This post is in a sense a twin of my last post. That post grew out of some featured articles on Autonomous Vehicles in a recent issue of "Science" magazine (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/01/robot-cars-now-new-and-improved.html for details). This post grows out of an item in the "Books" section of the same issue. The subject is Arthur C. Clarke. The occasion is a celebration of the fact that December 15, 2017 was the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
So who was Arthur C. Clarke and why does he deserve to have his centennial celebrated? He can best be described as a "futurist". Since he did most of his work before the word had been invented he went about it in the then usual way, he wrote Science Fiction. But like his contemporary Isaac Asimov he also wrote a considerable amount of nonfiction.
The article suggests rereading two of Clarke's works. Since I had both on my bookshelf I proceeded to do just that. They recommended "The Exploration of Space" as a nonfiction selection and "Childhood's End" as a fiction selection. They were both good choices. Before getting into them let me review his life focusing on his technical (i.e. factual) achievements. I will then move on to the two specific books and rope in some his other fictional work.
Clarke was born in the U. K. and died ninety years later in Sri Lanka after living there for many years with his "partner". Being openly gay was just not done at that time but he did not make a serious effort to hide his sexual orientation. He was always interested in technical subjects especially rockets and space flight. His first brush with cutting edge technology happened during World War II. He spent most of the war working on a classified project to provide ground assist to airplanes attempting to land in fog. This was a big problem during the war. The project didn't pan out at the time but influenced subsequent events.
Shortly after the war he introduced the world to geosynchronous satellites. The International Space Station (ISS) orbits near the earth about once every 90 minutes. The moon orbits much further out with a complete circle taking 28 days. It stands to reason that somewhere in between a satellite can take exactly 24 hours to orbit. And if it orbits in the correct direction over the equator it will appear to be completely stationary in the sky when viewed from the surface of the Earth.
Clarke published details of this in the October 1945 issue of "Wireless World". Therein he gave the proper altitude (about 22,000 miles) and the fact that three satellites poised 120 degrees apart would provide complete coverage. He also provided many other details, technical and otherwise. This was all more than a decade before the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite.
In 1979 he introduced the idea of a space elevator to the public in a science fiction book called "The Fountains of Paradise". Again, the idea is simple. If you could stretch a wire from the surface of the Earth to a point far out in space you could then attach an elevator to it. If you also hooked up electric power lines that the elevator could use then you would have an extremely efficient way to move things to and from space.
There are many technical problems. No material exists that is strong enough to be used for the wire. And that's just the beginning of the list of potential difficulties. But if a working space elevator could be built and turned out to be practical to operate it would completely revolutionize space travel.
And with that let me turn from nonfiction to fiction. (I will get back to nonfiction later.) "Childhood's End" is a great example of the creativity Clarke displayed during his entire life. The book was released in 1953, again before a single man had traveled into space. I recommend the book. But I can also recommend the 3 part miniseries of the same name that the SyFy channel broadcast in 2015 to those who don't want to hunt up a copy of the book. If you aren't already familiar with the story then the next part contains spoilers.
***** Spoiler alert.
In the book (the plot of the miniseries differs slightly but retains the important plot points) humanity is on the verge of sending men into space. All of a sudden giant space craft appear all over the earth. The "Overlords" announce their presence and decree that mankind will be deprived of space travel. Otherwise they are benign and helpful. But for reasons not explained at the time they refuse to reveal themselves. With the beneficial guidance of the Overlords war is abolished and material progress advances quickly. Earth becomes a paradise.
This goes on for some time. Finally, the Overlords reveal themselves. They look like classical devils out of mythology with horns and tails. But by this time humanity has been so accustomed to them and their reputation for benevolence is by now so well established that they are accepted with little trouble. Material progress continues but other kinds of progress comes to a nearly complete halt. First class art and significant scientific progress now seems somehow beyond the ability of current generations of humanity. Some people are concerned about this but most are not. No substantial opposition to the Overlords materializes.
We now reach the final stage. One day all the children below a certain age start changing drastically. The become literally superhuman. They attain superpowers and eventually all leave Earth for some unknown destination. Left behind are everyone above the cutoff age including the children's parents. Those humans left behind are now all sterile. There will be no more children and the non-evolved type of humanity will die off in a generation. "For humanity childhood has ended". Finally we learn that this is a transition that is common in the universe. And for some reason the Overlord race can't make it. They are doomed to be perennial midwives. So in the end we find out they are tragic figures.
***** End spoiler section
This was serious stuff. It was not at all the "ray guns, babes, and big headed aliens" that is the stereotypical Science Fiction fodder of the period. Clarke was great at coming up with creative and original thinking. He was not so good at characterization. Late in his career he wrote the "Rama" series. This was a serious but fictional take on what it would actually be like if an alien space ship took a swing through the solar system and chose not to stop. The books were very popular because of the seriousness with which they treated their subject and because of the care Clarke took with technical details. But they are a slow read.
Let's return to Clarke's nonfiction work. "The Exploration of Space" was written in 1951. I have the updated version that came out in 1959. The changes are fairly modest. By 1959 Sputnik had been launched but the Russian "Luna" mission, the first time the far side (often erroneously referred to as the "dark" side in the pre-Luna era) of the moon had been photographed, had not yet happened. It was also before Gagarin, the first man in space had taken his rocket ride in 1961. So Clarke sprinkled the results from these early space shots into the text but that left it little changed.
