Some More News - SMN: Dude, Where's My Self-Driving Car?
Episode Date: October 4, 2023Hi. In today's episode, we look at how autonomous vehicles work, and also how they don't work, and also also how they're being tested on city streets without your consent to help enrich people like El...on Musk. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dWvHJLjikgWikFBf4wllk8etc-SIdC8maB0-7eZA7LM/edit?usp=sharing Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Stop wiping and start washing. Go to https://hellotushy.com/morenews and use promo code MORENEWS for 10% off your first order. Factor, America’s #1 Ready-To-Eat Meal Kit, can help you fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. Head to https://factormeals.com/morenews50 and use code morenews50 to get 50% off. If you want to take ownership of your health, try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 Free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/MORENEWS. Check it out.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Ah geez and crackers! Hi everyone! Hey, hi. Sorry to be a little crabby Cody, but I got a blast through this.
I'm taking a road trip to Forks, Washington for my annual book club retreat, and I haven't read any of the books.
For some reason we're doing Infinite Jest, Middlemarch, and the Outlander series all in one weekend.
So I need a way to read all of those during my 19 hour drive
or else the breeders, which is how we say bee readers,
which stands for book readers, will mock me relentlessly.
Plus I'll get put in the tin can, a fiendish device
I absolutely will not go into further detail about.
It involves Vaseline and it's pretty fun.
Anyway, I don't want to take a train because I'm scared
it'll take me to wizard school
and I can't afford the student loans.
Also, TERFs.
So my only other option would be to get one of those self-driving cars.
And those have to be out by now, right?
Right?
Oh, either way, I guess I could-
Are self-driving cars out yet?
Son of a-
I ask a simple question, and then a title screen shows up
and now I have to talk about this
for the next 25 to 180 minutes.
Typical.
Feels like this happens every week.
But fine, here is some news.
We're gonna take a look at self-driving cars,
the companies attempting to make them,
the technology behind them,
and what the world might look like
if the least fun X-Man here
gets to flood the world with them.
I'm thinking Maximum Overdrive
with slightly less cocaine involved.
Warning slash teaser,
we are gonna talk about Eddie Muskster quite a bit today.
So get your popcorn and or Dramamine and or lube ready,
whichever you choose, you sicken me.
Okay, so when are we getting these self-driving cars?
Take it away, Elon.
We're probably only a month away
from having autonomous driving, at least for highways
and for relatively simple roads.
I think probably by end of next year,
self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200%
safer than a person by the end of next year. We're talking maybe 18 months from now.
I think we will be feature complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will
be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all
the way to your destination without an intervention. I feel very confident predicting autonomous
robotaxis for Tesla next year. I remain confident that we will have the functionality for the basic
functionality for level five autonomy complete this year. I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy
and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year.
I would be shocked if we do not achieve
full self-driving safer than a human this year.
I would be shocked.
Shocked, he says.
Positively electrocuted into a coma with disbelief
if Tesla doesn't achieve full self-driving
safer than a human in 2022.
And that's coming from Elon Musk.
Surely there's no evidence besides the entire montage
I just showed you and also a lot of other stuff
that he'd be wrong about anything at all
and should definitely be in charge of multiple companies
and also intervening with a war over Ukraine.
Anywho, Tesla absolutely has not developed
fully autonomous vehicles.
Nobody has, not even Jesus.
And I heard that guy could do a back flip.
Everyone's developed kind of autonomous vehicles,
which we will talk about,
including why kind of is really, really not going to cut it.
Cars that can drive a simple obstacle course
are not necessarily ready for the 405 at rush hour,
especially if there's a speed situation unfolding.
But that distinction hasn't stopped Elon
from continuing to make the claim
that full unencumbered self-driving cars are just,
they're just, oh, they're just a few months away.
He's even said it again multiple times
since we started to research and write this episode.
Somewhere, now, he's saying it right this second.
Where is he?
Where are you saying it, Elon?
Because it's somewhere.
And as wild as it is to watch him push the same lie
year after year, it doesn't even do justice
to how fantastical his claims have often been.
It's financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla.
They will be like owning a horse in three years.
I mean, fine if you wanna own a horse,
but you should go into it with that expectation.
Do we have a date for this video?
Ah, another sound prediction.
Teslas are so advanced, you see,
that buying any other car is like buying a horse.
And what's a horse worth?
One erotic massage tops?
His new thing is arguing that Teslas will soon be able
to be sent out as robo taxis
when their owners aren't driving them.
You know how people love having their cars borrowed
by complete strangers for long stretches of time.
But from the passenger's perspective,
it means no more having to make awkward small talk
with your Uber driver,
because nobody likes other people, according to Musk.
And if Elon gets his way,
soon you'll get to make awkward small talk
with the big man himself,
while he reads to you from his collection of stolen memes
on Tesla's X app.
Except you won't do that.
It's not happening.
We'll get to how self-driving cars work
and the reason this technology is so hard to manage
in a little bit, but just on the business side,
self-driving cars have to date been an unmitigated failure.
Companies like Tesla, Uber, Google, Amazon,
General Motors and others have spent $100 billion trying to make these products safe
in real traffic conditions.
So before we go any further, where are we at with that?
Jeez!
Whoa!
Shit, sorry.
Damn.
Let's see, we'll stop, let's stop, let's stop.
This is slow as it's ever gone.
Ah, shoot.
Okay, that was closer.
That was closer.
It just would have hit a little bit.
You know, if your car hits a kid just a little bit,
it's called a bumper kiss, builds character.
I was hit by seven cars when I was a kid
and it made me strong brain plus good speak.
Elon may be the most shameless liar
about what his cars can do.
Going so far as to stage a fake demo of their autonomy,
something he should probably, I don't know, go to jail for?
Like maybe just a little bit, builds character.
But he's not alone.
The CEOs of other autonomous car companies
make similar claims, despite the fact
that they are no closer to cracking the code.
Perhaps that's why Tesla asks people who own its vehicles
not to share so many clips of full self-driving mode.
Interesting.
