Driverless Cars-Part Deux

I and a church acquaintance were killing time in the coffee-shop (evangelical watering hole) last Sunday and happened to be discussing the driverless car concept. We considered sociological ramifications, dystopian outcomes and ultimately ended up solving the crisis in the Middle East. But early in the process, during the dystopian part, some thoughts were shared which I believe bear some consideration before we jump into our driverless vehicle with both feet.

I try not to watch much prime time TV; sometimes I succeed more than others.  But there is one show I go out of my way to not miss:  Person of Interest.  Lovingly known around our house as the “box show” because of the opening scene, it shows city streets crowded with pedestrians who have target acquisition boxes superimposed over them as they go about their business, all seemingly unaware that they are being tracked and monitored.

The show features two perhaps sentient artificial intelligence computers (never seen, always implied) which utilize human agents to do their bidding. Both were originally developed at the request of the federal government for purposes of tracking and locating “Persons of Interest” for counter-terrorism responses.  The original machine, Northern Lights, was programmed to keep people safe through this mechanism and had stop-gaps built into its programming to keep it from “evolving” into other directives.

The second, Samaritan, having had its software penned by a different author, has no such inhibitions and now only acts in its own self-interest, masterfully hiding its motives and carnage under the guise of interventions for the greater good. Long and short, a mechanism built to protect the public ends up being used against it.

Now that I’ve belabored the background, allow me to circle back around to the point of our hazelnut-cream laden dystopian discussion. We talked about accident avoidance, and more specifically, how that could play out in a world of driverless cars.

In our new Mockingjay world, two cars approach on an undivided highway. Car number one, its optical sensor on front obscured by squashed bug, fails to respond to a piece of demolition debris in the road and hits it, blowing the left front tire. The computer tries to respond, but the steering corrections cause the car to slide into the oncoming path of car number two due to the rain-soaked pavement.

The satellite network that ties all this technology together for routing purposes is monitored by a supercomputer that sorts out the data for driverless cars. This computer has received data via seat-sensors that car number one has four occupants, whereas the car minding its own business has only one. The computer runs its algorithm and determines based on speed that if they collide head-on, all five people will likely lose their lives, so in the name of accident avoidance it has to make a determination. Which of the cars does it hurl off the roadbed and into an area wooded with two-foot diameter oak trees?  Solve for X.

The stuff of an opening scene to a science fiction thriller? Maybe. But remember that history is riddled with stories of people giving up social freedoms, only later to have these same concessions turn dark and then be used against them.

Looking forward to my next caffeine laden revelation…

© 2015 D.W. Williams

The Municipal Joys of Car Ownership

In December of last year, my oldest boy purchased a fairly ratty Mazda Miata for himself. I had explained the titling and sales tax part of the purchase process, so he wasn’t shaken by those things or the DMV visit at the time. The proof of insurance and property tax receipt that Missouri makes you produce to license a vehicle weren’t relevant then because we weren’t licensing it yet. We had some wrench-time ahead of us because the car didn’t run. And so he contented himself with knowing that he had a project in the driveway and a title in his name.

Around the first of February, when we received our property tax declarations, I realized that:

      A.      He would need to declare his car.

      B.      He had never done this, didn’t have an account in the county tax system and would need a waiver to tag the car.

Unfortunately, in our county there is no online mechanism to set up a tax account, so the only way to get it done is a personal visit to the county courthouse. We scheduled a day to go, looking forward to the quality male-bonding time.

On the morning we slotted for this adventure, I was hemming and hawing about where to go. You see, unlike many counties, ours has two separate courthouses, one downtown and one in an adjacent community.  I thought back to my brush with jury duty at the downtown branch and recalled a less-than-stellar experience locating parking. 

An online search to locate available courthouse parking landed me on Yelp’s website, and after being sidetracked into reading a few individual reviews likening the downtown tax division experience to visiting another dimension, being thrown into a lake of fire, a run through the Inquisition’s dungeons and other equally colorful similes, I thought we’d visit the other one.

The day we went, the #2 courthouse’s T-1 line was down, and with it their network. The clerks were franticly faxing paper hard-copies to the downtown courthouse for entry and waiting on faxed responses. In spite of these technical issues the process was quick and painless, only consuming three unrecoverable hours from each of our lives. 

But the experience for the kid was priceless.  Where to start…

The 1” bulletproof Lexan with the 1960’s bullet shaped brushed-stainless George Jetson intercoms punched through it? Maybe the waiting line reception-guy dancing around like he was peddling circus sideshow tickets and shouting back and forth to his supervisor about how he was going to get sick and go home early? “You can’t tell me I can’t get sick. It’s my sick-time. I can get sick if I want to”?  He made good on the promise later.

 Adding to the carnival-like atmosphere was the potpourri of humanity in line, each owning a unique semi-intelligible dialect. If I concentrated hard on the conversations, I could almost understand the gist of what was said. Maybe county tax-departments are the Ellis Islands of the 21^st century.

About an hour after we had turned in the info and reconciled ourselves to the wait, the clerk that the circus-barker had assigned left for her lunch-break. I approached another window to make sure they still had someone working on this account. We’d heard nothing indicating that it was done, or even still in process. This other clerk was preoccupied and unaware of my approach.  

I spoke, but without his headset and the miracle of the Jetson intercom he was unable to hear me through his 1” Lexan, so I spoke through the paper-slot underneath the window. He jarred to attention and looked positively stricken, reacting as if he’d never heard English before. He glanced hopefully to his peers but they offered no help. After gathering his composure, he reluctantly slid on the Brittany Spears headset as if he was expecting an electrical shock. He told me he would have to defer to the floor supervisor, slipped the headset back off and went back to his quiet place.

Over the next 1½ hours we were offered three assurances it would “only be a few more minutes.”  Before he became sick, the circus-barker had started telling people as they walked in, “They’ve been here foreeeeever” (gesturing in our direction). And so we were. I guess he was cautioning these folks not to board the USS Titanic… His own small philanthropic contribution.

In spite of the surreal experience, we eventually succeeded and left with a tax-waiver in hand and assurances that the account was set up.  But I’m really looking forward to my son receiving 2-tax bills on 2-separate accounts for the same car.

Mass transit anyone?

© 2015 D.W. Williams