Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Episode 53: The Fails of Past Futures
Play Now!Some dreams from the past never came to be, and some should just stay permanently unrealized. I'll explore two such dreams in Episode 53: The Fails of Past Futures. Strap on, and hear my take on why the average person should never own a jet pack. Buckle up, and learn why the additional costs of self-driving cars simply don't offer the safety advantages, especially when one considers how some are thinking of paying for this added kit.
In this Episode, I play sound from three videos: the first episode of the 1949 Republic serial "King of the Rocket Men", and two videos celebrating the modern-day rocket man, Yves Rossi. I also play some maddening excerpts from episode 171 of 99% Invisible. I introduce the episode with Bruce Livesey, as always backed by KMFDM.
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Ah, self-driving cars, a favorite topic!
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to feasibility and safety of self-driving cars, I think you're basically wrong about everything. The hardware isn't outlandishly expensive relative to other sorts of hardware that goes into cars. (I mean, it is now, but early prototypes are always expensive.) The software isn't there yet, but it won't take a very high level of overall driving skill before superhuman reaction time, 360-degree vision, and a very accurate physics model lead to increases in safety that insurance companies can't ignore. And at that point there's going to be a lot of money put towards solving the political problems of liability and so on.
You're right that there's not going to be much demand from individual drivers for prototype self-driving cars that cost $10k extra when you still need to be behind the wheel paying attention anyways. But there are several factors that will push incremental progress towards full automation. One is incremental automation on the personal-vehicle side: "Adaptive cruise control" that changes speed to maintain following distance, lane following on the freeway, automatic emergency braking (or increasing break sensitivity in proximity to obstacles), back-up collision sensors... those are all features available in vehicles that are currently on the market. The other economic push comes from the commercial-vehicle side, where there are both significant incentives for incremental progress (even little things like alerting drivers about insufficient clearance could save a lot of money) and really ludicrous profits to be had if shipping companies could achieve full automation (you could operate the entire US trucking network at about twice the speed for about a fourth of the cost). But full automation of shipping (while kind of alarming for other reasons) has little to do with ads.
I hadn't heard anyone suggesting before that the relationship between self-driving cars and ads would be changing routes based on the whims of advertisers. Now that's an alarming idea! (I also haven't had anyone suggest that adaptive cruise control could be designed to slow down in the vicinity of certain billboards.) But I always figured out that the relationship between self-driving cars and ads would be similar to the traditional relationship between cars and ads. I think the amount of time spent commuting by car has had a huge impact on the amount of people listening to radio advertising. Fully self-driving cars would allow people to consume some different sorts of media on their commutes, and some of that media would probably be ad-supported.
One thing to note is that change would have little to do with the technological details of self-driving cars specifically, relative to other methods of commuting that don't involve people driving themselves. Another is that it's not clear how significant the relationships between commuting-time and consumption of ad-supported media will be. There's a reason why the self-driving car stuff was reorganized by the Searchies such that it's now part of their parent company (A to Z Holdings). It's not clear whether self-driving cars fit at all into the Searchies' core business model of internet advertising.
Hey, L33t!
DeleteA couple points. My rant (as "basically wrong about everything" as it may have been, a wrongness I concede is entirely possible) was driven by the quoted concept: I hadn't heard anyone suggesting before that the relationship between self-driving cars and ads would be changing routes based on the whims of advertisers. Alarming indeed. If true, that alone would be a good reason to avoid any auto-cab for hire.
Another reason to be suspicious of progress on the technology front leading to massive adaptation and implementation is the simple fact that people are driving less. It's not something I covered in the episode, but I've been following it closely for the last few years. Despite projections for increases, people have been spending less time and traveling on average fewer miles per year in cars since June, 2005, a date surprisingly coincident with the May, 2005, peak in oil production (broken only briefly later after the peak was realized and prices skyrocketed).
It's not clear whether self-driving cars fit at all into the Searchies' core business model of internet advertising.
No, but there were several clues in the 99% Invisible piece that, if followed beyond the episode, would suggest at least some casual tie-in. I might follow-up on those clues in a later episode, but would be happy to share them with you here (or in a less public forum) if you would are curious.
In the meantime, thanks for listening and sharing! I appreciate your continued insights. They keep me honest!
-Jim