The Hucksterism of Self Driving Vehicles

Another Wall Street Boondoggle Going Bust

I am sometimes amused by people who saw through the Covidcon who still remain steadfastly assured that all this new high technology AI is going to take over the world and turn us all into hackable cyborgs. Now I do assume that people with money and power will try to do everything they can to alter the landscape, the weather, and the human genome to make all of the above more controllable and predictable. I also assume that the shadowy deep state will run every unethical experiment possible in an effort to unleash chaos that they try to control. They see returns on investment in the areas of psychological manipulation and high finance. But I don’t see much in the real world that indicates that robots are going to take over anytime soon. The Covid “vaccines” may well contain all kinds of self assembling nanotechnology. but that doesn’t mean that it turns every injected person into a remote controlled agent. Weather manipulation I likewise assume is happening, but I don’t think it will move in predictable directions over large areas of a very complex system. That’s also assuming that there is no breaking point where the system tries to self correct and revert back to the mean, sometimes in a violent whiplash like manner.

This interesting article regarding self driving cars caught my attention this morning. I like driving. If I had to guess I’ve driven around 500,000 miles in cars, trucks, motorbikes and one old RV over the years. I’ve been on parts of Interstate-70, Interstate-80 and Interstate-40 in the United States so often I’ve memorized the road markers. I was averaging 100 miles of driving per day sometimes in 2020 during lockdowns (I was delivering food and people had to eat). I’ve had loads of delivery driving jobs over the years and the occasional long commute somewhere. I like old vehicles at the ADAS 0 level and have a preference for manual transmissions. Just give me a radio. I have never fathomed why anyone would want a computer in their car. Now you’ve doubled the amount of things that can go wrong.

I’ll admit I never drove as much in Thailand, in part because it took me awhile to get used to the steering wheel being on the opposite side of the vehicle as it is in the USA. That is especially challenging in a stick shift, which you obviously need to learn to do left handed. Plus I’m not legally allowed to drive commercial vehicles (taxis or shuttlebuses) both because I am not Thai and because I am a woman. If you haven’t had 15 Thai mafia jump out of a shuttlebus demanding money after they block your taxi on a dirt road, then you just haven’t lived. But I digress.

I have long believed that fully automated self driving cars are a fantasy, unless you are referring to something on an already controlled loop, e.g. an indoor racing track. Perhaps that is part of the reason the bored billionaires have all these strange fantasies of everyone living in smart cities? Like in Minecraft I assume that there are some missing links there that real world human engineers see. I never understood how they can think about the water temperature ideal for tadpole spawning in the game, yet they build roofs with solid blocks with no support beams whatsoever. That summarizes technocrat thinking quite well for me.

Regarding the fantasy of self driving vehicles, here was part of Brain Shillavy’s excellent report:

“Well if no one else has publicly said this yet, I will be happy to be the first one to do so: The fantasy of completely autonomous self-driving vehicles that will replace human drivers is now officially DEAD.

Reuters announced this week that the DOJ has started a criminal probe into Tesla’s claims of “self-driving” cars, which allegedly began last year, and is perhaps the reason why Andrej Karpathy, the former head of Tesla’s AI department and Autopilot driving assistance software, abruptly quit this past July after working on Tesla’s self driving vehicle system for five years.

While not mentioning the Reuters’ exclusive report on the DOJ’s criminal probe into Tesla, Ford and Volkswagen announced this week that they were halting further investments into AI self-driving vehicles, forcing Argo AI, an AV technology startup founded by Uber and Google veterans, to shut down.

Argo AI, an AV technology startup founded by Uber and Google veterans, will shut down following decisions by Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen AG to halt further investments in the company. The two automakers jointly invested in Argo AI.

Ford said that when it made its investment in 2017 that it expected to bring Level 4 self-driving technology to market by 2021. Level 4 refers to systems that do not require any driver interaction with the vehicle.

“But things have changed,” said Ford President and CEO Jim Farley in its third-quarter earnings release. “We’re optimistic about a future for L4 [advanced driver assistance systems], but profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off, and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology ourselves.”

“There were a lot of predictions about where we would be with autonomous vehicles, and they’ve just all come crashing down,” said Leonard Lee, managing director and founder of NextCurve, a technology consulting firm, in an interview this week, before the Argo AI news. “Uncomfortable realities have now revealed themselves to a lot of these companies as well as investors.”  (Full article.)

The Great Self-Driving Vehicle Cover-Up: How Safe are these Vehicles? Answer: We Don’t Know

Tesla Model S that crashed in Florida while on self-driving mode killing the driver. (Source.)

While some variation of self-driving vehicles have been on the road for many years now, it was only in June of this year (2022) that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started reporting on traffic accidents involving automated driving systems (ADS).

In June 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a Standing General Order (the General Order)  requiring identified manufacturers and operators (reporting entities) to report to the agency certain crashes involving  vehicles equipped with SAE Levels 3 through 5 Automated Driving Systems (ADS). While ADS vehicles are currently still in development, once mature, they will be capable of performing the entire dynamic driving task under defined operating conditions  and will not require a human driver to monitor and supervise the automation system. There are currently no ADS  vehicles for sale to the general public. While the General Order also covers vehicles equipped with SAE Level 2 Advanced Driver  Assistance Systems (ADAS), that data summary is provided in a separate report. (Source.)

