The Weekly Screed (#894)

This is harder than we thought

by David Benjamin

“I’m an obsolete design. T-X is faster, more powerful and more intelligent. It’s a far more effective killing machine.”

   — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

LAS VEGAS — This is the first year of the of the retreat of the heretofore unstoppable robo-car. I actually saw this coming — not because I know anything much about ECUs, AI, HUD, SOCs, radars, lidars, sensors, ethernets or even tire pressure and headlight bulbs. Pound for pound, I’m likely the least technical guy wandering the premises at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). According to reliable sources, more than 180,000 people flocked to Sin City this year for CES and only one (1) of them carried around a novel to read during his idle moments.

Guess who.

However, it’s been twenty-odd (very-odd) years now. Which means I’ve weathered a few of CES’ previous brave-new-world ninja-technology lifestyle convulsions. I was present at the dawn of the wireless, always-connected, remotely controlled, self-regulating, thinking, talking, self-cleaning and unburglable “smart home.” My favorite early iteration of this cultural juggernaut was a cute, relatable Bill Gates brainstorm named “Bob.”

Remember Bob? Remember Fuzzy Logic? How about 3D TV?

Never mind. The CES geeks are still talking (all right, whispering) about smart homes, and desperate for consumers smart enough to live in one of them. There’s a rubric that apples to this and a thousand other “consumer-friendly” technologies that I’ve thankfully forgotten: “This is harder than we thought.”

Pretty often, it’s harder than they thought because they didn’t ask two fairly obvious questions: 1) Who’s idea was this, anyway? 2) Even if we get it to work, who’s gonna buy this crap?

The autonomous vehicle (AV) is turning out way harder than anybody ever thought, except maybe me. I might’ve been the first one to ask Question #3: “C’mon. You’re kidding, right?”

Nope. Not kidding. Almost as soon as Tesla and an outfit called Waymo (formerly Google Car) conceived their separate visions of autopilot autos, they were eagerly deploying driverless prototypes willy-nilly into the avenues and cul-de-sacs of towns like Phoenix and Mountain View. Since that giddy beginning, the excitement in the combined automotive and various technology industries (let’s just call it The Industry) has been almost sexual in is intensity.

Because of the money that could be made by rendering obsolete not only a billion oil-and-piston cars but every licensed driver on the face of the earth, The Industry’s prophets paid scant heed to the few robo-car skeptics — like software detective Michael Barr, Dr. Philip Koopman at Carnegie Mellon and Gill Pratt at the Toyota Research Institute — who were saying, “This is harder than you think.”

Barr, Koopman and Pratt, among others, suggested that testing these things on the streets of Mountain View and Phoenix might not be the ideal first step, because, well, you might kill somebody.

Which, of course, happened. A prototype Tesla AV killed an eager early adapter in Florida. An Uber robo-car ran over poor Elaine Herzberg in Phoenix while she was pushing her bicycle across the street.

But wait, cried The Industry, what’s the big deal? Cars kill people all the time — 40,000 fatalities every year in America alone. This is true, but there’s a difference. First of all,“saving thousands of lives” — not “splattering jaywalkers” — was The Industry’s chosen AV mantra.

Second, as Koopman and others have noted, humans are strangely tolerant of the fallibility of other humans, especially in the driver’s seat. We assume that other drivers are going to screw up and we watch out for them. We understand somehow that people operating huge, dangerous, high-speed machines will inevitably — now and then — kill other people with their horseless carriages. What we don’t accept — at least not yet — is the idea of machines going out in public and killing people on their own initiative. We have scary-ass movies about that sort of thing: 2001, Alien, I, Robot and all those Terminator flicks.

A few years ago, I recognized, with a measure of chagrin, the inevitably of the autonomous vehicle. We were going to get ’em even if we did not want ’em, as a matter of economic desperation for The Industry. But I also recognized that the AV’s evolution would not track exactly according to the stated vision of Ford, Tesla, Uber and whoever. We would not see an immediate future in which your typical white-collar commuter would be tucked in the back seat of his Beamer pecking away at the Ferguson account or canoodling with Sybil the secretary while the car flawlessly charts, radars, lidars and GPSes its artificially intelligent course through rush-hour traffic and into the Loop in lickety-split time.

This fantasy is called Level 5.

Lately, the robo-car guys are trying to rustle up enthusiasm for something called Level 2-plus, which will debut as soon as they can figure out how to make Level 2 work. Or, in terms most non-Industry folks can grasp: You gotta crawl before you can stand up and fall on your face.

For now and for a while, the AV future isn’t really self-driving cars at all (which is harder than airplanes!). It’s buses. Shuttles. Vans. Mass transportation for senior citizens, students, hotel maids and folks in wheelchairs.

No speed. No glamor. No razzle, nor even a glint of dazzle. This mundane trend was manifest in a host of robo-shuttles littering the CES show floor this year — all of which, inexplicably, looked as though they’d been conceived by one guy, apparently poached from the design department at Cuisinart.

Regardless of brand, your 2019 robo-bus looks eerily like, well, a toaster — equipped incongruously with cute little soapbox-derby wheels. There’s no discernible front or back. It consists entirely of sides. And it’s adorable. As you peer inside at the cozy seats and the wraparound TV screen, as the music system kicks into the Andre Kostelanetz version of “The Girl from Ipanema,” this cuddly robo-bus seems to be patting you on the cheek and promising that, yes, you can strap Aunt Faye in here and she’ll make it unscathed and undisturbed all the way to the knitting bee at St. Cecilia’s… and back again.

Whoopee.

The key reason the robo-bus is currently hogging the limelight is that it’s the least “intelligent” of AVs. It navigates pre-programmed routes over and over, and it responds to surprises invariably. Whether the sudden obstruction on the road is a maniac waving a machine gun, a river of lava from Mount Wilshire or a wind-blown plastic bag, the trusty robo-bus will stop in its tracks — for months if necessary — until it goes away.

This is a far cry from the intricate ballet envisioned by AV prophets like Jensen Huang, of interconnected, artificially intuitive, zero-emission, 100 mph EVs tooling the streets, deftly dodging pedestrians in flawless synchrony, obeying the rules of the road like a fleet of 3000-pound, 300-horsepower obsessive-compulsive Transformers, each carrying a safe, warm, oblivious human like a yolk inside a titanium egg.

On the other hand, dullness has its blessings. A rolling toaster that spews elevator music and loops cat videos is certainly a safer ride to the future than an autonomous Uber car — with a narcoleptic “safety driver” — that hasn’t figured out how to tell dogs from Dodges.