Autonomous Vehicles – are they in the offing?

The advocates of driverless cars (autonomous vehicles, AVs) think they are already on the horizon and will reduce road deaths, pollution and traffic snarl ups. Their imminent arrival is seen as another disruptive influence on “current business” like  Blabla car share, Uber and AirbnB. These respectively aim to disrupt the status quo in medium distance and local transport and urban accommodation respectively. According to Paul Mason theses could be the harbingers of “dotcommunism”.

There is a key difference between these systems and AV’s. BlaBla et al are data based software systems that interact with the messy real world through people using Apps. AVs are software controlled hardware that interact with the real world by their sensors and software.

Piecemeal developments by individual motor manufacturers have led to vehicle features that seem to be the forerunners of this technology. Automatic gearboxes and cruise control systems have been around for decades, “park assist”, “lane control”, ”lane change” and “adaptive” cruise controls are becoming available. There are even subsystems to make sure the human driver is awake. So it might not seem unreasonable to assume that full autonomy would be a logical development from these systems.

But this is one of the many misconceptions about this technology. Current “driver assist systems” work on rule based “traditional” software. The complexity of driving in “the Real”* means that the software to operate these vehicle systems has to be more akin to Artificial Intelligence rather than complex computer logic.

Judging by the approach being taken by Google and others, AV software will be capable of learning from experience and taking actions based on it. One input to this learning should be the “rules of the road” of the local jurisprudence. Some governments believe that the manufacture and use of AV’s will offer significant economic advantages and are already putting in place regulations under which “on the road” testing may take place.  This regulation does not appear to include detailed test programmes or third party examination of the software systems that the recent furore over environmental testing indicates should be necessary.

So, AVs are on their way. The question is not so much when they’ll be here but how quickly they will be the only sort of vehicle in use. Their supporters paint a rosy future of adoption, because they believe everybody will want one for AV’s to take advantage of the time saving that their use will yield - the time currently “wasted” in driving. With an AV, you really can sleep as you drive to work, deliveries by AV will be quicker, for there’s no need for the driver to rest. Road accidents will be reduced because accidents are caused by the frailty of the human driver. AV’s will drive more closely to the vehicle in front, so can carry more traffic and, because the traffic will be a constant speed, AV’s will be more fuel efficient.

But an AV is expected to be more expensive than a conventional vehicle, so not everyone is going to be drawn in by such benefits. It would seem more realistic to assume there will be a mix of new and current technology where human drivers, pedestrians and cyclists will be mixing with AVs for some time. The mixing of humans and AVs is likely to cause trouble.

A human road user makes continuous observations to predict what others are likely to do, and communicates with them appropriately. This includes eye contact and exchanges of sign language – for example, to decide who should go first. Some situations require a human driver to have a loose interpretation of the “rules of the road” in order make progress e.g. when giving way to let someone out of a side road. Often, the decision to act is made quickly and almost without conscious thought.

This would not be a problem is AV’s were to be separated from human traffic – but that would require further investment in special “AV only” roads.

A lack of separation implies that an AV would have to include a code of ethics in its learning system; this leads to a question about who would take responsibility for its actions? Does the responsibility flow back to the manufacturer of the AV or to the person who last serviced it? A human driver probably has “self-preservation” pretty high in their personal “action oriented decision tree” which may override their personal ethics. Will an AV always have the same viewpoint, or will its view be different if it’s carrying live passengers rather than just “goods in transit”?

Can we have confidence that the AV programmers have thought that through and given their machines sufficient flexibility of action?

Assuming these issues can be fixed satisfactorily, there then is the issue of whether such cars are “closed systems”, or whether they would communicate with other AV road users and  traffic control systems – in fact both make eminent sense.

An AV communicating with traffic control systems should be able to  make better decisions about slowing down and stopping for (or even, perish the thought, “jumping”) traffic signals or clearing the way for public service and emergency vehicles. Communicating with other AV’s might enable the establishment of “road trains” which have been shown to reduce fuel consumption. They might even exchange real time road information with each other to warn of hazards.