And yet, because these car makers aren't about
to willingly showcase dismal failure,
our entire awareness of what they're currently capable of
comes from videos like the ones we just showed you.
So here's what we do know from what we can observe.
The cars appear right now to be pretty good
at going forward down one lane of the street,
getting up to speed and making right turns.
Just like me when I'm wasted.
And like drunk Cody,
they can traverse several miles of city streets
without killing anybody.
At least not in a way that can be proven
or that haunts you forever.
But those few things tested in areas
with no adverse weather or construction or schools
are not all that goes into driving.
They finished Donut Plains 1 with no other players.
Big difference between that and Rainbow Road
when a dozen red Koopa shells are coming your way,
which I hear happens all the time now in our big cities.
Ooh, still these basic driving demonstrations
have raised confidence in self-driving cars as coming soon.
Given how much autonomous vehicles are in the news,
you could even be forgiven for thinking
that they were already in widespread use.
This is what Domino's and Ford have come up with,
the self-driving delivery vehicles.
So, pizza customers are gonna be seeing this here in Ann Arbor. The big question remains, THE DRIVERS ARE GOING TO BE RECEIVING THE CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S
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CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMER'S CUST Phone number, submit it. You got it. You got it.
Domino's heat wave container is open.
You can safely remove your order now.
Ah, what an efficient and sensible use
for an entire six by 15 foot vehicle.
That's a clip from today.
Not today the day, today the show,
which people call the today show,
but it's really just today.
The year was 2017.
Domino's and Ford announced that they were going to test
deliver pizzas with self-driving cars.
That never happened.
The partnership fizzled out and Domino's then announced
a similar partnership with Nuro in 2019
before finally acknowledging earlier this year
that the technology isn't where it needs to be.
And also it's a bad idea.
We use entire cars to deliver pizzas
because people own cars.
If you're gonna get rid of the person,
then I don't know, drones?
Or one of those dildo robots you see?
Better than using them for cops, you know?
All right.
But you really wouldn't have known
any of this was in question from that puff piece on today,
reruns of which are called Yesterday.
Paul McCartney keeps suing the shit out of them. It's pretty funny. He must be so bored. any of this was in question from that puff piece on today, reruns of which are called Yesterday.
Paul McCartney keeps suing the shit out of them.
It's pretty funny.
He must be so bored.
You'd also think things were farther along,
given the recent announcement that San Francisco
is allowing 24-7 robo-taxi service from Waymo and Cruise.
Of course, to McCartney, it's a 24-8 robo-taxi service.
We'll get to the unregulated skull fuckery
of the San Francisco situation later on,
but for now, it's important to understand
that local regulators are approving these vehicles
to operate on city streets,
despite the fact that they are the subject
of regular software recalls,
often to fix things as basic
as following posted speed limits,
knowing what to do in an intersection,
and understanding not to harshly brake while making a left turn.
While most accidents involving the cars are minor,
they do appear to happen more frequently
than with cars driven by us basic sentient meat sacks.
The tech and the laws clearly aren't there yet,
but fuck it, we're doing it anyway because future.
CEOs are currently making their pitch
based on how much better at driving than humans
their cars soon will be.
Humans are so bad at driving, the CEO of GM's cruise says.
Musk says human driving is so dangerous
that eventually it will be outlawed.
Alphabet's, Google's Waymo. Yeah, I guess that's it will be outlawed. Alphabet's Google's Waymo, yeah, I guess that's it.
Alphabet's Google's Waymo runs huge data sets
to show how human driving is reckless
and contributes to deaths.
And it's not like they're entirely wrong about that.
More than 40,000 people die on US roads every year.
And the major factors in most of those crashes
are human negligence or error.
So the CEOs don't have to argue
that their self-driving cars will be perfect,
just that they'll be statistically safer than human drivers.
Except when you really look at the numbers,
humans are actually pretty good drivers,
responsible for only 1.35 fatalities
per 100 million miles driven.
And the increasing size of our cars
is what's largely responsible for the rise
in the number of fatalities over the last decade.
Though of course the ubiquity of smartphones
likely played a role as well.
The car companies have a huge incentive to convince you
that human driving is a death race down Fury Road,
which might make you less sensitive to their own vehicle's pretty notable shortcomings.
A couple of cruise driverless cars weren't able to reroute during last night's storm.
They both veered into an area of San Francisco that was taped off because of downed trees
and power lines. No one was hurt, thankfully, but the company had to send employees out
to get the cars out of the restricted area. Pesky rain! Lord knows I hate driving in the rain too.
But, you know, I can. Now, to be F to the B, I can't just show a few examples of autonomous
vehicles not functioning properly to make my case. That's anecdotal. It's the Cherry Garcia fallacy,
or something. It's that, it was that.
And there are plenty of demonstrations out there
where these cars appear to work as advertised.
Demos that the autonomous car companies
will happily point to as examples
of how far the technology has progressed.
Though, as we've already mentioned,
demos can and have been staged
and reporters can be easily impressed
given the staggering amount of data
the vehicles appear to process at once.
It's actually really hard to pin down exactly
which elements of driving the cars computers excel at
and which still need a lot of work.
All the code they use is proprietary
to a few huge companies,
and they generally only have to report driving incidents
when they involve a crash that would already be reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
For example, none of these companies have to report when their test vehicle veers dangerously
into a bike lane or stops in the middle of traffic. These cars could be doing things like
that three or four times a day or once a month. We simply don't know. And that
knowledge gap comes with fatal consequences. Tests here are continuing despite concerns about
the technology following the death of a pedestrian in Arizona this week. Today, police released this
dashboard video of the collision. I'll cut it off there because it's pretty goddamn terrifying to
watch a car just not
stop for a person.
Elaine Hertzberg was walking her bike across an Arizona street in March 2018 when a self-driving
car being tested by Uber struck and killed her.
Police said the vehicle was not to blame given that the monitoring driver was supposed to
take over in the event of a malfunction.
That driver, who had taken her eyes off the road
was charged with negligent homicide
and took a plea deal to avoid jail.
She was ultimately sentenced to three years of probation.
