-like robots that were reactive to their surroundings: light sensor, touch sensor, propulsion motor, steering motor, and a two vacuum tube analog computer. He called their exploration behavior Machina Speculatrix and the individual robots were named Elmer or Elsie (ELectro MEchanical Robots, Light Sensitive)
The rules for swarm robots back then were as simple as they will be today, as one should expect from swarms:
If light moderate (safe)
Then move toward
If light bright (unsafe)
Then move away
If battery low (hungry)
Then return for charge
Cool kids run their rods on decentralized oil, thanks to Diesel who not only warned of centralization dangers but invented standards-based solutions that work to this day
A month ago I was on a call with some top security experts in the industry. We were discussing my upcoming presentation about exciting control options and data privacy from applying decentralization standards to the automotive industry.
To put it briefly I was explaining how web decentralization standards can fix growing issues of data ownership and consent in automotive technology, a fascinating problem to solve which I have spoken about at many, many conferences over the past seven years.
Here’s one of my slides from 2014, which hopefully increased awareness about automotive data ownership and consent risks:
Much to my surprise I see this issue just hit the big papers for some well-deserved attention, albeit I also see it may be for the wrong reasons.
…data isn’t the new oil, in almost any metaphorical sense, and it’s supremely unhelpful to perpetuate the analogy…
That’s just to frame the many problems with this article. Here’s another big one. The author wrote:
We’re at a turning point for driving surveillance — and it’s time for car makers to come clean…
Haha, turning point. I get it. That pun should have led to “it’s time for car makers to choose a direction”. Missed opportunity.
But seriously, the turning point for many of the issues in this article surely was years ago. He raises confidentiality and portability issues, for example. Why is now the turning point for these instead of 2014 when encryption options exploded? Or howabout 2012 when a neural net run on GPUs crushed the ImageNet competition? I see no explanation for why things are present concerns rather than past/overdue ones.
I’d say the problem is so old we’re already at the solutions phase, long past the identification and criticism.
I had help doing a car privacy autopsy from Jim Mason, a forensic engineer. That involved cracking open the dashboard to access just one of the car’s many computers. Don’t try this at home — we had to take the computer into the shop to get repaired.
Sigh. Please do try this at home.
Right to repair is a very real facet of this topic. Cracking a dashboard for access is also very normal behavior and more people should be doing it.
When I volunteered my own garage space in the Bay Area, for example, I saw the reverse effect. Staff of several automotive companies came to join random people of the city in some good old community cracking of dashboards.
A guy from [redacted automotive company] said “…what do you mean you don’t bring rental cars to take apart and hack for a day? You should target ours and tell us about it.” Yikes. That’s not ethical.
The 1970s “hot-rod” culture in today’s terms is a bunch of us sitting around with disassembled junkyard parts in a controlled garage (not operational rental/borrowed cars on the street!) and our clamps on wires etc to linux laptops deciphering CANbus codes.
This journalist desperately needs to participate sometime in a local car hacking community or at least read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”….
It should not be hard for a machine owner to crack it open, when market regulations are working right. At least the journalist did not say an “idiot light” forced him to take his computer to the manufacturer for help.
Anyway, back to the point, the data models in automotive need to adopt decentralization standards if they want to solve for data ownership issues raised in this story.
But for the thousands you spend to buy a car, the data it produces doesn’t belong to you. My Chevy’s dashboard didn’t say what the car was recording. It wasn’t in the owner’s manual. There was no way to download it.
To glimpse my car data, I had to hack my way in.
In summary, data is not the new oil, right to repair means healthy markets trend towards hardware access made easy, and concerns about confidentiality and portability of data in cars are being addressed with emerging decentralization standards.
Sorry this article may not come with a viral click-bait title, but I’m happy anytime to explain in much more detail how technical solutions are emerging already to solve data ownership concerns for cars and give examples with working code.
Based on the new Quebec initiative, and old Dutch campaign against murder with cars, this is my draft image for the kind of mechanical pop-up drivers need to see when they approach any pedestrian crossing area
Here’s a shocking revelation: crosswalks don’t protect pedestrians.
As you maybe read here before when I joked about the fantasy crime called “jaywalking”, or wrote about cultural disparities in road safety, crosswalks are an unfair conspiracy by American car manufacturers that removed non-motorized forms of transportation (including pedestrians and especially women on bicycles) from the road.
Creating crosswalks and enforcing them has been by their nature extremely political acts.
It turns out that the car you drive is a surprisingly reliable proxy for your income level, your education, your occupation, and even the way you vote in elections.
Using cars as a proxy for power (enabling privilege and holding down the poor) is an inversion of what was supposed to happen with “freedom” of movement in America.
If you read the history of stop-lights in 1860s London, for example, a red light and an arm lowered to inform cars to stop being a threat. That’s right, stop-lights were initially designed (just thirty years after the concept of police were invented by Robert Peel) to allow pedestrians to move about freely. Somehow that concept was completely flipped to where pedestrians were pushed into a box (and harassed by police).
Consider how a lack of crosswalk, “ridiculously missing” as some would say, even has been linked to intentional unequal treatment of city residents.
Police detaining and questioning people for not using crosswalks (see points above) repeatedly has proven to be racist, to top it all off.
In brief, if you see a lot of cars on roads and few bicycles, check your value system for being anti-American, let alone anti-humanitarian.
Car manufacturers conspired through crosswalk lobbying to shift all rights away from residents in order to force expensive cars to be purchased for “freedom” to move about safely.
This devious plot runs so thick, Uber allegedly emphasized to its drivers that it would be better to sit in crosswalks to pick up passengers. The logic is they don’t care about blocking pedestrians, but do care about blocking other cars (note some US states also have laws encouraging this anti-pedestrian move).
Also worth noting is the flagship propaganda from Tesla this year has been bulletproof oversized trucks better suited for war zones where freedoms are missing than the public spaces of streets originally encouraging freedom of human movement and play.
Given the American context of turning streets into corporate-controlled death zones, the problem has been bleeding into Canada’s famous culture of “niceness”.
Thus Quebec has posted a video of crosswalks attempting to physically stop cars by telling them to be more polite to others:
It begs the question what damage or fine would be for running over the pop-ups, as they don’t seem to be designed (aside from the surprise) in a way that cars incur cost for disobeying them.
It also reminds me of the Ukrainian art experiment in 2011 (regularly featured in my talks as an example test for driverless car engineering) that popped up human-shaped balloons in crosswalks to stop speeding cars (triggered by a radar gun).
What if these pop-ups in Quebec were shaped like humans instead of just rectangles? That would be an even greater surprise with more psychological deterrence.
However it seems the Quebec design is more of an art experiment for shock/suggestion and education than a real safety control, and on that note the pop-ups could be a lot more creative and shocking.
I mean if you’re going to pop-up a bunch of columns, how about make the columns rise and to a scale that represents the increasing death rate of pedestrians year-over-year from cars? Then stick a “stop killing our kids” message on that barrier…as Small Wars Journal has illustrated:
Small Wars journal graph of eight basic effects at play in the information environment
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
