Tesla Service Is In a Fix

 

A recent article from Vox.com reports that about a fifth of Tesla owners who took their vehicles in for servicing were unhappy with how long the process took.  And investigative reporters at Vox have perused over a thousand complaints about Tesla to the Federal Trade Commission, revealing a variety of problems with a type of vehicle that was supposed to all but do away with automotive repair shops.

 

The Better Business Bureau has received over 9,000 reports on Tesla, many having to do with faulty or delayed service, inadequate supplies of spare parts, poor communication with the customer, and poor manufacturing quality in the first place. 

 

One mitigating factor in making bad service less bad overall is that electric vehicles (EVs) supposedly need a lot less service than internal-combustion (IC) cars do.  And while that may be the case eventually, Vox quotes a representative of the consumer-research firm J. D. Power as saying Tesla owners need service about as frequently as owners of conventional cars do.  So it looks like even Tesla owners need to go to the shop about as often as the rest of us do, which doesn't help if the experience with Tesla service is a bad one.

 

In Tesla's defense, their service-center count may not include their mobile units that schedule appointments at the customer's home or business.  And because so much of the Tesla functionality is computerized, remote software upgrades, diagnosis, and repairs are often done without any need to bring the physical car into a shop.  Even so, there are enough purely mechanical or electrical problems that necessitate a trip to the service center to warrant many times the number of locations that Tesla presently operates.

 

Some independent garages are starting to work on Teslas, but this can cause problems with the car's warranty, and Elon Musk has gone on record as opposing the right-to-repair movement that seeks to break up manufacturers' monopolies on service.

 

As every general knows, maintenance and repair are a vital part of any mechanized military effort.  A lack of spare parts can defeat an army as effectively as enemy fire.  Tesla is in a unique and transient situation, as they have exploited a cultural trend against fossil fuels that is especially popular among the upper classes who can afford electric cars, and done an end run around the established automakers by reinventing carmaking from scratch and dominating the U. S. EV market. 

 

But people who wear Rolexes and drive Teslas are not happy when they have to wait a month for a service appointment and then find it's canceled at the last minute.  At the present time and for some time in the future, most people will look at the prospect of an all-electric car and decide the questionable advantages are not worth the extra cost and the other problems:  limited range, scarcity of charging stations, and now, unreliable service.  So while Tesla has done a good job exploiting the low-hanging market fruit of relatively wealthy and environmentally-conscious customers, that market may be close to saturation.

 

To people who simply want a reliable and economical means of transportation, service is at least as important as features.  And no matter how well-built a machine is initially, sooner or later something will go wrong and a qualified person will have to get their hands on the car to fix it. 

 

I will confess to some feeling of nostalgia as I take my seventeen-year-old Element in to the independent shop that is used to seeing me every few months as yet another piece of it reaches the end of its service life, and thinking, "Gee, with the coming of EVs, all these garages will go the way of the village blacksmith before the Model T."  Now I'm not so sure. 

 

For one thing, electric vehicles are really hard on tires.  The sudden torque strains and the added battery weight will destroy ordinary car tires in short order, so EV tires have to be specially designed to take the added punishment.  And most Teslas don't have spare tires—don't ask me why, but they don't.  Maybe the car's too heavy to safely change a tire on the road. 

 

While the electronics industry has gotten us used to the concept—for good or ill—of using it and throwing it away when it breaks or a software upgrade renders it useless, a $45,000 investment can't be treated like that.  Lots of people out there keep their cars for five, ten, or fifteen years, and a century's worth of progress in auto manufacturing has made that kind of longevity possible. 

 

Even if everything else on a Tesla worked perfectly forever, the battery has a known and limited lifetime.  So far, the relative scarcity and prestige of Teslas make it economical to replace worn-out batteries, but this may not always be the case.  Life-cycle engineering takes a holistic view of a product from inception to end-of-life disposal or preferably recycling.  With Tesla's current focus on getting cars out the door, it looks like the company has neglected the maintenance part of the cycle.  This may well be a temporary condition, though.

 

If I were a young gearhead wanting to open my own automotive service center, I might well choose to specialize in Teslas and take my chances that Tesla wouldn't shut me down.  Because the demand is certainly there, and it doesn't sound like Tesla is anywhere close to meeting it with their own service centers.