The book can be divided into two parts. The early sections are "rocket science for regular people". Unlike today, Clarke correctly assumed that readers of the time could handle some simple mathematics. (Modern writers are justifiably afraid of doing this because of the current widespread fear of actual facts.) He does a nice job of covering the basics.
The most important tenet of rocket science is "it's all about delta-v". "V" for velocity is speed and direction combined. And "delta" is tech talk for "change in". So a change in speed counts as delta-v. But a change in direction (or a combination of the two) does too. When it comes to using a rocket to get from here to there the key thing to figure out is how much delta-v you need. To get from the surface of the earth to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) you need a delta-v of 17,000 MPH (miles per hour). To completely break free of Earth's gravitational field you need another 8,000 for a total of 25,000 MPH. In practical terms, getting to LEO gets you most of the way to practically anywhere.
Clarke does a nice job of laying all this out. He works through several examples like getting from LEO to the Moon or LEO to Mars or LEO to Venus. This is enough examples to show what's involved in getting from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anywhere else. And the delta-v required to get from LEO to the Moon or Mars or Venus (or pretty much anywhere else) is far less than 17,000 MPH. He also provides a basic tutorial on how rockets work and what can be done with a "chemical" rocket, a rocket powered by the traditional method of burning stuff.
Chemical rockets just don't work that well. It is possible to make one that can produce a delta-v of 25,000 MPH but it means the rocket consists almost entirely of fuel. There are some tricks like multiple stages that help. But none of the tricks work well enough to substantially improve the situation. This failure is one reason people are so interested in space elevators, for instance. Clarke does not investigate space elevators in this book but he does investigate alternatives like atomic powered rockets. He does not delve very deeply, however.
In the second part of the book he goes into how we would do this or that. Given that he is doing this before we had any practical experience with space travel he does a remarkably good job. For instance, he talks about various practical aspects of space travel. He calculates roughly how many pounds per day an astronaut would need to survive in space. At the time a "man in the can" was a given because no practical alternative yet existed.
The technology of the '50s was obviously not up to the task in several areas so he was forced to speculate. But pretty much every technical advance he foresees did not come to be. This leads him to conclude that certain missions that are beyond even our current capability would be feasible. In other areas he completely misses technical advances that redefined what was possible. It turns out that predicting the future is really hard to do.
Most obviously he missed the development of small, powerful, resource stingy, computers and other electronic devices of astonishing capability. This has allowed the "man" in the can to be replaced by electronics. The savings have made it possible to send robot missions to Mercury, Pluto, and many of the places in between. These missions are literally impossible to do if people have to come along for the ride.
He also spends some time on large telescopes. He correctly identifies the two big limitations at the time on telescope design but finds no solutions to either. The first was weight. As you make the mirror bigger it must be more and more rigid so that it doesn't distort due to the influence of gravity. The practical limit had already been achieved by the 200" Palomar telescope. A substantially bigger mirror would distort to the point where the image would be inferior to what the Palomar mirror was capable of.
The other problem is caused by the fact that the atmosphere is always in motion. That means that when you look at some object in space small moving lumps of air between the object and the telescope act like lenses and bend light. At some point "atmospheric distortion", even on the best of nights, again degrades the image. And again the Palomar telescope is about as big as you could go before atmospheric distortion results in a poorer image from the larger mirror.
Both of these problems were eventually solved and Clarke saw neither solution coming. Large mirrors are now made of segments. Each segment is smaller than the 200" Palomar mirror and sophisticated machinery makes sure that each segment has the right shape and is pointed correctly. The diameter of the Palomar mirror is 5 meters. A 5 Meter telescope mirror is now considered to be on the small side.
The solution to the atmospheric distortion problem is adaptive optics. The mirror surface is literally bent and twisted many times a second to cancel out the atmospheric distortion. And powerful computer processing also allows two telescopes to operate as if they were a single telescope whose mirror diameter is the distance between them. Earth based telescopes are literally capable of feats unimaginable to Clarke. His solution was to put telescopes in space or on the moon. Space based telescopes (Hubble now, and soon the James Webb Space Telescope) do exist but only in small numbers. No one has tried to put a telescope on the moon.
I'm not trying to knock Clarke here. What I am actually saying is that the prediction business is extremely difficult to do. He does it as well as anybody can. But the results are off the mark for the most part. Let me digress into fiction for a moment before finishing up with some more fact.
Clarke wrote a short story called "The Sentinel". At some point it attracted the attention of a movie director named Stanley Kubrick. The resulting collaboration produced "2001: A Space Odyssey". If you are not familiar with it and you check it out your reaction will probably be "what's the big deal?" But "2001" was a breakthrough and became hugely influential. And so many of the things that made it special at the time have been incorporated into out culture to such an extent that they are no longer noteworthy. And it turns out that "2001" incorporated many of the key aspects of "Childhood's End". So let me review some key plot points.
The movie revolves around the influence of a "monolith". This is a dark rectangular object whos dimensions are in the ratio of 1x4x9 (one then two squared then three squared). We first see some apes fooling around with a monolith in the background. The apes discover weapons. One ape throws a bone into the sky and it morphs into a satellite. This is one of the all time great transitions in movie history. We next follow a scientist who is sent to investigate an "anomaly" on the moon, another monolith. This monolith sends a signal that causes a mission to Jupiter to be undertaken.
