Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hello everyone, welcome to Forward Thinking the Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Buck Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today we wanted to talk a bit about autonomous cars,
Speaker 1: those robo cars the future that are going to take
Speaker 1: us everywhere we want to go, no problem whatsoever. They're
Speaker 1: never gonna melt down, They're never going to turn on us,
Speaker 1: they're never gonna start running down Sarah Connor, Joe, you
Speaker 1: seem to well, should we explain a little bit what
Speaker 1: autonomous cars first? What they are? Okay, an autonomous car,
Speaker 1: at least the general consensus is that this is a
Speaker 1: vehicle that has technology that allows the car to navigate
Speaker 1: and drive through various landscapes without the need for a
Speaker 1: human being to actually manually control the vehicle. That's that's
Speaker 1: kind of the over all definition, I would say, of
Speaker 1: an autonomous car. So you just hop into your Crossford
Speaker 1: puzzle and then you're at work. Yeah, something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like the way most of us drive, as it
Speaker 1: turns out. Yeah, no, that's that's kind of the idea.
Speaker 1: And yeah, slightly if your death's planned right, right. It's
Speaker 1: a goal that a lot of different companies are working towards.
Speaker 1: Google of course famously had their own autonomous car debuting
Speaker 1: on the roadways of California, but we've seen other vehicles
Speaker 1: kind of like well, other manufacturers follow suit. I mean,
Speaker 1: like companies have started to make them now to sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Lexus has its own that it's working on, but there
Speaker 1: are others as well, and it's kind of interesting to
Speaker 1: see this development. But we know that there are people
Speaker 1: out there who have concerns, some of which I would
Speaker 1: say are very legitimate concerns, some of which might be
Speaker 1: a little more based on a misunderstanding of the technology.
Speaker 1: And we went under the kind of talk about those
Speaker 1: concerns and sort of what the potential approaches to a
Speaker 1: suede fears. Okay, Joe, do you would you like to
Speaker 1: take on the role? Yeah, my my angry confused luddite
Speaker 1: uncle Jed. Okay, yeah, it is he the one who
Speaker 1: said he was shooting at some crude Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess the wouldn't He was shooting us some food and
Speaker 1: up from the ground came up up from the Grand
Speaker 1: Care bubble, and food that would just be gross. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Jet, Yeah, well, I mean I don't think Jed
Speaker 1: likes this idea. Jed does not like the idea of
Speaker 1: an autonomous car. So no, I mean it, uh it
Speaker 1: frightens and confuses him. He uh, has he perhaps seen
Speaker 1: the movie Maximum Overdrive? Is he upset about this thing
Speaker 1: in the in the nineteen eighties, he saw the Stephen
Speaker 1: King directed film Maximum Overdriving. He's got some concerns he'd
Speaker 1: like to confront you with before he's really convinced about
Speaker 1: the safety of this whole autonomous car deal. One of them,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, Uncle Jed says, is I can't get my
Speaker 1: computer to do what I want half the time. It
Speaker 1: crashes every time I turn it on. You know, I
Speaker 1: click on something on the internet and it never works.
Speaker 1: You know, everything goes crazy. Right? Is that going to
Speaker 1: happen to my car? And am I going to crash
Speaker 1: into a telephone pole because I clicked on the wrong website?
Speaker 1: That's a legitimate fear for someone who has a lot
Speaker 1: of clicking going on whenever they're on the internet. All right, sure,
Speaker 1: And and part of the thing is that obviously you're
Speaker 1: not going to be visiting perhaps the websites of ill
Speaker 1: repute on your car. So therefore there's slightly less danger
Speaker 1: of running into the same kinds of problems that you
Speaker 1: wouldn't run into on the internet in your car. Well,
Speaker 1: let's make it a little more general. Just imagine Uncle
Speaker 1: Jed is generally concerned that something's going to go wrong
Speaker 1: with his autonomous car, that it's going to malfunction somehow. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is going to lead the problem, and that's a
Speaker 1: completely understandable fear. That's a couple of things I think
Speaker 1: we can look at. One is that when it comes
Speaker 1: to a general purpose computer like the kind that most
Speaker 1: of us have on our desks or that we carry
Speaker 1: around when a messenger bag or whatever, um, these computers
Speaker 1: have to do a lot of different things. They have
Speaker 1: to be able to handle different types of tasks. You're
Speaker 1: gonna be loading on all kinds of software onto these
Speaker 1: Sometimes pieces of software work will conflict with one another
Speaker 1: because they were you know, when they were being designed.