Nobody in the Arizona state government to approve the test
or anyone from Uber was ever charged,
despite the fact that Uber disabled
the car's emergency braking system
to reduce the jerkiness of rides,
something several Uber executives raised concerns about.
Uber has for years been waiting for self-driving cars to become a reality so it can fire all of its drivers
who totally aren't employees
so it can actually turn a consistent profit.
Side note, did you know that Uber
only had its first operating profit this year?
And that's pretty much only because of food delivery
and inflation.
The company gave up trying to develop its own autonomous car
a few years ago and is now hoping Waymo can bail it out
of having no actual business model.
Elaine was the first person in the US confirmed
to have been killed by an autonomous vehicle,
but she wasn't the last.
Tesla's autopilot, wait, I don't think I put that in big enough air quotes.
Tesla's autopilot has been involved in hundreds more crashes than they publicly reported,
resulting in 17 deaths.
And while it's not possible to know for certain that all those deaths were the software's
fault, many of them share commonalities.
Nearly a quarter involved a motorcycle,
a vehicle that might be tricky
for a self-driving car to recognize,
but which isn't exactly rare on US streets.
If the Tesla failed to recognize an elephant,
you might think, okay, how often is an elephant
on the street outside of an army of the 12 monkeys scenario?
But there are 8.6 million motorcycles in the US
and your stupid robot car better be able to see them.
While we're on the subject,
there's a difference apparently
between full self-driving Tesla software
that it claims will soon be able to take you
from point A to B with no driver assistance
and autopilot, which is just an enhanced
driver's assistance feature
that requires an attentive human driver at all times.
This is despite Elon claiming in 2016
that a Model S and Model X at this point
can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person,
right now.
That statement could get him into a lot of trouble
as Tesla is being sued for the 2018 death
of Apple engineer, Walter Huang,
who was using a Tesla on autopilot when it crashed.
Tesla's lawyers hilariously argue
that Musk should not have to be deposed in that case,
because his very real, extremely public statement
about autopilot could have been a deep fake.
Like a Model S and Model X at this point
can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person.
Right now.
Wow, deep fakes are getting so good in 2016
in front of an audience.
They even got the sweat glare and the attempted goatee.
So I guess the real issue here
is that one of our regulatory agencies
really dropped the ball
by letting him call it fucking autopilot,
which literally means self-driving.
Despite all his bluster, Tesla's technology is at best,
indirectly responsible for at least some of these deaths.
And he doesn't appear any closer than the other guys
to making this jerk off daydream a reality.
What's really remarkable is,
even though there's seemingly endless footage
of self-driving
cars pulling a Benny the Cab, most autonomous vehicle companies claim to be at level 4 or
above.
Fun little fact, there are six levels of vehicle autonomy.
Level 0 is no autonomy.
Level 1 is like most of the cars we currently drive that have things like cruise control
or some other driver's assistance. Level two, I believe, is cup holder and level five is complete automation. You punch
in an address and the car takes you there while you nap, watch suits, or read a postmodern
encyclopedic novel where there's 96 pages of just end notes. Level five is the holy grail of levels and kind of where you need to be at a minimum
when safety is involved.
If all we're ever going to have are cars
that kind of drive sometimes
and only under predictable conditions,
then what's the point?
The $100 billion investment is only worth it
if we save lives and commute in comfort and luxury.
If that future isn't coming, shouldn't we cut our losses?
Like we did with the Snyderverse.
I mean, it's not like the fans would reject a series
of plotting unwatchable films
and the studio would just keep making more.
That's not how CEOs behave.
But again, everything we've talked about so far
is easy to ignore if you believe that these mistakes are just stepping stones
on the way to the inevitable breakthrough
that makes the cars all work perfectly,
saving us stress on our commutes
and tens of thousands of lives a year.
So next, let's take a look at how autonomous vehicles
actually work and why that future might not be inevitable
or to avoid the double negative, why it's super-evitable.
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Not by Neptune though, by one of the other planets.
You know the one, Mercury.
Anyway, we've talked about the amazing claims
some lying liars have made about their self-driving cars
and how that's led demonstrably to preventable deaths.
Wee!
Now we're going to look at the technology
behind self-driving cars and why it's so difficult,
even for super smart people
like Russia's favorite little assets,
to get these things right.
Most autonomous vehicles use a combination of cameras,
radar, and LIDAR,
which stands for light detection and ranging.
Waymo cars, for example, are covered in LIDAR sensors
that blast laser pulses at the surrounding environment.
When these pulses bounce back to the sensor,
the vehicle's computer makes a rendering
of the area surrounding the car. It is, in a sense, a Batmobile. And that is
very cool. I wish I could use LiDAR to keep a certain puppet from sneaking up on me during
my afternoon nap. He calls himself the Sleepy Ticklebug and it haunts me all day every day.
It's haunting me now. Sleepy Ticklebug. Of course, LIDAR appears to work well in low light
conditions and during rain, but it is more limited
around dust and smoke. And my napping room is filled
with dust and smoke. That's how daddy likes it.
That's how he likes it.
Hey, remember how I said most autonomous vehicles
use a combination of technologies
to render their surroundings?
One that doesn't is Tesla,
which relies exclusively on cameras
at the demand of one Elon Musk.
He did this despite misgivings from his engineers
about its reliability.
Without getting too technical,
one concern about using only cameras is that they can
only render two-dimensional images and require computer calculations to judge depth.
If the car can't match a pixel in one camera with the same point in space in a separate
feed, it can't accurately analyze the 3D space around it.
Though the tech is improving, this is a major limitation of the camera only approach.
Musk says he's doing it this way since quote,
"'Humans drive with eyes and biological neural nets,
so makes sense that cameras and silicon neural nets
are only way to achieve generalized solution
to self-driving.'"
It's a weird claim considering he also says
that humans are terrible drivers.
Like if people are such bad drivers,
why would you want to exclusively emulate
their poor method of perception if you don't have to?
Anyway, he's probably just doing it
because cameras are way cheaper than LIDAR.
And once the cost of LIDAR comes down enough,
he will likely backtrack.