For the most part the space ship was operated by the now infamous HAL computer. HAL goes nuts and kills all the astronauts but one. The surviving astronaut gets to Jupiter where he encounters another monolith. There the monolith puts him through what can only be described as a psychedelic experience. This transforms the astronaut into the "Space baby" that the movie ends with.
In "The Sentinel" an object is found on the moon. An attempt is made to take a sample. The object is impervious. You can't hammer a chunk off of it. you can't scratch it with a diamond. You can't melt it with a blow torch. Finally a nuclear weapon does the job. The idea is that the object is sending a "heartbeat" signal to some unknown destination. When the object is destroyed the signal stops and some unknown race learns that there is now a space faring civilization on Earth.
"2001" combines this idea with that of the Overlords. In 2001 they are no longer devils. Now they are mysterious monoliths. But the idea is the same. They transform apes into humans and they transform humans into star children. This is the core evolutionary path in "Childhood's End". With Kubrick's help the story is told in a much more compelling way than it was in Clarke's book. But at it's core it is the same story. And it is a very interesting and imaginative story.
Back to fact. You would think that the science of rocketry would have advanced from the '50s when Clarke was writing "Exploration" to now. But that turns out to not be true. I have covered the state of the art of rocketry in several posts. Here's a link to my first post on the subject: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/space-shuttle-rip.html. Here's a link to my most recent post: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/11/rocket-science-in-fact-and-fiction.html. It turns out that I tend to repeat myself. The reason is that when it comes to the economics of rocket ships nothing changes. Clarke hits the highlights in "Exploration". His observations were based on the state of the art in the '50s. Not much has changed.
My 90-9-1 formula is still pretty much unchanged. A rocket consists of 90% fuel, 9% structure, and 1% payload. And it costs about $10,000 per pound to put a payload into LEO. That's pretty much what Clarke said. That's what I have said on several occasions. In one of my posts I noted that Elon Musk said he could get it down to $5,000 per pound. So as I was writing this I went on the Internet and got some numbers for the SpaceX Falcon 9, Musk's rocket. Fueled up and ready to go, the latest version ("full thrust") weighs 1,210,457 lbs. on the launch pad. The list price for a launch is $62 million.
So how many pounds can it put into LEO? Well, there are three answers. The first one is 50,265 lbs. That would mean that 4% of the rocket is payload. That sounds like a big improvement. But the devil is in the details. A Falcon 9 is a three stage rocket. It has a large main stage and a relatively small second stage. Then there's what you put on the top of the second stage. This includes but is not limited to the payload. The total weight of whatever you put on top of the second stage can weigh up to 50,265 lbs. and it will make it to LEO. And it would be great if it was all payload. But it isn't.
If you want to buy the whole package from SpaceX then you need a PAF (Payload Attach Fitting). SpaceX gives you two options. A "heavy" PAF will accommodate 24,000 lbs. of payload. This means that the payload now constitutes 2% of the total weight. And this pencils out to roughly the $5,000/lb. Musk promised. So we're all good now, right. Not completely. SpaceX also offers a "light" PAF. If you go with the light PAF you are limited to a payload of 7,612 lbs. Now we are back to about $10,000/lb.
It is broadly reported that SpaceX missions to the ISS deliver about 5,000 lbs. of material. Given the press's propensity for simplification and approximation I'm going to assume that the PAF used to deliver supplies to the ISS is the light one. For things to work the payload must be able to navigate, change orbit, and rendezvous with the ISS. This takes a complex package with fuel, rockets, and other stuff. It include all this capability requires that the PAF be heavier so the size and weight of the actual payload must be smaller and lighter.
This is a classic example an old saw I invented that says "the bullet items giveth and the fine print taketh away". If you want to provide your own PAF then a Falcon 9 will be able to deliver a total package weighing about 50,000 lbs. to LEO. If your needs are simple (just something to protect your satellite during launch and give it a small kick into your preferred orbit) then a heavy PAF will work for you and your payload can weigh as much as 24,000 lbs. But if you need a "full function" PAF, something that can deliver your payload to the ISS, for instance, then you need the light PAF and your payload must weigh no more than 7,612 lbs.
So are we really doing better? Before they added safety improvements the old Space Shuttle could deliver itself, several astronauts, a life support environment and supplies for said same astronauts, a handy extension arm, and 62,000 lbs. of payload to the ISS. And it could do it for roughly $10,000/lb.
It is early days for SpaceX and the Falcon 9. It has rapidly evolved through several versions in a few years. Once the research and development costs are recovered and the design and construction stabilizes it is hoped by everybody that the per launch cost of a Falcon 9 will go down quite a bit. But even if SpaceX can deliver supplies to the ISS for $5,000/lb. access to space will continue to be fantastically expensive.
And that means that a lot of things, a return of astronauts to the moon as anything other than a publicity stunt, sending people to Mars and returning them safely, mining asteroids, anything that requires sending a lot of material to space, is just going to be too expensive to pay its own way. Today weather satellites and communications satellites pay their own way. Scientists argue that certain exploratory missions pay their own way and I agree with them. But lots of people disagree with that position.
