13 January 2022. Autonomous vehicles | Time

Self-driving cars? Very little movement. | Against clocks.

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#1: Self-driving vehicles? Very little movement

The technologist Rodney Brooks has his annual update on the current state of various technology forecasts that he made in 2018—across space, AI, machine learning, and autonomous vehicles. (I was alerted to this by John Naughton’s Observer column on Sunday).

I’m going to pick up here only on his review of autonomous vehicles—partly because he admits both how over-optimistic he was (even though he was pessimistic by comparison with others in 2018). And partly because he thinks this industry optimism has actually got in the way of progress in the direction of greater vehicle autonomy.

He also has a detailed table where he monitors the state of his forecasts against his annual assessments, which I’m not going to go into here, although some of the detail is revealing.

It starts with a spoiler alert:

very little movement in deployment of actual, for real, self driving cars.

And the lack of progess is, he thinks, startling:

Way back four years ago when I made my predictions about “self driving cars” that term meant that the cars drove themselves, and that there was no one in the loop at a company office, or following in a chase car, or sitting in the drive or passenger seat ready to take over or punch a big red button. As I documented in last year’s updatethe AV companies conveniently neglect to mention these uncomfortable truths when they give press releases about their great progress.

But, when you watch the promotional videos, there are tell-tale clues:

(I)f you carefully watch Waymo’s breathless “ooh” and “ah” filled video about their first deployment in San Francisco you will occasionally see the hands and knees of the safety driver sitting in the driver’s seat, conveniently unmentioned in the video that is trying to give the impression that their service is deployed. If you carefully read about the Chandler, Arizona, deployment and watch videos from there you will see how there is constant contact with people watching from home base, there are rescue vehicles that come and deposit a human driver to take over in some cases, and most importantly that the scale of the number of rides they give per week is tiny.

And so on. There’s quite a lot more of this sort of the detail in the piece.

There’s also a longer historical sweep than you normally get in discussion of AVs, based on Peter Norton’s book Autonorama.

(D)riverless cars, with safer roads, have been predicted again and again, for over 80 years, and it is always just around the corner... Norton points out that many companies have talked up the imminence of autonomous cars for a long time. Here is the list he documents for one such company, GM (which bought Cruise in 2016):

- 1939 World’s Fair at their Futurama exhibit, GM promised autonomous vehicles by 1960.

- 1964 World’s Fair in Futurama II, GM promised it again.

- 2010 GM and SAIC (Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation) promised that it would arrive by 2030 as Xing! (autonomous Shanghai)

- 2017 GM 2017 Sustainability Report: Zero Crashes. Zero Emissions. Zero Congestion.

As he says, “the long tail of difficult situations” tends to delay deployments. The devil is always in the detail, especially in complex environments such as urban and other mobility.

This also reminds me of Paul Raven’s observation about the chimera that is the ‘smart city’, which also goes back to the World’s Fair in 1939. It’s a technological construct that promotes the interests of particular groups without necessarily being that achievable.

Two of Brooks’ earlier predictions on AVs were about dedicated lanes on freeways for autonomous vehicles, and vehicles having the capability to park themselves after the human driver hands off to them. Both are within the realms of technical capability; the reason he thinks they won’t happen is because no-one is working on them.

And the reason that no-one is working on them is because they’re all working on “actual, for real, self driving cars”. The first one, in particular, was the subject of a US proposal in—wait for it—1997.

(W)hen the hubris of fully self-driving cars made the need for external help for AVs seem redundant, such projects disappeared.

Then again, when we see the failures of the much less ambitious UK smart motorways programme, maybe even having autonomous lanes on freeways is more ambitious than AV advocates would have us believe.

#2: Against clocks

Writing about Mark Boyle yesterday, I was reminded that one of the technologies Boyle decided to remove from his life was the clock. He wanted to get back to a world in which our bodies responded to light and dark and seasonal variations.

And that reminded me of a long article from last year by Joe Zadeh in Noema on the notion of clock time—something that has become increasingly artificial over the years.

(The time ball on the Greenwich Observatory. Photo by ChrisO via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0.)

At the end of the 19th century, time was identified, at least by anarchists, as being political. There were attacks on clocks in Paris and Bombay, and the apparent attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, the symbolic location of Greenwich Mean Time¹. But not any more:

The destruction of clocks seems outlandish now. Contemporary society is obsessed with time — it is the most used noun in the English language. Since clocks with dials and hands first appeared on church towers and town halls, we have been bringing them closer towards us: into our workplaces and schools, our homes, onto our wrists and finally into the phone, laptop and television screens that we stare at for hours each day.

Or, as Jeremy Rifkin put it in a 1987 book:

“All of our perceptions of self and world are mediated by the way we imagine, explain, use and implement time.”

One of the things that happened during the pandemic, especially during lock-down, is that people reported feeling at odds with time. But it’s possible that time was at odds with them. The article quotes the philosopher Kevin Birth, who argues in his book Objects of Time that time doesn’t produce the clock; the clock produces time:

Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon.”

And it turns out that when it comes to atomic clocks, this is literally true. Their apparent precision comes from the fact that they have been disconnected from the irregularities of the Earth’s oscillations:

The movement toward standardized time reached its apex in the 1950s, when atomic clocks were judged to be better timekeepers than the Earth itself. The second, as a unit of time, was redefined not as a fraction of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, but as a specific number of oscillations of cesium atoms inside an atomic clock.

At the moment, we add a leap second to our atomic clocks to keep them in tune with the Earth. But even that is up for debate at next year’s World Radiotelecommunications Conference.

And this is a kind of metaphor for the relationship between time and nature that the article also explores, via a long discursus into territory that might be more familiar about the relationship between clocks, industrial capitalism, and colonialism. In the latter case, colonisers ignored the sophisticated time systems of indigenous peoples:

When British colonizers swept into southeastern Australia in search of gold, they depicted the timekeeping practices of the indigenous societies they encountered as irregular and unpredictable in contrast to the rational and linear nature of the clock. This was despite the fact that indigenous societies in the region had advanced forms of timekeeping based on the moon, stars, rains, the blossoming of certain trees and shrubs and the flowing of tides.

Of course, the linear nature of the clock is terrible at helping us to understand anything that doesn’t follow a uniform pattern of development—like the patterns of of climate change, for example:

The climate crisis is a realm in which linear clock time frequently and fatally misfires... Warming temperatures, ocean acidification, ice melting and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are constantly being translated into clock time to create tipping points, thresholds, roadmaps and sustainable development goals for us to beat or aspire to. When a “surprise” happens, time estimates crumble in the face of reality.

Michelle Bastian of Edinburgh University, who edits the academic journal Time & Society, suggests that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time. Hours and weeks don’t matter much to nature.

Bastian herself has proposed clocks that are more responsive to the temporalities of the climate crisis, like a clock synchronized with the population levels of endangered sea turtles, an animal that has lived in the Pacific for 150 million years but now faces extinction due to temperature changes. These and other proposals all have the same idea at their core: There are more ways to arrange and synchronize ourselves with the world around us than the abstract clock time we hold so dear.

As I say, it’s a long piece, but it made the present strange. As Zadeh says, clocks in our society are like money; completely self-referential and self-generated systems that we don’t question often enough—or very much at all.

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1. This last was used as the basis of The Secret Agent, a novel by Joseph Conrad, and Sabotage, a film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock.