Self Drive Vehicles
The Problem
Daily Telegraph - 4th Oct 2019
The fact that a self drive vehicle ("SDV") appears to work in Phoenix, Arizona in good weather on well maintained roads is a total irrelevance - it has to work faultlessly in appalling and weird circumstances.
Currently, there is about one death per 4 million hours of vehicle travel which sounds fine but in the USA that is still 30,000 deaths per year.
I think that to be socially acceptable, SDVs are going to have to achieve better than one death per 10 million hours of vehicle travel so they will only kill 12,000 people each year in the USA. At the same time they must not disrupt or annoy other traffic to the extent that the total death toll rises.
So far the death toll from SDVs in the USA is one, Elaine_Herzberg. But that unfortunate event generated huge publicity and made Google stop work for 6 months. Imagine what 33 deaths every day will do (ie 12,000 pa). What is worse, a lot of these deaths will be totally bizarre - they will occur in circumstances where a human driver would not have had an accident.
The fact that 18,000 lives have been "saved" each year by SDVs will not be mentioned because individually you won't even know - a drunk driver destined to kill you in a different life got home safely in a SDV.
Ten million hours is about what you would drive in 1,000 lifetimes of motoring. Now think back over your life - I guarantee you have come across some weird and bizarre events. Imagine how many you would have come across in a thousand lifetimes of motoring.
Quite Common Events
All of the following (and dozens of others you cannot even imagine) will inevitably occur at some point in 1,000 lifetimes of motoring - trust me. Can the SDV cope?
It is Winter and the sun has just come up in front of or behind the SDV and is making it extremely difficult to see
It is pitch dark with heavy cloud cover and raining torrentially with thunder and lightning.
The SDV is travelling on an unmarked road with no street lights, signs or road markings.
It has a software fault that it is unaware of
It has a hardware fault that it is unaware of
GPS has stopped working
There is no phone coverage so it cannot communicate with anybody or anything
It is very low on electric charge
It has a flat tyre but does not realise that because the sensor has broken.
There has been a bad accident and the road is blocked
It is snowing very heavily and the road is covered in snow which is forming drifts
There are hailstones so big they crack the windscreen (there is a bridge it can shelter under but it won't because this is beyond its comprehension)
A policeman is redirecting traffic manually
There is a crowd of football supporters blocking the road
There are road cones lying all over the place
Three matt black fuel tanks, each five foot square, have fallen off the back of a wagon and are bouncing along the motorway in front and beside you (this happened to me on the M62)
A herd of black cows has wandered out onto the road
A large animal dashes across the road in front of you
A volcano erupts and you are deperately trying to outrun the ash cloud (the SDV will slow right down to a crawl because visibility is poor)
A man with a knife has the door half open and is going to climb in and kill you (the SDV refuses to move because the door is open - Health and Safety)
You can see a tornado forming half a mile away and coming your way (the SDV ignores it because it thinks it is a tree - it has no concept of what a tornado is)
A huge Tsunami is roaring towards you and you have ordered the SDV to go up a hill to higher ground (but it is a 30mph speed limit so it travels at 29mph and stops for a red traffic light)
Planes, boats, tents, hang-gliders and various other extraneous objects prepare to join you on the road (I encountered a boat in the USA bouncing along a motorway). I lost a dinghy from my roof years ago in the UK. Not to mention grandmothers rolled up in carpet having died on the boat ("it seemed the easiest way of getting her home")
A child playing a game is lying on the road pretending to be a speed bump ...
There is a child's balloon blowing about on the road (the SDV thinks it may be a rock)
A man jumps off a bridge which is 300 feet above the road but the SDV ignores him (things in the sky are irrelevant) until he hits the windscreen killing one of the occupants. Subsequently, SDVs attempt to understand the idea of objects descending from the sky. Then an SDV takes violent evasive action to avoid a falcon which is diving to hit a pigeon. There is no danger from the birds but the SDV kills a tramp who is asleep by the side of the road. The tramp's relatives (who kicked him out) are overcome with grief and collect $10m.
There is an airshow nearby and a diving plane appears to be on a collison course (which it is but not really). What will the SDV do?
Now that SDVs attempt to predict the result of aerial events the situation gets worse as various people are killed by SDVs which have suddenly sighted clouds, hot air ballons, the sun, satellites, drones - all manner of harmless aerial objects. Tricky, isn't it?
The tailgate on a lorry full of concrete blocks drops down and a human driver would realise that the blocks will very shortly start to fall into the road. But a group of SDVs are oblivious to the danger until several blocks fall off (and and cause a huge pile up in which several people die)
Weird but Inevitable Events
Over some 1,000 lifetimes of motoring you are going to experience the most incredibly weird events - for example:
The road is umarked on the map and has no street signs or road markings. It is pitch black, raining torrentially and part of the road has been washed away and a tree has fallen down across the road. Meanwhile, a woman in dark clothing has just got out of her matt black car and is running across the road in a panic in high heels and falls over in a huge puddle. The SDV is confused and runs over the woman very slowly but makes no attempt to stop ...
