Autonomous Suicide
Maybe I’ll get to the ChatGPT freakout stage one day, but for now I’m still on freaking out about self-driving car technology.
by Rich Herschlag
Right about now I’m supposed to be freaking out about ChatGPT taking my job, which actually I’ve been offering to ChatGPT or anyone anywhere who will take it for about the last ten years. My fear is I’ll have the whole transfer of responsibilities worked out and at the last minute the AI will back out once it realizes what it’s like to slink on your belly through a 120-year old dark, damp, moldy, rat infested crawl space with 18 inches of height clearance.
Maybe I’ll get to the ChatGPT freakout stage one day, but for now I’m still on freaking out about self-driving car technology. To the extent that over the course of my life I’ve logged somewhere on the order of three quarters of a million miles largely in the New York-New Jersey area where drivers are so bad they might as well already be deceased, I’m excited. The problem, however, is not replacing them. The problem is replacing me. I’m thinking over my dead body and that may indeed be the way it ends up.
Having been in hyperalert survival mode for decades I’ve developed not only eyes in the back of my head but extrasensory microchips in my hippocampus. It turns out assuming everyone else on the road is a half awake drunken crackhead in the middle of getting a blowjob has saved my life and the lives of others countless times. I don’t doubt a bunch of geeks in Silicon Valley can do a decent job of simulating a left turn onto a busy two-way street at the perimeter of the mall. It’s just that I would sooner wear a yarmulke to a Proud Boys rally than put my future five-year-old granddaughter in the backseat of a driverless vehicle on her first day of kindergarten.
If there is ever a prayer of my ceding autonomy to a Google, Tesla, or any other driver bot, the little guy in the dashboard is going to have to show me some serious chops in the following real life instances.
That Killer Left Turn
This is a subset of the general left turn genre, which as a whole serves to tamp town the American life expectancy. We’re both stopped at an intersection, facing each other, and we both want to make a left. Neither of us is sure who got there first, and even if we are we’re not sure the other would agree. Though we have no real future as a couple I look into his eyes and he into mine. There are two or three false starts but within a few long, moments rivaled in awkwardness only by the dilemma of asking someone out in person on a first date, somebody gets inspired and flashes a headlight, waves a hand, or just starts ramming speed. A couple of polite bots, however, might be out there all day exchanging data, and if they’re not from the same manufacturer the next day, too.
The Dude under the Truck
One time a few years ago I was rolling down a single-lane, two-way rural road and saw an 18-wheeler pulled over about halfway onto the shoulder. There was no one else around and no sign of a driver. Because my paternal grandmother was from the old country and left me with some sort of roadway sixth sense I slowed down considerably and gently swerved wide to the left. At exactly the moment I might have been terminating a life a rather elderly gentleman popped out from beneath the chassis following what looked like a fruitless attempt to check the brakes. In a parallel universe where autonomous driving ruled, this same gentleman was destined to become meat stuck in the grille of my 2014 Subaru Impreza. But in this universe he got to go home and drink a Colt 45 malt liquor while falling asleep to WWE. Thanks, Grandma!
The Kid in the Alley
As in many old small Northeast cities not quite modernized in the 20th century, urban planners from the 18th and19th centuries (who weren’t called urban planners) didn’t have 21st century crazed vehicular culture in mind when they drew up residential streets so tightly. In my adopted hometown of Easton, PA I know from experience when I’m driving on a side street and suddenly see a bicycle wheel on the sidewalk it may be a kid zooming out from one of the countless connected alleys in a carefree id-driven attempt to cross the street so many eight-year-olds easily master.
One such time I was traveling about 20 mph in my Honda Fit, perhaps spotted just the cusp of a dirt bike tire, and hit the brakes well before my conscious self had even an inkling of what was coming. Managing to stop about a nanometer short of the kid on the dirt bike was some combination of a miracle and a reflexive act of my primal brain, but I can assure you either Elon Musk or anything coming out of the auto plant in Fremont, California would have made the kid a long-term care patient at St. Jude.
Semi on the Shoulder
This is a variation on the pulled over truck theme. About a decade ago I was heading west about 60 mph in the right lane of Route 78 in New Jersey during a drizzle when I somehow knew the semi on the shoulder about 200 feet ahead was about to pull back onto the road. I started braking about a half second before there was any sign of life in the cab or the slightest movement in a truck wheel, but in any case the final resting position of my Honda Fit was front hood under the truck with front windshield staring up at the semi-trailer rear. Getting decapitated, by the way, does not disqualify you from driving a brand new driverless vehicle off the lot.
