The Quiet Road

Mass adoption of autonomous / self-driving cars will not happen in western society. BOOM! There I said it.

Now, this is just a prediction based on personal opinions about human nature / psychology, culture, law and attitudes. There’s no hard evidence behind it and I’m not pointing to a graph and trying to explain why these particular values mean Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) contravene the basic laws of physics dammit!

This is more about the technology succumbing to a confluence of sociopolitical impediments rather than having one single fatal flaw, or because of some technological impossibility. Also, I’m not for a moment suggesting that limited adoption of AVs won’t happen (it already has). Expect the Planned City in China that only has AVs, or the Palo Alto gated community with a fleet of corporate-sponsored AVs. I could also envision AVs being more widespread in a world without mass personal car ownership… but by that stage we’re no longer talking about the same “western society” that I see through my window every day.

The thing that fascinates me most though… is that we suddenly have a classic philosophical thought experiment (The Trolley Problem) bursting out of the realm of the hypothetical and getting right up in the faces of engineers. As someone who has been both an engineer and a philosopher, this makes me grin.

For those unfamiliar with the Trolley problem; you can go and read all about its history as a thought experiment on wikipedia. I’m going to explain it here though — but specifically in terms of how it relates to AVs.

So I got to imagining the guy working at the lab developing the Morality Chip. I bet they don’t call it that of course… that would really put the willies up Joseph Q. Public. But that’s what it is (yes yes, it’s actually software not “a chip”… but for dramatic purposes and ease of visualisation I’m imagining it as a discrete hard-coded “Morality Core” in every AI-enabled machine… an Asimovian safeguard against hacking). And whoever is working on that thing is spending their days asking some really weird questions… many of which centre on how many pedestrians your life is worth. Oh man, I’d love to be programming that thing. What strange afternoons they must be.

Clearly AVs will be programmed to take some sort of limited evasive action if they detect an imminent collision. And as soon as that evasive action involves more than slamming on the brakes (and even then, there are hypotheticals involving the relative speeds of the cars behind you); as soon as it involves altering direction as an emergency maneuver… we have entered a very weird moral universe.

It’s weird partly because it’s only inhabited by AIs.

OK. Maybe Formula 1 drivers. Maybe. But mostly AIs.

Here’s the scenario… you or I are driving along at a safe 50kph in a 60kph zone. Without warning, the truck in the oncoming lane (which is travelling too fast to begin with) has a tyre failure and suddenly barrels right towards us.

At that moment, you or I react based on a tiny number of urgent bits of information. Raw survival instinct, sheer panic and the most godalmighty injection of adrenalin instruct our arms to jerk the wheel towards whatever seems like the safest direction for us (and our passengers) at that moment.

Perhaps the pedestrian we kill continues to haunt our conscience forever. Perhaps their family hates and blames us. But if so, it’ll be completely irrational. The expectation that any human being has moral agency in that overwhelming fraction of a second; that terrifying moment during which their life has suddenly come under threat; a situation about which they possess incomplete information and literally not enough time to rationally consider options. Whatever emotions may swirl around afterwards, the law would not hold us accountable. And no rational person would.

But that all changes when the decision to swerve into the pedestrian is taken by a processor quick enough to actually weigh up the options. We inject morality into the moment. A situation that was previously just the chaotic outcome of uncontrolled physics and neurochemistry turns into The Trolley Problem. But no longer as a thought-experiment. Now it’s a design decision. And different people… different numbers of people are really going to die based on how our engineers are coping with The Trolley Problem.

The AV doesn’t jerk the wheel and mount the pavement out of sheer panic… it notes the trajectory of the truck, notes its own trajectory and it calculates that killing the pedestrian is the only guaranteed way to prevent a collision. Once it’s made that calculation… what do we — sitting in a quiet lab as the clock slowly ticks towards lunch — what do we tell the car to do?

