The Coming Disruption of Transport

[TrickyRicky]

"Why do you think it would create more extreme levels of inequality?"

You could do 1000 Ph.D.'s answering that question but let's put it this way: How is all this technological convenience going for the young generations buying into it's promise? Henry Ford owned a car and so could his employees aspire to. In the future the Elon Musks of the world will own their own cars and regular people will not. They won't want to because of the convenience right? Just like all those other inconvenient things like their own phone, media library, home, career, relationships, family, etc.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

^The Seba video makes a fairly strong case that EVs will become incredibly cheap. That would seem to imply an equalising rather than unequalizing direction. Lack of mobility is itself a barrier to equality.... so cheaper mobility means both more disposable income and more opportunity.

However, I can certainly see impacts which would lead to greater autocracy and loss of privacy. Will all those L5 level vehicles be reporting data to a central network controller? Will local control points have data caches that can be downloaded? Does this enable every vehicle on the roads to be tracked centrally? Can vehicles be placed in “stealth” mode?

The answer to all of the above is, YES.

Even today, if you're buying a recent model year internet-connected car, odds are very high that its reporting its position to some third party source, even if you don't subscribe to services like GM's OnStar

 

[TheTigerMaster]

It's amazing how long the internal combustion engine has held sway. Sure, we rode horses for many hundreds of years before the industrial revolution, but it's still noteworthy that I could pull up to a gas station today, (drop in a couple of lead pellets, if still running on original valve seats) and fill up a 100 year old car and drive away. In my vintage motorcycle club there are several guys who regularly ride motorcycles from the 1930s and you just fill up at the Esso like you would the latest 2020 hybrid car.

I suspect its likely due to political reasons, rather than technological. We've all seen how the auto and oil industries have moved to kill the development of EVs 20 year ago.

For general purpose commuting, EVs are superior to ICE vehicles in nearly every conceivable way. The rest of the world is just waking up to this untapped potential

 

[Admiral Beez]

I suspect its likely due to political reasons, rather than technological. We've all seen how the auto and oil industries have moved to kill the development of EVs 20 year ago.

For general purpose commuting, EVs are superior to ICE vehicles in nearly every conceivable way. The rest of the world is just waking up to this untapped potential

I agree. In 2016 we bought probably our last new ICE vehicle. Unlike most of my neighbours we have a private driveway so charging will be easy.

 

[crs1026]

The answer to all of the above is, YES.

Even today, if you're buying a recent model year internet-connected car, odds are very high that its reporting its position to some third party source, even if you don't subscribe to services like GM's OnStar

Yeah - A couple months back I rented a Nissan at a US airport, and had to press a YES on the touchscreen acknowledging that I was aware that the car was so equipped and would periodically connect and report its status.

- Paul

 

[crs1026]

The answer to all of the above is, YES.

Even today, if you're buying a recent model year internet-connected car, odds are very high that its reporting its position to some third party source, even if you don't subscribe to services like GM's OnStar

Yeah - A couple months back I rented a Nissan at a US airport, and had to press a YES on the touchscreen acknowledging that I was aware that the car was so equipped and would periodically connect and report its status.

- Paul

 

[TrickyRicky]

I dislike ICE’s regardless of climate change or cost considerations because gasoline is frankly a disgusting liquid as are it’s gas biproducts.

I also like sensor and automation technologies as driver assistants. I’m willing to go deep there but draw the line at full automation.

Humans think we are smart but from a sensor perspective we are morons. Have you ever seen the brain of a shark? We are olfactory idiots compared to a shark. That said we have cultural and philosophical brainpower that is fare more important than sensors. Sensors and even sensors that think are idiots.

Maybe AI technologies are addressing these issues but when you drive you are relying on philosophical and cultural norms and behavioural gambits. The other driver may be bad, drunk, even suicidal but you’re trusting they share certain traits such as self preservation or a sense of remorse about taking you out even if they want to die etc. Big data and machine learning can use scenarios to iterate towards these behavioural philosophies but at it’s core the vehicle remains agnostic towards it’s own survival and yours. This also says nothing about why and how you want to get from a to b which is even more complex than how you get there safely.

