Driver Distraction Technology

Not this hand-off

In the aftermath of the 737 MAX crashes, I wrote First We Change How People Behave.:

The fundamental problem of autonomous vehicles sharing roads is that until you get to Level 5, you have a hand-off problem. The closer you get to Level 5, the worse the hand-off problem.

Three years earlier, Paul Vixie was more specific in Disciplining the Unoccupied Mind:

Simply put, if you give a human brain the option to perform other tasks than the one at hand, it will do so. No law, no amount of training, and no insistence by the manufacturer of an automobile will alter this fact. It's human nature, immalleable. So until and unless Tesla can robustly and credibly promise an autopilot that will imagine every threat a human could imagine, and can use the same level of caution as the best human driver would use, then the world will be better off without this feature.

Follow me below the fold for an update on the hand-off problem.

Elon Musk: Threat Or Menace? Part 5

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Much of this series has been based on the outstanding reporting of the Washington Post, and the team's Trisha Thadani is back with Lawsuits test Tesla claim that drivers are solely responsible for crashes. My main concern all along has been that Musk's irresponsible hyping of his flawed technology is not just killing his credulous customers, but much more seriously innocent bystanders who had no say in the matter. The article includes video of:

• A driver who believed Autopilot could drive him home despite his being drunk. The car drove the wrong way on the highway and killed another innocent victim of Musk's hype.
• Autopilot rear-ending a merging vehicle and killing another innocent victim, a 15-year-old.
• Autopilot slamming into a broken down vehicle on the highway. When the Tesla driver left the wreck she was hit and killed by another car.
• Autopilot speeding through a T-junction and crashing into a parked truck.

Below the fold I look into Tesla's results, Musk's response, the details revealed by the various lawsuits. and this excellent advice from Elon Musk:

"If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company."

Elon Musk, 24^th April 2024

Elon Musk: Threat or Menace Part 4

The previous post in this series, Elon Musk: Threat or Menace Part 3, was based on the impressively detailed reporting from a team at the Washington Post on the crash that killed Jeremy Banner in The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash. The team's subsequent equally detailed Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first ‘Full Self-Driving’ fatality triggered this comment which concluded:

It seems the driver thought that it was OK to drive home with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 because he believed Musk's hype that Fake Self Driving would handle it despite having to repeatedly override it on the way out.

Now, the team's Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani are out with In 2018 crash, Tesla’s Autopilot just followed the lane lines. Below the fold I look into what it reveals about Autopilot.

Autonomous Vehicles: Trough of Disillusionment

Jeremykemp CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

This is the famous Gartner hype cycle and it certianly appears that autonomous vehicles are currently in the Trough of Disillusionment. Whether they will eventually soar up to the Plateau of Productivity is unknown, but for now it is clear even to practitioners that the hype bubble they have been riding for years has burst.

Below the fold I try to catch up with the flood of reporting on the autonomous vehicle winter triggered by the bursting of the bubble.

There Is No Planet B: Part 2

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In Part 1 I applied basic arithmetic to the logistics of Elon Musk's claimed plans for colonizing Mars in 2050 to show they were implausible. Below the fold I continue, first by discussing Maciej Cegłowski's equally basic dissection of NASA's economically implausible plans for Mars in Why Not Mars?. Second, by reviewing the host of non-logistical and non-economic problems facing humans attempting to survive on Mars based on:

• Kelley and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars.
• Towards Sustainable Horizons: A Comprehensive Blueprint for Mars Colonization by Florian Neukart.

Why Worry About Resources?

The attitude of the crypto-bros and tech more generally is that they are going to make so much money that paying for whatever resource they need to make it will be a drop in the ocean. Amd that externalities such as carbom emissions are someone else's problem.

I discussed Proof-of-Work's scandalous waste of energy in my EE380 talk, Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities? and elsewhere, since 2017 often citing the work of Alex de Vries. Two years ago de Vries and Christian Stoll's Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem pointed out that in addition to mining rig's direct waste of power, their short economic life drove a massive e-waste problem, adding the embedded energy of the hardware to the problem.

de Vries Fig. 1

Now, de Vries' Bitcoin’s growing water footprint reveals that supporting gambling, money laundering and crime causes yet another massive waste of resources.

