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More information has come in concerning last week’s fatal incident involving an autonomous car and it is not good. That robot car just straight up murdered the poor woman walking her bike across the road: it didn’t even try to stop. The human “back-up driver” onboard was also utterly useless (although this might actually be a pretty accurate representation of how people will be once they get in one of these things and start watching Netflix or writing opinionated blog posts or whatever).
Now Uber is far from my favorite company. I dislike their creepy name (with its third Reich overtones) and their extraction-based business plan of squeezing drivers/franchisees as hard as possible while avoiding all meaningful oversight and liability. They perfectly exemplify the MBA’s “heads I win-tails you lose” mentality and it doesn’t surprise me that they have botched things so badly right out of the gate. Additionally, the homicidal actions of their sloppy robot have made it harder to ignore the voices questioning what sort of autonomous future we want for the roads. So maybe it is a good time now to heed those voices and brainstorm about the things we want from autonomous automobiles! Here are some of my requests to the powers that be, just jotted down as loose notes:
1) Non-monopolistic: We need more than one or two big companies making these transportation units, or we are going to all be held hostage by their cartel. The big company will make the decisions about national (or international) transportation priorities and the rest of us will all be dragged along for the ride (as it were). We already had this model in the middle of the 20th century when automobile companies ruthlessly dominated infrastructure/land-use planning and suppressed other modes of transportation or city planning. It worked barely…for our huge growing country, but those days are gone and now we need…
2) Trains trains trains: America has one of the finest freight rail networks in the world, but our light/passenger rail is terrible. China has leapfrogged us completely. In the Middle Kingdom, you can make a trip from Beijing to Shanghai (a little farther than New York to Chicago) on a high speed train in a bit more than 4 hours. During peak hours the trains run every 5 minutes and cost about 80 dollars.
3) Ability to recognize things: An idea which has come up is that robot cars won’t be able to recognize humans with lidar/radar/sonar and suchlike electronic sensors alone. Pedestrians and bicyclists will need to wear beacons to avoid death by Uber (domestic animals and wildlife will obviously be out of luck). This is unacceptable! Back to the drawing board, tech guys—your cars will have to do better than this
4) We need these cars to be tamper-proof. If hot-rod teenagers can hack the things and make them go 300 miles an hour over washed out bridges, then the technology will not be sufficient to keep riders safe from tampering or to keep car companies safe from litigation, or to keep the roads safe at all.
Cars are all made in some robotic factory anyway—the price comes from setting up the automated equipment. This means that there is not much price difference between making a super luxury car and an ultra-economy model (they are both twisted into shape from the same steel and wires). The fact that the luxury car costs 4 or 5 times as much as the hatchback is because some MBA guy decided people would pay that much more for increased status.
One of the biggest problems with our roads are the extent to which they reflect status. Somebody driving an expensive car often takes liberties and chances with other people’s lives which make it apparent that they really think they are worth many times more than the underclass nobodies they are crushing. Will robot cars reflect this dynamic? Traditional car companies must be desperate for such an outcome (they make a lot of money with luxury models), yet I hope we have a more egalitarian result. If the future consists of giant robot tank/limousines going 200 miles per hours with carte blanche to knock anyone off the road, we might as well keep the dangerous broken system we have.
I have been enthusiastic about robot cars and I continue to believe they offer astonishing new realms of freedom, leisure, and opportunity for all. I can move to the country! Grandma can go shopping whenever she wants! But after looking at the inhuman mess which big companies have made out of the energy industry, the medical industry (shudder), the aviation industry, or the telecom industry, it seems like corporations might need some guidance from the rest of us.
RIP to the first victim of an autonomous car. Details are still coming in, but it seems like an Uber robot SUV being tested in Tempe, Arizona killed a woman who was walking her bicycle. Well, I guess technically some rich guy was already killed while incorrectly operating his semi-autonomous Tesla, however today’s accident feels more real to me and, judging by headlines, to everyone else as well.
