This is darkly amusing, in a Terry Gilliam Brazil kinda way:
“There is so much cognition that you need here,” Sierhuis says. The driver—or the car—has to interpret the placement of the cones and the behavior of the human worker to understand that in this case, it’s OK to drive through a red light on the wrong side of the road. “This is not gonna happen in the next five to ten years.”
It’s a stunning admission, in its way: Nissan’s R&D chief believes the truly driverless car—something many carmakers and tech giants have promised to deliver within five years or fewer—is an unreachable short-term goal. Reality: one; robots: zero. Even a system that could handle 99 percent of driving situations will cause trouble for the company trying to promote, and make money off, the technology. “We will always need the human in the loop,” Sierhuis says.
But Nissan has a solution: a call center with human meatbags ready to take command via remote control.
So, the car is going to find a situation it cannot handle and then, well, then this is supposed to happen:
- The car stops in a manner that doesn't get it rear-ended by an actual driver who expects the car in front of it to be able to handle basic driving tasks
- The "driver" of the car notices the car has stopped, probably after some sortof alarm that will in no way cause them to panic
- The "driver" will then call a call center for help
- The call center, the staffing of which will be unregulated and thus we just have to kinda hope that NIssan hires good people, pays them well, and hires enough of them, will have someone available to take the call
- The call center agent will use cameras and sensors to figure out what is going on
- The agent will then send the car instructions that should get it out of its mess
- Assuming the data connection works (a far from certain thing on my commute, for example) and the call center agent has correctly diagnosed the problem and have sent the proper instructions,the car should start moving. It might even happen before road rage sets in and the drivers behind you have carried your car off the road and ripped off its tires
This is a system that only an MBA could devise. It is going to be fucking hilarious if it ever makes it to the real world.
What is not funny is the fact that these cars and no where near ready for primetime, and yet there is already a push to spend public funds on these autonomous vehicles in the place of robust public transportation:
One would think that the local transit agency, Metro, would understand that access to the shiny new subway station would be important in fulfilling its utilitarian purpose. Unfortunately, sometimes one gets the impression that building shiny new rail lines and raising taxes, rather than mobility itself, is the agency’s main objective.
It should, therefore, be hardly surprising to anyone who is familiar with L.A. County’s Metro that a sales tax increase and extension which will likely be placed before the County’s voters this November. The sales tax measure would raise $130 billion over 50 years includes little or no money for public transportation based on new and evolving technologies like autonomous vehicles.
This is the danger of neo-liberalism and the denigration of the public sphere. Self driving cars in the near to midterm are self evidently bullshit. We are simply no where near being able to handle the myriad of edge cases that make up driving in the United States: weird roads, unclear signage, weather, construction, local driver habits, etc,etc,etc. But people believe the bullshit becasue it comes from the private sector and so is held out as the obvious solution to the imagined failures of the public sector.
And the private companies have all the incentive in the world to push for this money. It helps subsidize their research efforts and bonuses and they don't actually have to deliver to get paid. By introducing a profit motive into the public sphere, neoliberals have turned public utilities from being concerned with the public good to being concerned with private good. Solving public transport issues can be hard, but they are hard in part becasue we do not value public services and do not wish to pay for them. Becasue the left and the right have argued that public services are not as efficient, effective and frankly as acceptable as private services, we are collectively quite happy to pay for private bulshit in stead of public good.