Jaywalking, Manhattan-style, the 1970s. Transgressions against civic order this small were leavened by the five murders a day the NYPD had on its hands in those years. In midtown, even the well-dressed joined the scofflaws.
The phrase “jaywalker” doesn’t begin to describe the suicidally aggressive people ubiquitous in the streets of downtown LA at night in 2018.
They lollygag across thoroughfares with their back to oncoming traffic. They lurk between lanes in the unlit portion of the block, clad in dark clothing head to toe, arguing with ghosts. Dark shapes shamble through dark backgrounds, towing crazy, shadow dancing in headlights, drug sweaty, angling for insurance payouts.
My biggest fear as an Uber driver has never been robbery. It’s clipping one of these guys and spending the next year fighting in court. They’re a menace and the City has granted them dominion. It no longer issues tickets on Skid Row as the recipients would never pay them. Unpaid tickets add up to bench warrants. Bench warrants require jail time. And jail is the states most valuable commodity. It won’t part with a bunk for less than a felony. Besides, the whole business of citing unsafe behavior is now racist and classist. We can’t have that. Our feral metropolis is Woke.
Into this heedless breach approaches our near future of headless Ubers. The case for Autonomous Vehicles is offered as a fait accompli, first as freight, soon as rideshare. Ecce technocratic determinism!
Progress™ suffered its first casualty this week in Tempe, Arizona. The victim, a homeless woman pushing a bike laden with plastic bags across a boulevard at night. The car had a human backup driver ready to seize the wheel in just such an eventuality, but she was otherwise occupied. It was a well-lit suburban arterial with no traffic. The victim managed to find the shadowiest spot from which to emerge, then proceed heedlessly into the path of an oncoming Volvo going 40mph.
And so we have reached the Black Mirror inflection point.
1) Let us tell it like it is: the Safety Operator is merely a psychological prophylactic. Human backups won’t hit the brakes in a pinch any faster than the autonomous functions will. Their role is theatrical; to look purposeful and not text behind the wheel. Whoops.
2) the Futurists can site the slow/non reaction of the backup driver as confirmation of the supremacy of AV technology. Human negligence kills 30,000 people a year, sayeth the mantra. Refusal to adopt transformative change is unsound reasoning. Luddite.
3) the beta-testing cities are now playing the role teaching hospitals do in the medical profession: patients/riders as guinea pigs. To paraphrase Atul Gawande, without teaching hospitals there cannot be doctors, including himself. Would he allow his own children to be treated at one? Never.
4) In 2015, Arizona declared itself a regulatory haven in order to attract testing operations from self-driving car companies. Other states will follow suit, competing for the business.
You can see where this is going. Robotics will force moral dilemmas we are hard-pressed to answer individually, which renders them all the easier to ignore collectively. The auto fatality rate will become our moral calculus. As long as it ticks down each year, the “robotics is preferable to people” ethos will prevail.
Which means self-driving Ubers are headed for the Serengeti of Skid Row Los Angeles and an inevitable paso doble with its peripatetic residents. If you were looking for a natural laboratory for perfecting the kinks in the autonomous backup braking systems you couldn’t do better.
As a driver I’m not sure who to root for.
Always illuminating perspectives here. You’ve got a lot going on. Questions:
Are autonomous vehicles better, worse, or diffent than ATM machines, PayPal, Google Wallet, or Square that squeezed out human bank tellers and physical banks? iTunes and Netflix vs. record stores and video rental shops? Amazon vs. book stores (or any kind of store?) Google vs. reference librarians? Expedia vs. travel agents? Are these quantitative diffences or is it the relentless cumulative pressure on wages and employment that are the problem?
Whenever I’m in Japan I ask myself why there aren’t any homeless camps and beggars in Tokyo, Hiroshima, or Kyoto. Japan has roughly the same aggregate wealth of California and presumably the same naturally occurring percentages of people with mental health problems, bad luck, addiction, and “poor life choices.” Diffferent societies manage their affairs differently… Who exactly is to blame for the homeless population stumbling around the streets of LA?