There are signs that he already is.
Just a very easy guy to read.
I wish my book club was reading him, I'd be done already.
But in FABness to Musk,
who according to everyone around him
simply will not listen to the people around him,
this is an ongoing debate
and nobody really knows the correct way
to render a 3D model of the world
for a fabulous computer car
because nobody has yet built a fabulous computer car
that doesn't screw up all the time.
The real problem, even after you've mastered the technology
that gives the car a view of the world,
is teaching a computer to interpret that information
so it knows what to do in a wide variety of situations
and under a wide variety of conditions.
That's why self-driving cars perform well
in predictable situations, but completely fall apart
if anything, and I mean anything unexpected happens.
Anything.
Anything.
You see, part of the difference
between a biological neural net and a silicon neural net
is that human brains have the ability
to see something they've never seen before,
put it into the correct context,
and make a decision about how to react.
For example, how nobody saw the movie Cats,
or in the case of driving,
you've probably never personally seen a peeping Tom
fall from a tree and land directly in front of your car
before another person in an anachronistic Eddie Bauer fest
pushes him out of the way.
But if you did, you'd probably react
by either swerving or braking
because you've experienced stuff like that
and can quickly make sense of what's going on.
Unlike this car driven by Marty McFly's robot grandfather,
which slams right into him,
thus putting the entire space-time continuum into jeopardy.
It's wild how that one deleted scene
revealed Marty McFly's grandpa is a robot for no reason.
Any diddles, the computer in self-driving cars
doesn't know how to interpret anything
it hasn't been programmed to interpret.
Things like these are called edge cases
because it almost gives the computer sexual arousal.
Ah, so close.
Some individual edge cases are pretty rare,
but all the edge cases put together
make them fairly common overall.
So they have to be addressed
before we can actually make progress.
One example that comes up often is pigeons.
As Max Chavkin wrote last year in Bloomberg,
humans encountering a group of pigeons in the street
know to maintain their speed
because they know the pigeons will fly away as they approach
and that's what the drivers behind them
also expect to happen.
But an autonomous vehicle
doesn't conceptualize any of that.
It sees a collection of pixels
or some kind of little obstruction
and it might decide to swerve or stop completely,
causing danger to the passenger, the people around the car,
and other drivers or computer cars
that aren't expecting that response.
Now, obviously, you could program the computer
to recognize pigeons and keep driving
through that specific obstruction,
but humans can see a group of pigeons of any size or color
from any angle and know that that's what it is.
Self-driving cars can't,
and it's incredibly difficult to teach them that,
especially for any conceivable situation
or obstacle that might arise.
As Chafkin writes, quote,
"'Computers deal with their shortcomings
through repetition,' meaning that if you showed
the same pigeon scenario to a self-driving car enough times,
it might figure out how to handle it reliably,
but it would likely have no idea
how to deal with slightly different pigeons
flying a slightly different way.
And that's the major hurdle that Tesla,
Cruise, Alphabet's, Google's Waymo,
and others have not been able to overcome.
Right now, to a self-driving car,
any group of pigeons might as well be another car,
a toddler, or a news host,
riding by on one of those cool,
one-wheel motorized skateboards only non-losers have.
Oh, it stopped for the pigeons.
You love to see it.
You absolutely love to see them stopping for the pigeons.
No, you don't!
You don't love to see it!
In that demo of a Waymo car from 2019,
the vehicle only briefly breaks when the pigeons fly by,
then accelerates again when they're out of the way.
It shows the tiny variations in common driving obstacles
we see every day and how, quite frequently,
continuing to drive or even accelerating
is the safer choice.
But now all these companies are in a bind
because a single fatality due to vehicle error
could crush them in the court of public opinion
and derail their plans like some kind of autonomous,
self-coal shoveling rail-less train.
As a result, most self-driving cars are programmed
to simply stop when they don't know what else to do,
which happens a lot and typically
in the middle of the goddamn street.
What the fuck?
There's like 10 of them, right? I'm not gonna let you get away with this.
Crew says its cars decided to all shit the bed, my words,
at the same time because, their words,
a large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints,
causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles.
It's not the car's fault, you see,
but the fact that so many people were using up the wifi,
which prevented the cars from talking to each other.
Cars are always the priority as we've discussed.
They get all the space on the road
and now all the broadband internet.
See, it turns out that the good self-driving cars
share data to perform better on the roads
by communicating about conditions,
the timing of upcoming traffic lights, et cetera.
If they aren't sharing data,
they tend to make the flow of traffic slower,
partially because they stop every time
someone chucks a banana peel out the window.
And since these cars are starting to show up in major cities,
we should probably be happy that they freeze up
when they don't know what to do
like Mitch McConnell at a press conference,
because the alternative could be even worse.
Except that tactic is also a problem
specifically for emergency responders.
Despite Waymo's insistence that its cars know
to get out of the way of emergency vehicles,
there have been dozens of incidents
during testing in San Francisco
just in the last
few years where they, um, yeah, haven't. In one incident, a fire truck was blocked by a driverless
Waymo Jaguar and firefighters had to walk up to the car and tell a disembodied voice that it needed
to move the fuck out of the way. The remote monitor, a human being said,
"'Yes, I understand.'
After which the car still didn't move
and the fire truck had to back up
and find another way around."
Fire's not going anywhere, I guess.
You know, fire can't spread.
It's not butter.
This kind of thing hasn't been uncommon.
So sometimes stopping when confused is good
and other times it's bad.
It's almost like there's no binary answer
because driving is an extremely fluid
and unpredictable process that can't be done by computers.
And again, just to remind you,
all of these cars are being described as level four
on that autonomy scale, level four.
BMW describes level four as being able to handle
highly complex urban driving situations,
such as the sudden appearance of construction sites
without any driver intervention.
Pretty sure that description doesn't go on to say,
but sometimes they will randomly stop
and then drive away from the support team
trying to fix them.
This is just fake it till you make it style showmanship.
But as we've seen from Elon's braggadocio,
people will believe that you've made a self-driving car
even when you haven't.
