“Your address book is now comfortable to flick through while driving.” This is from Eyelights themselves.
But: “All distracting applications will be blocked while driving (YouTube, Netflix, Games …).”
Well, that’s a relief, that the driver is not actually watching movies while at the wheel.
Romain Duflot, chief executive and co-founder of EyeLights, dismisses suggestions that the hologram could be a distraction for drivers, saying that taking your eye off the road to check a phone is far riskier. “Phone distraction occurs in 52 percent of all trips that ended in a crash,” he said.
There’s an agenda here. They estimate that autonomous cars will save nearly a million lives a year, because (to use a favourite term of advertisers) “up to” 90% of fatal crashes are caused by human error; thus, “there is compelling logic in removing humans — the key source of the error — from the driving equation.”
And as Romain Duflot points out, mobile phone distraction is now the leading cause of road deaths. So instead of having to look at a little screen, you now have a nice, big, safe, easy-to-read wireless holographic screen projected on your windshield.
The more you can distract people, the more you can shatter their attention, fragment their minds, intrude on them at every juncture, fry their brains with microwaves, and the more people you can kill through “driver error”, the easier it will be to persuade us that there is “compelling logic” to let machines take over all the driving.
I am a great fan of the Dexter Morgan novels, the wholesome serial killer from Miami, and in particular his descriptions of the merry mayhem on Miami’s roads. They sound very similar to Johannesburg roads. If you were to introduce AI vehicles to Johannesburg, it would take human drivers about half a second to “game” the algorithms. If they see that an AI vehicle leaves a sensible gap ahead of it, the Jo’burg driver will immediately pull straight in, and force the AI vehicle to fall back.
You would have to tweak those algorithms to become much more aggressive, if you want your AI vehicle to get there the same day. You can spend an hour stuck in the traffic jam just getting out of your housing complex in Johannesburg. You have to hustle to survive.
How on earth is a hologram being projected on your windscreen even legal? How can anyone be this stupid and get away with it?
The answer is, it fits the agenda. The “compelling logic” that will see human beings being removed from the driving equation. Compulsion is definitely part of the new equation.
Here’s a radical idea. Why not have a “smart” car that detects when a driver is using a mobile phone, and immediately alerts the police and the emergency services, while preparing for an emergency stop? Because if a driver is using a mobile phone, there must be an emergency. Either a real emergency which the driver is signalling, or the emergency that you have an unattended vehicle on the roads, with a driver openly committing a crime.
That would concentrate people’s minds a bit.
I’ve said over and again, the trick to getting AI implemented is not to make the machines smart. It’s to make the humans dumb. To dumb them down, to have them staring at a nice big screen while they drive, thinking they’re being “smart”. Because now they’re not looking a little screen in their hands.
One of the first psychologists who looked at the dangers of talking on the phone and driving (I can’t find this online any more) described how she stepped on to a street crossing as a pedestrian, having made what she thought was eye contact with a driver who was talking on a phone while looking straight at her. Only when she was nearly run over did she realise that the driver was staring into space while talking, completely oblivious to the world outside; and, far from making eye contact, had not seen her at all. And now drivers are going to be looking at a hologram hovering in front of their eyes while they’re behind the wheel. And the idea that this might be at all dangerous is dismissed out of hand. The alternative is “far riskier”.
Studies have shown that talking hands-free is just as dangerous as using a handset. This has been used by some people as an argument that radiation is not affecting the brain. I’ve always said, you are probably safer with a driver using a handset, rather than hands-free, because (1) the driver is aware that they are doing something illegal, and will pay more attention to what’s out there on the road, if only to keep an eye for the cops; and (2) because they are driving one-handed, they are automatically made more aware that they are driving. They’re not staring into space and chatting to an invisible person. And (3) as far as radiation goes, the car is a Faraday cage; even if you’re using hands-free, you’re being radiated at high levels, with the radiation trapped in the car and the phone powering up to a maximum, because it’s inside a metal box.
A passenger in a car will modulate the conversation depending on what’s happening out there on the road— if you’re overtaking a huge truck approaching a blind rise, they will see this, and understand that you are concentrating. The person talking to you on your phone has no sense of your road conditions. I really wonder how many people have actually listened to fatal road accidents happening on the other side of the wireless connection, and hung up that call, thinking … what have I just done?
A few years ago, I saw two women killed by a driver using a phone, just up the drive from our house in rural Eswatini. We heard an almighty bang and some screaming. Within two minutes, we were there. The one woman had just died. The other was pinned under a truck that had gone off the road. We sat with her for a couple of hours until emergency services managed to free her. She died in hospital a short while later. Both of them were well known in the community. The driver said his brakes had failed, but the police said they were fine.
A while later, I happened to meet the driver’s sister, in a completely unrelated setting. She told us that her brother had in fact been talking to their mother on the phone at the time of the accident.
The one victim’s young son lived just across the road from where this accident happened. The two women had just taken a quick walk to see some furniture that was for sale down the road. I will never forget the absolutely heart-rending weeping of this kid, with his mother lying dead at the side of the road.
When you see someone killed in front of you by a mobile phone, and then you see how this kind of incident is leveraged into an argument that we should eliminate human beings altogether from “the driving equation” and leave it all to the machines —
All of you autonomous vehicle pundits need to get real, need to get honest. There is no way you can have a hybrid population of autonomous vehicles and human drivers out there on real roads. The human drivers will always start “gaming” the AI, it’s what humans always do on the roads. And you will have to start “gaming” us aggressively back. This means war between robots and humans, and you must be honest and declare it. I wonder how long the robot driver would last in Miami. Probably longer than the one in Jo’burg, I would venture. I say this with a touch of pride, because Dexter is always very patriotic about Miami drivers being more psycho than those from anywhere else.
The only way this system can work properly, is if human beings are indeed totally removed from the driving equation. That is the agenda. This means that a large number of people must be killed through human error, to reinforce the “logic” of autonomous vehicles. The “EYELIGHTS LOOK BEYOND” technology is a worthy contribution to this cause.