 

Sources:  The Vox article "Missing parts, long waits, and a dead mouse:  the perils of getting a Tesla fixed" by Rebecca Heilweil appeared on Aug. 24, 2022 at https://www.vox.com/recode/23318725/tesla-repair-mechanic-delay-electric-vehicles-ev.  

Averse to the Metaverse

 

The company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, sparked some criticism after it opened its keynote "Horizon Worlds" virtual-reality (VR) platform to France and Spain last week.  According to an article in Slate, new European users were disappointed in the graphics, to say the least.  And judging by the screen shots provided in the article, they have a point.  Adjectives like "bland," "cartoonish," and "slightly weird" come to mind.  In common with many VR systems, only the upper bodies of human avatars appear.  I've never understood the reason for this myself, but one user speculated that it was so that nobody online can have sex. 

 

At any rate, it doesn't sound like the French are going to start holding meetings of the Académie Française in Horizon Worlds any time soon.  But Mark Zuckerberg can live without the Academy's forty members if he can get several million mere mortals to join.

 

Meta has put a huge chunk of its colossal resources into its metaverse venture, some $13 billion, and you can be sure the firm is not doing that for fun.  Its vision is that as Internet bandwidth and access increase, you will be able to don a VR headset and basically live life online:  working, playing, even exercising (I suppose, but this might present problems unless you're doing it on some physical treadmill tied to your VR system).  As for sex, there's plenty of that on the Internet already, so maybe Meta is staying out of that area purely for business reasons. 

 

There is a theory in the history-of-technology field called "technological determinism."  It basically says that technology has its own built-in direction, and once a technology develops into a feasible, marketable form, there's no stopping it.  Its development path and growth are intrinsic to the nature of the technology, and human factors and influences count for nothing.  The term was invented mainly by people who didn't believe in it to criticize those who appeared to support it, but I've never encountered a pure card-carrying technological determinist. 

 

Nevertheless, a lot of stories of how technologies developed tend to make it seem inevitable in retrospect.  I think this betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the storyteller, and some of the best histories of technology I have encountered look at failed technologies that might have succeeded if certain almost random factors had gone the other way. 

 

With "Horizon Worlds" we are witnessing the first baby steps of a new technology which Meta, at least, hopes will inevitably dominate the Internet and become as much a part of our lives as mobile phones—and all they can do—have become today.  And, as any good public corporation will try to do, Meta intends to turn this into cash—lots of cash.

 

The Slate article quotes a University of Virginia professor's dark prophecy that Meta hopes to "monitor, monetize, and manage everything about our lives."  While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it's hard to deny that the picture conjured up by proponents of VR, especially the Meta-style of VR, seems to aspire toward a kind of totalizing, all-inclusive situation in which people would take off their VR headsets only to attend to physical needs, like eating, going to the bathroom, and (maybe) sex.  And sleep, unless we manage to genetic-engineer our way out of that little necessity.

 

In promulgating his Meta vision, Zuckerberg and his colleagues suffer from a problem that they has in common with many tech-savvy leaders who combine awesome technical and business skills with the philosophical understanding of ten-year-old boys.  There are various answers to the question, "What are humans for?"  Different cultures and religions come up with different answers, but the worst response of all to that question is to ignore it altogether. 

 

Any entity whose business operations affect millions or even billions of people, as Facebook/Meta's does, should consider seriously what its model for human flourishing is.  And the bigger the firm is, the more seriously it should consider that question. 

 

Unfortunately, this rarely happens.  Instead, a business like Meta is in practice avoiding two guardrails on opposite sides of a wide road.  One guardrail is profits:  if the firm ceases to make money going forward, something has to be done to avoid the guardrail of losses that kill the firm.  The other guardrail is a combination of law and public criticism.  Even a profitable business can go out of existence if its leaders end up in jail or become social pariahs, as the Weinstein Company did when its head Harvey Weinstein was accused (and eventually convicted) of sexual misdeeds.  As long as a firm avoids hitting these two guardrails, its leaders will consider it a success, and will keep doing whatever they feel is necessary to keep going, regardless of the firm's effects on the souls of its millions of customers.