A fully automated vehicle is going to have to have a seriously robust limbic system if it wants to operate universally in urban traffic

 

[ssiguy2]

Another major issue that with self-driving vehicles is liability, both legal and financial.

Right now an accident caused by the driver is the legal and financial responsibility of the driver and obviously not any passengers. With SDV, all of a sudden everyone in the vehicle is a passenger as there is no driver. So if you are in an accident then who is to blame? It will happen all the time as computers are not perfect and fail but also all the perfect computers and well maintained cars still slide all over the damn place in snowstorms or when they hit black ice regardless of whether the computer is running the show.

Who would be held accountable in such a situation? The people in the vehicles can certainly claim innocence as they weren't driving in the first place. Does this mean only the manufacturer can be sued for legal, personal, and financial restitution? Good luck getting the automakers to take on that kind of responsibility which could run into the TRILLIONS {yes with a T} over time bankrupting every automaker or them refusing to build SDV. Will a person any longer even need to take a driver's license as you don't need one to sit on the couch?

These are MAJOR implications, far more so than the technology itself. This key issue hasn't been addressed yet because we have no fully SDV on the market yet and could single handedly bring SDV to a screeching halt.

 

[44 North]

Curiously, the thing limiting the adoption of this kind of solution might not even be the advancement of Artificial Intelligence in self-driving applications, but rather, the poor state of cellular networks in much of the world. This kind of solution cannot be implemented using 4G networks, because the latency is too high. Under 4G LTE, it might take a quarter of a second for a remote operator to send an instruction to a car, and get feedback. Lower latency 5G networks would need to be deployed at a broad scale to enable this use case. Furthermore, this solution might also require a higher density of cellular sites, to further guarantee reliability. This could be a tall order in a lot of countries. Even in the United States, their 4G LTE networks can barely handle streaming video. Canada's cellular networks are fairly robust though, so we might actually be one of the first countries to adopt this kind of solution.

Satellite phones are already old technology, and satellite internet is right around the corner. That still wouldn't solve issues like being in a strong storm, being in a tunnel or deep valley, etc. Definitely better than cell tower connection in fringe areas, but not foolproof.

Still though I'm very much on a wavelength that remote/tele-driving could be in our future and linked with AI cars. Would drivers know or care if their "self-driving" vehicle were driven by someone getting paid pennies per hour in a developing country? Or a prison somewhere? Likely not. And still self-driving, to some extent.

I dislike ICE’s regardless of climate change or cost considerations because gasoline is frankly a disgusting liquid as are it’s gas biproducts.

Gas is still pretty good though. I have a battery chainsaw and lawnmower. Limited power, limited use, takes forever to charge, and I charge it with a gas generator so a bit counterproductive. Also the batteries break and are simply not repairable, and are very expensive. The lawnmower itself broke last fall and unlike basically any small engine going back a century, there is no fix available. Proprietary and confusing electrical components. It's now an expensive hunk of plastic. But still good while it lasts. Quiet, no motor oil, no drippy jerry cans.

 

[Tommy521]

However, I can certainly see impacts which would lead to greater autocracy and loss of privacy. Will all those L5 level vehicles be reporting data to a central network controller? Will local control points have data caches that can be downloaded? Does this enable every vehicle on the roads to be tracked centrally? Can vehicles be placed in “stealth” mode?

As others have said, you are absolutely correct. This enables every vehicle on the road to be tracked centrally. However, this is already possible.

For many years, bluetooth detectors have been used along roadways to determine traffic speeds and volumes.
Of course, the City of Toronto claims the bluetooth readings are encrypted, anonymized, and averaged. But it's entirely possible that this is not the case.

Point being, currently all (relatively recent) model cars, cellphones, GPSs, etc, can be centrally tracked similarly to what could be done with fully autonomous vehicles. There is definitely potential for a AV system to be abused, but there is already a system in place with the same potential to be abused. If we trust our lawmakers and city officials to tell the truth about the anonymitiy of the current bluetooth detectors, I would think the same should be said about a future system which tracks and operates AVs. My main concern with this is the movement of TaaS towards large companies, as opposed to publicly run services with accountability to the public they are serving.