Add some sauce to the dish… the car is self-aware enough to know how many occupants it has.

if( count($passengers) >= count($pedestrians_on_trajectory) ) {
    execute_trajectory_change( 'fast' );
} else {
    spotify( 'REM_EndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt' );
}

Will we see industry standardisation? Or will Mercedes place a higher value on driver life than BMW? Will that become a selling point? Will we have social oneupmanship, with some looking down their noses at people in non-Pedestrian Parity Approved brands? Will the cycling lobby demand a 1.1x multiplier to compensate for the additional speed above walking pace they are travelling? Strange afternoons.

Ford Motors
Guaranteed to value your life at the Texas legal maximum of 2.3 pedestrians!

With different implementations of the same technology there’s simply no way to know whether AVs from different developers are making the same decisions… whether they place the same relative values on human lives. But unlike that split-second monkey-brain decision we make under the most severe pressure we’re ever likely to encounter; this is very definitely a moral question. Deliberate decisions are being made. Imagine the scandal when they unearth the subfunction…

if( in_array( $passenger_nationality, 'french' ) {
    $num_passengers = $num_passengers - 1;
}


PS: I’m not suggesting that The Trolley Problem is going to sink AVs. As I say; the problem with this technology is more about — what I perceive as — a large number of different legal, moral, cultural and technological obstacles which are likely to combine to prove insurmountable in practice. This is just one of them. That said, the look on the face of the first guy whose car drives him off a cliff rather than hitting a couple of kids… the look on his face when his car actively prevents his monkey-brain-driven attempts to save himself… if that guy is me, I hope I have the last-minute presence of mind to glance in the mirror and take solace in how funny it all is.

PPS: Needless to say; this is all a very simplified stating of the problem facing the engineers. Once you throw in probability? Oh man, then you enter a world of weirdness. If “Evasive Maneuver 1” has a 40% chance of avoiding impact with the truck but is 70% likely to kill 2 pedestrians, does “Evasive Maneuver 2″ trump it? Despite being 99% certain to kill at least 1 pedestrian it has a 75% chance of avoiding a collision…”

Am I the only one who experiences an involuntary shudder when I try to picture the activities of a wealthy hunting-party in modern Iraq?

26 members of hunting party kidnapped in Iraq in 2015 freed https://t.co/eEgoX1lP5w

— TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) 21 April 2017

Perhaps I’m being cynical, but a hunting expedition in a country in the grip of an active armed insurrection — arguably in a state of civil war — seems like precisely the sort of trip you might take if you were looking to stray way beyond the normal bounds of acceptable behaviour.

It won’t be featured in the public-facing marketing bumpf, but I would expect these trips to kick off with a few days of massacring local and imported exotic animals with increasingly powerful ordnance before culminating in a two day hunt where the prey is the most cunning animal of them all…

… man!

Part of you knows it’s true.

“Today I Thunk”… kind of like “Thought For Today” but with less gravitas.

Scanning through my twitter feed this morning I encountered not one, not two, but three separate tweets insisting (using clever little analogies) that Apple Mac Computers are better than Windows Computers. “My computer is better than yours!” they wailed (I’ve always felt Mac users protest a little too much, to be honest, but that’s another discussion).

Are these people children? Or have they reached adulthood without managing to grasp the notion of personal preference? For the vast majority of people, they are most comfortable using whatever computer they first spent time with. Mac? Windows? It makes no difference.

I can do literally everything (I need to do) on a Windows system that an Apple user could do on their Mac. More than that, years of use have made me comfortable with Windows and not with Macs, so if you were to ask me to do the same thing on a Mac I would take twice as long because I’d be struggling with a system I’m unfamiliar with. But I’m pretty sure I could do anything I need to do on a PC in roughly the same time as someone familiar with Macs could do it on their system.

The need of some people to tell the world how much better their computer is to your computer or my computer is a need rooted in playground insecurity. It’s weird, it’s adolescent and people should really get the hell over it. I use Windows because I’ve used Windows for 20 years now. It is the best system for me. When I hear someone tell me that actually their system is better, I picture that person running up to a concert pianist and insisting that the guitar is a better instrument for making music.

Seriously, that’s how much sense you’re making with this weird computer one-upmanship you’ve got yourself involved in. Put an end to it now and embrace the adult realisation that other people don’t feel exactly the same about everything as you do. Sheesh.