Musk seems to understand this dynamic
and how critical it is that Tesla
actually eventually delivers.
But the overwhelming focus is solving for self-driving.
So, yeah.
And that's essential.
And that's really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.
Yeah.
I know I've given the guy a lot of shit, which he deserved, but I think he's right
here.
The selling point of Tesla is that eventually you're going to be able to do Sporkle quizzes
in the backseat while the time cop looking car takes you to Burning Man or wherever.
If that doesn't happen, the company's effectively worthless.
You know, once that carbon credit scam falls through.
So that's the $100 billion question.
Will that happen?
Experts in the automation space don't agree.
Some, especially if they work for one of these companies,
are still bullish that a breakthrough
is right around the corner.
Others think purchasable driverless cars
that are reliable at level five are decades away
if they ever happen.
And that's where we are.
People like Elon Musk, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt,
Alphabet's, Google's Waymo Chiefs,
Takedra Malakana and Dmitry Dolgov,
Aurora CEO Chris Ermson,
and others are showing us an impressive
but critically flawed product and saying,
"'Hey, this thing kind of sucks, but imagine if it didn't.'"
And yeah, man, if the cars worked as advertised,
I guess that would be pretty cool, but they don't.
And it matters that they don't.
We touched on this same issue in our episode on AI.
There are seemingly endless potential dangers
and benefits to this tech,
but it's hard to know what to do with that knowledge
when none of it works reliably.
For now, it seems like they're just trying to convince us
to let them widely release the subpar version
around the country with no consequences to them
or their companies if they ruin everything and kill people.
So next, we're going to talk about
what the ramifications of this are
and what the world might look like if I'm wrong
and all these ding-dongs are right.
I mean, I'm not a scientist.
You could be watching this
in a level five self-driving car right now.
Although if you are, and it's the year 2078,
the promo code for whatever ad you're about to watch
probably won't work anymore.
I mean, give it a shot.
Even people in the future need 15% off on mattresses, right?
Right? Still got mattresses in the future need 15% off on mattresses, right? Right?
Still got mattresses in the future?
There's nobody in the room.
Okay.
Hey, it's Cody from the show.
I'm so busy, you know?
Always on the phone, making deals,
making them and breaking them.
Pointing my finger in the air.
It's hard to find the time to eat properly.
That's why I get down with AG1.
It's a daily nutritional supplement, but in drink form,
because Cody doesn't have time for vitamin pills.
He's far too important for that.
I gave AG1 a try because of these ads,
and it really is good for long shoot days
when I don't have time to eat food.
A lot of people take multivitamins,
so why not take it as a drink?
This drink that I'm about to slurp on.
I'm gonna slurp on it.
I didn't mix it up enough.
Oh well!
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It aids with your gut health,
and it makes me feel good when I'm wheelin' and dealin'.
Wearin' my suit pants, you know?
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Go to drinkag1.com, gonna say that more clear. Go to drinkag1.com. I'm going to say that more clear. Go to drinkag1.com slash more
news. That's drinkag1.com slash more news. Check it out and try to get the rest of it.
How'd that promo code work out for you? Don't answer. I can't hear you specifically because
you're in the year 2078 and I'm not, and for no other reason.
Before the break, we were talking about how self-driving
cars are here now, even though they're not good
at a big chunk of what we consider driving,
and it's unclear if they ever will be.
And it's time to see what all this looks like
when we open the flood gates and let current,
giant air quotes, level four self-driving cars
invade our cities.
As we mentioned earlier,
that's exactly what's happening right now in San Francisco.
Waymo and Cruise were specifically given permission
to operate a 24 seven robo taxi service in the city.
And that's in addition to the 40 other companies
that had previously been given permission
to test vehicles in a more limited capacity.
For the autonomous vehicle companies, that's crucial,
since they need to test their cars over millions of miles
and can't simulate real street conditions
on a private track.
So if you live in San Francisco,
you didn't vote for this or have any kind of say in it,
but congratulations, you are now the world's guinea pigs.
If guinea pigs had to dodge a 4,000 pound robotic vehicle
careening through a stop sign
that had a little bit of spray paint on it.
I actually don't really need to tell you how that's going.
As you've already seen several clips
from the post floodgates era in San Francisco in this video.
That car just itching to drive through a family,
all these cars stopped in the road at that outdoor festival,
both from San Francisco within days
of when regulators allowed them free access to the roads.
And the approval came after they'd already been causing
problems for more than a year.
These cars have parked on the sidewalk, not cool,
sped away from cops, kind of cool,
and wandered aimlessly by the dozens
into a single cul-de-sac, weird.
So you get it, but let's watch one more clip just for fun.
About one minute in, our car was at a green light,
but wouldn't budge.
It's a very safe situation for the car to turn
and it's just staying here, I'm not sure why.
The car eventually inched forward, but kept stopping.
We're kind of now riding in between two lanes.
Then all of a sudden in between two lanes. Then all
of a sudden it hit the gas.
Okay I don't know what it's doing now. Our car drove straight towards the
median and just stopped picking up almost two full lanes. This is not good.
While other drivers cruised right past that closed lane, our car sat parked on a busy
street for 20 minutes, causing a traffic jam for blocks.
You see how even if there's no danger to human lives, this still just kind of sucks?
At least Cruise has put may stop quickly on the back of all of its vehicles, so you're
aware of the thing it does all the time.
But if any other driver did this, they would absolutely get at least a ticket,
if not arrested, if not shot.
You may be wondering how regulators gave a green light
to an unproven technology,
which frequently has high profile hiccups.
You will absolutely not be surprised to find out
that one of the members
of the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPAC,
which approved the rollout,
is a former managing counsel at Cruz
and refused to recuse himself from the vote.
Not that it would have mattered,
given that the CPACs voted eight to two
in favor of the plan.
But still, bad optics, CPAC.
What are they, playing hockey underwater?
Get out of here.
Immediate issues have prompted
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
to petition CPAC to reconsider their vote,
and local emergency authorities aren't happy either.
San Francisco's fire chief says the vehicles
are not ready for prime time.