Speaker 1: It wasn't designed on a machine that was also running
Speaker 1: you know, X number of other programs. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if you have twenty programs on your computer and you're
Speaker 1: regularly running four of them, it may very well be
Speaker 1: that any one of those four would be fine on
Speaker 1: its own, but when you start running them together, they
Speaker 1: start to compete for resources. Your computer starts to have
Speaker 1: trouble managing that those resources over time, and then problems happen.
Speaker 1: Right in your car, your car is a much more
Speaker 1: specific piece of machinery. It's not a general purpose device,
Speaker 1: and so the computers aboard cars are very specifically tuned
Speaker 1: to what they need to do, and they don't do
Speaker 1: other stuff, and that's generally speaking, a pretty good thing.
Speaker 1: It makes them more reliable in the long run because
Speaker 1: there are fewer things that can enter fear with the
Speaker 1: functioning of that device. So the likelihood of a full
Speaker 1: malfunction the way you would experience on say a regular computer,
Speaker 1: is much lower in something that's has that specific a purpose.
Speaker 1: On top of that, I think that will we will
Speaker 1: have plenty of things that will warn us when something's
Speaker 1: not going well, and I don't think we're ever going
Speaker 1: to reach the point where manual control is no longer
Speaker 1: an option at all. So worst case scenario, you flip
Speaker 1: the switch from robo to me and then you take over.
Speaker 1: But I really think that the likelihood of computer crashes
Speaker 1: becoming a common thing is not that high. And also
Speaker 1: this is something that whenever you take your car and
Speaker 1: to be serviced, I would imagine that's going to be
Speaker 1: a routine part of getting your car the car right.
Speaker 1: And I mean there are certain things that you will
Speaker 1: we would expect to happen, like, for instance, as improvement
Speaker 1: come for the software side of the autonomous car, because
Speaker 1: really autonomous car is kind of like another computer in
Speaker 1: the sense that you've got the hardware and the software.
Speaker 1: But as improvements come along, then I would imagine there
Speaker 1: will be things like firmware updates. This is where a
Speaker 1: company will send out a kind of software that's very
Speaker 1: fundamental to the function of a particular device. You see
Speaker 1: this all the time, and things like phones, gaming consoles,
Speaker 1: even computers, desktops and laptops can get firmware updates. I
Speaker 1: would see that happening. But I really don't think that
Speaker 1: the the common crash that we experience in our our
Speaker 1: desktop and laptop lives would be something that's going to
Speaker 1: plague us in a car setting. And lots of cars
Speaker 1: already have micro controllers in them, right, Oh yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: they all do. I mean pretty much every car that's
Speaker 1: been manufactured over the last couple of decades has had
Speaker 1: some forms of micro controllers in them. Some of them
Speaker 1: have fairly you know, uh, sophisticated computer systems in them,
Speaker 1: which it's all meant to diagnose problems and to keep
Speaker 1: tracked things, which is one of those things that people
Speaker 1: complain about really because in order for you to really
Speaker 1: know what's going on with your car, is these get
Speaker 1: more and more complex, you have to really plug it
Speaker 1: into a computer, and not everyone has the capability of
Speaker 1: doing that, although we're starting to see some things like
Speaker 1: some cool uh things coming out for smartphones where you
Speaker 1: can actually attach it to your smartphone and you plug
Speaker 1: screen yeah yeah, yeah, that special proprietary cable, you plug
Speaker 1: it into your car, and then your smartphone tells you
Speaker 1: what's wrong. It's a good way of finding out if
Speaker 1: your mechanics on the up and up. Yeah, and also
Speaker 1: not having to waste that, you know, two hours of
Speaker 1: your life and however many dollars going into a mechanic
Speaker 1: just to see what's wrong. So so we already have
Speaker 1: computers in cars, it's just going to get more sophisticated.
