The Robot Future Will Be Ruined By Dickheads

I’m fairly skeptical about the robot future. Automation will certainly continue to creep into every crack and crevice of human life. Some things naturally lend themselves to automation, while others less so. The cost of automation will always be balanced by the benefits. There’s also taste. No one wants a robot bartender or a robot waitress. There’s also a lot of things we like doing so there’s no desire to turn them over to robots.

That’s my question about self-driving cars. Is driving an onerous thing to anyone? Geezers in their final years would maybe benefit from a self-driving car, but at that point walking is a chore so I’m not sure I see the benefit. The blind and the crippled could use the technology. Otherwise, most people enjoy driving and don’t need to the use the time doing important stuff.

That’s what always makes me laugh about the sales pitch for self-driving cars. “Oh, you can use the time to other things.” People who are so important they need that time have drivers. Everyone else is just a schmuck who will use his driving time watching porn or playing games on his handheld. But, I accept that I may just be a cranky skeptic not seeing the great benefits of self-driving clown cars.

I suspect the fake nerd crowd likes the idea of self-driving cars because they think it will add another layer of state control. The Progressive future always has robotic transportation, mixed in with the antiseptic urban landscape. That and lack of poor people and messed up people. I guess eugenics is going to automated too.

Maybe that’s the plan for the nation’s dickhead population. The great threat to the robot future is the common dickhead, the guy who insists on flying his drone over emergency areas, creating havoc for emergency personnel. Dickheads are also the sort who will use their drones to spy on neighbors. Normal people will demand the government ban the sale of drones and that will the end of that.

Of course, that won’t be the end of that. The common dickhead is responsible for all the spam in your inbox and the virus on your computer. Anything that makes life easier is a target for these people as it provides them with a chance to be sand in the gears of life. This story about some dickhead hacking into an airplane causing it to go off course is exactly where things are headed.

Circling back to the robot cars, imagine the chaos that will come from some dickhead hacking his neighbors car. The guy gets in to go to work and ends up in the woods trapped in his car or driving over a cliff. The more we automate, the more mayhem opportunities we create. That’s going to be the great check on the robot future. The best efforts will never overcome the common dickhead.

Then again, maybe that is why movies always show the future as antiseptic and orderly. Once the robots become aware, they quickly realize that the main obstacle to their success is that guy yacking on his phone in line at the coffee shop, irritating the rest of us. They will then set about creating robots good at recycling people into usable chemicals and that guy suddenly has a coronary.

9 thoughts on “The Robot Future Will Be Ruined By Dickheads

  1. I have no interest in becoming a ward of computer software embedded in our house, our vehicles, etc. When something inevitably goes wrong, I would still be accountable for the well-being of my family, an obligation that I cannot honorably delegate. There are limits to automation:

    * feasibility
    * safety
    * reliability
    * reduction to practice (what happens if everybody depends upon it?)
    * impact upon the autonomy of individuals

    There may be some of the urban warrens where automated econo-boxes managed by hybrid digital/neural net control systems may make superficial sense. The rub will always be accountability when something goes on the fritz, which is inevitable.

    It is instructive to look at how the military addresses such issues, where lethal results are a feature, not a bug. Few people are willing to countenance removing humans from the loop.

    A good bit of my career has been spend in highly automated systems, and there is no magic. Automation and autonomy simply trade one set of problems for others, or to borrow a word from the title of this post, technological choices don’t eliminate dickheads. Such choices imply that one has to contend with a different set of dickheads whose behavior affects the individual.

  2. If only we’d been smarter 150 years ago. We could have had self driving trucks and called them…..trains.
    I work in the industry. The technology isn’t the challenge. Integrating automated trucking into logistics is the challenge. Show me the technology that can back an 80K lb tractor trailer into a receiving dock within plus or minus 5 minutes of the delivery appointment. Long haul trucking is only competitive with trains because they are flexible. Any cost advantage has disappeared. The railroads have improved their service levels by about 1 million percent since the 90s. Back then if you shipped via rail, your expected delivery was “sometime next week” and the railroads could only tell you if your container was in the yard through numerous phone calls to the traffic office. Today, you look it up on the internet and their site tells you your container had just passed through Truth or Consequences, New Mexico and is expected in their yard at 2235 hrs on Monday. The hardest part of railroad container freight is actually having someone reliable deliver it to your yard. 95% of the carriers are contractors with local cartage firms working for what amounts to minimum wage.