A cute way to say extremely dangerous
and an obstacle to our job, which is putting out fires.
Increasingly, a lot of people agree,
so much so that the state's DMV told crews
to reduce its fleet in the city by half
less than two weeks after regulators
gave them the green light.
Or as a self-driving car might recognize it,
a possibly green shape, maybe a pigeon,
does not compute Hong Kong splat.
And it's not just San Francisco.
Across the US, there's a staggering lack of regulation
as to when and how vehicles like this
can be out on the streets.
Unlike in European countries,
in our neck of the increasingly scorched woods,
quote, car companies self-certify
that their vehicles comply with federal guidelines
pertaining to everything from steering wheels
to brake fluids,
but no such rules address the driver assistance and autonomous technologies.
There simply isn't any formal test required before a bunch of rogue robots go public.
Even before the San Francisco approval, all a company needed to get a permit to test driverless
cars in California was to be conducting the test themselves, have a supervisor present,
and have the finances to pay off any settlements
from people who might be injured or die.
It's like a carbon credit for negligent manslaughter.
There are a few more requirements
for companies testing the cars with no driver present,
but not many.
They have to alert the local authorities,
ensure that there is a communication link
between the vehicle and a remote operator,
and declare that the car is capable of operating
without a driver and has reached level four
or five of automation.
And despite their self-certifications,
we've already established that there are significant doubts
that they've actually reached that level.
So it feels improbable that regulators
are going to be able to make an educated decision
about what to do given that Waymo and Cruise
are not required to report most of these incidents.
In addition to crashes,
the only thing regulators can see is information
that's also publicly available,
which the industry calls disengagements.
These are when...
It's when Jenny leaves me, it never comes back.
Oh, oh God, sorry, no, it's, sorry.
Disengagements are actually where a manual driver
has to turn off the vehicle's autonomous mode.
Quote, when a failure of the autonomous technology
is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver
disengage the autonomous mode and take immediate manual control of the vehicle.
And I read that entire boring thing to you just now because the car companies really, really like interpreting it in a manner
which allows them to avoid reporting critical issues.
For example, Cruise did not report this incident from 2017,
where an observer saw an autonomous vehicle
go through a red light.
According to Cruz, the light changed from yellow to red
while the vehicle was crossing the crosswalk.
And as that happened, the autonomous vehicle trainer
took manual control of the vehicle
and proceeded through the intersection.
Okay, so the car was about to run a red light,
then hit the brakes at the last second in the crosswalk.
So the human driver ran a red light,
which I guess is safer.
You see the problem,
Cruz, Waymo and others are not reporting incidents
that they almost certainly should
due to a narrow interpretation of the rules,
arguing that the human driver took over the car
for some reason other than safety or a vehicle failure.
And we just have to take their word for it.
We have no way of knowing whether Pickle,
the name of the car, ran the red light on its own.
Not only have these reporting standards not been updated
since the self-driving expansion,
they're actually much worse now,
since California doesn't require companies
to submit disengagement data if they are collecting fares.
The DMV just kind of assumed that if companies
were allowed to start charging customers for rides,
that somehow that means that the kinks
would have been worked out.
Surely we wouldn't charge people for automo cars
if they didn't work so good!
And this is all from a state with historically better reporting standards than other places where self-driving cars are being tested.
And speaking of these testees...
People are fucking in the cars.
They researched confessions from people who ride in the backseat, and they're like, doing it!
They're having sex in the backseat of these things! I'll say it again for the people fucking in the back seat and they're like doing it. They're having sex in the back seat of these things.
I'll say it again for the people fucking in the back.
People are fucking in the back of these cars.
Oh yes they are.
I'm as excited about it as this lady is.
And I want to give you as many details as I can
while still allowing this video to make this sweet,
sweet green backside crave, but also as a thing we made up.
So cue the sex music.
Yeah, All right. I'm ready to read some robo-taxi cab confessions. Hat tip to the San Francisco Standard, whose meticulous reporting
resulted in these sexy, scandalous secrets. Quote, we got in and just got straight to it.
Making out, said Megan, who got into the cruise wearing nothing but a robe. One thing led
to another, and he made sure that I was taken care of, if you will. I was like, I have no underwear
on, and I am ready to go in this kimono. And I was using his slippers that were like five sizes too
big. That, wait. Using his slippers to do what?
You were wearing his big slippers, right?
But you said using.
You said using.
Did you do something else with the slippers?
Did you have the guy do mouth stuff to the slippers?
I'm sorry, this slipper thing really spoiled the mood for me.
And I was just about to get to the part
where her partner claims to have performed
six separate sex acts in cruise vehicles.
I am both impressed and also think
you might have some kind of hangup
of the Cronenbergian persuasion.
Anyway, people are having sex in the robo cars,
but only in the cruise robo cars,
which makes me think this is an Alphabets, Googles,
Ruth's, Chris's Waymo false flag.
Either that or cruise cars, they just have sexier seats.
Speaking of banging, cars driven by humans
keep hitting the robo taxis then driving away.
Because why wouldn't you?
Not that we're condoning it,
but you've gotta be pretty scrupulous
to leave a note on an empty car
that might back into a fire hydrant at any moment.
And these things, the sex and the hit and runs,
aren't an organized protest.
So just imagine if the famously politically passive people
of San Francisco started to intentionally screw
with the cars.
First, find a cone.
They're everywhere.
Then gently place it on the car's hood.
Make sure their car is empty.
And repeat.
It's really fun and anyone can do it.
It's true.
The cars are absolutely gub fumbled
when a cone is placed on the hood.
They don't know what to do, so they stop.
It's like putting a banana peel on a cat's head.
And this is exactly what the San Francisco group,
Safe Street Rebel is asking people to do.
The group wants car free spaces
and better public transit in general,
but the self-driving cars have become
a remarkably effective symbol of everything wrong with car culture and tech bros overall. The vehicles clog up the streets,
get preferential treatment over pedestrians and cyclists, and cars driven by actual people
create another harrowing surveillance obstacle on every block, and of course appear to be wildly
unsafe. It makes sense they'd be a perfect target if you're looking to fuck with an omnipresent symbol
of late stage capitalism.
