Blocked by Alex Roy for pointing out his Hypocrisy and Recklessness
Today I was blocked by Alex Roy on LinkedIn for pointing out that he was not on high enough ground to call out others for hype and misleading people about autonomous vehicles and what they can and cannot currently do. Alex takes people on for exaggerations regarding what these systems can currently do. Which I applaud him for. The problem is that makes it look like he is the champion of the right approach. Given his fame and now senior position at Argo AI many people will believe he is on firm ethical and engineering ground. That will lead them to even deeper levels of false confidence. That in turn will make them more likely to be Guinea pigs for his company and others, cause many to lose their lives needlessly and keep this industry on the reckless and extremely counter productive path it is on.
The two areas Alex and most of the AV makers, OEM’s and “experts” in the space get wrong. They believe shadow and safety driving are the best or only approach to creating this technology. And that by extension the lives lost are for the greater good. The other problem area being that they believe the simulation available in that industry is the pinnacle of simulation technology and as such is not able to replace most of the public shadow and safety driving. Of course, they are wrong about every bit of this.
Regarding public shadow and safety driving. It is impossible to drive the one trillion miles or spend over $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. Many of which are accident scenarios no one will want you to run once let alone thousands of times. Also handover cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios, by any monitoring and notification system, because they cannot provide the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing the right way. (Oddly enough Alex is against “L3” but where handover is used for development. Which is what occurs in public safety driving. Alex knows that the reason companies release L2+/L3 systems is because they want to dupe people in to thinking these are products that have completed development and testing for the environments, they are being used in. This is not the case. They are in development and using public shadow and safety driving. The only difference being these systems use their customers as Guinea pigs not employees. My guess is that since Argo doesn’t have an L2+/L3 product but does public shadow and safety drive Alex tries to split hairs.)
Regarding simulation. The overwhelming majority of simulation technology in this industry has huge technology gaps. Including RightHook, a company Alex invests in. These systems, most of which relay on gaming technology, do not operate in proper real-time. They also do not have precise vehicle, tire, road, environment or sensor models. This will lead to massive false confidence and tragedy down the road. That will occur because the system will assume certain environmental, vehicle and tire performance when it plans and executes. Since these are not precise enough accidents will occur in the real world when they should not or be worse than they need be.
Instead of simply refuting the points and having the discussion Alex, who routinely directly confronts others, chose to block me on LinkedIn. I can assure you that if he could make an objective point that showed my POV were incorrect he would do so. In blocking me Alex has admitted I am correct by default. I simply cannot abide someone one who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing to this degree. Those who portray themselves of protecting the public while doing the exact opposite cannot be tolerated. I of course encourage Alex to post in response to this article. I would like the readers to see both sides. Those who believe they are doing the right thing should seek the light of day not avoid it.
Note — I have a conflict of interest here. I now have a company about to release a product set that solves all of this so these AV makers can actually get to L4 and not hurt people for no reason trying. This includes a full motion simulator, proper simulation, an end-state scenario matrix and assistance with proper systems engineering. The entire set is fully integrated. For 1.5 years I tried very hard to avoid creating my own company. This was because I did not want to create this obvious conflict of interest. When someone pontificates that others are doing something wrong, especially when it harms people, it is best they not make money on the resolution. I tried to help many simulation companies in the space. They turned that assistance away either because they came from IT and gaming, did not know what they did not know and were too arrogant to dig a little deep into what aerospace, DoD and the FAA have done for the pest few decades, or we did prove this to them and they chose to wait until their customers figured this out and paid them to make a change. As I found none of that acceptable, I created Dactle, partnered with the right folks to make the entire solution. (Yes, I did reach out to Alex about helping RightHook. And in his defense, he has publicly stated he invests in RightHook.)
Please find more information in my articles here:
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine-End Public Shadow Driving
Common Misconceptions about Aerospace/DoD/FAA Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles
The Hype of Geofencing for Autonomous Vehicles
