Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

This proposal on the upcoming federal election talks about some interesting gaming of the voting system.

In Canada, there are 3 (and sometimes more) strong parties. This is true in much of the world; in fact the two-party USA is somewhat unusual. However, with "plurality" style elections, where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat even though they might have well under a majority, you can get a serious difference between the popular vote and the composition of the house. Americans see the same in their Electoral college and in gerrymandered districts.

The author, who wishes to defeat the incumbent Conservative party, proposes a way for the other two parties (Liberals and New Democrats) to join forces and avoid vote splitting. The Liberals and NDP are competitors, but have much more affinity for one another than they do for the Conservatives. They are both left-of-centre. This collaboration could be done at a national party level or at the grass roots level, though it would be much harder there.

Often in parliaments, you not only get splitting within the race for each seat, you get a house where no party has a majority. For minority governments, one party -- usually the largest -- strikes a deal with another party for a coalition that allows them to govern. Sometimes the coalition involves bitter enemies. They cooperate because the small party gets some concessions, and some of their agenda is passed into law, even though far more of the dominant party's agenda gets passed. Otherwise, the small party knows it will get nothing.

Among the most common questions I have seen in articles in the mainstream press, near the top is, "Who is going to be liable in a crash?" Writers always ask it but never answer it. I have often given the joking answer by changing the question to "Who gets sued?" and saying, "In the USA, that's easy. Everybody will get sued."

Yesterday I attended the "Silicon Valley reinvents the wheel" conference by the Western Automotive Journalists which had a variety of talks and demonstrations of new car technology.

Now that robocars have hit the top of the "Gartner Hype Cycle" for 2015, everybody is really piling on, hoping to see what's good for their industry due to the robocar. And of course, there is a great deal of good, but not for several industries.

Let me break down some potential misconceptions if my predictions are true:

Recently I did a road trip through Portugal. I always enjoy finding something new that they are doing in a country which has not yet spread to the rest of the world.

Along a number of Portuguese roads, you will see a sign marked "velocidade controlada" -- speed control -- and then a modest distance down the road will be a traffic light in the middle of nowhere. There is no cross street. This is an interesting alternative to the speed bump or other "traffic calming" systems.

Most of you would have heard about the giant scandal where it has been revealed that Volkswagen put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests in the USA and possibly other places. It's very bad for VW, but what does it mean for all robocar efforts?

You can read tons about the Volkswagen emissions violations but here's a short summary. All modern cars have computer controlled fuel and combustion systems, and these can be tuned for different levels of performance, fuel economy and emissions. (Of course, ignition in a diesel is not done by an electronic spark.) Cars have to pass emission tests, so most cars have to tune their systems in ways that reduce other things (like engine performance and fuel economy) in order to reduce their pollution. Most cars attempt to detect the style of driving going on, and tune the engine differently for the best results in that situation.

VW went far beyond that. Apparently their system was designed to detect when it was in an emissions test. In these tests, the car is on rollers in a garage, and it follows certain patterns. VW set their diesel cars to look for this, and tune the engine to produce emissions below the permitted numbers. When the car saw it was in more regular driving situations, it switched the tuning to modes that gave it better performance and better mileage but in some cases vastly worse pollution. A commonly reported number is that in some modes 40 times the California limit of Nitrogen Oxides could be emitted, and even over a wide range of driving it was as high as 20 times the California limit (about 5 times the European limit.) NOx are a major smog component and bad for your lungs.

It has not been revealed just who at VW did this, and whether other car companies have done this as well. (All companies do variable tuning, and it's "normal" to have modestly higher emissions in real driving compared to the test, but this was beyond the pale.) The question everybody is asking is "What the hell were they thinking?"

That is indeed the question, because I think the central issue is why VW would do this. After all, having been caught, the cost is going to be immense, possibly even ruining one of the world's great brands. Obviously they did not really believe that they might get caught.