Plus, it's fun.
If I was a little younger and didn't have this
gosh darned orange conophobia,
which is an actual thing I will have you know,
look it up, don't look it up.
The car companies, actually look it up, it's real.
The car companies for their part
appear to be totally taken aback by all of this.
The hot backseat slipperlingus, the hit and runs, even the fact that anyone might try to sabotage and thus highlight a glaring weakness of their product. Waymo told ABC7 News, not only is this understanding of how AVs operate incorrect, but this is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on
our roadways. We will notify law enforcement of any unwanted or unsafe interference of our
vehicles on public roadways. Encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways, they say.
I don't need to show more clips, do I? I feel like we've got a sense of how respectful Waymo
and Cruise are acting toward the people of San Francisco.
They have the potential to rake in a self-driving
buttload of money should their vehicles be allowed
to expand across the US, and they have every incentive
to make sure that happens.
But look, we've talked a lot about how much
these cars don't work, but before I strike out
for beautiful,
Forks Washington,
I remember the thing from earlier
that I'm definitely gonna do.
It's not part of a bit, I'm going there.
Forks Washington, before I go to Forks Washington,
we should talk briefly about why it would still suck
even if these cars did work.
Because in this world that Musk envisions,
there would undoubtedly be some positives.
Autonomous vehicles could be a boon
to people with disabilities,
especially if they end up being cheaper than taxis
and cover more ground than public transit.
But there's no guarantee that the rides
would be affordable or accessible.
That would only happen under regulations
that the companies are likely to oppose
and have been pretty successful at evading up to this point.
There's also the potential to save the lives
of some of the more than 40,000 people
who die annually on American roads.
We'd all want a world where these deaths could be eliminated
except of course for Carnage the Killer Car, obviously.
But is that definitely what would happen?
It feels like we're being asked to ignore
the kinds of accidents that aren't a person's fault.
Like, shit's still going to happen.
As long as millions of cars
are all speeding around every day,
people are still going to die sometimes.
The whole thing is kind of an argument
for more public transit, which has proven to be safer.
And while we're just speculating,
I would posit that the per accident death toll would be
higher with only self-driving cars on the road. According to the NHTSA, half of all passenger
vehicle occupants killed in crashes in 2021 weren't wearing seatbelts. Arguably, if the public
is convinced that autonomous vehicles are safer than other cars, they might not wear seatbelts as
often, which would mean a higher death rate per accident.
After all, you can't have sex in the back seat with one on,
unless you incorporate into your lovemaking, as you should.
So, bonus.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt says his cars
more strictly enforce seat belt usage as well,
since the car may not operate
unless the seat belts are fastened.
But in the tech bro envisioned future,
people aren't just sitting in stationary positions
and it's going to be way more difficult
to consistently enforce that safety standard
if humans trust the car implicitly.
And if people like Musk are out there making stuff up,
like, well, actually seat belts are unsafe and not based
and they need to be replaced with a fart button
that toots out Morse code for 420.
We can debate hypotheticals all day, and I would love to.
That's my slipper fetish.
But as you can see, there's absolutely no way to be sure
the autonomous future would result in fewer deaths.
And even in a world where the vehicles work as advertised
and there's suitable regulation,
there are going to be plenty of drawbacks.
For example, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.
Spend enough time around Phoenix, Arizona,
and you'll spot cars and vans cruising
without anyone behind the wheel.
Arriving shortly.
But semi-trucks, they're the new frontier
in driverless vehicles
being tested right now.
Oh, cool, yeah, sweet, giant driverless trucks.
I'm sure those will work out great.
Look, I like progress and I understand the trade-off.
A lot of horses lost their horse jobs with the automobile.
But lately, our government has been,
let's call it dipshitted,
when it comes to regulating
and supplementing new technology.
Maybe we should pass some legislation with economic relief and job training included.
Or do we only talk about that when it's coal miners?
This is also going to invite an even greater tech invasion into our lives,
drastically increasing the amount of time we're on camera every day.
It's the same trade-off tech companies often make to provide a futuristic product at an affordable price while raking in record profits.
They trade your data.
Under a capitalist system, they owe it to their shareholders to monetize in every way
they can.
You want your phone to recognize your face?
You have to give a company that sweet face.
You want self-driving cars?
Then people like Elon will probably be able to hear and see everything happening in your
car and potentially hold it against you.
You'll start getting ads in your car.
You will be monitored all the time.
That could be beneficial in rare cases like a murder, but what about doing drugs in your
car?
Is your Cybertruck going to narc on you?
There are already patents for self-driving cars to repossess themselves if you miss a payment.
This is not what the Jetsons promised us.
I want a tiny car for my dog, get on it, Musk.
Actually don't, because I care about my dog
and don't want it to get hurt.
Traffic would also get worse as people increasingly choose
to travel alone in a car instead of communally
on a bus or subway.
And as we already pointed out,
they tend to make the flow of traffic slower.
The car insurance industry would change massively.
And even if you're not driving the car,
you might still be held liable when things go wrong,
depending on the vehicle's terms of service.
And what happens if insurance companies get access
to all of your car's data?
Currently, your insurance for your Tesla goes up
if it detects you driving at night.
It's easy to imagine what kinds of sneaky data dealings,
hidden fees and subscriptions will arise from these people.
Finally, perhaps the greatest concern
is that the few companies that already control everything
we watch, type, look up and listen to
will now also control how we get around
in the physical world.
Do we really want one more aspect of our lives to be owned and run by Google? Do we really want
to live inside a big smartphone? With all of these concerns, it's worth asking why this is
the future we're rooting for. An all-electric, self-driving fleet won't solve climate change,
it doesn't improve the livability of our cities-driving fleet won't solve climate change, it doesn't
improve the livability of our cities, and it won't address the issues of social isolation,
fragmentation, and lack of public spaces that are a result of rampant car culture.
In fact, it emphasizes those problems. We did a whole video about how cities are overly designed
for cars over people, and you think this will solve that?