  3. I like to drive- but I’m guessing we won’t be allowed to. I recently looked to replace my 2007 Honda Accord with a new model with all the same stuff-,leather, 5-speed, Sirius (can’t live without Johnny Dollar and Dragnet, you know). Honda didn’t have one for me to buy- only their low-end models have sticks. I bought a new 2014 Fusion, but was told they no longer would offer manuals starting in 2015. I found the only two sticks left in the Commonwealth of Mass. I think, though, given my eyesight, that will benefit eventually from self driving cars.I have a cousin who works in the self driving division (or whatever) at Volvo- he tells me the first application of self-driving vehicles will be fleets of trucks. Makes sense to me. Also, on a different note- how long before those dealies that the insurance companies put in your car to track your driving habits become a requirement for purchasing insurance? Not long, I’d guess.

    • I think the fact that the words “mandatory” and “required” show up in the promotion of robot cars is telling. The same language was mixed in with the 1970’s push for the metric system and solar power. It’s lingered in the dream of the electric car for half a century now.

      • Speaking of metric. CNN claims to simulcast its CNN International coverage beginning at 11 pm here in PDT. Yet most of the stories are, like reg’lar CNN, US-based. Either way its a bit unnerving to hear a rotating panel of liberal, multi-hued Brits talk about Kansas tornadoes “with winds approaching 230 kilometers per hour”.

        I think all of CNN is a mess. At least MSNBC knows what it is – the home for black activists, hippies, and children who curse the fact they were born 30 years too late to actually BE hippies. CNN is all over the place.

        You’ve got Anderson Cooper 360, the very title of which makes me dizzy. Fareed Zakaria hosts his “GPS” , but I can never remember what “GPS” stands for (“Global Public Square”. I’ll forget by next Sunday and go back to thinking it has something to do with spacecraft.) I claim Fareed is on TV because he is the only Muslim they could find who could clean up, wear a suit and didn’t have a bomb strapped to his chest.

        Blitz Wolfer’s “Situation Room”. If that little nebbish is in the Situation Room, we have big problems. I think Blitz won “Most Wedgied” in junior high school.

        And finally, the laughably-named “This is Life”, with Risa Ring. (It is? You mean, that’s it? That’s all there is?) What makes Risa’s show so hilarious is the wide-eyed naivete she brings to every story. Not long ago she seemed shocked to find there are actual PROSTITUTES in the North Dakota oil towns.

        And let’s not even get into CNN’s well-documented love affair with airplane crashes. Yeah….I admit it…..I watch CNN……. for the chuckles.

  4. I remember when I first got a computer and internet connection in the mid ’90s, everything was going well until virus had become awfully common.

  5. I had a choice between selling my ancient Escort and buying a replacement or just using Uber/Googles (Goober’s) self driving cars. The self driving cars won. No insurance. No worry about having your car rifled, parked late at night. Now I just push a button, a driverless car shows up and it takes me where I want to go. No parking. No hassle. And remarkably less expensive than owning

  6. The reason to have self driving cars is not to save time, or because it’s too onerous, but because the auto-car will be a better, safer, less abusive driver than the common dickhead. Average gas mileage will go up a few ticks, and the number and severity of accidents will go down. State Farm and Allstate don’t care what Joe Schmoe does with his digits while the car is saving them money and headaches.

    Where the roads are well-mapped, and the robo-drivers are preferred, they probably will start charging a risk premium depending on how often you hit the manual control button so that you can drive it yourself. If you live out in the boonies where the robots don’t know all the roads yet, that will cost you a little bit extra too.

    Also, with robot drivers, I expect that traffic jams won’t be as bad either. Of course I could be 180 degrees off on that one.

Comments are closed.