So until there is a breakthrough that neither Arthur C. Clarke nor I can foresee happens that drastically reduces the cost of access to LEO very few "space" projects are going to get funded. And that means that for the foreseeable future (always a chancy proposition) people flying all over the place in space ships will continue to exist only in realms of Science Fiction. That has been distressingly true for far too long a time. Unfortunately, the chances of a breakthrough that would change things is and continues to be vanishingly small.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Robot Cars - Now new and improved
"New and Improved" has graced many a package in my day. Presumably it is technically correct. But it is hard to tell because the differences between the "old" version and the "new" version of the product are (with the exception of the packaging) often modest at best. I have done two posts on this subject previously. The first one can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/03/robot-cars.html. The second can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/05/robot-cars-update.html. Frankly not that much has changed in the slightly more than two years since my last post. So my usage of "New and Improved" is in line with common Madison Avenue usage.
One thing that has changed is that we now have an approved acronym: "AV". "AV" stands for Autonomous Vehicle. It is starting to pop up everywhere. And one of the places where it popped up recently is in a pair of articles published in the magazine "Science". "Science" is the top U. S. scientific journal. (The top scientific journal in the world, and the only one ranked higher than "Science", is the British journal "Nature".). In their December 15, 2017 issue they asked "When will we get there?" on the cover and printed two articles purporting to answer the question inside.
Another thing that has changed since the second article is that I have a new car that is equipped with a lot of automation. It warns me if there is a car in my blind spot. It has a backup camera. It also can look to the side when I am backing out of a parking spot and warn me if something is coming. It also has a feature that will maintain a consistent distance between my car and the car in front of me. It can often detect when I am wandering into the next lane. It also warns me if the car in front of me has slowed down or, in the case of a traffic light, if the car in front of me has started moving. It's not a full up AV but it is several important steps closer than my old car was.
So what did "Science" have to say (besides endorsing the use of "AV")? The Society of Automotive Engineers (the group behind the "SAE" numbers on oil cans) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA - a Federal Agency) got together and came up with a 6 level ratings system for AVs. A level 0 car is like what your grandparents used to drive. It has no automation. A level 5 vehicle is a completely self driving car, what everybody assumes we are pointing at. (The other levels fall somewhere in between.) In the first article ("Not so Fast") the author characterizes the likely timing of when level 5 vehicles will be available as "Somewhere over the rainbow", in other words, way out in the far distant future. Elsewhere he characterizes it as being "still decades away".
The author is generally pessimistic about how fast things will progress. This is a nice counterbalance to the cockeyed optimism of most reporting on the subject. But I think the author is excessively pessimistic. So how does he justify his position?
Well, first he reports there is "surprisingly little research" to back up most predictions of how fast things will progress. He is completely correct here. Most of what we know is from press releases and not from, say, public demonstrations of capability. Sure, there are any number of stories of some reporter being hauled around in a "self driving car". But most of what is demonstrated is the capability to handle carefully set up test tracks, not realistic simulations of real world situations. The last public "bake off" between groups of AV builders happened nearly a decade ago and involved a tightly controlled environment. Various vendors have racked up an impressive number of "open road" miles since but very little detail is available about how uncontrolled the circumstances were.
We know, for instance, that there have been more than a dozen accidents involving Google test cars. These all happened in urban areas with good sight lines and slow speeds. And in almost all of these cases some inattentive driver rear-ended a Google car that had been stopped at a stop sign or traffic light for several seconds. The author of the Science piece correctly noted that these are relatively easy situations for an AV to cope with.
Then there is the now infamous incident where a Tesla driver was killed while the car was driving itself. But this driver was well known for ignoring the restrictions Tesla placed on when its automation should be used. And the situation was quite unusual. A truck with a trailer connected by a long tow bar was turning. The Tesla went between the truck and the trailer and hit the bar, which it had not detected. So the car made a mistake that drivers can and often do make and this driver forced the car's automation outside the parameters he was specifically directed to stay within.
This incident is included in story after story about AVs (including this one) because it is the one and only example so far of a fatality associated with autonomous vehicle operation. Most fatalities caused by drivers don't make the news precisely because there are so many of them, about 30,000 per year.
What else? He defines an AV as "a car that takes you where you want to go, at any time and under any drivable condition, without any human intervention". At first blush that seems to be a perfectly sensible definition. But then he takes "under any drivable conditions" and "where you want to go" to extremes. He cites "to New York City or the Gobi Desert" as examples of where you might want to go. I do not expect my current car to be able to go all the way to the Gobi Desert and it doesn't matter whether it's me or automation that is in control. I freely concede that an AV that can take someone to a specific point in the Gobi desert and do it without any human intervention is a long ways away.
But I live in Seattle, and I have a brother who lives in New York City. I think it's reasonable to expect an AV to be able to do most of the work necessary to go from here to there. It should be able to pick me up at my doorstep and eventually deposit me at my brother's doorstep. But I would expect to help with the selection of gas stations and motels.
My car can't drive itself. But I can plug the address of a gas station, a motel, even that of my brother, into the car's navigation system and it can provide me with detailed instructions for getting there. If I plug successive waypoints in as I go along the route it can get me there in stages. And my car can handle the entire route from my front door to my brother's front door in one shot if I want to drive day and night straight through. Let's say I could take the current capabilities of my car and add an additional capability that would permit me to press an "AV" button. When pressed it would make the car then do the driving instead of me. If such a feature could be added then I would say that that the resulting vehicle would count as an AV.
So I think the author goes too far. But he does point out a valid concern. He points out that "[c]ompanies have gotten very good at crafting statements that will be presented in the most positive light". Too true. And the author points out that an AV needs to handle common suboptimal situations like rainy weather or crowded roads. From there he quotes an expert who says "he wouldn't be surprised if it's 2075 before we get there". I think this is a valid concern but I think both the author and the expert are excessively pessimistic.
