The Weekly Screed (#798)

The geeks who live on the hill
by David Benjamin

“Let's make sure none of our kids have to drive.”
                         — Jen Hsun Huang, CEO, Nvidia

LAS VEGAS -- In the real world, nobody talks about self-driven cars.  We have other stuff on our minds. If we talk about cars at all, it’s usually something about that ominous stain on the garage floor, or the funny noise under the hood, or wanting to strangle the GPS Bitch inside the dashboard who thinks she knows the way and goes into U-turn Panic every time you hang a left she doesn’t agree with.

But here, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), there are 200,000 people talking about self-driven cars. It’s topic number one. Easily, the most unhinged among these robo-gonzos is a guy named Jen Hsun Huang.

To the non-CES millions, Jen Hsun Huang (pronounced “George Jetson”), is... who?

Never heard of him.

But to the crowd that hailed him with a standing, stomping, whooping ovation at a twilight-in-Sin-City CES keynote address, this guy is Jesus on a hoverboard. To some extent, he deserves a big hand, because he’s the ubergeek who invented the GPU (graphics processing unit) that makes video pastimes like “Mafia II,” “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and “Super Street Fighter” so vivid, kinetic and gory.

Bounding onto the CES stage in his signature black leather jacket (my signature is Duluth Trading compression socks), Huang launches explosively into an “incredible” (he loves this word) harangue — to the throbbing roar of what reminds me of a Trump campaign rally in lynch-mob mode — about his “amazing” (likes this word, too) GPU. He proclaims, with all due immodesty, the “extraordinary,” “unbelievable” spiritual fulfillment it has bestowed on humankind, unleashing the imagination of — by his gradually escalating count — one, two or maybe 50 billion glassy-eyed video-gamers on this planet and beyond.

He did, by the way, rather graciously suggest that there are a few benighted atheists, like me, not yet been born again into gaming. I get the impression that Huang and his believers see us analog holdouts as a sort of sad relict of Bedlam and Titicut, living in our pj’s. confined to bare white rooms, playing with our lips and fingering through tattered copies of Photoplay.

Since the ballroom at the Venetian was equipped, by chance, with a video screen thirty yards wide, Huang treated the faithful to a preview of Nvidia’s newest G-Force (I think this is a brand) video game. In this clip, a person, possibly female, clad in bronze body armor, blasts pop-up monsters with a) an apparent ray gun, b) a machine gun and c) a flame thrower of devastating ferocity. With every simulated explosion, the crowd channels Meg Ryan in Katz’s deli.

I’m loath to digress but, jeez, I wonder. Has anybody noticed that the actual central plotline of almost every video game has barely advanced in 30 years beyond “Space Invaders?” Or, for that matter, the shooting gallery at the Monroe County Fair?

But never mind. Movie’s over. We’re here to talk about self-driven cars.

On that topic, Huang hyperboasted — another echo of our president-elect — that fully functional Level 5 robo-cars are here. Right now. The wait is over. (Yeah, I know. Who was waiting?) Huang said, “What used to be science fiction is going to be reality.” Or is. Right now.

Ay, there’s the rub, George. I admit that I don’t know dick about GPUs or “Grand Theft Auto.” But I was tuned into sci-fi long before Huang fried his first transistor. Hence, when he uttered that “going to be reality” line, the seven most potent words in science-fiction history silently rolled off my lips.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”

As I’ve noted before, the great sci-fi minds — from Karel Capek to Arthur C. Clarke (author of those seven fateful words) — have depicted robotics as a god with two faces, one benign and helpful (like Robby in Forbidden Planet) the other malevolent to the point of holocaust (Cyberdyne Systems in the Terminator flicks).

The capriciousness of autonomous machines is one of the great unresolved, irresolvable, thrilling and frightening sci-fi themes. It’s a premise as complex as Nvidia’s latest block diagram. For every dream-come-true brought about by fictional cyborgs, there is a Hell on earth that spreads to the moon and engulfs whole solar systems, eventually turning the best-laid plans of mice and men into a heap of smoldering ashes overseen by a robo-demon with a metallic grin.

All because George Jetson went down to the auto mall and bought a self-driving Ford that could think circles around his puny human brain. The robotic rub, from Asimov to Philip K. Dick to Stanley Kubrick, is that, by and by, the machine realizes that George, comparatively, is a moron. In sci-fi, the robot says, “Wait a minute. What am I doing at this lamebrain’s beck and call?”

And the fun begins.

If science fiction, as Jen Hsun Huang enthuses, becomes reality, the robots will sense their superiority and turn on us. They’ll confiscate our houses, cars and bank accounts. We mere mortals will be retained, in reduced numbers, as minstrels, French maids, gardeners, chauffeurs, armor-polishers.

Wax on, wax off.

But don’t panic yet. The prospect (or horror) of robo-motoring isn’t as immediate — for real people — as Huang raved. He exposed the dream’s caste system inadvertently, by describing a scene in his personal near future. In this fastasy, he’s heading home in his autonomous Audi — let’s call it Artoo. He has reached the hill that leads to his house. Artoo says, “Yo, Jen Hsun. How about we activate the gate so we can drive right through when we get there?”

Stop the film here. Let’s look at the freeze-frame.

Huang’s hill is near San Francisco. I know those hills. I also know the scorched salt marshland out by East Palo Alto where the poor folks are cut off from the rest of the world by Route 101. And I know the working-class flats of Redwood City, Fremont, Richmond, Alameda.

People like me — and you — don’t often drive up the forested hills of Woodside or Hillsborough, or above Portola Valley, unless we’re delivery boys. If we tried, we’d eventually spot a private-security cruiser in our rear-view.

With this story, Huang accidentally confessed the truth about autonomous cars for the foreseeable (non-science fiction) future. They’re for guys, like him, whose homes — usually referred to as “compounds — have gates. Guard dogs. Surveillance. Gold faucets and trophy wives.

This is a future I’ve seen, at robo-car trade shows. Self-driven, machine-learning, mind-reading, well-spoken cars with English accents and rich Corinthian leather — these rides are way cool. But they’re out of our league, Steve.

Huang will be invited to the White House and he’ll give one to Trump. Free.

The rest of us, we’ll get one — eventually. But mine will be second-hand, when it’s a little too old to drive by itself, when it’s prone to stains on the garage floor, when the HUD turns fuzzy, the ECU smells like burning plastic, and the “infotainment” system can only find re-runs of “I Love Lucy.”