The SDV has hardware and software faults that is is unaware of and has no access to GPS or any form of communication. The sun is very low but blinding and reflects off the water on the road, a nearby lake and vehicles. A herd of cows is blocking the road just round a very sharp turn. The SDV thinks the black cows are shadows and ignores them ...
A tree suddenly falls over in the storm and a long line of fast moving vehicles are all braking as hard as they can. There is a huge truck behind the SDV which may well have trouble stopping but the SDV is not smart enough to drive off the road through a hedge so it just stops and the truck runs right over the top of it.
The SDV sees a group of young children reflected in a big glass shop window on a corner and thinks they are right in front of it. Given a choice of killing young children or an old person (of zero economic value) it decides to run over the old person - and does so
It is raining heavily and meanwhile a huge tanker is spilling lubricating oil all over the road but the SDV thinks it is just water and drives right into it. Then it begins to slide out of control and hits a group of small children and kills several of them.
An SDV on a normal day in Boston suddenly swerves violently and mows down a group of black people standing at a bus stop. Despite a huge investigation their appears to be no explanation for this. The black community riot - "these things are deliberately murdering people of colour".
A young girl is travelling home in Nevada in the middle of a heatwave when the SDV suddenly locks all the doors and just drives off into the desert where she dies of dehydration. Investigators are unable to find a reason for this happening
Regulation
Every time somebody is killed there will be an outcry and the SDV manufacturers will be paranoid about being sued. So, SDVs will obey the law to the letter and they will also obey the Highway Code.
Now just down the road from me is a set of traffic lights where I turn right to go into Hale. This is a very busy junction and the only way you can turn right is to wait for the light to turn red, thereby stopping the traffic coming towards you, and then turn right through a red traffic light. An offence punishable by three points on your licence. Hundreds of people do this routinely every day.
But an SDV will not do that. It will wait until it can turn right through a green light. Which might mean it waits for an hour or more.
According to the highway code, you should always give way at a roundabout to a vehicle already on it. If you do that (and the SDV will) you could easily wait for an hour. Similarly trying to get out onto a busy road - in practice the only way you can do this is to edge out and force people to stop. The SDV will not do that - it will wait all day if necessary.
These things will be like learner drivers only ten times more annoying - people will risk their lives and the lives of others to get past. So they may not have accidents but, trust me, they will cause accidents by the thousand.
Even the thought of it is making me angry ...
Software Updates
I do know about this stuff - see mopeks - 35,000 lines of code - every line written by me.
Every couple of weeks Microsoft updates the operating system on my laptop - mostly in response to the discovery of faults, security vulnerabilities and so on. Now imagine you have 100 million SDVs out there and you want to update the software because of a vulnerability so this is urgent. How are you going to test it? The truth is you can't. You do your best but you cannot guarantee the update is 100% perfect.
If Microsoft get it wrong on my laptop - no big deal. It might annoy me but nobody died. Now imagine a sotware update that is fatally flawed. It works perfectly in daylight but as it gets dark it cannot see black people wearing dark clothing in the rain under sodium lighting because of some subtle problem. So in the course of one night, some thousand people die - 90% of whom are black. Can you even imagine the fallout?
And how do you put it right? The correction might kill ten thousand Chinese people in a smoggy atmosphere. And so on. And once these things start to go wrong it all escalates and people panic and make mistakes. "You have just killed 1,000 people because of sloppy coding - you had better get this right or you will be facing fifty years inside - meanwhile 100 million SDVs are stationary awaiting the crucial update". Guaranteed to produce a calm, measured response.
You think I am exagerating? Just talk to somebody in charge of a big computer system. I was in charge of the Northern Midland and Western Stock Exchange Computer system and on one occasion we were a hairs breadth away from losing all the data - and I do mean all of it - every backup had failed. Some 120 firms would have have been out of business. But nobody died.
Hacking
With sufficient determination, intelligence, experience and and balls somebody will get into the sytem. Bear in mind that the SDVs will receive an endless stream of data. Traffic updates. Software updates (see just above). Weather and control information. And if you know what you are doing you can slip in some malware that just sits there doing nothing - just a few lines of code amongst millions of lines.
You then talk to those few lines of code and they download and install a few thousand lines of code and you experiment on a few SDVs until you know that your malware will really work as planned - you can now take control of 100 million SDvs whenever you wish. They will ignore head office and obey you without question. But head office don't know that because everything is working normally so far ...