First of all, in many cases crowded roads are easier to deal with than less congested ones. Things play out slowly and there are only a few ways for things to go wrong. And if things go wrong the usual solution is to stop the vehicle, something that can be quickly because the vehicle is going so slowly. The same thing is true of rain. There are two issues. Firstly, how slippery is the road. Computers have access to sensor data that people can't even comprehend. So they can continuously monitor traction conditions and act accordingly. Most people are not very good at this.
Secondly, what's the visibility situation? I live in a part of the country where it rains a lot. For the most part visibility remains good. It does tend to get dark out but cameras and other equipment used in AVs are actually better at coping with this than people are. So again in many common situations AVs will cope with the situation better than people do. But that's not always the case.
If you are on a congested road where everybody is in "stop and go" mode then an AV can easily do a fine job of following the car in front of it. In an actual test in my car I found my car did a much better job than I could in these circumstances. But what about really congested situations when you need to move over a lane to get to an exit? What if there is no gap? We've all become more or less adept at bulling our way into the next lane and have accepted that this sometimes may result in honking horns or rude gestures. But what would an AV do in the same situation?
Most of the time when I am driving in rain visibility is diminished but remains adequate. But sometimes the sky opens up and visibility drops to effectively nothing. You can run into a similar situation if there is a bus or big truck in the next lane throwing spray everywhere. Can an AV handle these situations?
How about snow? Snow can make roads slippery. But it can also blot out lane markers. Or it can come down so fast that visibility drops to almost nothing. Or you can get snow over ice, an unfortunately all to common situation where I live. This can give the appearance of tricky but manageable conditions while masking extremely dangerous conditions.
I had not given sufficient consideration to the fact that an AV must be able to handle not only easy situations (dry road, good visibility) but poor situations (rain, congestion). And there is a continuum here. Moderately poor situations are common enough that the AV must be able to handle them. And as the degree of difficulty rises so does the rarity. At some point a tradeoff will be made. An AV will be designated "good enough" if it can handle poor situations up to a certain degree of difficulty. Where will the line be drawn? That is yet to be determined. But AVs will not be required to handle "anything, anywhere, any time".
The first AVs to be put into circulation will only be able to handle fairly easy situations. They are likely to be restricted to urban areas. I think it is likely that they will be handle both day and night time. But they will probably not be able to handle moderately bad weather. They will not be able to handle truly awful situations. But my city tends to shut down when assaulted with only modest amounts of snow. So the fact that some or all AVs might be pulled out of service when it gets truly awful is less of a change than most people think it is.
Another location that is likely to see AVs early is the Interstate. There is a lot of interest in autonomous long haul trucks. There is a lot of money available in this market. It is common for a big rig to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on in a year. And a lot of that mileage is racked up on the Interstate at night. And there are complex rules governing how long a driver can drive between bouts of down time. If a driver can put his truck on autopilot for several hours straight and it doesn't count as driving time then the truck can be kept on the road doing productive work for more hours per year. That's worth a lot of money to trucking companies. And that's why there are several different groups working on AV trucks.
Right now there is a lot of talk about "how safe is safe enough?" And the author goes into this. The conventional wisdom is that AVs have to be a lot safer than regular cars. Certainly the amount of coverage devoted to AV accidents and not devoted to regular accidents would indicate that this is true. But there is a big fear/novelty thing going on. The very fact that there hasn't been a second "AV" fatality guarantees that whenever it happens it will get a lot of coverage. So far the nonfatal accidents that AVs have racked up have generated little coverage. That's because they tend to be very low speed fender benders. The lack of blood means these incidents also lack newsworthiness.
And this brings up a point that only occurred to me after reading these stories AVs currently operate in an extremely conservative manner. What do I mean? Have you ever drifted through a stop sign? Have you ever "accidently" exceeded the speed limit. Have you ever cut one or another additional corner (i.e. barging when you needed - or just wanted - to change lanes)? We all do. It's a routine part of how most of us drive. We conclude we can safely cheat a bit so we do. But AVs all ALWAYS scrupulously follow all traffic regulations. And their first response to anything hinky is to slow down. People are already starting to notice that AVs are extremely annoying to share the road with because they operate in such an extremely conservative manner.
They currently only annoy a few people because AVs are only on public roads in a few places. But if significant numbers of AVs hit the road in a bunch of different places this could quickly become a serious problem. I live in one of the most congested cities in the country. Something that, at least in the short run, is likely to increase not decrease, congestion will quickly become extremely unpopular. From a technical point of view this problem is easily solved. AV programming can be changed to behave differently (i.e. drive more aggressively with a less scrupulous adherence to traffic regulations). But the political, social, and cultural forces that would inevitably be brought to bear to reel things back in would make this impossible.
Now let me move on for a moment to the second article entitled "A mater of trust". It deals with people riding in AVs. Surveys show that a large percentage of the population is afraid or at least concerned. We have all seen "technology goes berserk" movies and TV shows without number. We have been conditioned to be afraid of killer robots and technology spiraling out of control. And an AV can easily kill someone. So there is something to the concern. But the results of the research reported in the article can be succinctly summarized. In a number of different situations people went from being concerned to being bored in about 15 minutes. A few minutes of actual experience with a simulated AV is all it takes to totally eliminate the concern.
