Google doesn’t want driverless cars to have manual override:
Google told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that Congress must fast-track self-driving cars by waiving states’ rights with a federal takeover of all roads and highways, the better to keep America ahead of Europe, China, and Japan, which are “hot on our heels.”
Google has gone to Congress in hopes of circumventing an imminent release of California rules that would bar fully “autonomous vehicles” without steering wheels and brake pedals. Draft regulations advocated by the state DMV would require all driverless vehicles to have human-override capability as a redundant safety feature in the event of a technology failure or other emergency.
My suspicion is Google wants to see its autonomous vehicles take over the jobs held by taxi, Uber, and Lift drivers, so those driver’s profits all over the world can go to Google. They may even be planning to form their own version of Uber, at half price, with no drivers. You give where you are and where you are going to your phone, a computer-driven car pulls up, takes you to your destination, and you get out as your credit card is tapped.
If there is a driver override though, they would have to have a driver there for liability reasons just in case, and there goes the profit margins.
Government will probably support this, because there are those who think driverless cars will be just one more attack on privacy by the surveillance state:
•Cars may soon need to share collected data to help prevent accidents
•Some say this is an invasion of privacy given amount of data collected
•The data could be sent to third-party advertisers or law enforcement
Self-driving cars could know a lot more about you than you might think.
Packed with sensors, they have the resources to record almost every part of your journeys and driving habits.
And, according to some groups, autonomous vehicles will soon operate more like surveillance drones, collecting data from both drivers and the public.
‘The availability and resolution of imaging from satellites, drones, self-driving cars and more will continue to increase exponentially,’ Sedicii Innovation CEO Rob Leslie, told conspiracy site InfoWars…
The Department of Transportation may soon require cars sold in the US to share data with other systems to help prevent accidents.
You can see where it goes. Millions of driverless vehicles, each outfitted with GPS and cameras in all directions, linked up to mobile and Wifi, able to transmit live video of everything around them to a central center (while scanning license plates and faces), and it even tracks the fares by credit card.
Supposedly the FBI developed software which can take several videos of an incident, from different angles, and synchronize and merge them into a single 3D representation – even extrapolating what it would look like from unfilmed angles. Once the model is created, you can rotate around it and move around in it as you roll time forward and backward, as if it were an image in a 3D shooter videogame. If you have driverless cars, and the WiFi bandwidth can be laid in an area of operations, it is not inconceivable that cities would see their entire “non-denied-area”/”public-space” reality recorded in raw form, and able to be later accessed in 3D shooter format, allowing any government agency to follow you to your destinations 24/7 or go back and see anything anyone did, whenever they wanted, without ever having a boot touch the ground.
It is no big deal if you are aspiring to be one of the drones, but if you ever thought you might have the next killer tech idea, or form the next big multinational enterprise, you would have to factor in how easy it would be for some people to get eyes in your life. If government and the corporate sector get too close and begin trading favors, or if fedguv collapses and the surveillance state becomes the secret-private-sector-surveillance-machine-for-hire, you’d best assume everyone who would want you to fail would be watching you 24/7, and looking for blackmail, prosecutable activity, or anything which could ruin you or your operation.
What is amazing is how quickly we are approaching a world which even Orwell and Huxley would never have been able to dream was possible. Even more amazing is that as bad as it gets, when technology advances again it will get even worse. I can’t imagine what it would look like after a hundred years of technological advancements like that we have seen in the last ten. Think privacy is dead now?
Compared to just a few hundred years from now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
AC –
Another angle you’ve left out. Auto pilot works great in good weather conditions. When weather conditions deteriorate, the sensors have issue and can’t do things like see other cars, accurate placement on the grid, speed of your car etc. This is a known problem with airplanes. There have been a number of crashes in the last decade due to bad weather causing sensor malfunctions, causing autopilots shutting off, and pilots with to little stick time who were just there to turn on the auto pilot.
I suppose that if the car has no user override, then when the weather turns bad, there will be no cars moving. Of course will we be happy with that? The northeast will be shutdown for weeks whenever a snowstorm hits. Google hasn’t thought that through, but hey if you are in So Cal and the weather is clear 99% of the time, why would you think of something like snow? or freezing rain?
Good point.
Close. The Israelis invented it, and shared it with the FBI. It also has the ability to put a halo-outline on a particular person, or (even cooler) take everyone but that person (or persons) out of the video and show just what they did.
If you want to see this tech in action, turn on any NFL game. The system they use to put the 1st down lines on the field and put circles around a particular player’s feet at the run a play? Same software, with some of the features tweaked.
I remember watching years ago the Robin Williams film The Final Cut (2004 film). The film is based in the future where most people have clips (Voluntary chosen by the parents) put into them at birth to record every moment of their lives. Robin Williams works on taking these memories and displaying it for the families at Funderals. The scary thing is that the technology will probably come out in the future but unlike this film will not need wait for the person to be dead to view the recording.
“Even more amazing is that as bad as it gets, when technology advances again it will get even worse.”
As I click up to 70, I chuckle. Having no progeny to care about [Have….but care….] I see this as a reward for many. Without the onslaught of technology, my progeny would only evolve to love the races that will kill them.
This is similar with another blogger recently who called Trump the suicide pill. Defeat the establishment, install Trump, and watch the revolution destroy that which the enemy thought they had created.
If you’re not already aware of it, the British series “Black Mirror” imagines a lot of disturbing consequences of the rush to insert technology into every area of our lives (and into ourselves, in a number of episodes).
What JohnC describes from “The Final Cut” is a central SF device in several of the episodes.
One episode of particular relevance to AC’s surveillance topic is “Be Right Back”, in which a grieving wife procures a ‘replicant’ of her dead husband based on everything the replicant company could find about him on the internet. While the story is about how he is a less-than-perfect copy of the original because despite the real man’s preoccupation with social media, not everything about his personality was captured and the result had an “uncanny valley” effect, the scary application would be intel agents creating digital ‘replicants’ of any person of interest.
These would not have all of the depth or knowledge possed by the real individual, but like the software able to isolate an individual out of a crowd using multiple-angle video, software able to integrate an individual’s digital footprint into a simulacrum of that person may reveal clues about that person not apparent to traditional observation methods. Think of the movie “The Cell” – instead of going into the dream world of a comatose kidnapper to tease out clues to the location of his victim, agents might simply interrogate a virtual suspect synthesized from the real target’s online presence, without a search warrant or 5th Amendment protection.
Microtargeting databases like Catalist already do this kind of massive integration in a more mundane form. Since we’ve known about Catalist since 2008, I suspect that what I describe probably exists by now in some crude form at least.
Interesting.
I agree the “Black Mirror” is really good. It’s a twilight about the future. It’s really worth watching and I say this as someone who mostly quit watching TV about twenty years ago.