There’s a downside to providing the AV’s with communication. Their systems could be vulnerable to attack by third parties.  This vulnerability, demonstrated on an existing vehicle, will require the software to be resistant to sophisticated “cyber” attacks. Governments might want access to AV system, particularly to the SatNav systems as this would enable viable road pricing schemes to be introduced. These are seen as an effective way to reduce pollution and further road development as well as being another attack on Civil liberty. However the authorities don’t need to know who is driving an AV – just who to bill.

AVs in operation will need to top up with fuel – if it really is driverless, will it have authority to charge the cost to its owner credit card or would it have its own account? Does a human need to own an AV? Their use would be a natural for an extension of an App like Uber to be summoned on demand.  Alternatively, an owner could use a combination of BlaBla, Airbnb and Uber Apps to rent one out to other people when it’s not required for her/his own use… 

We’re back to “dotcommunism”.

Finally, assuming these hurdles have technical and social solutions, how can the public be sure they are safe and fit for purpose? Given the recent discovery that a motor manufacturer has been “cheating” during emissions testing, governments have to think through how the vehicles will be tested and type approved. That could delay the whole project, particularly as there would have to be Government agreement at all levels.

AVs are not in the offing, they are beyond the horizon.

Notes

* A term (meaning the real world) borrowed from the “Culture” science fiction novels, , written by the late Ian M Banks

** This brings to mind the idea of the vehicle having a “personality” with a backup available in case of a “mental” break down – as exemplified by Eddie, the shipboard computer in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy”.

Science in the making?

One of the (many) advantages of being a student again is that you have the opportunity to attend lectures on all manner of stuff. I was at one in UCL the other week (hosted by the STS department) which was presented by Professor Mark Maslin and Professor Simon Lewis. They discussed their recent paper (Defining the Anthropocene, published in Nature 11 March 2015) to support their assertion that the world is now entering a new geological epoch.

The main inference of the lecture  was that mankind has done so much to change the world (moving specifies from continent to continent, wiping out species that either weren’t convenient and others that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, moving more material around that is normally achieved by erosion, not to mention increasing concentrations of Carbon Dioxide and Methane in the atmosphere) that the world is a very different place compared with a few years ago and there is no way to turn it back to how it was. Even if we (humankind) removed the excess Carbon Dioxide and Methane (and changed our ways not to make it again) replacing the moved and extinct lifeforms is not possible.

We were shown several slides of graphs of atmosphere (mostly undecipherable from anything further back than row 2 in the lecture theatre) emphasising the point and, on the face of it, there was a pretty good case for the assertion and it didn’t appear that there was any serious argument amongst scientists to the contrary.

But, there is apparently an almighty row about when this event is deemed to have occurred. More evidence of Science in the Making for, despite previous changes of geological epochs being dated to within a few million years, attempts are being made to date this one to a year! This all stems from the criteria that have been agreed for these “state” changes to have deemed to occur. As one of the audience remarked the debate seems to be similar to the attempts made in previous centuries to ascertain the number of angels on a pin head.

I leave that debate to scientists and philosophers of far higher academic clout except to observe that this is more evidence to demonstrate that the making of science is a social thing – Science in the Making.

To end this piece, there was one interesting speculation (or was it a fact?) that I noticed from the talk. Carbon dioxide levels appear to have been rising in the atmosphere for more than a couple of thousand years. But, it seems as if there was a dip in in the 1600’s. It was suggested that this was due to the impact of Europeans on the South American indigenous population – or rather the impact of their diseases. The dip was thought to be due to a rapid increase in re-afforestation of South America caused by a large reduction in the indigenous human population due to imported small pox running riot through it. I think I heard the estimate that some 50M* people were wiped out in a very short space of time: this gave the equatorial forests time to recover from the deforestation caused by mankind within about 50 years, taking up the carbon as they did so. This reduced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and contributed to the reduction of global temperatures in the early 17^th C - perhaps also enabling those winter ice fairs on the River Thames.

We all adjourned to a bar in UCL afterwards – one that I had never discovered before!

Notes

* Any errors in the above are all mine! Wikipedia has various estimates for the population of South America before Columbus "discovered" the place and of the death toll from the diseases brought by the Europeans (South American Population estimate). I hope the meeting at Paris at the moment don't get any ideas from this.........