There are some easily implemented recommendations. A display inside the car that lets the passengers know what is happening or is about to happen (i.e. "you are about to reach your destination") seems helpful. Similarly, indicators like flashing lights or the like on the outside of the vehicle seem helpful. They would signal say a pedestrians that wished to cross in front of an AV that the AV sees them and will wait for them. But only a modest amount of this sort of thing is all it takes to make people comfortable with AVs.
I think these results from the second article feed into the concern raised by the first article about safety. People currently have no personal experience with EVs. So they tend to err on the side of caution. But I think experience will quickly ameliorate this need for caution. We already see some effects. Even a non-AV car like the one I own logs a ton of data. This makes the determination of whose fault an accident was much easier and more determinative. We saw this with the fatal crash. Tons of data about what the driver was and was not doing was available. We have also seen it with the Google accidents. Tons of date made it crystal clear that the Google car has behaved appropriately and the "loose screw behind the wheel" in the other car had not.
I expect car makers to initially self-insure because everybody expects that the "victims" in an AV - non-AV crash will ask for millions. But these victims are likely to be confronted by tons of evidence from the AV that the AV was not at fault. Once things settle down, if a car company has to shell out a big settlement every once in a while but most of the paying ends up being done by the non-AV side of the conflict things will change quickly. And I think it will take more than fifteen minutes for this to all shake out. But I don't think it will take long.
This brings me to my final subject. Will AVs change behavior? Specifically, with people with access to AVs pile on the mileage? Preliminary indications at that the answer is yes. In one experiment people were given access to a simulated AV. In this case it was just a car with chauffeur. People in the test racked up considerably increased mileage. It was just so damned handy.
But this test only lasted a week. So there was definitely a novelty factor going on. Who wouldn't want to show off their chauffeured car? It is unclear what the long term effect would have been. But I have to confess that this and several other studies indicated that access to AVs increases average miles driven per week. I can wave my hands and propound arguments that the long term result would be different. But at this time I have zero evidence to put behind such an argument. The best I can come up with is "its too soon to tell" and that's weak.
Everybody has been saying "EVs in 2020" for years now. 2020 is getting closer and closer. Also, the number of players keeps increasing. And today's newspaper includes a one paragraph story reporting that General Motors has just filed paperwork with the U.S. Department of Transportation requesting permission to put cars "without steering wheels or pedals" on the road next year. Certainly the official story from a number of these players is that they still think they can hit the 2020 target.
So I will "revise and extend" my old prediction. I predict that we will see AVs on the road by 2020, at the latest by 2021. They might only be available in "selected areas". But these will be fully autonomous cars (or trucks) on regular public streets. And I predict that we will see AVs widely available by 2030. If I keep my current car for 15 years (I kept my last one for 16) then I will be looking for a new car in 2030. I have told numerous people that I believe my current car will be the last conventional car I own. By then I expect to either shift to an AV or go carless. I would use an Uber-like service instead. Welcome to the future.
One thing that has changed is that we now have an approved acronym: "AV". "AV" stands for Autonomous Vehicle. It is starting to pop up everywhere. And one of the places where it popped up recently is in a pair of articles published in the magazine "Science". "Science" is the top U. S. scientific journal. (The top scientific journal in the world, and the only one ranked higher than "Science", is the British journal "Nature".). In their December 15, 2017 issue they asked "When will we get there?" on the cover and printed two articles purporting to answer the question inside.
Another thing that has changed since the second article is that I have a new car that is equipped with a lot of automation. It warns me if there is a car in my blind spot. It has a backup camera. It also can look to the side when I am backing out of a parking spot and warn me if something is coming. It also has a feature that will maintain a consistent distance between my car and the car in front of me. It can often detect when I am wandering into the next lane. It also warns me if the car in front of me has slowed down or, in the case of a traffic light, if the car in front of me has started moving. It's not a full up AV but it is several important steps closer than my old car was.
So what did "Science" have to say (besides endorsing the use of "AV")? The Society of Automotive Engineers (the group behind the "SAE" numbers on oil cans) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA - a Federal Agency) got together and came up with a 6 level ratings system for AVs. A level 0 car is like what your grandparents used to drive. It has no automation. A level 5 vehicle is a completely self driving car, what everybody assumes we are pointing at. (The other levels fall somewhere in between.) In the first article ("Not so Fast") the author characterizes the likely timing of when level 5 vehicles will be available as "Somewhere over the rainbow", in other words, way out in the far distant future. Elsewhere he characterizes it as being "still decades away".
The author is generally pessimistic about how fast things will progress. This is a nice counterbalance to the cockeyed optimism of most reporting on the subject. But I think the author is excessively pessimistic. So how does he justify his position?
Well, first he reports there is "surprisingly little research" to back up most predictions of how fast things will progress. He is completely correct here. Most of what we know is from press releases and not from, say, public demonstrations of capability. Sure, there are any number of stories of some reporter being hauled around in a "self driving car". But most of what is demonstrated is the capability to handle carefully set up test tracks, not realistic simulations of real world situations. The last public "bake off" between groups of AV builders happened nearly a decade ago and involved a tightly controlled environment. Various vendors have racked up an impressive number of "open road" miles since but very little detail is available about how uncontrolled the circumstances were.