It might seem like AVs demand a great loss of privacy to use, but in reality it is quite a small step from where we currently sit. Especially if you think about the reporting of location data a cellphone does on its own regardless...

 

[Admiral Beez]

Gas is still pretty good though. I have a battery chainsaw and lawnmower. Limited power, limited use, takes forever to charge, and I charge it with a gas generator so a bit counterproductive. Also the batteries break and are simply not repairable, and are very expensive. The lawnmower itself broke last fall and unlike basically any small engine going back a century, there is no fix available.

I think if we all drove EVs today and someone invented the ICE, we'd all be saying wow, I can drive for as long as I want? And a powerplant I can pretty much take apart and fix myself (well, up to the 1990s tech).

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Maybe AI technologies are addressing these issues but when you drive you are relying on philosophical and cultural norms and behavioural gambits. The other driver may be bad, drunk, even suicidal but you’re trusting they share certain traits such as self preservation or a sense of remorse about taking you out even if they want to die etc. Big data and machine learning can use scenarios to iterate towards these behavioural philosophies but at it’s core the vehicle remains agnostic towards it’s own survival and yours. This also says nothing about why and how you want to get from a to b which is even more complex than how you get there safely.

You give technologists (and philosophers!) too little credit - AI ethics in self-driving vehicle is an issue that has been identified for quite awhile now:

The Ethics of Autonomous Cars, Self-Driving and the Trolley Problem

Self-driving cars have become technologically feasible. The question now is: are they ethically feasible?

interestingengineering.com

The Moral Imperative Of Self-Driving Cars

Some say that achieving self-driving cars is a moral imperative, yet it is worth examining what that means and seek an informed viewpoint.

www.forbes.com

As a counterpoint - you are presuming self-preservation and morality among other drivers actually creates a condition that is amicable to the preservation of life when pushed to extremes. I am not sure if the high rate of injury/fatality associated with operating motorized vehicles is supportive of that interpretation. In fact, one *may* be able to argue the human factor (unpredictablity/variability, susceptibility to interference, slow and imperfect reflexes, etc) is the least conducive element to overall safety. It may provide the driver some feeling of control in the event of an accident - but I am not sure if actual outcomes (especially averaged over large Ns) will be supportive of the worth of control.

AoD

 

[crs1026]

Still though I'm very much on a wavelength that remote/tele-driving could be in our future and linked with AI cars. Would drivers know or care if their "self-driving" vehicle were driven by someone getting paid pennies per hour in a developing country? Or a prison somewhere? Likely not. And still self-driving, to some extent.

It's just an extension of things like Onstar combined with Apple Tech Support. Car drives itself, until you get into that magic problem where the car comes to a stop.
"Hello, Onstar? My car seems to have frozen behind a Dump Truck that wants me to back up"
(Tech's mouse cursor appears on the car's video screen)
"Oh, I see your problem. Hang on...."
(Car backs up, tech turns control back over to the car)
"Anything else I can help you with?"
"Nope, we're good now thanks"

All good until the inevitable upsell "I see it's almost lunch time, and there's a great diner just up the road....can I reroute you to stop there? I can preorder your table and your food choice......"

- Paul

 

[kEiThZ]

All good until the inevitable upsell "I see it's almost lunch time, and there's a great diner just up the road....can I reroute you to stop there? I can preorder your table and your food choice......"

Privacy is my biggest concern in this future utopia.....

I am enthusiastically cheering on the age of electric. But I'm not entirely sold on fully autonomous transport. Also Tony Seba seems to conflate these into one disruption. EVs alone can bring a 40-60% improvement in operating costs. That will be disruptive in its own right. Comparable to his horse vs. car example. Going from privately owned EVs to AEVs is all about distributing the capital costs. That's a whole different disruption.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Whenever I walk up Parliament St. past the Esso at Amelia St. I think to myself, EVs can’t come soon enough. That Esso is a blight on the area, cutting off the pedestrian retail on the east side of the street and attracting some sketchy folks. This area is just crying out to be bought and redeveloped. A community centre would do nicely with residential above.