Theses and libraries

I've an essay to write (the bane of the course - the lectures are interesting and make you think - the essays just make you think*) and some one recommended to me that I should look at a PhD thesis written about 10 years ago. So I searched (on line) the library index and found the document. It was in the store. So I placed a request, only to be told by the system (gloomily I thought) "items in the store may not be available on a loan basis".

A couple of days later I received an email to let me know it was now available for collection. Sure enough, it was only available for reference purposes. It was nearly 2 inches thick**. The document was labelled "not to be scanned" and I wondered (just to myself) why this was the case - was it something that the PhD student had insisted upon, so that anyone wanting to read his/her results had to go through the same sort of pain as her/he had experienced when researching unscanned 19th C documents, or was there some sinister Wikileaks motive?

I hurried away into the library to find a quiet spot to cogitate on the matter. Quiet spot! Some hopes - it was 3 o'clock on a Tuesday of the second week of term 1 and the place was packed out. What is it about students these days - haven't they a sense of what they're at Uni for? Or has the imposition of student fees made them aware of what they are really there for?

Two hours later I was none the wiser about why the thesis was not available for scanning but full of admiration for the work that had gone into it and fascinated by the revealed machinations of erstwhile 19th Century Railway engineers. Reluctantly I relinquished the work to the librarian before I left for home.

As far as the essay was concerned, I was not much further forward.


*There's clearly something wrong with my writing style!
** 50 mm as near as dammit

That Car Company and NOx emissions

I admit it. I own one of those cars that is affected by the scandal surrounding a certain German car company. I chose the car because the specification said it had the performance to do the job required as well as adequate safety systems and creature comforts. I trusted the manufacturer and the regulators to ensure that the car met current legal and environmental requirements. As far as I was concerned, it was a "black box”*.

On the face of it, it appears that the company stands squarely in the dock but I think the testing agencies are there too.

As identified in a recent WSJ report, the company has been hoodwinking the US (and possibly the European) test agencies. The EMS - a computer that controls the engine based on data from sensors littered all over the vehicle, including the driver’s controls - has been programmed to recognise when the car is in a test situation and alter the engine performance accordingly. Now that the US EPA has discovered what’s going on it is not difficult to imagine how it was done.

Several questions for the company arise from this discovery.

The first relates to the management “culture” of the company and, in particular, of that of the design team responsible. The CEO of the company in the US (Michel Horn) has stated to the US House Energy and Commerce Committee that it was the work of a few “individuals” and happened without the knowledge of the board.

This is strange, for it appeared that the company had made some significant break-through in Diesel technology when the new engine was announced. The brilliant engineers had managed to cajole their diesel engines to meet a tough environmental standard in a way that not only delivered good engine performance and fuel economy but also without the costly paraphernalia of Urea injection systems that other diesel engine manufacturers needed. This was not questioned at the time by the motoring journals, the public, other manufacturers or the Board of Directors of the car company. 

It appears that this Board had expressed no interest in how this feat had been achieved. Given the way this company has prided itself on both its technology and know-how, one would have thought that someone in the organisation would have questioned this and, had they been given a truthful answer, been suspicious. It's not that the senior management should know how their engineers achieved the result but that they should have ethics policies and audit procedures in place to make sure that the result had been achieved according to these policies. Or perhaps the company management style and reward mechanisms are so strong on achievement and conformity that no one dared to ask the question. The panel of a recent BBC podcast of “The Bottom Line” certainly seem to think so. 

Quite where the company goes from here is difficult to plot; they have to find a technical fix for the 11 million or so vehicles that are affected, one that will meet the demands of both the regulators and their existing customers. Neither will be easy. There’s talk of a “class” action being taken out by lawyers on behalf of (and crowd funded by) the "deceived" customers.

The regulatory test agencies should be in the dock too. They have two questions to answer. One is how they originally established the standards and the required tests; the second is how can they ensure that not only do the engines now meet the mechanics of the test, but that they meet its intention too – e.g. the emissions are controlled in all conditions.

The test standards and processes are developed jointly with the motor industry: this may compromise both the standards and the processes.