We know, for instance, that there have been more than a dozen accidents involving Google test cars. These all happened in urban areas with good sight lines and slow speeds. And in almost all of these cases some inattentive driver rear-ended a Google car that had been stopped at a stop sign or traffic light for several seconds. The author of the Science piece correctly noted that these are relatively easy situations for an AV to cope with.
Then there is the now infamous incident where a Tesla driver was killed while the car was driving itself. But this driver was well known for ignoring the restrictions Tesla placed on when its automation should be used. And the situation was quite unusual. A truck with a trailer connected by a long tow bar was turning. The Tesla went between the truck and the trailer and hit the bar, which it had not detected. So the car made a mistake that drivers can and often do make and this driver forced the car's automation outside the parameters he was specifically directed to stay within.
This incident is included in story after story about AVs (including this one) because it is the one and only example so far of a fatality associated with autonomous vehicle operation. Most fatalities caused by drivers don't make the news precisely because there are so many of them, about 30,000 per year.
What else? He defines an AV as "a car that takes you where you want to go, at any time and under any drivable condition, without any human intervention". At first blush that seems to be a perfectly sensible definition. But then he takes "under any drivable conditions" and "where you want to go" to extremes. He cites "to New York City or the Gobi Desert" as examples of where you might want to go. I do not expect my current car to be able to go all the way to the Gobi Desert and it doesn't matter whether it's me or automation that is in control. I freely concede that an AV that can take someone to a specific point in the Gobi desert and do it without any human intervention is a long ways away.
But I live in Seattle, and I have a brother who lives in New York City. I think it's reasonable to expect an AV to be able to do most of the work necessary to go from here to there. It should be able to pick me up at my doorstep and eventually deposit me at my brother's doorstep. But I would expect to help with the selection of gas stations and motels.
My car can't drive itself. But I can plug the address of a gas station, a motel, even that of my brother, into the car's navigation system and it can provide me with detailed instructions for getting there. If I plug successive waypoints in as I go along the route it can get me there in stages. And my car can handle the entire route from my front door to my brother's front door in one shot if I want to drive day and night straight through. Let's say I could take the current capabilities of my car and add an additional capability that would permit me to press an "AV" button. When pressed it would make the car then do the driving instead of me. If such a feature could be added then I would say that that the resulting vehicle would count as an AV.
So I think the author goes too far. But he does point out a valid concern. He points out that "[c]ompanies have gotten very good at crafting statements that will be presented in the most positive light". Too true. And the author points out that an AV needs to handle common suboptimal situations like rainy weather or crowded roads. From there he quotes an expert who says "he wouldn't be surprised if it's 2075 before we get there". I think this is a valid concern but I think both the author and the expert are excessively pessimistic.
First of all, in many cases crowded roads are easier to deal with than less congested ones. Things play out slowly and there are only a few ways for things to go wrong. And if things go wrong the usual solution is to stop the vehicle, something that can be quickly because the vehicle is going so slowly. The same thing is true of rain. There are two issues. Firstly, how slippery is the road. Computers have access to sensor data that people can't even comprehend. So they can continuously monitor traction conditions and act accordingly. Most people are not very good at this.
Secondly, what's the visibility situation? I live in a part of the country where it rains a lot. For the most part visibility remains good. It does tend to get dark out but cameras and other equipment used in AVs are actually better at coping with this than people are. So again in many common situations AVs will cope with the situation better than people do. But that's not always the case.
If you are on a congested road where everybody is in "stop and go" mode then an AV can easily do a fine job of following the car in front of it. In an actual test in my car I found my car did a much better job than I could in these circumstances. But what about really congested situations when you need to move over a lane to get to an exit? What if there is no gap? We've all become more or less adept at bulling our way into the next lane and have accepted that this sometimes may result in honking horns or rude gestures. But what would an AV do in the same situation?
Most of the time when I am driving in rain visibility is diminished but remains adequate. But sometimes the sky opens up and visibility drops to effectively nothing. You can run into a similar situation if there is a bus or big truck in the next lane throwing spray everywhere. Can an AV handle these situations?
How about snow? Snow can make roads slippery. But it can also blot out lane markers. Or it can come down so fast that visibility drops to almost nothing. Or you can get snow over ice, an unfortunately all to common situation where I live. This can give the appearance of tricky but manageable conditions while masking extremely dangerous conditions.
I had not given sufficient consideration to the fact that an AV must be able to handle not only easy situations (dry road, good visibility) but poor situations (rain, congestion). And there is a continuum here. Moderately poor situations are common enough that the AV must be able to handle them. And as the degree of difficulty rises so does the rarity. At some point a tradeoff will be made. An AV will be designated "good enough" if it can handle poor situations up to a certain degree of difficulty. Where will the line be drawn? That is yet to be determined. But AVs will not be required to handle "anything, anywhere, any time".
The first AVs to be put into circulation will only be able to handle fairly easy situations. They are likely to be restricted to urban areas. I think it is likely that they will be handle both day and night time. But they will probably not be able to handle moderately bad weather. They will not be able to handle truly awful situations. But my city tends to shut down when assaulted with only modest amounts of snow. So the fact that some or all AVs might be pulled out of service when it gets truly awful is less of a change than most people think it is.
Another location that is likely to see AVs early is the Interstate. There is a lot of interest in autonomous long haul trucks. There is a lot of money available in this market. It is common for a big rig to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on in a year. And a lot of that mileage is racked up on the Interstate at night. And there are complex rules governing how long a driver can drive between bouts of down time. If a driver can put his truck on autopilot for several hours straight and it doesn't count as driving time then the truck can be kept on the road doing productive work for more hours per year. That's worth a lot of money to trucking companies. And that's why there are several different groups working on AV trucks.