There was a discussion between a news anchor and some “expert” pundit on Fox News in the immediate aftermath of the horrific tragedy in Norway, in which 76 people are known to have been murdered. The “expert” was pontificating on the reasons why Norway might be the target of an Al Qaeda terror attack. They’re members of NATO, he pointed out. They recently arrested an Islamist cleric, he pointed out. In the eyes of Muslim fanatics, Norway might share the stigma of the Danish cartoon incident, he suggested. The news anchor interjected… “it has been suggested that the perpetrator of these acts is actually a native Norwegian with a right-wing islamophobic agenda…” To which point the “expert” responded curtly, “I don’t think we should speculate about these things until we have all the facts!”

However much you or I may hate to perpetuate stereotypes, Fox News seems to have no problem promoting the idea that “Americans don’t do irony”.

But sadly, it wasn’t just the rabid right who immediately started to shriek “Muslims!” as soon as the news of a bomb in Oslo hit the airwaves. Peter Beaumont, a columnist with The Guardian, was quick off the mark with his entirely inaccurate and unjustifiable speculation. In an article – Oslo bomb: suspicion falls on Islamist militants – that has since been removed from the website (though is still currently available thanks to Google cache) Beaumont kicks off with the gloriously inept intro…

Oslo police have confirmed the source of the blast that damaged the prime minister’s offices in Oslo was a bomb. The question now is who is likely to be behind it.

The most obvious conclusion would be a jihadist group.

Really Peter? And why’s that exactly?

Is it because most acts of terrorism in Europe are carried out by jihadist groups? Because actually, between 2006 and 2009 (the most recent years for which we have accessible data) roughly 0.4% of incidents categorised as “terrorism” in Europe were carried out by groups with a known Islamist agenda. Yup, that’s a staggering 99.6% of recent terrorist acts carried out by non-jihadist groups. So why the freaking hell is it “the most obvious conclusion” that a jihadist group bombed Oslo?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that Peter Beaumont was alone in coming to that “obvious” (and utterly wrong) conclusion. Merely that he – like a huge number of people out there – have bought into a media narrative that is dangerously flawed and borderline racist. Though of course, given that Beaumont’s article was actually a part of that ongoing narrative, further reinforcing and extending it, he does warrant a tad more criticism than most of the people who have succumbed to the notion that Islam is somehow uniquely linked with terrorism.

In the hastily rewritten article that replaced the “suspicion falls on Islamist militants” one, Beaumont shamelessly spends much of his time highlighting the (ultra-tenuous) reasons why it was understandable for people to leap to the jihadist conclusion without ever referring to his own culpability in this bandwagon jumping.

The most tempting and immediate conclusion was that it would be a jihadist group, as the style of the Oslo attack bore strong similarities to other earlier attacks in Europe and elsewhere.

Really? Which ones? How many jihadist carbombs have there been in Europe? How many jihadist groups have sent a lone assassin to gun down members of a leftwing political youth movement in Europe? I’m not saying these things have not happened (though I personally don’t recall that being the modus operandus of Europe-based Islamist terrorism) but the fact of the matter is that “the style of the Oslo attacks” bears at least as much a similarity to the 99.6% of terrorist acts in Europe that were not carried out by Islamists. So again, why make that connection?

I am not downplaying acts of violence perpetrated by those with an Islamist agenda. I’m not downplaying any acts of violence at all. Being murdered by an Islamist suicide-bomber on the London tube is no more or less tragic than being murdered by an Islamophobic gun-man on a Norwegian island. Neither victim is less dead. And neither perpetrator is less unhinged or less monstrous.

What I am doing, however, is condemning a partly unconscious, partly conscious media narrative that appears to suggest that terrorism is somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary, synonymous with Islamist extremism. A media narrative that insists the statistically less likely conclusion is the “obvious” one. A media narrative that, by virtue of its focus on jihadist groups despite their relative lack of activity in Europe, is guilty of forwarding a deceptive – and racist – agenda.