But that's not all. de Vries has joined a growing chorus of researchers showing that the VC's pivot to AI wastes similar massive amounts of power. Can analysis of AI's e-waste and water consumption be far behind?

Below the fold I discuss papers by de Vries and others on this issue.

There Is No Planet B: Part 1

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CC-BY-SA-4.0

Anything Elon Musk says must be treated skeptically. This is particularly true of anything involving timescales (see Tesla robotaxis). And it is even more true of Musk's plans for visiting and eventually colonizing Mars.

Below the fold in part 1 of this two-part post, I apply some arithmetic just to the logistics of Musk's plans for Mars. Part 2 isn't specific to Musk's plans; I discuss two attempts to list the set of "knowns" about Mars exploration, for which the science is fairly clear but the engineering and the economics don't exist, and the much larger set of "known unknowns", critical aspects requiring robust solutions for which the science, let alone the engineering, doesn't exist:

• Kelley and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars.
• Maciej Cegłowski's Why Not Mars?.

Robotaxi Economics

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The New York Times team of Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu have been covering San Francisco's experiment with robotaxis from Waymo and Cruise for some time. Their latest report is G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly., and it is a doozy. Leaving aside the serious safety issues that finally forced the DMV to stop Cruise operating, their history of interference with first responders, and the traffic congestion they exacerbate, the really devastating part of the article is the economics. Below the fold, I lay out the numbers.

Elon Musk: Threat or Menace Part 3

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I started writing about the danger to innocent road users, pedestrians and first responders caused by Elon Musk lying about the capabilities of his buggy Level 2 driver assistance technologies (Autopilot and FullFake Self Driving) two-and-a-half years ago and followed up with two more posts. I have personally been involved in a near-accident caused by a Tesla randomly stopping for no reason on the Dumbarton Bridge.

The reason for yet another post in the series is that Trisha Thadani, Rachel Lerman, Imogen Piper, Faiz Siddiqui and Irfan Uraizee of the Washington Post have published an extraordinarily detailed forensic analysis of the first widely-publicized fatal Autopilot crash in The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash. This was the crash in which Autopilot failed to see a semi-trailer stopped across its path and decapitated the driver.

Below the fold I comment on the details their analysis reveals.

The Synchronous Delivery Problem

Parked at the end of the alley behind our house as I set out on my morning bike ride was a large pickup marked Nuro hauling a large trailer with some vehicle inside. I often see Nuro's "autonomous" Priuses in our neighborhood, so I assumed one had failed and was being collected. Near the end of my ride a few blocks from our house I passed another. At the end of the alley as I returned was this unfamiliar vehicle, so I stopped and took a picture.

As I watched it drove forward about 15 feet, paused, drove forward another 15 feet and stopped about 4 feet from the back of a parked SUV. It thought for a while then backed up, returning to near its starting point. I understand, I too think it is a problem that our streets are infested with parked monster SUVs.

Unlike Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" I don't think testing the Nuro-bot on our streets is a significant danger. They move slowly, make noise, are clearly cautious, and aren't being used by cult members. Below the fold I question not the technology but the economics.

Elon Musk, Threat or Menace Part 2

Last April I wrote Elon Musk: Threat or Menace? flagging three of his externalities; the carbon footprint of his infatuation with cryptocurrencies, the environmental impact and cost of his infatuation with colonizing Mars, and the threat his infatuation with camera-only autonomy for Teslas posed to innocent bystanders. Last August I followed up with Autonowashing, detailing the incredible "depths of irresponsibility involved in Tesla's marketing".

Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital is a very successful and innovative venture capitalist. Maxwell Strachan interviewed him for The ‘To the Moon’ Crash Is Coming. I think Wolfe captures the essence of the problem:

I think a lot of people took the Elon playbook and basically said, If I just promised the moon, I can get too big to fail, I can just keep raising money as I raise expectations. And if I raise expectations, fundamentals don't matter. The only thing that matters is expectations. And if I can keep leading people—or in some cases misleading them—then it'll keep working if I don't get caught. And if I do get caught, in the case of Theranos or in the case of Nikola [Editor’s note: the electric-truck maker that paid a $125 million after the SEC charged the company’s founder with misleading investors over social media], maybe you pay a fine or you have your day in court, and maybe Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is found guilty or maybe the zeitgeist of the day surprises and she's not. But so far, there has been really no great penalty for people whose relationship with the truth is less than ideal.