Beyond that, they have seriously reduced the trust that customers and governments will place not just in VW, but in car makers in general, and in their software offerings in particular. VW will lose trust, but this will spread to all German carmakers and possibly all carmakers. This could result in reduced trust in the software in robocars.

What the hell were they thinking?

The motive is the key thing we want to understand. In the broad sense, it's likely they did it because they felt customers would like it, and that would lead to selling more cars. At a secondary level, it's possible that those involved felt they would gain prestige (and compensation) if they pulled off the wizard's trick of making a diesel car which was clean and also high performance, at a level that turns out to be impossible.

Much press has been made over Jonathan Petit's recent disclosure of an attack on some LIDAR systems used in robocars. I saw Petit's presentation on this in July, but he asked me for confidentiality until they released their paper in October. However, since he has decided to disclose it, there's been a lot of press, with truth and misconceptions.

There are many security aspects to robocars. By far the greatest concern would be compromise of the control computers by malicious software, and great efforts will be taken to prevent that. Many of those efforts will involve having the cars not talk to any untrusted sources of code or data which might be malicious. The car's sensors, however, must take in information from outside the vehicle, so they are another source of compromise.

There are ways to compromise many of the sensors on a robocar. GPS can be easily spoofed, and there are tools out there to do that now. (Fortunately real robocars will only use GPS as one clue to their location.) Radar is also very easy to spooof -- far easier than LIDAR, agrees Petit -- but their goal was to see if LIDAR is vulnerable.

The attack is a real one, but at the same time it's not, in spite of the press, a particularly frightening one. It may cause a well designed vehicle to believe there are "ghost" objects that don't actually exist, so that it might brake for something that's not there, or even swerve around it. It might also overwhelm the sensor, so that it feels the sensor has failed, and thus the car would go into a failure mode, stopping or pulling off the road. This is not a good thing, of course, and it has some safety consequences, but it's also a fairly unlikely attack. Essentially, there are far easier ways to do these things that don't involve the LIDAR, so it's not too likely anybody would want to mount such an attack.

Indeed, to do these attacks, you need to be physically present, near the target car, and you need a solid object that's already in front of the car, such as the back of a truck that it's following. (It is possible the road surface might work.) This is a higher bar than attacks which might be done remotely (such as computer intrusions) or via radio signals (such as with hypothetical vehicle-to-vehicle radio, should cars decide to use that tech.)

Here's how it works: LIDAR works by sending out a very short pulse of laser light, and then waiting for the light to reflect back. The pulse is a small dot, and the reflection is seen through a lens aimed tightly at the place the pulse was sent. The time it takes for the light to come back tells you how far away the target is, and the brightness tells you how reflective it is, like a black-and-white photo.

To fool a lidar, you must send another pulse that comes from or appears to come from the target spot, and it has to come in at just the right time, before (or on some, after) the real pulse from what's really in front of the LIDAR comes in.

The attack requires knowing the characteristics of the target LIDAR very well. You must know exactly when it is going to send its pulses before it sends them, and thus precisely (to the nanosecond) when a return reflection ("return") would arrive from a hypothetical object in front of the LIDAR. Many LIDARS are quite predictable. They scan a scene with a rotating drum, and you can see the pulses coming out, and know when they will be sent.

Jean-Louis Gassée, while a respected computer entrepreneur, wrote a critical post on robocars recently which matches a very common pattern of critical articles:

The pattern is as follows:

I wrote earlier on the drama that ensued when a group of SF writers led a campaign to warp the nomination process by getting a small but sufficiently large group of supporters to collude on nominating a slate of candidates. The way the process works, with the nomination being a sampling process where a thousand nominators choose from thousands of works, it takes only a 100-200 people working together to completely take over the process, and in some cases, they did -- to much uproar.

In the aftermath, there was much debate about what to do about it. Changes to the rules are in the works, but due to a deliberate ratification process, they mostly can't take effect until the 2017 award.

