Waiting For ALV In America

essay

No, not Alvin America. I have no idea who that is and I'm certainly not waiting for him.

Long before automatic braking, self-parking or even night-sensing headlights I longed for the day when I could crawl into my vehicle, exhausted or distracted or even (heaven forbid!) inebriated, and have it drive safely home with no help from me other than giving it a destination. Oh sure, I could get home using public transportation... buses and trains and such, but they held all the cards; it was necessary to adhere to their pick-up locations and schedules and I had to remember not to drink my fare money. Taxis were an option, but usually only for the more well-to-do -- since daily use of taxis, multiple times a day, can be prohibitively expensive for a middle-class commuter.

No, an Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) promises so much more than public transportation ever could, and in a country which loves its private vehicles an auto-drive feature is immensely appealing. Parents can program it to bring their kids to school, violin practice or scout meetings safely and with no distractions. People with diminished capacities like those taking strong medicine, the handicapped or the aged can go anywhere they desire with little restriction. The vehicle can become a family taxi, dropping off and picking up each member according to their schedules, reducing overall vehicle load on the roadways. Computerized sensing systems don't ever get tired, have a complete view of the road and completely eliminates accidents (that it might cause)... as well as reacting thousands or millions of times faster in emergencies than humans can.

Of course, it's not all borscht and sardines. There's an enormous down side-- just ask bus, train and cab companies and they'll bend your ear on the subject for hours. Apparently, ALVs represent the single most destructive force to the public transportation game since the horseless carriage. They lament the inevitable loss of revenue coming from a true private livery service: Each person with an ALV need never call a cab again; punch a quick code into your smartphone and the ALV is on its driverless way to come get you.

Large blocks of downtown city land now taken up by pricy parking lots, some charging in excess of $25 a day per space, will be threatened with bankruptcy as ALVs take their passengers to work and then park back at home or on the street in a quiet neighborhood; or continue on to serve other family members, eliminating the need for nearby parking.

What about the larger picture? Each of those threatened industries connect to a dozen other businesses, each of which would also be hurt by the change. Bus and taxi drivers would become superfluous, as would the mechanics who service the vehicles. The vehicles themselves would cease to be ordered as a huge industry dried up, also affecting automakers. The infrastructure of each would become largely redundant and useless. In short, they would go the route of the milkman or a diaper service

And I can assure you, they will not go quietly into that dark night.

Not while they still have the money for litigation and bribery. Not while their PACs in Washington can insure certain bills never make it to vote. And not as long as they can spread around a thick blanket of lies and fear and innuendo (and money) for the purpose of discrediting a fledgeling though inevitable modernization of society. Progress may march on... but not here, not as long as they can resist the change.

Still, it seems that there are still a few corporate entities on the planet which are both good and rich. Google, for one. They have spent the last few years tirelessly developing the software for a truly safe ALV and have been driving -- I mean, allowing the car to drive itself -- all over the California highway system. With at least two people in the vehicle at all times, one to monitor the software and the other to take over in case of emergencies, Google has wisely not attracted any more attention about the program than the vehicle itself did, an otherwise nondescript sedan sporting a rooftop of bulky and awkward sensing equipment. It seems the bugs have been worked out, too... after over 140,000 miles each of unaided road sharing the only incident to speak of was a mild fender-bender... caused by the vehicle behind the ALV, at a red light.

That doesn't stop detractors from protesting wildly, spreading unsubstantiated fears of 'robot cars gone wild', painting blood-red pictures of ALVs rising up on their rear wheels, sprouting AK-47's from hidden recesses, peppering the highway with bullets in a gasoline-fueled rage over the dehumanizing treatment they receive by 'fleshies'.

Not gonna happen.

Terminator and Transformer movies aside, these vehicles are about as aware of you as an Epilady is of the leg it riddles with a thousand points of pain. It does a job like a toaster, nothing more. And the single-minded focus with which ALVs perform their assigned duty would be admirable... if there were a way for the machine to do anything else but their programming... it's all they can do, as immutable to change as gravity. If ALV injuries were to happen at some point, you can be damned certain it would be due to careless software design by a human developer, or abysmal treatment of the vehicle itself, allowing its sensors to become obstructed or otherwise damaged... which would again be caused by careless humans, not machinery.

In other words, fear and paranoia of ALVs are wasted emotions, like being scared of a windowpane because you once got cut by glass. Hear what logical-minded science investigators have to say about them:

Google's Self-Driving Cars

3/7/2011

'The Week' online magazine

Google showed off its cutting-edge, self-driving cars to a select group of attendees and journalists at this weekend's Technology Entertainment Design conference, which unites many of the world's leading innovators. On a closed course in Long Beach, Calif., the driverless vehicles, which Google has been developing for years, speedily maneuvered around traffic cones, occasionally screeching as they made tight turns. Google hopes the cars' reliability — each one has traveled 140,000 miles without an accident — will eventually help to reduce the 37,000 road deaths in the United States each year.