Musk doesn't care about the truth of his statements, or the impact of his companies' policies, because his wealth insulates him from consequences. If regulators or victims come after him he can tie them up in courts until their resources are exhausted or his fan-bois can make them irrelevant. Since Autonowashing I've been collecting illustrations of this attitude, and the time has come to lay out a sample of them below the fold.

Autonowashing

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On the 16^th Tom Krisher reported that US Opens Formal Probe Into Tesla Autopilot System:

The U.S. government has opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot partially automated driving system after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles.

The investigation covers 765,000 vehicles, almost everything that Tesla has sold in the U.S. since the start of the 2014 model year. Of the crashes identified by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as part of the investigation, 17 people were injured and one was killed.

NHTSA says it has identified 11 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards.
...
The agency has sent investigative teams to 31 crashes involving partially automated driver assist systems since June of 2016. Such systems can keep a vehicle centered in its lane and a safe distance from vehicles in front of it. Of those crashes, 25 involved Tesla Autopilot in which 10 deaths were reported, according to data released by the agency.

On the 19^th Katyanna Quach reported that Senators urge US trade watchdog to look into whether Tesla may just be over-egging its Autopilot, FSD pudding:

Sens. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) put out a public letter [PDF] addressed to FTC boss Lina Khan on Wednesday. In it, the lawmakers claimed "Tesla’s marketing has repeatedly overstated the capabilities of its vehicles, and these statements increasingly pose a threat to motorists and other users of the road."

These are ridiculously late. Back in April, after reading Mack Hogan's Tesla's "Full Self Driving" Beta Is Just Laughably Bad and Potentially Dangerous, I wrote Elon Musk: Threat or Menace?:

I'm a pedestrian, cyclist and driver in an area infested with Teslas owned, but potentially not actually being driven, by fanatical early adopters and members of the cult of Musk. I'm personally at risk from these people believing that what they paid good money for was "Full Self Driving". When SpaceX tests Starship at their Boca Chica site they take precautions, including road closures, to ensure innocent bystanders aren't at risk from the rain of debris when things go wrong. Tesla, not so much.

I'm returning to this topic because an excellent video and two new papers have shown that I greatly underestimated the depths of irresponsibility involved in Tesla's marketing.

Elon Musk: Threat or Menace?

Although both Tesla and SpaceX are major engineering achievements, Elon Musk seems completely unable to understand the concept of externalities, unaccounted-for costs that society bears as a result of these achievements.

First, in Tesla: carbon offsetting, but in reverse, Jaime Powell reacted to Tesla taking $1.6B in carbon offsets which provided the only profit Tesla ever made and putting them into Bitcoin:

Looked at differently, a single Bitcoin purchase at a price of ~$50,000 has a carbon footprint of 270 tons, the equivalent of 60 ICE cars.

Tesla’s average selling price in the fourth quarter of 2020? $49,333.

We’re not sure about you, but FT Alphaville is struggling to square the circle of “buy a Tesla with a bitcoin and create the carbon output of 60 internal combustion engine cars” with its legendary environmental ambitions.

Unless, of course, that was never the point in the first place.

Below the fold, more externalities Musk is ignoring.

First We Change How People Behave

Then the system will work the way we want. My skepticism about Level 5 self-driving cars keeps getting reinforced. Below the fold, two recent examples.

Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree (also here) by Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark starts:

If you've read about bitcoin in the press and have some familiarity with academic research in the field of cryptography, you might reasonably come away with the following impression: Several decades' worth of research on digital cash, beginning with David Chaum, did not lead to commercial success because it required a centralized, banklike server controlling the system, and no banks wanted to sign on. Along came bitcoin, a radically different proposal for a decentralized cryptocurrency that didn't need the banks, and digital cash finally succeeded. Its inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, was an academic outsider, and bitcoin bears no resemblance to earlier academic proposals.