Speaker 1: And also the other thing I would answer, although I
Speaker 1: don't like taking this approach very frequently because it's like saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I know you're saying the future is bad, but the
Speaker 1: present is bad too, because that's that's kind of a
Speaker 1: lame argument. But cars breakdown already, right, I mean, stuff
Speaker 1: goes wrong with cars. It physical things, and cars can
Speaker 1: break and wear down and stop working, particularly if you're
Speaker 1: not taking very good care of your car. But even
Speaker 1: if you think you are, things can go wrong. And hypothetically,
Speaker 1: if you have more computers watching that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: that might help in the long run, because you might
Speaker 1: get to the point where your car can tell you when, oh,
Speaker 1: this piece is running low. Oh this oil is running low.
Speaker 1: We need to do something about this before it breaks. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For instance, my wife's car lets us know when the
Speaker 1: tires need to get more air in them. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it used to be a few years ago.
Speaker 1: The way you would notice that as when you walk
Speaker 1: up to your car in the parking lot, you think, whoa, Oh,
Speaker 1: I guess I can't drive. Yeah, I guess I need
Speaker 1: to get to the closest gas station get some air
Speaker 1: in these tires. So so Uncle Jed has another concern though,
Speaker 1: hit me, Uncle Jed, Well, Uncle Jed is also he's
Speaker 1: a very sweet man and uh, every year he buys
Speaker 1: aunt Ruth a birthday present. That's very sweet of him.
Speaker 1: But if he's got to get in an autonomous car,
Speaker 1: that's some kind of computer, right it hooks up to
Speaker 1: the internet. Sure isn't everybody gonna see exactly where he
Speaker 1: goes all the time and know the store he goes
Speaker 1: to to get aunt Ruth's birthday present and they're all
Speaker 1: going to gab to her and she's going to know
Speaker 1: what the president is before she gets it. So autonomous
Speaker 1: cars spoiling birthdays. So essentially we're talking about privacy issue. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, if we want to be more
Speaker 1: more general than that. So, yeah, I can see where
Speaker 1: the concern is there. Now I think that I think
Speaker 1: a lot of these systems are going to have to
Speaker 1: have built into them privacy measures because privacy is is
Speaker 1: a huge issue for a lot of people, and I
Speaker 1: don't think that's going to go away. In fact, it's
Speaker 1: going to get more important as we get more involved
Speaker 1: with computers in our cars. I think that the potential
Speaker 1: solution for this is to do what Google says it does.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming that what Google says it does is what
Speaker 1: Google actually does. I'm not I don't work for Google's
Speaker 1: I don't see behind the cartain, so I don't know
Speaker 1: for sure, but I'm going to take them at their word.
Speaker 1: Google's approach is to strip all the identified ying information
Speaker 1: off of any particular vehicle when it's tracking things like traffic,
Speaker 1: So that way, as you drive down the street, your
Speaker 1: data is going to Google, so it knows how fast
Speaker 1: you're going. This is assuming you're using a Google Maps
Speaker 1: application on your smartphone ors device, So it knows that
Speaker 1: there is a vehicle going down a particular road at
Speaker 1: a particular speed, and then it it extrapolates from that
Speaker 1: what the traffic conditions must be like on that particular road.
Speaker 1: I would imagine that most of our systems will have
Speaker 1: to have a similar thing in place. Now, what will
Speaker 1: be interesting is to see how that pans out, because
Speaker 1: I think law enforcement would be say, hey, no, it
Speaker 1: would be awesome if we could track where everyone was
Speaker 1: all the time, right. Sure. Some of the gossip that
Speaker 1: I've heard about it is that cars eventually you're going
Speaker 1: to have little black boxes the same way that airplanes do.
Speaker 1: You know, when you get into the car. You don't
Speaker 1: only use a key to get into the car, you
Speaker 1: use a personalized key that tells the car that you
Speaker 1: are the one driving it, for liability issues, for insurance,
Speaker 1: for for traffic accidents, all all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And and so it might have you know, your own
Speaker 1: personal information coated in when you when you get into
Speaker 1: the car and therefore not talent ruth where you're going.
