Maximum Overclock

us everywhere we want to go, no problem whatsoever. They're never gonna melt down, They're never going to turn on us, they're never gonna start running down Sarah Connor, Joe, you seem to well, should we explain a little bit what autonomous cars first? What they are? Okay, an autonomous car, at least the general consensus is that this is a vehicle that has technology that allows the car to navigate and drive through various landscapes without the need for a

human being to actually manually control the vehicle. That's that's kind of the over all definition, I would say, of an autonomous car. So you just hop into your Crossford puzzle and then you're at work. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, just like the way most of us drive, as it turns out. Yeah, no, that's that's kind of the idea. And yeah, slightly if your death's planned right, right. It's a goal that a lot of different companies are working towards.

Google of course famously had their own autonomous car debuting on the roadways of California, but we've seen other vehicles kind of like well, other manufacturers follow suit. I mean, like companies have started to make them now to sure. Yeah, Lexus has its own that it's working on, but there are others as well, and it's kind of interesting to

see this development. But we know that there are people out there who have concerns, some of which I would say are very legitimate concerns, some of which might be a little more based on a misunderstanding of the technology. And we went under the kind of talk about those concerns and sort of what the potential approaches to a suede fears. Okay, Joe, do you would you like to take on the role? Yeah, my my angry confused luddite

uncle Jed. Okay, yeah, it is he the one who said he was shooting at some crude Yeah, yeah, I guess the wouldn't He was shooting us some food and up from the ground came up up from the Grand Care bubble, and food that would just be gross. Okay, So Jet, Yeah, well, I mean I don't think Jed likes this idea. Jed does not like the idea of an autonomous car. So no, I mean it, uh it frightens and confuses him. He uh, has he perhaps seen

the movie Maximum Overdrive? Is he upset about this thing in the in the nineteen eighties, he saw the Stephen King directed film Maximum Overdriving. He's got some concerns he'd like to confront you with before he's really convinced about the safety of this whole autonomous car deal. One of them, I'm sure, Uncle Jed says, is I can't get my computer to do what I want half the time. It crashes every time I turn it on. You know, I click on something on the internet and it never works.

You know, everything goes crazy. Right? Is that going to happen to my car? And am I going to crash into a telephone pole because I clicked on the wrong website? That's a legitimate fear for someone who has a lot of clicking going on whenever they're on the internet. All right, sure, And and part of the thing is that obviously you're not going to be visiting perhaps the websites of ill

repute on your car. So therefore there's slightly less danger of running into the same kinds of problems that you wouldn't run into on the internet in your car. Well, let's make it a little more general. Just imagine Uncle Jed is generally concerned that something's going to go wrong with his autonomous car, that it's going to malfunction somehow. Okay, this is going to lead the problem, and that's a completely understandable fear. That's a couple of things I think

we can look at. One is that when it comes to a general purpose computer like the kind that most of us have on our desks or that we carry around when a messenger bag or whatever, um, these computers have to do a lot of different things. They have to be able to handle different types of tasks. You're gonna be loading on all kinds of software onto these Sometimes pieces of software work will conflict with one another because they were you know, when they were being designed.

It wasn't designed on a machine that was also running you know, X number of other programs. So, for example, if you have twenty programs on your computer and you're regularly running four of them, it may very well be that any one of those four would be fine on its own, but when you start running them together, they start to compete for resources. Your computer starts to have trouble managing that those resources over time, and then problems happen. Right in your car, your car is a much more

specific piece of machinery. It's not a general purpose device, and so the computers aboard cars are very specifically tuned to what they need to do, and they don't do other stuff, and that's generally speaking, a pretty good thing. It makes them more reliable in the long run because there are fewer things that can enter fear with the

functioning of that device. So the likelihood of a full malfunction the way you would experience on say a regular computer, is much lower in something that's has that specific a purpose. On top of that, I think that will we will have plenty of things that will warn us when something's not going well, and I don't think we're ever going to reach the point where manual control is no longer an option at all. So worst case scenario, you flip the switch from robo to me and then you take over.

But I really think that the likelihood of computer crashes becoming a common thing is not that high. And also this is something that whenever you take your car and to be serviced, I would imagine that's going to be a routine part of getting your car the car right.

And I mean there are certain things that you will we would expect to happen, like, for instance, as improvement come for the software side of the autonomous car, because really autonomous car is kind of like another computer in the sense that you've got the hardware and the software. But as improvements come along, then I would imagine there will be things like firmware updates. This is where a company will send out a kind of software that's very

fundamental to the function of a particular device. You see this all the time, and things like phones, gaming consoles, even computers, desktops and laptops can get firmware updates. I would see that happening. But I really don't think that the the common crash that we experience in our our desktop and laptop lives would be something that's going to plague us in a car setting. And lots of cars already have micro controllers in them, right, Oh yeah, no, no,

they all do. I mean pretty much every car that's been manufactured over the last couple of decades has had

some forms of micro controllers in them. Some of them have fairly you know, uh, sophisticated computer systems in them, which it's all meant to diagnose problems and to keep tracked things, which is one of those things that people complain about really because in order for you to really know what's going on with your car, is these get more and more complex, you have to really plug it into a computer, and not everyone has the capability of

doing that, although we're starting to see some things like some cool uh things coming out for smartphones where you can actually attach it to your smartphone and you plug screen yeah yeah, yeah, that special proprietary cable, you plug it into your car, and then your smartphone tells you what's wrong. It's a good way of finding out if your mechanics on the up and up. Yeah, and also not having to waste that, you know, two hours of your life and however many dollars going into a mechanic

just to see what's wrong. So so we already have computers in cars, it's just going to get more sophisticated. And also the other thing I would answer, although I don't like taking this approach very frequently because it's like saying, hey, I know you're saying the future is bad, but the present is bad too, because that's that's kind of a lame argument. But cars breakdown already, right, I mean, stuff

goes wrong with cars. It physical things, and cars can break and wear down and stop working, particularly if you're not taking very good care of your car. But even if you think you are, things can go wrong. And hypothetically, if you have more computers watching that kind of thing, that might help in the long run, because you might get to the point where your car can tell you when, oh, this piece is running low. Oh this oil is running low.

We need to do something about this before it breaks. Yeah. For instance, my wife's car lets us know when the tires need to get more air in them. So, uh, you know, it used to be a few years ago. The way you would notice that as when you walk up to your car in the parking lot, you think, whoa, Oh, I guess I can't drive. Yeah, I guess I need to get to the closest gas station get some air

in these tires. So so Uncle Jed has another concern though, hit me, Uncle Jed, Well, Uncle Jed is also he's a very sweet man and uh, every year he buys aunt Ruth a birthday present. That's very sweet of him. But if he's got to get in an autonomous car, that's some kind of computer, right it hooks up to

the internet. Sure isn't everybody gonna see exactly where he goes all the time and know the store he goes to to get aunt Ruth's birthday present and they're all going to gab to her and she's going to know what the president is before she gets it. So autonomous cars spoiling birthdays. So essentially we're talking about privacy issue. Yes, I think, you know, if we want to be more more general than that. So, yeah, I can see where

the concern is there. Now I think that I think a lot of these systems are going to have to have built into them privacy measures because privacy is is a huge issue for a lot of people, and I don't think that's going to go away. In fact, it's going to get more important as we get more involved with computers in our cars. I think that the potential solution for this is to do what Google says it does. I'm assuming that what Google says it does is what

Google actually does. I'm not I don't work for Google's I don't see behind the cartain, so I don't know for sure, but I'm going to take them at their word. Google's approach is to strip all the identified ying information off of any particular vehicle when it's tracking things like traffic, So that way, as you drive down the street, your data is going to Google, so it knows how fast

you're going. This is assuming you're using a Google Maps application on your smartphone ors device, So it knows that there is a vehicle going down a particular road at a particular speed, and then it it extrapolates from that what the traffic conditions must be like on that particular road. I would imagine that most of our systems will have

to have a similar thing in place. Now, what will be interesting is to see how that pans out, because I think law enforcement would be say, hey, no, it would be awesome if we could track where everyone was all the time, right. Sure. Some of the gossip that I've heard about it is that cars eventually you're going to have little black boxes the same way that airplanes do.

You know, when you get into the car. You don't only use a key to get into the car, you use a personalized key that tells the car that you are the one driving it, for liability issues, for insurance, for for traffic accidents, all all that kind of stuff. And and so it might have you know, your own personal information coated in when you when you get into the car and therefore not talent ruth where you're going.

I could just imagine getting into the car and saying, take me to the last place you were before you came back home. Wow, Okay, I gotta rethink my plans for the future of my travel alright. But anyway, Yeah, so, so some of these questions we can't answer immediately simply because we're not in that era yet. But I would imagine that as we build out these systems, that's something that we have to take into consideration because it's it's Uncle Jed's not going to be the only guy to

be concerned about this. Certain people people rightfully are protective of their privacy, and I think that's a healthy attitude. Well, uncle Jed's got one real final concern and this maybe ties more into that scary movie even more than the other ones. But not scary movie. Not that scary. No, No, no, Maximum overdrect the documentary about the future of right right exactly autonomous of trucks, Alien take over um soda machines

chucking out cans at people. Well, nobody wants that, No, But in the movie I think it's what is it? Aliens take over our technology? What what if? Because Uncle Jed's heard about these hackers, right and he he knows that there's these hackers out there? What if the hackers put a virus in his autonomous car? Yeah? Um, Uncle Jed, Let me let me put your minded ease. First of all, I think that getting access to a particular vehicles computer

will not be easy. The physical location of the computer, I would imagine, would be difficult to reach without specific kinds of tools. On top of that, reaching a car through some sort of wireless means would be somewhat problematic, I would imagine. Uh. In fact, I would be more worried about hackers targeting the underlying infrastructure that exists within say a city, than with in an actual car. Targeting a specific car be very tricky and right because these