Right now there is a lot of talk about "how safe is safe enough?" And the author goes into this. The conventional wisdom is that AVs have to be a lot safer than regular cars. Certainly the amount of coverage devoted to AV accidents and not devoted to regular accidents would indicate that this is true. But there is a big fear/novelty thing going on. The very fact that there hasn't been a second "AV" fatality guarantees that whenever it happens it will get a lot of coverage. So far the nonfatal accidents that AVs have racked up have generated little coverage. That's because they tend to be very low speed fender benders. The lack of blood means these incidents also lack newsworthiness.
And this brings up a point that only occurred to me after reading these stories AVs currently operate in an extremely conservative manner. What do I mean? Have you ever drifted through a stop sign? Have you ever "accidently" exceeded the speed limit. Have you ever cut one or another additional corner (i.e. barging when you needed - or just wanted - to change lanes)? We all do. It's a routine part of how most of us drive. We conclude we can safely cheat a bit so we do. But AVs all ALWAYS scrupulously follow all traffic regulations. And their first response to anything hinky is to slow down. People are already starting to notice that AVs are extremely annoying to share the road with because they operate in such an extremely conservative manner.
They currently only annoy a few people because AVs are only on public roads in a few places. But if significant numbers of AVs hit the road in a bunch of different places this could quickly become a serious problem. I live in one of the most congested cities in the country. Something that, at least in the short run, is likely to increase not decrease, congestion will quickly become extremely unpopular. From a technical point of view this problem is easily solved. AV programming can be changed to behave differently (i.e. drive more aggressively with a less scrupulous adherence to traffic regulations). But the political, social, and cultural forces that would inevitably be brought to bear to reel things back in would make this impossible.
Now let me move on for a moment to the second article entitled "A mater of trust". It deals with people riding in AVs. Surveys show that a large percentage of the population is afraid or at least concerned. We have all seen "technology goes berserk" movies and TV shows without number. We have been conditioned to be afraid of killer robots and technology spiraling out of control. And an AV can easily kill someone. So there is something to the concern. But the results of the research reported in the article can be succinctly summarized. In a number of different situations people went from being concerned to being bored in about 15 minutes. A few minutes of actual experience with a simulated AV is all it takes to totally eliminate the concern.
There are some easily implemented recommendations. A display inside the car that lets the passengers know what is happening or is about to happen (i.e. "you are about to reach your destination") seems helpful. Similarly, indicators like flashing lights or the like on the outside of the vehicle seem helpful. They would signal say a pedestrians that wished to cross in front of an AV that the AV sees them and will wait for them. But only a modest amount of this sort of thing is all it takes to make people comfortable with AVs.
I think these results from the second article feed into the concern raised by the first article about safety. People currently have no personal experience with EVs. So they tend to err on the side of caution. But I think experience will quickly ameliorate this need for caution. We already see some effects. Even a non-AV car like the one I own logs a ton of data. This makes the determination of whose fault an accident was much easier and more determinative. We saw this with the fatal crash. Tons of data about what the driver was and was not doing was available. We have also seen it with the Google accidents. Tons of date made it crystal clear that the Google car has behaved appropriately and the "loose screw behind the wheel" in the other car had not.
I expect car makers to initially self-insure because everybody expects that the "victims" in an AV - non-AV crash will ask for millions. But these victims are likely to be confronted by tons of evidence from the AV that the AV was not at fault. Once things settle down, if a car company has to shell out a big settlement every once in a while but most of the paying ends up being done by the non-AV side of the conflict things will change quickly. And I think it will take more than fifteen minutes for this to all shake out. But I don't think it will take long.
This brings me to my final subject. Will AVs change behavior? Specifically, with people with access to AVs pile on the mileage? Preliminary indications at that the answer is yes. In one experiment people were given access to a simulated AV. In this case it was just a car with chauffeur. People in the test racked up considerably increased mileage. It was just so damned handy.
But this test only lasted a week. So there was definitely a novelty factor going on. Who wouldn't want to show off their chauffeured car? It is unclear what the long term effect would have been. But I have to confess that this and several other studies indicated that access to AVs increases average miles driven per week. I can wave my hands and propound arguments that the long term result would be different. But at this time I have zero evidence to put behind such an argument. The best I can come up with is "its too soon to tell" and that's weak.
Everybody has been saying "EVs in 2020" for years now. 2020 is getting closer and closer. Also, the number of players keeps increasing. And today's newspaper includes a one paragraph story reporting that General Motors has just filed paperwork with the U.S. Department of Transportation requesting permission to put cars "without steering wheels or pedals" on the road next year. Certainly the official story from a number of these players is that they still think they can hit the 2020 target.
So I will "revise and extend" my old prediction. I predict that we will see AVs on the road by 2020, at the latest by 2021. They might only be available in "selected areas". But these will be fully autonomous cars (or trucks) on regular public streets. And I predict that we will see AVs widely available by 2030. If I keep my current car for 15 years (I kept my last one for 16) then I will be looking for a new car in 2030. I have told numerous people that I believe my current car will be the last conventional car I own. By then I expect to either shift to an AV or go carless. I would use an Uber-like service instead. Welcome to the future.
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