Speaker 1: I could just imagine getting into the car and saying,
Speaker 1: take me to the last place you were before you
Speaker 1: came back home. Wow, Okay, I gotta rethink my plans
Speaker 1: for the future of my travel alright. But anyway, Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: so some of these questions we can't answer immediately simply
Speaker 1: because we're not in that era yet. But I would
Speaker 1: imagine that as we build out these systems, that's something
Speaker 1: that we have to take into consideration because it's it's
Speaker 1: Uncle Jed's not going to be the only guy to
Speaker 1: be concerned about this. Certain people people rightfully are protective
Speaker 1: of their privacy, and I think that's a healthy attitude. Well,
Speaker 1: uncle Jed's got one real final concern and this maybe
Speaker 1: ties more into that scary movie even more than the
Speaker 1: other ones. But not scary movie. Not that scary. No, No, no,
Speaker 1: Maximum overdrect the documentary about the future of right right
Speaker 1: exactly autonomous of trucks, Alien take over um soda machines
Speaker 1: chucking out cans at people. Well, nobody wants that, No,
Speaker 1: But in the movie I think it's what is it?
Speaker 1: Aliens take over our technology? What what if? Because Uncle
Speaker 1: Jed's heard about these hackers, right and he he knows
Speaker 1: that there's these hackers out there? What if the hackers
Speaker 1: put a virus in his autonomous car? Yeah? Um, Uncle Jed,
Speaker 1: Let me let me put your minded ease. First of all,
Speaker 1: I think that getting access to a particular vehicles computer
Speaker 1: will not be easy. The physical location of the computer,
Speaker 1: I would imagine, would be difficult to reach without specific
Speaker 1: kinds of tools. On top of that, reaching a car
Speaker 1: through some sort of wireless means would be somewhat problematic,
Speaker 1: I would imagine. Uh. In fact, I would be more
Speaker 1: worried about hackers targeting the underlying infrastructure that exists within
Speaker 1: say a city, than with in an actual car. Targeting
Speaker 1: a specific car be very tricky and right because these
Speaker 1: aren't going to be running all by themselves. They're going
Speaker 1: to be working with an entire internet of structures that
Speaker 1: is going to be helping them figure out where to go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if nothing else, you'll have mesh networks, which means that
Speaker 1: you will have a network that is composed of a
Speaker 1: certain number of vehicles in a certain place at a
Speaker 1: certain time, and that number is constantly changing as vehicles
Speaker 1: leave the road or into the road. And this is
Speaker 1: a very complex system. It's difficult to even build, much
Speaker 1: less hack into. But I really think targeting a specific
Speaker 1: car is unrealistic, just like targeting a specific computer tends
Speaker 1: to be unrealistic. And a lot of the problems that
Speaker 1: we have with hackers getting access to people's computers has
Speaker 1: to do with things like downloading malware and installing it
Speaker 1: on your computer, which gives the opportunity for hackers to
Speaker 1: uh to mess with you, or giving someone your password
Speaker 1: or something like that, or not changing the factory default password.
Speaker 1: Right right now, when you're talking about a car, because
Speaker 1: of its specificity, because it's meant for a specific range
Speaker 1: of features, I don't imagine that you will be downloading
Speaker 1: stuff to your car to increase that. Like I can't
Speaker 1: imagine it being something that the user could easily do
Speaker 1: where Let's say that you think, oh, I want to
Speaker 1: make Mike, I want my car to go twenty miles
Speaker 1: per faster than what the factory setting allows. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to download the speed demon a clock your engine, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna yeah, I'm gonna overclock as opposed to overdrive.
Speaker 1: I would download that that some maximum overclock is what
Speaker 1: we should call this episode. Um, but yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: That's the idea I would say, is that it's it's
Speaker 1: such a specific use that I can't imagine that we're
Speaker 1: going to have the ability to download malware to our cars.
Speaker 1: So it's only if the source is corrupted, which means
Speaker 1: that that malware goes out to everybody. And uh, I
Speaker 1: would and because it would be such a high value target,
Speaker 1: I imagined that there would be a lot of security
Speaker 1: around those systems, right, And you know, there's there's ways
Speaker 1: that people could screw with your card today without having
Speaker 1: a fancy computer running everything that it does. You know,
Speaker 1: someone could come in and cut your brake line. Someone
Speaker 1: could mess with the traffic system in your in your
Speaker 1: county and script the traffic lights the ground. There's actually
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff that people could do to cause
Speaker 1: mayhem already again, you know, that's not necessarily the best argument, Like, well,
Speaker 1: don't be scared of the future because the present is terrifying.