One popular proposal, called E Pluribus Hugo appeals, at least initially, to the nerdy mathematician in many of us. Game theory tries to design voting systems that resist attack. This is such a proposal, which works to diminish the effect that slate collusion can have, so that a slate of 5 might get fewer than 5 (perhaps just 1 or 2) onto the ballot. It is complex but aimed to make it possible for people to largely nominate the same way as before. My fear is that it modestly increases the reward for "strategic" voting. With strategic voting, you are not colluding, but you deliberately leave choices you like off your ballot to improve the chances of other choices you like more.

After a hard 10 weeks, our Singularity University Graduate class for 2015 will have its closing ceremony this Thursday night. If you are in the Bay Area, consider coming down to join luminaries of the SFBA accelerating technology community at San Jose's California theater and see presentations from the 5 top student teams as well as tables and posters from all 24 of them. With 80 students from 40 countries it's an eclectic and amazing group.

You can get Event info and tickets here.

Everybody has heard about Google's restructuring. In the restructuring, Google [x], which includes the self-driving car division, will be a subsidiary of the new Alphabet holding company, and no longer part of Google.

Having been a consultant on that team, I have some perspective to offer on how the restructuring might affect the companies that become Alphabet subsidiaries and leave the Google umbrella.

From small beginnings, over 800 people are here at the Ann Arbor AUVSI/TRB Automated Vehicles symposium. Let's summarize some of the news.

Test Track

Lots of PR about the new test track opening at University of Michigan. I have not been out to see it, but it certainly is a good idea to share one of these rather than have everybody build their own, as long as you don't want to test in secret.

I'm in the Detroit area for the annual TRB/AUVSI Automated Vehicle Symposium, which starts tomorrow. Today, those in Ann Arbor attended the opening of the new test track at the University of Michigan. Instead, I was at a small event with a lot of good folks in downtown Detroit, sponsored by SAFE which is looking to wean the USA off oil.

Much was discussed, but a particularly interesting idea was just how close we are getting to something I had put further in the future -- robocars that are cheaper than ordinary cars.

We know electric cars are getting better and likely to get popular even when driven by humans. Tesla, at its core, is a battery technology company as much as it's a car company, and it is sometimes joked that the $85,000 Telsa with a $40,000 battery is like buying a battery with a car wrapped around it. (It's also said that it's a computer with a car wrapped around it, but that's a better description of a robocar.) (Update: Since this article was written, the cost of the Tesla battery has dropped to closer to $20,000.)

At Singularity U, we're releasing a new video series answering questions about our future technology topics that come from Twitter. My segment is one of the first, and while regular readers of my blog will probably have seen me talk about most of these, here is the video:

Facebook's ARPU (average revenue per user, annualized) in the last quarter was just under $10, declining slightly in the USA and Canada, and a much lower 80 cents in the rest of the world. This is quite a bit less than Google's which hovers well over $40.

The press were all a-twitter about a report from Reuters that there had been a near miss between Delphi's test car and one of Google's though it was quickly denied that anything happened

The situation described, one car cutting off another, was a very unlikely one for several reasons:

At Singularity University, our students have been forming interesting ventures after the class for the past 6 years. This fall, we'll also be starting an SU Startup Accelerator for nascent startups working on exponential technology to solve the world's biggest problems. We will be accelerating both for-profit ventures (for the world's greatest problems can also be the greatest opportunities) and $50K grants for non-profit efforts.

I want to begin a series of thoughts on how E-mail has failed us and what we should do about it.

Yes, E-mail has failed, and not, as we thought, because it got overwhelmed with spam. There is tons of spam but we seem to be handling it. The problem might be better described as "too much signal" rather than the signal/noise ratio. There are three linked problems:

A reader recently asked about the synergies between robocars and ultracapacitors/supercapacitors. It turns out they are not what you would expect, and it teaches some of the surprising lessons of robocars.

2 months mostly on the road, so here's a roundup of the "real" news stories in the field.