Data collected by the NHTSA from July 13, 2021 through May 15, 2022 recorded revealed 367 crashes.

Last week, the NHTSA released new statistics that reportedly revealed that Tesla had the most fatalities among self-driving cars. (Source.)

However, the NHTSA admits that their data is limited because it is based on self-reporting, and before the NHTSA started tracking accidents last year, we were totally at the mercy of the companies producing this technology to report on their safety records.

With $BILLIONS of investment money at stake to produce self-driving vehicles, do you think they were motivated to self-report their safety data?

Earlier this year (February, 2022), Google-owned self-driving taxi service company Waymo sued the California Department of Motor Vehicles to prevent them from revealing their safety records to the public, claiming that it revealed proprietary information that could be shared with their competitors.

A California judge agreed with Waymo, keeping the public in the dark as to their safety records.

A California court ruled this week to let Waymo hide some of the safety data for its autonomous vehicles—a decision that could have ripple effects for how other autonomous vehicle makers handle the trade secrets of their self-driving tech moving forward.

The ruling, which was passed down Tuesday by the Sacramento County Superior Court and which you can read for yourself here, marks the end of a short, bitter legal battle kicked off by Waymo last month.

The Alphabet-owned company sued the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to prevent the agency from disclosing proprietary details about its public safety protocols to the general public. The DMV, at the time, was mulling over how best to respond to a public records request for Waymo’s application to deploy its tech across Sacramento. (Full article.)”

Does any of this sound a little familiar to any of you? So these companies are using these self driving vehicles on real world roads in real world conditions, which might be a lot different than in, err, test modules. The general public has been assured that these self driving vehicles are safe and effective, are probably better at driving than fallible humans and will certainly get you to your destination with less hassle. They just need to work a few kinks out.

Some people become worried that maybe these autonomous vehicles are not as safe as thought, and the National Transportation Board begins studying it. The industry then sues them to keep the data on crashes private, as this could reveal trade secrets. So they want it all quietly to go away. Maybe these automated features aren’t so safe after all. Could self driving features be a reason, beyond vaxxidents, why car accidents in the USA have been surging for the past few years?

Does any of this sound like a timeline on the Covid vaccines? From decades of driving in real world conditions across all manner of terrain, I’ve known for a long time that a computer cannot respond optimally to trillions of real world situations. I used trillions for a reason. The amount of information that a human takes in with their five senses in every moment is near unquantifiable. When this is extrapolated out to a lifetime and the genes that stretch out however many millenia, it is absolutely unquantifiable. That’s before we consider that all these inputs were loaded in by humans to begin with.

“People are finally starting to wake up to the fact that the techno-prophecies of technocrats are largely based on faith, and science fiction, and not reality, and evidence of this fact is everywhere. The technology is failing, not advancing.

Here is a pretty good list of “technological obstacles” that make the idea of fully autonomous self-driving vehicles impossible, and this list is nowhere near exhaustive:

• Artificial Intelligence is still not able to function properly in chaotic inner-city environments.

• A car’s computer could potentially be compromised, as could a communication system between cars.

• Susceptibility of the car’s sensing and navigation systems to different types of weather (such as snow) or deliberate interference, including jamming and spoofing.

• Avoidance of large animals requires recognition and tracking, and Volvo found that software suited to caribou, deer, and elk was ineffective with kangaroos.

• Autonomous cars may require high-definition maps to operate properly. Where these maps may be out of date, they would need to be able to fall back to reasonable behaviours.

• Competition for the radio spectrum desired for the car’s communication.

• Field programmability for the systems will require careful evaluation of product development and the component supply chain.

• Current road infrastructure may need changes for automated cars to function optimally.

• Validation challenge of Automated Driving and need for novel simulation-based approaches comprising digital twins and agent-based traffic simulation. (Source.)”

Here’s a hack for when the self driving cars take over the world:

I pulled a few of those pictures from The Science Analyst, who wrote regarding AI. There’s a lot more limitations than you think. It’s sort of like the difference between knowing how automatic weapons work from watching a few Rambo movies where he mows everybody down with a machine gun in each hand versus actually shooting the gun yourself.

How smart is Artificial Intelligence really?

As the Science Analyst concludes:

So a computer will never be intelligent

Intelligence means that you can adapt to different circumstances, automatically.
But when a really new situation occurs, the computer will fail.

We see this clearly in Tesla’s autopilot driving:
1. It can not detect a cart pulled by horses. Often has same problem with pedestrians.
2. It can drive very fast when the driver is asleep:
("I'm Speechless": Police Chase Down Tesla On Autopilot Doing 90 MPH With Driver And Passenger Asleep)
3. Tesla malfunctions and crashes into a man at high speed while the driver was trying to park. Video (NSFW- person gets hit)
4. Search: Tesla Autopilot tries to kill me

There is no statistics and no algorithm (and no feed-back) that can make a computer adapt to a problem before it occurss”

So what does make humans different? Who is our programmer? In honor of it being Sunday, I’ll end with these last thoughts:

“We need the Spirit in the Machine

Our model of the brain, with neural networks and algorithms had no chance of working. On almost every place it needs a programmer, a decision maker or something.
Without it, the brain would be just chaos.

But now we have a spirit that can observe things, even decide things. This is exactly what we need to make our brain work. Maybe we even need more, but this is a start.

We can simply not create something out of nothing.

In another post I will go further into a model of the spirit.
See you there..”

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