This is a regulatory system failure akin to (but perhaps not as economically serious as) the changes to bank regulations that are thought to have triggered the financial crash of 2008.

The second point, which is really a sub set of the first, is how the test authority can ensure that the cars meet the intention of the standard Perhaps they have to adopt the type approval testing applied within the aircraft industry - the test authority should insist on access to the computer code.

Would the authorities have the resources and capability to examine it in the detail required? If not, could the verification be “crowd sourced” by making the code “open access”? At present such code is the intellectual property of the company. In some jurisdictions, non-franchised repair organisations find it difficult to gain access to it for diagnostic use. Once the code is made public, clever programmers will be able to subvert it and provide customers with software to defeat the probable changes made to comply with the regulations.  David Golumbia discusses this issue in his article in Uncomputing .

Let’s assume that the car company can satisfy the regulators that the changes they plan to make to the affected engines are effective: it’s still not the end of the issue.  At present, there is no legal requirement (in the UK) for an owner of an affected vehicle to have it retrofitted. Including a test of these emissions in the mandatory annual test of roadworthiness (due after a vehicle is three years old) would force the issue. It is possible that such measurement may be required from some time in 2018. This gives the grey industry plenty of time to develop test beating “retrofit” kits that can be removed prior to the test - already, owners can “chip” their vehicles to improve performance. Such “test beating” might be discovered if would be possible to measure the emissions from specific vehicles from the roadside – so far, such measurement does not appear to be on the horizon local or government agencies within the UK.

Whilst on the subject of software in cars, another question arises. Computers are ubiquitous in cars – they control significant safety systems: traction control, anti-skid, and cruise control and navigation. There have been several demonstrations of hackers taking control, the most recent by a wire free remote connection.  

Computer control will soon be extended to the full “autonomous” vehicle. This poses the question of whether regulation can move fast enough to protect the public from the unintended consequences of the next technology. The UK government has made a start in this direction and published a set of guidelines under which such vehicles may be tested but these have yet to be translated into regulations.

The recent revelations also pose a moral question to be answered by users of the vehicles affected for there have been claims in the UK press that NOx emissions by diesel cars account for a number of deaths from pulmonary diseases each year. The sources for this information are unclear. The UK government committee on the medical effects of air pollutants in April of this year was uncertain and called for more research.

So what should the customer do now? Is continued use acceptable until the modification is applied? Is the modification just a technical fix with further unintended consequences? It might just push me (and the Company) into going electric.

But the regulation of test processes has to be resolved soon.

Notes

* It is black, as it happens but by "black box" I'm referring to is piece of finished technology as discussed in the book "Science in Action" by Bruno Latour, published by The Open University Press.

Introduction

If you have been following one of my other blogs (http://vagabond-round-britain.blogspot.co.uk/) you will realise that I am engaged in a course of study at University College, London (UCL) towards gaining an MSc in Science Technology and Society http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/. It seemed a good idea at the time - it would get me away from the ghetto of similarly greying (or greyed) males, forever talking (or playing) golf or bridge or discussing the twin P's * or how the world was much better then **. I also thought that it might keep Mr Alzheimer at bay, although I now discover that there's not much scientific evidence for that (needs citation as they say in Wikipedia).

I originally intended to be a full time student - until I saw the work load expected. 'I'm not in a hurry' I thought, 'I don't need this for a career - so I'll do it part time - over two years'.

One of those has passed and I'm now in the final year. I've done four modules so far, learnt a lot about facebook (but still not about how it selects the posts for you to see...) and a little about twitter (I don't know why I bothered), and have not been surprised about the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. I have four more modules to do, followed by the dreaded dissertation - 10,000 words of stuff about something I have researched for myself.......Yikes (as they say)

When I commenced the course it had not been my intention to blog about it and have managed for a year without changing this intention. However, I find that one is required of me as part of one of the modules I have chosen to "do" - sorry, I mean study. So, as with my sailing blog, the goal posts have changed.



The first real post has to be published by the end of this week........

By the way, for reasons that escape me, this blog is time-stamped in Pacific Standard time - can I use that to my advantage when submitting it for marking?


Notes
* Prostrates and Pensions
** insert your own value of then