aren't going to be running all by themselves. They're going to be working with an entire internet of structures that is going to be helping them figure out where to go. Yeah, if nothing else, you'll have mesh networks, which means that you will have a network that is composed of a certain number of vehicles in a certain place at a certain time, and that number is constantly changing as vehicles leave the road or into the road. And this is a very complex system. It's difficult to even build, much

less hack into. But I really think targeting a specific car is unrealistic, just like targeting a specific computer tends to be unrealistic. And a lot of the problems that we have with hackers getting access to people's computers has to do with things like downloading malware and installing it on your computer, which gives the opportunity for hackers to uh to mess with you, or giving someone your password or something like that, or not changing the factory default password.

Right right now, when you're talking about a car, because of its specificity, because it's meant for a specific range of features, I don't imagine that you will be downloading stuff to your car to increase that. Like I can't imagine it being something that the user could easily do where Let's say that you think, oh, I want to make Mike, I want my car to go twenty miles

per faster than what the factory setting allows. So I'm going to download the speed demon a clock your engine, right, Yeah, I'm gonna yeah, I'm gonna overclock as opposed to overdrive. I would download that that some maximum overclock is what we should call this episode. Um, but yeah, that's the That's the idea I would say, is that it's it's such a specific use that I can't imagine that we're going to have the ability to download malware to our cars.

So it's only if the source is corrupted, which means that that malware goes out to everybody. And uh, I would and because it would be such a high value target, I imagined that there would be a lot of security around those systems, right, And you know, there's there's ways that people could screw with your card today without having a fancy computer running everything that it does. You know, someone could come in and cut your brake line. Someone could mess with the traffic system in your in your

county and script the traffic lights the ground. There's actually a lot of stuff that people could do to cause mayhem already again, you know, that's not necessarily the best argument, Like, well, don't be scared of the future because the present is terrifying. That's that's not not necessarily the way to get Uncle Jed to sleep well at night. But no, it's it is true that that really there are going to be

some challenges in the future. But the nice thing is that by acknowledging the fact that there are challenges and acknowledging the fact that there are potential worries, you can take those into consideration when you're building things out. It's not like this is a system that's hitting us tomorrow and we're all just going to have to adjust to

it and then see how it shakes out. We are aware of these things before the systems are in place, which hopefully means that we will be able to take that into consideration when we actually build everything out and make it as safe as possible, which is really the goal when you think about it of autonomous cars. I mean, I've got just a couple of figures here. We've actually seen a dramatic decline in fatalities in the United States

due to car accidents over the last few decades. And it's mainly due to improvements in in the way that vehicles are built and the way that laws have required us to do things like were a seat belt. But the decline has been pretty dramatic. Back in nineteen seventy two, there were, according to the National Traffic Safety Administration, four thousand nine fatalities in nineteen seventy two due to traffic accidents.

In twenty eleven it was thirty two thousand, three hundred sixty seven, so more than more than a twenty thousand person drop in those decades because of these Now, think about that in the terms of every traffic accident and how human error plays a part in that. Again, estimates range, but usually human error is said to be a factor in About are the numbers that I've seen? Yeah, it's it's. It ranges again depending on how you define it, like whether or not it was the sole contributor to an

accident or whether it was part of the problem. And then the really funny thing is of those who cause traffic accidents with their own human error, seventy percent of them think they're better than average drivers. Right, Yeah, well, this is the same sort of problem we see with multitaskers. Right, there's very good evidence to show that multitasking means that you your capacity to do any one of those multiple tasks goes down. But there's a tiny percentage of people

who are actually capable multitaskers. They're called supertaskers. And so two percent the population are supertaskers. The other percent believe they belong in the two percent and and are lying on their resumes. Yeah, so same sort of thing. If if you've gone around anent of all accidents are caused in part by human error. If you remove human error out of that, that number drops so low. I mean,

think about that. That could affect everything, not just from the fatalities, which would be amazing enough, but you wouldn't have to worry so much about you know, insurance rates could go down because accidents become so rare. You're you're talking about the fact that you don't need to worry about ensuring vehicles as much over time. Whether or not that actually would pan out, I don't know. That's sort

of a business side thing, but it could happen. And also, you don't worry about taking your baby out, your your your brand new car out and getting it dinged on its first joy ride, or your actual baby here here. I I would imagine that many people would feel very much safer carrying precious cargo through the streets robo baby on board, I think about. Okay, Well, the good thing is we have some more time before robo car has become a thing that everyone is dealing with. So I'll

keep working on Uncle Jed. And in the meantime, for all you listeners out there, if any of you have any suggestions for topics that we should look at things that are going to be unfolding in the future, whether they're technology based or otherwise, I recommend you let us know. In fact, go to the Forward Thinking website that's fw thinking dot com and take a look see see the

blog posts, the podcast, the video series. It's up there, and let us know what is it about the future that has to be excited We can't wait to hear from it. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places