Terrorism Vs. Extremism

The other thing I want to address here is the weird way in which the language of (much of) the media switched from “possible Islamist terrorism” to “right-wing extremism“. A jihadist terrorist is an extremist . A Norwegian terrorist is an extremist. When an Islamist group or individual is involved, it’s “terrorism”, and there’s a subtle unspoken sense in which all of Islam – every Muslim – must shoulder some of the responsibility. But when the perpetrator is a Norwegian right-winger, then he’s a “lone extremist”. Possibly mentally ill.

The language we use is part of that. The word “terrorism” doesn’t distance the perpetrators from the mainstream population to quite the same extent as the word “extremism” does. It’s subtle. And I’m fully prepared to believe that the journalists and editors who create this obscene media narrative are largely unconscious of it. But that doesn’t excuse it. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should allow it to go unchallenged. And if we define Anders Behring Breivik as somehow “unhinged” or “mentally ill”, then the same applies to the suicide bombers who blew themselves up in London, or the hijackers who crashed airliners into American buildings.

Which is definitely not to say that I am defining anyone here as “mentally ill”. In fact, briefly donning my psychoanalyst hat, I have to say that I’m increasingly dissatisfied with the medical metaphor of psychology. However, I am calling for consistency in the media when it covers mass murder. Consistency, perspective and a thorough appreciation of the facts. As opposed to the current gung-ho willingness to perpetuate a narrative that is clearly at odds with reality.

Posting here has been light recently for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the main one is the oppressive wave of misanthropy which has crashed down upon me in recent months. From a purely personal perspective, my life is pretty damn good. But as soon as I cast my eye over world events in search of something to write about, I feel my blood pressure rise and a powerful combination of despair and rage grips me. What starts out as an attempt to analyse the recent European economic negotiations collapses – with alarming speed – into an expletive-ridden rant about “the idiots” making “disastrous ideologically driven decisions about matters they don’t understand… decisions that will cause terrible suffering on an unprecedented scale”. And not only that, pretty soon I’m ranting about “the even bigger idiots who elected this bunch of terminal cretins!”

See what I mean about the misanthropy?

And yes, there’ll be some wags out there who wonder “so how’s that any different from your usual stuff?” Well, the fact is, I like to think that even at my most hyperbolic, there’s a method to my madness… a point to be made, even if it only barely emerges from the raving lunacy. Recently though, the red mist has been descending and obscuring any sensible position I might wish to convey. And while I’m a great believer in free speech, I’m also a believer in the maxim that if you have nothing worth saying, then at least have the good sense to keep your mouth shut.

See, contrary to appearances, I don’t like being the angry dude muttering “fricking idiots!” whenever a news or current affairs programme comes on TV. I don’t like that my first reaction to reading most news stories on the web is to shake my head, sigh and wonder audibly why mainstream journalism has become little more than a bunch of fools recycling press releases and parroting the craven ideology of the global establishment. I don’t like being constantly reminded of the fact that politics has become the nigh-exclusive preserve of gombeens and charlatans. And I definitely don’t like the uncomfortable sensation of rage rising within me when I reflect on the fact that this overall state of affairs is calmly accepted by the population at large (hell, more than just “accepted”… read the comments thread beneath almost any web article and it quickly becomes apparent that this overall state of affairs is positively embraced by the population at large).

However, it struck me today that none of this was likely to change any time soon. So my choices were threefold… I could give up this blog completely; I could content myself with posting the occasional music video, movie review or funny photo of a kitten; or I could embrace the misanthropic rant as an essential facet of any remotely aware person’s blog.

Eventually I sighed, muttered “bloody people!” and chose the third of those options.

That said, I’m going to try to overcome this ire. For some, anger is an energy. For me, it tends to get in the way. Even when it’s entirely justified. Which – as even the briefest of glances around the world will demonstrate – is most certainly the case.

Now, I’m away in Serbia for a few days. I’m going to try and use the time to decompress a little. To mellow. And hopefully I’ll be a little more productive upon my return. For now though, I have a couple of short pieces to get off my chest…