In fact, it brings us further
from that utopian world we're picturing.
Like when pop culture depicts
the idyllic city of the future,
do they often fill that city with cars?
Is there ever traffic in the ideal utopian future?
It's usually shit like monorails or pneumatic tubes,
otherwise known as public
transportation. The USS Enterprise is just a big bus when you think about it. I'm not saying that
we shouldn't make cars automated, but self-driving vehicles are a little like e-cigarettes in that
they solve the wrong problem. Like the point is to stop the bad habit, not make the habit easier to
ignore. And the real problems are issues that autonomous car companies have no interest in addressing.
All they want is to corner the market and fill as many cities around the world as possible
with their self-driving taxis, then ultimately sell these cars individually to as many people
as can afford them and avoid paying as many legal fees as possible when things go sideways.
None of it has anything to do with saving lives
or making things more convenient
or helping people with disabilities,
no matter how much the CEOs pretend otherwise.
There are plenty of obvious ways to spend billions of dollars
to save 40,000 lives a year.
Cryogenically freeze everyone in Wyoming, for example,
and that's just off the top of my head.
Ultimately, that's the key point to remember.
If we go down this road,
we're giving even greater control over our lives
to these wads, the tech CEOs who've kept promising us
a bold and beautiful future and provided nothing
over the last 15 years, but a string of embarrassing failures
and housing prices nobody can afford.
These are the folks who will be programming the AI
that has to solve the trolley problems of the future.
If a self-driving car is careening toward an old woman,
do we want it to keep going
or swerve and risk hitting a school bus?
I'm not sure I'm prepared to answer
that complex moral question,
but I sure as shit know that Elon Musk isn't.
His cars will probably do whatever's most racist.
So yeah, that's the self-driving cars episode, I guess.
Don't worry about my book problem from before.
During the second ad break, I asked ChatGPT
to summarize all of the books as if it was one book,
and it turns out it's just about a tennis player
who time travels to the future
to fuck a raincoat or something.
Look out you forking breeders, here comes Cody
and he'll be drunk on the magic of books and nitrous oxide.
Okay, we're not doing the normal end of the credits bit where I make whatever up.
I wanted to talk about this.
It didn't have much to do with the episode, but it kind of does.
All right, there's this passage from Elon Musk's new biography,
and it discusses the any day now Cybertruck,
this unrendered collection of polygons that nobody should actually want.
And aside from the fact that apparently everybody at Tesla agrees that it's ugly
and nobody wanted to make it,
they actually made an alternate design begging Elon
to not make the Cybertruck, but whatever.
It apparently stemmed from a question
from one of his children.
And their question was basically,
why doesn't the future look like the future?
And Elon's response was apparently to force a company
to spend massive amounts of wealth on this monstrosity,
this unrendered abomination.
He apparently, he's saying, well, the future,
the future should look like the future.
So here, now we have too many cars on the road
and they all look like Blade Runner.
You know how Blade Runner was good?
You know how we all watch Blade Runner
and we all went like, wow, I want to live in Blade Runner.
Like, how are you watching movies and you're like, well, this aesthetic, this dystopian aesthetic, it's healthy and good.
All things should look like this dystopian hellhole called Blade Runner.
It's an absurd reaction and impulse to force this on the road because, quote, the future doesn't look like the future.
Because here's the actual answer to this question.
Why isn't the future?
Why doesn't it? Why doesn't the future look like the future? Because here's the actual answer to this question. Why isn't the future? Why doesn't it? Why doesn't the future look like the future? Because it's not the future. It is the present.
We live in the present. Things don't look like our predictions of dystopia because that's not
how time works. We are here. We are now. We're working with what we have. Trends change not based on fucking Blade Runner.
I am so baffled by this person
and anybody who wants this.
What are you doing?
Wowee, thank you so much for watching the video.
Here's what the improvised end of credits would have been.
Vroom, I'm a car.
I don't know what I would have done.
Thanks for watching.
Make sure to like and subscribe.
We do appreciate it.
Check out our patreon.com slash some more news.
We have a podcast called Even More News
and you can listen to this show as a podcast.
It's called Some More News.
All that stuff is where podcasts live.
We've got merch with the,
uh,
the tickle bug man guy on it.
Uh,
you know,
from earlier.
Um,
and honestly,
I'm a car.
Hiya, folks.
If you're listening to my voice right now, that means you're into learning new things.
Like, for example, how to build a tiny house for at least 12 pet toads.
You're not content to let the world's critical insights pass you by.
Like, for example, the fact that toads need way, way, way more space than you would think.
Yes, that's right.
And I think that an inquisitive person such as yourself
should definitely check out the Jordan Harbinger Show,
which features in-depth interviews
with some of the world's most fascinating minds,
like Bill Nye, Terry Crews, and Annie Duke.
They've also got Feedback Friday episodes
to respond to listener questions
about everything from asking for a raise at work
to helping a family member escape a cult.
A toad cult?
Who's to say? Anyway, the Jordan Harbinger Show is a great compliment escape a cult. A toad cult? Who's to say?
Anyway, the Jordan Harbinger Show
is a great compliment to this podcast.
Here, you might hear the latest news
about America's toxic food system.
On the Jordan Harbinger Show,
you can listen to a Skeptical Sunday segment
about why some foods that are available in the US
are banned in other parts of the world.
Whether Jordan is conducting an interview
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you'll find something useful
that you can apply to your own life
in every
single episode of the Jordan Harbinger show.
That could mean learning how to ask advice the right way,
or it could just be discovering a slight mindset tweak that changes how you
see the world. Search for the Jordan Harbinger show.
That's H A R B as in boy,
I N as in Nancy G E R as in really got to read the Wikipedia page on totes
through to the end.
Next time available on Apple podcasts,
Spotify,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Good day.
What's up guys.
I'm Brendan shop.
If you love everything,
mixed martial arts,
I'm talking UFC breakdowns,
UFC picks one championship picks Bellator PFL.
You name it.
Your boy breaks it all down.
Tune into The Shop Show, available every Monday wherever you listen to your podcasts.
The Shop Show. Enjoy.