Apocalypse Now
The F1 final is being staged at Silverstone and filmed live to 350 million people. But just as it ends, dozens of SDVs come onto the track. It later transpires that they gained entry via an emergency access point intended for rescue vehicles. The lead SDV just drove at the gate and the lock broke. And exactly 110 SDVs start to go round the track at 80 mph in a procession. Everybody assumes this is some sort of scheduled event and the TV cameras keep rolling
After a while they all stop for a few seconds out of sight of the stands. Then suddenly two SDVs come hurtling towards each other, each one travelling flat out at maybe 100 mph. They collide head on in a fireball (a charged lithium battery will explode like a bomb under the right conditions) right in front of the main stand. Everybody is stunned but this is only the start. A few seconds later, four SDVs hurtle into each other and explode in another, bigger, fireball. Then six and so on.
The grand finale is two groups of ten SDVs - twenty in total, exploding in one colossal explosion. Then all the audience get a text message explaining that this event was sponsored by "SDV Sign" and that in one hours time, 500 SDVs will commit suicide off Beachy Head.
Police and rescue services start to drive to Beachy Head but they cannot get there - the entire area is surrounded by SDVs which are parked ten deep. They let through film crews but nobody else. A police helicopter starts to land but as ten SDVs charge towards it the pilot has second thoughts and lifts off just in time.
And as promised, 500 SDVs dive off Beachy Head and plummit 500 feet into the sea forming a pyramid fifty feet high. The videos of Silverstone and Beachy Head break all records for viewing - more than the twin towers.
The next day SDV Sign issue an ultimatum. Unless the Government of the United States of America immediately bans all SDVs in perpetuity they will destroy every airplane in the USA. This claim is met with incredulity but one hour after the ultimatum, one thousand SDVs take over Atlanta Airport and demonstrate what they can do on a disused 747 used for aircraft evacuation training.
They drive at the undercarriage at high speed until it collapses and the plane drops on its belly. They then drive straight into the cockpit and each of the engines. The plane is totally destroyed as are seven SDVs in the process. The only reason the plane does not catch fire is because the fuel tanks have been emptied and deliberately filled with water.
They then form into a giant V sign and drive round the airport before driving out by flattening the perimeter fence in a hundred different places to make a point
SDV Sign announce that so far nobody has died but if they wished they could kill sixty million people in the next 60 seconds. "Lock the doors, disable the airbags and accelerate towards the nearest high value target - a crowd of people or a vehicle with people in it". The maths stack up and people believe them.
At this point the insurance companies withdraw all cover from SDVs and the President goes on TV to say they will not give in to blackmail but all SDVs are grounded until further notice
A month later the President and the Pentagon decide that the hacker has actually done them an immense favour - had the SDVs been under the control of an enemy power they could have easily destroyed the entire infrastructure of the USA. As a top secret report put it "no structure in the USA could withstand impact from an endless series of two ton objects travelling at 100mph. Fifty million SDVs could return us to the stone age. And if these things ever learn to fly then the situation will be 100 times worse"
All SDVs, Passenger Drones (see above) and every form of non human controlled moving object are immediately banned. Every government in the world follows suit. An exception is subsequently made for autonomous vacuum cleaners and grass cutters under ten pounds in weight - until hundreds of autonomous vacuum cleaners and grass cutters invade the Trafford Centre Shopping Mall and they too are banned.
Summing Up
For SDVs to really work they have to drive for 10 million hours without killing anybody. And when they do kill somebody (which they will) they have to cope with lawyers, the media and the insurance companies.
This will be made much worse by the fact that in almost every case, a human driver would NOT have killed anybody in those circumstances. This is NOT because the SDV is reckless, drunk, drugged up or incompetent to drive - just amazingly stupid and totally lacking in even a vestige of common sense (see Artificial Intelligence above). That is a fundamental problem which will not be solved until the Singularity (at which point we are all totally screwed anyway)
The fallout will be continuous and devastating as each day in the USA dozens of people die in a ludicrous manner:
Lawyer: "It swerved to avoid a child which is commendable but then ran over a group of homeless black people asleep by the side of the road. As far as we can tell, it thought they were just a pile of garbage! Doesn't that tell you everything about the wealthy, white, middle class people who wrote the computer code?"
Oh dear.
On top of that the hacking danger is very real and they will annoy everybody who drives by their excessive caution and the total death toll will rise as a direct result.
Woman: "You honour, I have to get to work on time or I will be fired and I have three young children to support. I set out allowing 30 minutes to travel one mile through the small town of Hicksville. Before SDVs arrived on the scene that would normally take 5 minutes. I was following an SDV which just sat there refusing to move for some reason. I finally got past but then another one refused to go out onto the roundabout. I got past but a kid on a bike also overtook an SDV and we collided. I am so sorry. I know his mom and pop and I am devastated"
Judge: "These things are a menace, case dismissed"
Conclusion
When I started writing this I felt that they would be very annoying but inevitable - now I think they may well go the way of Concorde and Google Glass - clever but unable to cope with the real world. Or maybe the real world is unable to cope with them.
Bob Cory
Modified on 27/10/2019 at 09:56:21 by ℗ Bob Cory