They comprehensively debunk this view, showing that each of the techniques Nakamoto used had been developed over the preceding three decades of academic research, and that Nakamoto's brilliant contribution was:

the specific, complex way in which the underlying components are put together.

Below the fold, details on the specific techniques.

ASICs and Mining Centralization

Three and a half years ago, as part of my explanation of why peer-to-peer networks that were successful would become centralized, I wrote in Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks:

When new, more efficient technology is introduced, thus reducing the cost per unit contribution to a P2P network, it does not become instantly available to all participants. As manufacturing ramps up, the limited supply preferentially goes to the manufacturers best customers, who would be the largest contributors to the P2P network. By the time supply has increased so that smaller contributors can enjoy the lower cost per unit contribution, the most valuable part of the technology's useful life is over.

I'm not a blockchain insider. But now in a blockbuster post a real insider, David Vorick, the lead developer of Sia, a blockchain based cloud storage platform, makes it clear that the effect I described has been dominating the Bitcoin and other blockchains for a long time, and that it has led to centralization in the market for mining hardware:

The biggest takeaway from all of this is that mining is for big players. The more money you spend, the more of an advantage you have, and there’s not an easy way to change that equation. At least with traditional Nakamoto style consensus, a large entity that produces and controls most of the hashrate seems to be more or less the outcome, and at the very best you get into a situation where there are 2 or 3 major players that are all on similar footing. But I don’t think at any point in the next few decades will we see a situation where many manufacturing companies are all producing relatively competitive miners. Manufacturing just inherently leads to centralization, and it happens across many different vectors.

Below the fold, the details.

Shorter talk at MSST2018

I was invited to give both a longer and a shorter talk at the 34^th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology at Santa Clara University. Below the fold is the text with links to the sources of the shorter talk, which was updated from and entitled DNA's Niche in the Storage Market .

Blockchain for Peer Review

An initiative has started in the UK called Blockchain for Peer Review. It claims:

The project will develop a protocol where information about peer review activities (submitted by publishers) are stored on a blockchain. This will allow the review process to be independently validated, and data to be fed to relevant vehicles to ensure recognition and validation for reviewers.  By sharing peer review information, while adhering to laws on privacy, data protection and confidentiality, we will foster innovation and increase interoperability.

Everything about this makes sense and could be implemented with a database run by a trusted party, as for example CrossRef does for DOI resolution. Implementing it with a blockchain is effectively impossible. Follow me below the fold for the explanation.

Do You Need A Blockchain?

David Gerard's Do you need a Blockchain? Probably less than Wüst and Gervais think you do reviews an interesting paper, Do you need a Blockchain? by Karl Wüst and Arthur Gervais of ETH Zurich. Their abstract says:

In this article we critically analyze whether a blockchain is indeed the appropriate technical solution for a particular application scenario. We differentiate between permissionless (e.g., Bitcoin/Ethereum) and permissioned (e.g. Hyperledger/Corda) blockchains and contrast their properties to those of a centrally managed database.

Gerard is, for him, pretty enthusiastic about the paper:

This paper is worth your time. They explain the jargon at length, and discuss many commonly-advocated blockchain use cases — it’s a useful survey of the area — even as the authors are huge Bitcoin and blockchain advocates, and somewhat more optimistic for applying blockchains than is really warranted.

Below the fold, I look at both the paper and Gerard's review.

Why Decentralize?

In Blockchain: Hype or Hope? (paywalled until June '18) Radia Perlman asks what exactly you get in return for the decentralization provided by the enormous resource cost of blockchain technologies? Her answer is:

a ledger agreed upon by consensus of thousands of anonymous entities, none of which can be held responsible or be shut down by some malevolent government ... [but] most applications would not require or even want this property.

Two important essays published last February by pioneers in the field provide different answers to Perlman's question:

• Vitalik Buterin's answer in The Meaning of Decentralization is that what you get depends on what exactly you mean by "decentralization".
• Nick Szabo's answer in Money, blockchains, and social scalability is "social scalability"

Below the fold I try to apply our experience with the decentralized LOCKSS technology to ask whether their arguments hold up. I'm working on a follow-up post based on Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula and Ethan Zuckerman's Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization from last August, which asks the question specifically about the decentralized Web and thus the idea of decentralized storage.