AV are neither better or worse than other technical advances which make labor redundant. They are different in kind, though. Headless Ubers will enter our physical space and expand their footprint. Netflix and Amazon reduced the worldly footprint of the businesses they conquered. The two Californias you describe so well at Granola Shotgun will be throwing shoulders in the streets. Two liberal pieties: “no rules for the homeless”, and “we need Silicon Valley to pay our bills”, are now in dubious battle.
I actually feel really bad for the woman behind the wheel. Even if she had been paying attention, she wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and now she’s got to live with this.
Japan has ancestor worship, a conservative family structure, and in-laws in the house. And subsidized housing for senior citizens. Those that are alone die inside. Kodokushi.
You’re on to something here, Ben. I would wager many of the long-term homeless were raised in a deficit of family structure. They’ve been wards of the state, partially or entirely, for much of their lives.
1. I think the key point is that, as you point out, if you, an Uber driver, were in the same situation, the state would not be so understanding. In the state’s calculus, the Uber driver is replaceable–Uber, the corporation, is not.
2. My car, at least, has windows on all sides. I think that if you, an Uber driver, were in the same situation, the odds are that you would have noticed the homeless person by the side of the road, and mentally prepared for the possibility of what was to come. Odds are, you would have braked when she entered the road–there is a good chance that the outcome, in this case, would have been the same, but those are the odds. As you point out, you have trained yourself to identify this situation: on average, you will do a better job than an AV of not killing homeless people.
3. A few weeks ago (and a few days before I almost hit a homeless man who was crossing an on-ramp, where there was no crosswalk marked, because there was no sidewalk), a self-driving car almost hit my car, as I was on the freeway, driving home. I saw that car, two lanes to the left of mine, as it slowly and smoothly moved right into the lane next to mine, and then kept moving right. I honked (and braked hard), which apparently woke the driver up enough to intervene and keep his car from hitting mine.
Now I have been driving on freeways for several years, and I am a human, so I notice the telltale signs: the inattentive impatience of a driver who realizes, a little too late, that he really needs to be a few more lanes to the right–the quick shift to the right, the little body roll that prefigures it. None of these signs were present, because the self-driving car is not programmed to imitate them. The self-driving car moves into your lane with no fear, because it never sees you, and–more importantly–because it never occurs to it that switch two lanes at once is inherently risky.
But, even more importantly–as you point out–the self-driving car is not programmed to recognize human signs, and mechanically cannot be. Self-driving cars always look ahead, because there they have a chance of making sense of what they see. The AV couldn’t see the homeless woman until she was in front of it, by which time it was too late to do anything.
But now how is an AV going to (a) identify a pedestrian standing on a sidewalk and (b) determine that he is likely to jump out into the road? As you point out, this isn’t possible: the AV cannot see the pedestrian, and it cannot recognize his signs. So–we end up with the conflict you describe, where the corporation (driving Progress!) cannot honor the social contract imposed on drivers. In the end, the social contract for AVs will end up like the contract for public transportation: if you get in the way of a train, street car, or bus, and you get hit–it’s your fault.
“In the state’s calculus, the Uber driver is replaceable–Uber, the corporation, is not.”
I smell a Black Mirror episode, right here.
“I am a human, so I notice the telltale signs: the inattentive impatience of a driver who realizes, a little too late, that he really needs to be a few more lanes to the right–the quick shift to the right, the little body roll that prefigures it. None of these signs were present, because the self-driving car is not programmed to imitate them.”
Exactly. The “little body roll” is precisely the sort of organic data point humans pluck from their vision field and react to below the level of conscious decision making.
“In the end, the social contract for AVs will end up like the contract for public transportation: if you get in the way of a train, street car, or bus, and you get hit–it’s your fault.”
Forward pointing dashcams will be the AV defense line. Uber drivers don’t have them, placing them at a legal disadvantage.
Great comments, James!