Deer God
On a cold winter night in 2006 driving my gray ’93 Saturn north on old Route 611 in Horsham, PA a large buck sprinted leftward across my field of vision. I swerved just right of “Rudolph” and as the gently as possible toward a narrow shoulder absent of pedestrians, coming to rest finally at the fieldstone wall of a two-hundred-year-old inn. The buck never hung around to thank me, but my reward was a passenger side door only moderately dented.
When my insurance company rep asked me if I hit the deer at all I gave the wrong answer, otherwise known as the truth—no. Sorry, she said. Hit the deer next time—even slightly—and you can avoid paying the deductible. I get the feeling AI, like State Farm, doesn’t have a soft spot for animals, and I am to this day reluctant to hand over my moral decisions to either corporate entity. Moreover, if it ever comes down to a choice between a) hitting granny on the right or, b) hitting mom with stroller on the left, I believe or at least hope I possess the quiet confidence to find a choice “c” no Silicon Valley geek could ever program into a chip.
The Hills Don’t Have Eyes
Like countless suburban and semi-rural areas of the country, mine features many steep little crests in the roads severely limiting sight distance. At the crest right near our house opposing traffic is something like a black hole encompassing the final 50 feet or so. Every few months from my living room I hear a nasty thud-crunch at the crest and know someone made a blind, premature left. These past 18 years I’ve been able to avoid that same fate through both raw fear and finely attuned hearing. Show me the bot who recognizes the faint but distinct sound of wheel tires flattening fallen leaves on the other side of the crest and I’ll gleefully take that nap on the last leg of the ride home from work.
If a Tree Falls in the Woods
Driving on a narrow two-way road after a storm many years ago I noticed a large tree branch about to fall into my lane. The decision before me was more or less binary—hit the brakes and hope to stop before the point of impact or speed up and try to beat the branch to the punch. I was young and cocksure at the time so I floored it and narrowly avoided a totaled Ford Granada. I’m not saying that if a tree falls in the woods a programmer doesn’t hear it. I’m just saying they probably need to go through a few hundred self-driving vehicular tree falling fatalities till they have all the kinks worked out.
Hit the Road Jack
I’ve never been carjacked, but there is still time. I have the scenario all worked out in my head. I will ride around the neighborhood at an increasing speed, chitchat mindlessly with the increasingly nervous carjacker, and when he least expects it slam into a concrete barrier sending his head into the windshield while I grab his gun and fire a warning shot into his spleen. Call me foolish, but this is my dream and in a life where every day brings with it a new form of emasculation, oppression, subjugation and humiliation I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some code nerd steal my lone chance to act out one of my favorite scenes in the video game Crazy Taxi.
Highway to Hell
Back in the pre-internet dinosaur days of April 1991 I had to head upstate to Albany, New York to challenge the results of my final professional engineers license exam. (I killed the multiple choice part, but my handwriting on written sections had been a problem throughout my young life.) Late at night with a motel reservation waiting I was humming along around 65 mph in my ’86 Chevy Cavalier heading north on Route 287 in New Jersey when I slammed the brakes for reasons that hadn’t yet crossed my conscious mind. When the vehicle came to a stop about three seconds later I was on the precipice of an unfinished highway and staring down about 50 feet into a chasm that had yet to be backfilled. There was literally rebar sticking out of the end of an unfinished concrete roadway slab.
Once I had turned around and pulled over I whipped out my NJ/NY map and noticed the double line that connected Route 287 on the Jersey side with Route 287 on the New York side was a pair of dashed rather than solid lines. As the map key explained, this was the symbol for unfinished roadways. They weren’t kidding. The practical end of the road that particular night was as unmarked and surreptitious as NJDOT could muster, and it’s a good thing I was a frequent dead-of-night driver with well-honed hypersensitivity or there would have been one less civil engineer in the world. You could say today’s GPS might have preempted this sort of potential plummet, but the greater point is as drivers we must be ready for anything, and I am—except for surrendering my autonomy to a series of algorithms I will never see, understand, or trust.
Read the latest for Banter Members:
It's Been Three Years Since Trump Deliberately F*cked Up America's Covid Response
Now that Trump is running again, he and his Republican Party should absolutely be held accountable for the oceans of blood dripping from their hands.
by Justin Rosario
On Friday, March 13, 2020, we got an email from the Alexandria City Public School district. Schools would not be reopening on Monday and would, in fact, remain closed until after Spring Break. That was a full 4 weeks away on April 13. Later, we would be informed that school would be virtual for the rest of the year. They would not reopen until the Fall of 2021….continue reading here.
A programmer named Sridar has already written code to solve each of those edge cases. Update 11.4.567.4356.987.33.56.2 will be rolled out in an over the air update Tuesday night at 1:43 am.
Amen. I don't want to be a crash dummy for self-driving car technology either. I'm a programmer so I know to avoid new software as the bugs are being worked out.