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August 16, 2020 06:34 pm

Cory Doctorow: 'Self-Driving Cars are Bullshit'

"Self-driving cars are bullshit," writes Cory Doctorow:I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness... But I'm a science fiction writer and that means I can tell the difference between "thought experiments" and "real things." Alas, the same cannot be said of corporate America. For example, according to its own IPO filings, Uber can only be profitable if it invents fully autonomous vehicles and replaces every public transit ride in the world with them. Elon Musk — a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers of the dirtiest SUVs in America, without which those planet-killing SUVs would not exist — makes the same mistake. Musk wants to abolish public transit and replace it with EVs (he says that public transit makes you sit next to strangers who might be serial killers, which tells you a lot about his view of humanity). Now, both Uber and Musk are both wrong as a matter of simple geometry. Multiply the space occupied by all those AVs by the journeys people in cities need to make by the additional distances of those journeys if we need road for all those cars, and you run out of space... these fairy tales require so much credulity to be taken seriously that they strain even the car-addled imaginations of American automotive culture, and also rely on the irrational exuberance inspired by imaginary self-driving cars to propagate and persist. But that exuberance is sorely misplaced. Machine learning systems have brittle and unpredictable failure modes that can be triggered by accident or deliberately. The unconstrained problem of navigating busy cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML. Or, at least, it's insoluble if you care about whether cars kill even more people in even less predictable ways than they do now... Doctorow adds that a key plot point in the third book in his "Little Brother" series (coming out in October) is "subverted, lethal autonomous vehicles." But Doctorow also shares a link to his short story "Car Wars," commissioned by Deakin University to explore the sociotechnological issues around autonomous vehicle. It begins with a high school warning parents about students performing "dangerous modifications" to their car in violation of new federal laws -- three student vehicles were already confiscated for "operating with unlicensed firmware." (And "one of those cases has been referred to the police as the student involved was a repeat offender.") But as the school launches its random vehicle firmware audits, a developer sends a desperate message to his followers on Twitter about something even more disturbing that's happening in real-time...

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