Speaker 1: That's that's not not necessarily the way to get Uncle
Speaker 1: Jed to sleep well at night. But no, it's it
Speaker 1: is true that that really there are going to be
Speaker 1: some challenges in the future. But the nice thing is
Speaker 1: that by acknowledging the fact that there are challenges and
Speaker 1: acknowledging the fact that there are potential worries, you can
Speaker 1: take those into consideration when you're building things out. It's
Speaker 1: not like this is a system that's hitting us tomorrow
Speaker 1: and we're all just going to have to adjust to
Speaker 1: it and then see how it shakes out. We are
Speaker 1: aware of these things before the systems are in place,
Speaker 1: which hopefully means that we will be able to take
Speaker 1: that into consideration when we actually build everything out and
Speaker 1: make it as safe as possible, which is really the
Speaker 1: goal when you think about it of autonomous cars. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've got just a couple of figures here. We've actually
Speaker 1: seen a dramatic decline in fatalities in the United States
Speaker 1: due to car accidents over the last few decades. And
Speaker 1: it's mainly due to improvements in in the way that
Speaker 1: vehicles are built and the way that laws have required
Speaker 1: us to do things like were a seat belt. But
Speaker 1: the decline has been pretty dramatic. Back in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: there were, according to the National Traffic Safety Administration, four
Speaker 1: thousand nine fatalities in nineteen seventy two due to traffic accidents.
Speaker 1: In twenty eleven it was thirty two thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: sixty seven, so more than more than a twenty thousand
Speaker 1: person drop in those decades because of these Now, think
Speaker 1: about that in the terms of every traffic accident and
Speaker 1: how human error plays a part in that. Again, estimates range,
Speaker 1: but usually human error is said to be a factor
Speaker 1: in About are the numbers that I've seen? Yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 1: It ranges again depending on how you define it, like
Speaker 1: whether or not it was the sole contributor to an
Speaker 1: accident or whether it was part of the problem. And
Speaker 1: then the really funny thing is of those who cause
Speaker 1: traffic accidents with their own human error, seventy percent of
Speaker 1: them think they're better than average drivers. Right, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: this is the same sort of problem we see with multitaskers. Right,
Speaker 1: there's very good evidence to show that multitasking means that
Speaker 1: you your capacity to do any one of those multiple
Speaker 1: tasks goes down. But there's a tiny percentage of people
Speaker 1: who are actually capable multitaskers. They're called supertaskers. And so
Speaker 1: two percent the population are supertaskers. The other percent believe
Speaker 1: they belong in the two percent and and are lying
Speaker 1: on their resumes. Yeah, so same sort of thing. If
Speaker 1: if you've gone around anent of all accidents are caused
Speaker 1: in part by human error. If you remove human error
Speaker 1: out of that, that number drops so low. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about that. That could affect everything, not just from
Speaker 1: the fatalities, which would be amazing enough, but you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to worry so much about you know, insurance rates
Speaker 1: could go down because accidents become so rare. You're you're
Speaker 1: talking about the fact that you don't need to worry
Speaker 1: about ensuring vehicles as much over time. Whether or not
Speaker 1: that actually would pan out, I don't know. That's sort
Speaker 1: of a business side thing, but it could happen. And also,
Speaker 1: you don't worry about taking your baby out, your your
Speaker 1: your brand new car out and getting it dinged on
Speaker 1: its first joy ride, or your actual baby here here.
Speaker 1: I I would imagine that many people would feel very
Speaker 1: much safer carrying precious cargo through the streets robo baby
Speaker 1: on board, I think about. Okay, Well, the good thing
Speaker 1: is we have some more time before robo car has
Speaker 1: become a thing that everyone is dealing with. So I'll
Speaker 1: keep working on Uncle Jed. And in the meantime, for
Speaker 1: all you listeners out there, if any of you have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for topics that we should look at things
Speaker 1: that are going to be unfolding in the future, whether
Speaker 1: they're technology based or otherwise, I recommend you let us know.
Speaker 1: In fact, go to the Forward Thinking website that's fw
Speaker 1: thinking dot com and take a look see see the
Speaker 1: blog posts, the podcast, the video series. It's up there,
Speaker 1: and let us know what is it about the future
Speaker 1: that has to be excited We can't wait to hear
Speaker 1: from it. For more on this topic and the future
Speaker 1: of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you
Speaker 1: by Toyota. Let's go places