Stupid Smart Stuff
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
Yes, there are horror stories about "dumb" transportation software that linger in the forefront of our memories. But ask yourself, What is the burden of proof for this technology? Do self-driving cars and aircraft automation systems have to work 100 percent of the time before we accept their usefulness?
If that's the burden of proof, we will remain stuck with human drivers who are much more "dumb," by a measure of the car accidents and plane crashes they cause.
The author's argument against automation in these life-saving contexts is weak. His article would have been stronger if it stuck with points about watches and similar consumer products.
[0] http://www.statisticbrain.com/airplane-crash-statistics/
I think you missed the point of the article. Its not that existence of automation is bad, its the implementation of it that (in a lot of cases) is wanting, useless, distracting, or even detrimental to the items purpose.
If we accept the author's argument that a human driver can't watch over an automated car, the question becomes fairly black-and-white: do we rule out the driver or rule out the automated vehicle?
Within this rigid self-imposed framework, the author seems to choose Option B: ruling out vehicle automation. Throughout this post (in the aircraft analogy, for instance), he notes the importance of human supervision.
To this, I say, Where is the evidence that human-supervised vehicles are safer than fully automated cars? Where is the evidence that humans are better equipped than good software to react to split-second emergencies?
The only point in favor of human drivers is that we have more stats to describe them, but the stats are horrific. By contrast, Google's autonomous cars have logged over 300,000 miles in various conditions without an accident (minus getting rear-ended by a human driver).
National data, but only for fatal accidents: https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/... Articles 1103 and 1106.
More detailed source of national fatality data: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
First of all, most of all civil aviation disasters in history have been caused by human error[0] (or, in at least 4 incredibly famous examples, human intention). Yes, humans have lost their lives to technology failing, but the assertion that the pilots always are able to do something if they had just been more aware and given control of the dozens of subsystems that a commercial jet controls behind the scenes is rather ridiculous. The "Shit Happens" factor exists for any level of technology.
Or the idea that human beings can react faster than a computer can in the one or two seconds of a car accident. The same car that is able to detect the fact you're trying to leave your lane when you accidentally fall asleep at the wheel and try to wake you up or keep you in lane, the same car that is able to fire airbags in the milliseconds after a major deceleration or impact event. The same car that prevents your brakes from locking up and tries to prevent your car from hydroplaning when you decide to speed over that puddle of water because you're late and speed limits are just a government ploy or some other bogus Libertarian rationale.
People will die driving in self-driving cars. This will happen some time in the future - it's an inevitability. But it is incredibly difficult to believe that figure will be anywhere near the scale of the ~35,000 automotive deaths per year in the United States we average now.
If we take the obviously huge leap to compare air travel's legendary reliability thanks in a big part to autopiloting, equipment redundancy, regular inspections and maintenance, and so forth to self-driving cars, we'd believe the deaths to be on the order of 35 or less a year. Cars may never be that reliable due to other factors (like all of the vehicles being on the same plane of travel), but it's still far more likely to be an overall win.
Yes, progress in technology is a horrible, horrible thing. Let's just put our heads back into the dirt and pretend it isn't happening.
[0]: http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm, because everyone always asks for citations instead of spending two seconds to search for themselves.
That's not his assertion. His assertion is that the pilots had no idea that anything was wrong (or being compensated for) up until the plane basically said 'fuck it, you deal with it'.
> "Or the idea that human beings can react faster than a computer can in the one or two seconds of a car accident"
Where is this claim being made? Certainly not in the article. As for the rest of your paragraph, those seem like individual, single-purpose systems (for the most part). When you're talking about larger systems where things within the car must communicate with each-other a lot more (probably written by different groups), I expect the scope for bugs is greater.
> "People will die driving in self-driving cars ... it's an inevitability"
I completely agree. The really interesting thing will be who is considered (legally) liable at that point. The manufacturer? The software authors? The driver? It's not really that clear cut and I bet the insurance companies are already thinking about this.
> "Yes, progress in technology is a horrible, horrible thing. Let's just put our heads back into the dirt and pretend it isn't happening."
Where did this negativity/sarcasm come from? The author of the piece isn't claiming progress is horrible so why put these words in his mouth? I read his basic point to be "design better stuff, there's plenty of research you can already draw on". That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
The more used, the weaker the defense.
Nowhere did the author say that progress in technology is horrible. OP is not a Luddite by any means.
Yes, sometimes it is horrible. New technology is not always "just a tool" (like a knife, which you can use to spread butter or kill someone), it frequently has inherent uses and can push towards certain societal outcomes. Not always good ones.
Technology is not some king we have to obey and adopt wholesale. It's something intelligent beings create at their and for their convenience.
>If we take the obviously huge leap to compare air travel's legendary reliability
Not that much reliability over cars, that's just the impression bad statistic give.
If you add the total hours of car driving and compare to the total hours of flying, it more or less comes as a wash for deaths per hours travelling with each kind of vehicle.
I went on a road trip recently and I've been thinking about how advances in car technology change how we view cars. I came to a similar conclusion as Don - specifically the change from manual to automatic gearboxes has meant that people have to concentrate less on driving and can devote their attention to other things.