The reaction: "We need them, and people want them," says Sebastien Thrun, the project's chief engineer, as quoted by CBS News. Many "people who can't drive today, like blind people or aging people, should be able to drive," and with these cars, they could. But don't hold your breath, says Aaron Saenz at Singularity Hub. Yes, there is "awesome engineering" on display here, but "I still haven't seen anything that lets me believe that the social and legal barriers opposing robot automobiles are falling."

Have they been a success so far?

In tests with a human behind the steering wheel (ready to take over at any time) the seven Google cars — six Priuses and an Audi TT — have driven "more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control." According to Google, the cars have maneuvered "down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe." In all that time, the only accident that occurred came "when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light."

Who's behind the project?

Google recruited engineers from "a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government" and known as the DARPA challenge. Sebastian Thrun, the main "brainpower" behind the robot cars, is a Stanford professor and Google engineer who helped win the second iteration of DARPA — a "$2 million Pentagon prize for driving autonomously over 132 miles in the desert."

What benefits might robot cars bring?

Google engineers are evangelists when it comes to road safety, claiming that robot cars could greatly reduce the 37,000 road deaths in the United States each year. Robots, according to the engineers, "react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated." Beyond that, "the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together."

When will they hit the mainstream?

Human-free cars are a long way from becoming a regular sight — "even the most optimistic predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away."

"Sensors that read the road more intricately and keep you safely in your lane aren’t far off, and there’s been talk of installing a computer sensor underneath especially congested highways to better regulate traffic flow during rush hours. In other words, the experience of driving your car is slowly but surely beginning to mimic the experience of being a passenger on a train."

Witness the latest technology from Volvo: Automatic braking to prevent collisions. New Volvos will be outfitted with computerized sensors that detect when pedestrian or other obstacles draw near, and automatically hit the brakes for you. Volvo’s new Vision Statement is that “By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.”

Damned impressive stuff... well, except for the detractors. Whom, as you might have guessed, are made up of mass transit authorities and mouthpieces, their representatives in congress, and a scattering of paranoids and Luddites. Each with their own reason for killing these cars, as a group they have no problem squelching the forward progression of humanity as a whole. I'll ignore their protests, as my father did when they put the hate on cell phones and as my grandfather did when they sounded out against microwave ovens... and as my great-grandfather did when these same types of people rallied to kill the horseless carriage. They can squeal like a rusty wheel begging for oil, but they have trouble understanding that they will not get the oil... in the long run they will only get replaced.

And that's what needs to happen to every car on the road today-- get replaced. Or at least modified, because having a human driver among a freeway full of ALVs would be like having a mule in a race of stallions, and would surely muck up the works. On the city streets however, ALVs would be meek creatures, designed to behave within the constraints of all local road regulations, Caution and Care (its two digital angels) watching at all times, earning electronic kudos for being the most defensive of drivers. A frisbee rolling out from between two cars would be enough to warrant a slowdown, as the software reacts to the directive 'where toys go, children are never far behind'.

Let's take it one dimension further. If I live in a mountainous area and pass by a lot of cliffs, I would love a car which sees the falling rock overhead that I might miss and calculates a safe driving trajectory to avoid contact. The same would go for avalanches hurling tons of snow, hurricanes and tornadoes filling the air with debris, the frozen chunk of washroom ice dropping out of that 747... or facing down 'snowball alley' near the grade school. Well, maybe not the last one. Though these dangers are rare, how wonderful it would be to have an electronic bodyguard tirelessly protecting us from peril in any direction!

For the time being, there are a lot of people to convince. If ALV's are to find their way smoothly into today's traffic, the doubters must believe beyond all suspicion in the superiority of the system, and to that end I have a suggestion.

The world's sexiest car event.

I'm not kidding! Program 20 or more ALVs to follow a rough and twisted course at high speed to its own unique destination within an arena, making sure that the courses intersect hundreds of times. This would be an impossible task for even highly experienced race car drivers and dozens of accidents would occur. ALVs, however, would race towards their inevitable doom fearlessly... but thanks to their collision-avoidance abilities, no car would touch another (although they would be breathtakingly close!), even at double the speed of the human drivers! A little nudge here, a touch of gas there, tap twice on the brakes and every ALV makes its goal, at the same time, not a ding in the process! Then do it again, using audience input to create new courses, to see if it would be possible to make the vehicles crash. It wouldn't be.

Take this event to racetracks around the country and afterwards, make sure there are plenty of applications at all the exits for ownership of an ALV. My guess? 20 million sales nationwide, easy. And with all its advantages, there won't be a pre-ALV car on the road in 10 years.

Then all we need to do is find work for all the cab and bus drivers.

Copyright 2011 Bruce Ian Friedman