I used to be deeply in love with the idea of cars. They represented power, freedom, and status…until I tried to drive one and realized A) I am terrible at it; and B) it is profoundly easy to hurt or kill someone with a car. American society is designed to normalize this in all sorts of ways… to such an extent that most people don’t even notice our rising traffic fatality statistics. In Holland, if you kill somebody with a car, no matter what the circumstances, it is a real problem, but in America, even if you pretty much straight-up murder somebody through volition or grotesque incompetence, the police will come and rationalize a way it was the bicyclist’s or pedestrian’s fault and give you a hug and a root beer sticker. (If you kill more than six people you get a free foot-long hero sandwich!)
The deep indifference of the authorities is born out by the numbers: in 2016, 37,461 people died in traffic-related accidents in the United States. If 40,000 people died in a war or by gun violence, society would be up in arms (so to speak) and we would be having a national conversation about how to improve things (editor’s note: in 2016, 38,000 Americans were killed by guns. What sort of dark carnival are we running over here?).
America is too spacious for us to ever be free of automated carriages. I live in New York because, despite the cars, I can bicycle here (barely) and because there is a 24-hour subway (also barely…thanks a lot, Cuomo). But beyond the coral-reef lifestyle of America’s one worthwhile city there is too much distance to cover. Even if we were all Lance Armstrong (and we’re really not) we would still need motors to get around.
We have decided not to invest in effective national mass transit. Likewise, we are not redesigning roads in ways which have been proven to make them safer in Europe and Japan (safer for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists alike). Our only hope of diminishing the carnage and damage wrought by our 1950s/60s era national transportation system is effective robot cars. This won’t work if we take the lamentable current state of transportation as something to aspire to.
So, although today’s headline was scary and terrible, we need to keep looking at the bigger picture. We are fixated on the person tragically killed by a robot car because it is novel and garners attention (look, here I am writing about it too), but the real headline should be the hundred people who were killed in the United States today by normal human drivers. Of course, that is the same story every day so nobody remarks upon it. So Uber (and Google, and Tesla), get your act together. Break down the data and figure out what went wrong and fix it. Why didn’t your car stop (they are supposed to have faster reflexes than any person)? Also, why was the “car” a giant hulking tank to begin with? What is wrong with robot cars that are adorable little soft alien bug cars, like the Japanese are working on?
Robot cars are coming and I believe they will be glorious, but a lot more work is needed…and more imagination and creativity are needed too. So let’s slow down for a moment, but then speed up. Think of the one person killed, but think of the hundred too.
We all know that South Asia and East Asia feature the most populous cities and nations on the planet…in terms of human life. But is this true for ducks as well? Here is a humorous/nightmarish/cute/troubling (?) video clip of hundreds of thousands of ducks stampeding through the roads of a town in Thailand. I was unable to find out all the details, but I will let the madness speak for itself. Keep watching the video—there is an intermission, but more ducks are on the way!
By means of translation and interviews, Yahoo news has provided us with some of the details of this avian stampede writing that, “Jack Sarathat lives in Thailand and was driving through Nakhon Pathom, about an hour west of Bangkok. Suddenly he was forced to bring his car to a halt. About 100,000 ducks were on the loose and taking over the rural road in the Bang Len district.”
Although we know the place and the person on camera, we still don’t know why these ducks were on the move or where they were from (though it must have been some sort of industrial duck farm clearing inventory). The article says that none of the ducks were injured, but they look far too delicious for me to believe that without question.
This video contextualizes the earlier post about Zhu Yigui, a Fujianese duck farmer, who rose to be rebel king of Formosa before the Chinese authorities of the day crushed him like an egg. It is possible I snickered some when I read that his qualification for leadership was the ability to train and lead ducks. I am not laughing now—it is obvious that ducks in aggregate are a mighty force!
Artist’s Interpretation
ferrebeekeeper 