It’s not just self-driving or any of the other “DDIY (don’t do it yourself) tech that isn’t ready for primetime.
It’s humans.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system was one of the probable causes of a fatal 2018 crash into a concrete barrier. In addition, the safety board said the driver was playing a mobile game while using Autopilot before the crash, and investigators also determined he was overly confident in Autopilot’s capabilities.
“Overly confident,” huh. Well, duh.
Who ever heard of a human who wasn’t, at the least, confident that the tech they spent their money, especially expensive tech, wouldn’t do what they expected.
“In this crash we saw an over-reliance on technology, we saw distraction, we saw a lack of policy prohibiting cell phone use while driving, and we saw infrastructure failures, which, when combined, led to this tragic loss,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said at the end of the hearing on Tuesday. “We urge Tesla to continue to work on improving their Autopilot technology and for NHTSA to fulfill its oversight responsibility to ensure that corrective action is taken where necessary. It’s time to stop enabling drivers in any partially automated vehicle to pretend that they have driverless cars.”
Even driverless cars tell drivers to stay alert, as do “Autopilot.”
Of course, doctors have been telling people to eat more veggies for decades and you know how well that’s worked.
Say the word “auto” to anyone and they will hear “you don’t have to do anything, X does it for you.”
A recent article in Wired focused on the industry claim, amplified by the media, that driverless cars will be a boon to seniors — not that any of them were asked.
Not only are the claims that these systems might help older people overblown, they’re also made, for the most part, without including those older people in studies of the effects of the technology.
What a joke. If you claimed to design a better surfboard, but had never surfed, people would be more than skeptical.
This is a common cycle in technology, more broadly. Over and over again, designers claim their products will be great for an aging population without actually including that population in the conversation. “I think there’s been a lot of new technologies being marketed toward older adults but that haven’t necessarily been designed for them, with their capabilities in mind,” Wendy Rogers, a professor at the University of Illinois, told me for an episode of my podcast Flash Forward. (…)
In many cases, such products were designed by younger people with little sense of what seniors actually need. “So, the buttons are small, the voice quality is not easy to hear, the number of steps required to set it up to get it to do what you want to do is complicated,” Rogers told me. “There are a lot of apps out there, things that are supposed to support pain management, for example, and they’re just not designed well for older adults.”
One of the best examples of bad design is found in most alarms, such as smoke alarms and carbon monoxide monitors. They all have one thing in common, the sound they emit is usually high-pitched, which is pretty useless, since high frequencies are the first to go; not just in old people, but in middle age and younger.
A friend in the geriatric field told me that nursing homes and assisted living facilities often have trainees smear a light coating of Vaseline on their glasses. Functioning all day (or longer) gives them a much better understanding of what many seniors deal with all the time.
You would think companies would be more interested in the reactions of their target market, but when that market is seniors, companies see no need to ask, since they know best — especially true when technology is involved.
There seems to be an assumption, conscious or not, that as joints stiffen brains do, too. And I’m sorry to say it is much worse in younger males.
And younger males are the guys who get funded first.
But contrary to tech lore, data isn’t black and white. It can be massaged and manipulated to support or contradict opposite sides of the same argument.
Take self-driving cars. Google claims the data proves them safer than human drivers.
But is that what the data really shows or is it being stage-managed?
“You can’t just extrapolate Google cars driving ~1.5 million miles under specific conditions (weather, topology, construction, traffic, accidents around it, etc.) to usurping the ~3 trillion miles/year under all conditions in the US. 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles is the current non-self-driving numbers.
2014 had ~30k fatal crashes out of the 3 trillion miles traveled. We have to understand not how those crashes happened, but what makes the vast majority of them not happen. Luck is not a contributor, expertise is. Understanding human expertise is the key, not human frailty.”
Tech claims that security isn’t that big a problem and certainly not one that requires statutory approaches or regulation.
Two years ago Eddie Schwartz, vice president of global security solutions for Verizon’s enterprise subsidiary, said that self-driving cars will prove an irresistible target for hackers if they ever hit the roads.
Change if to when. Of course they’re irresistible; hacking and controlling a real car on a real road, with the potential of doing real damage, would be catnip to a large number of naïve kids (to prove they can), not to mention angry adults (getting even) and terrorists (creating chaos).
The cars aren’t yet able to handle bad weather, including standing water, drizzling rain, sudden downpours and snow, let alone police instructions (…) “I am decidedly less optimistic about what I perceive to be a rush to field systems that are absolutely not ready for widespread deployment, and certainly not ready for humans to be completely taken out of the driver’s seat.”
And now being added to the thrills and threats of hackable cars comes Otto — an affordable $30K (cheap when you consider the cost of a new rig) retrofit to make big rigs self driving.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