But that's not necessarily a good thing - by getting rid of the idea that driving is an activity that requires full-time attention we are making it more unsafe because people then feel justified in paying it less attention. The reductio ad absurdum argument is the self-driving cars that he mentions at the end of the article, but this is just the end of the spectrum.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is.
The quip about the laws in the article is misguided, none of the laws so far have been about licensing self driving cars for everyday use, they have been to clarify the legality of putting test vehicles on public roads.
Self-driving cars are great example of cost cutting. It would take $ 100 000 000 000 to develop system which can actually drive. Google is using GPS with fraction of cost. But GPS signal is very weak, easy to block or even spoof. If self driven cars will become reality $20 gadget could collapse traffic in entire city for hours/days.
Your $20 evil genius GPS blocking gadget is far more likely to cause the regular human beings in their cars to lose track of where they are going than the robot that has been designed with this exact constraint taken into consideration.
Furthermore, as of right now and the near and mid-term future, it's not legal for the car to drive itself without a human at the wheel. Which means the self-driving car still has to function as a human-drivable car. The final nail in your mustache twirling GPS-blocking evildoer's coffin.
Before we go to a complete driverless system, it's likely we'll need lots more sensor assistance, such as "active highways" with mile marker and lane-keeping RFIDs paved into the roads, and other similar technologies. But we're probably at least 30 years off from even having that conversation given the conservative climate and the love for personal driving in this country.
Maps and dead reckoning fall more under navigation than they do driving and that part of the problem is reasonably solved.
A watch that needs to be put on a charger? Smart is not exactly the word I would use for such revolutionary design.
Presumably this is a product for the same market that wants to plug in their glasses :P
With something like pebble, I wonder how much energy is necessary? Could some well-placed solar cell on the watch do the trick (think calculators).
If I could get one wish in life, it would be to have something like nuclear batteries we always see in sci-fi (actually, there are probably 12 other things that would be more important in the long run)
But that's still not enough power to drive the screen on most "smartwatches". Nor their higher power cellular/wifi components.
Fact of the matter is, TFT screens eat batteries like no-one's business. No avoiding it. E-ink screens would do better, but have nighttime visibility problems that would be hard to overcome.
Plain and simple, the undoing of the smart watch is the battery. It's an obstacle we may someday overcome, but until that day, it's not likely to catch on and become the big hit everyone wants it to be.
My Casio watch has two tiny solar panels built into its face. According to the manual, 5 minutes of sunlight each day (or a few hours of indoor lighting) is enough to compensate for normal use, and the battery will last 6 months even without any sunlight.
I've had the Casio for 9 years now. It still works fine, and I've never had to manually charge or replace the battery. The battery does get a bit low in the winter when the watch spends a lot of time covered by thick clothing, but that problem is easily fixed by leaving the watch in the sunlight for a few hours when spring comes.
Sure, it's not "smart", but it can display the time in several different timezones, act as a stopwatch, and even has a button that lights up the display at night (which will probably drain the battery faster). All running off of two solar panels the size of the nail on your pinky.
That sounds overly pessimistic. Computing power per watt has improved by several orders of magnitude over the last couple of decades already. Combined with more energy-efficient displays (anyone wants to improve on e-ink?), who knows what we could pull off 5-10 years from now, even without a significant change in battery capacities?
300K * k * 1GHz = ~4pW
Or, in other words, you are right, we can in theory reduce the power consumption of our computers so much that a current watch will last for a lifetime.
Even disregarding that for e-ink, there's the radio, which is limited by the channel capacity, from which I'd say we're also less than a magnitude away for isotropic radiation.
The actual technology for this has been around for long time. I'm aware of at least two startups that tried to commercialise it but they faced the chicken and egg problem of (1) getting manufacturers to make changes to their devices/batteries and (2) getting enough the charging pads in enough places to for it to be worth the everyone's time.
Neither company survived but I suspect this was a market-timing problem. Given the wide proliferation of devices (phones, tablets, etc) some solution will eventually get adopted. If those companies were starting now I think they'd have a better shot.
Not all people have the same sleeping pattern. While 9PM may be cool enough time to remind you to recharge the battery, it will be a disaster for other people. I think either of following will be a great feature to add: 1) auto-recognizing sleeping pattern of watch wearer (may be hard to implement); 2) just to add an option in system setting your usual sleep time.
People always get upset at these "smart" devices, and decry their stupidity, and yet they wouldn't really do that much better of a job were they in the device's shoes, so to speak.
If we are to design autonomic systems that are safer, better and as the article says, smarter, we need to put real thought into the unintended consequences.
I had a WinCE device, one of the first ones ever made. It had two fatal flaws
* volatile storage, all notes, memos, calendar entries, everything was in ram
* it would wake up and vibrate and turn on the backlight to tell you it was running out of energy
The Author has problems with a Sony Smart-watch yet there is a picture of a Samsung Gear on the article.
Much of the criticism for the watch is indeed deserved - Smart Watches are more of a novelty at this point. If he had stuck with Smart Watches then this would be an acceptable and deserved criticism.
But he moves on to Cars and then muddies the waters with why long term attention spans inversely co-relate with automation. What does one have to do with the other? Why go ranting about unrelated points to "round out" the word count?
Why not wear it 24/7?
That's a legal requirement so people can test autonomous systems - which is very important. It's not suggesting that self-driving cars should always rely on a human to monitor them.