 

Aesthetics are more than just a thing that has to meet minimum standards in order for people to use a platform like "Horizon Worlds."  Aesthetics is another word for beauty.  In the past, advances in technology have led to the creation of beautiful things that make the world a better place.  Advances in building technology led to artistic creations such as Chartres in France and Burgos in Spain.  Cathedrals were designed for the ordinary human, just like "Horizon Worlds" is.  But those who built the cathedrals of the Middle Ages were guided by a very specific vision of human purpose:  to encounter, and eventually to love, the Divine.  Their creations gained thereby a timelessness that motivates even a secular culture such as that of France's today to reconstruct Notre Dame after its disastrous fire, at a cost of millions of dollars.

 

The metaverse can be a place of truth, beauty, and goodness.  But those values can be achieved only if those designing it make these values intentional goals.  On the other hand, if their guides are only the two guardrails of profit and avoiding jail or pariah status, they are likely to forge an erratic path that may lead millions of people to places they wish they hadn't gone to.

 

Sources:  The article "Why the Metaverse Has to Look So Stupid" by Nitish Pahwa appeared on Slate's website on Aug. 19, 2022 at https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-horizon-worlds-facebook-looks-crappy-explained.html. 

AI Illustrator Still Looking for Work: The Shortcomings of DALL-E 2

 

The field of artificial intelligence has made great strides in the last couple of decades, and any time a new AI breakthrough is announced, critics voice concerns that yet another field of human endeavor has fallen victim to automation and will disappear from the earth when machines replace the people who do it now. 

 

Until recently, the occupation of art illustrator seemed reasonably safe from assault by AI innovations.  Only a human, it seemed, can start with a set of verbal ordinary-language instructions and come up with a finished work of art that fulfills those instructions.  And that was mostly true until AI folks began tackling that problem.

 

The AI research lab OpenAI has publicized its work in this area using a "transformer" type of program that has gone through two versions so far, DALL-E and now DALL-E 2.  I'm sure the late surrealist artist Salvador Dali would be pleased at the honor of having a robot artist named after him, but the connection between his works and the productions of DALL-E 2 are perhaps closer than the researchers would like.  In an article in IEEE Spectrum, journalist Eliza Strickland highlights the shortcomings of DALL-E 2's productions and speculates on whether such systems will ever be generally useful.

 

As is the case with most such human-task-imitating systems, the first step the researchers took was to compile a large number of examples (650 million in the case of DALL-E 2) to train the software about what illustrations look like.  The images and their accompanying descriptive texts were all from the Internet, which has its own biases, of course.  The researchers have learned some lessons from previous fiascos with AI software that allowed random users to request sketchy or offensive products, so they have been very careful about pre-screening the training images and (in some cases) manually censoring what DALL-E 2 comes up with.  They have also not released the program for general use yet, but have carefully selected users under controlled conditions.  If you just let your imagination roam with the scenario of letting some randy teenage boys loose with a program that will make a picture of whatever they describe to it, you can see the potential for abuse.

 

For certain purposes, DALL-E 2 does fine.  If you want a generic type of picture that would look good as a filler for a brochure about a meeting, and you just want to show some people in a corporate setting, DALL-E 2 can do that.  But so can tons of free clip-art websites.  If you want an image that conveys specific information, however—a diagram, say, or even text—DALL-E 2 tends to fall flat on its digital face.  The Spectrum journalist was privileged to make a few text requests to DALL-E 2 for specific images.  She asked for an image of "a technology journalist writing an article about a new AI system that can create remarkable and strange images."  She got back three photo-like pictures, but they were all of guys, and only one seemed to have anything to do with AI.  Then she asked for "an illustration of the solar system, drawn to scale."  All three results had a sun-like thing somewhere, and planet-like things, and white circular lines on a black background showing the orbits, but the number of planets and what they looked like was pretty random.  So technical illustrators (those who are left after software like Adobe Illustrator has made every man or woman his own illustrator) need not file for unemployment insurance right away.  DALL-E 2 has a way to go yet.

 

There is a fundamental question lurking in the background of AI exploits like this.  It can be phrased a number of ways, but it basically amounts to this:  will AI software ever show something that amounts to human-like general intelligence?  And believe it or not, your humble scribe, along with Gyula Klima, a philosopher then at Fordham University, recently published a paper addressing just that question, and we concluded that the answer was "No."

 

As you might guess when a philosopher gets involved, the details are somewhat complicated.  But we began with the notion that the intellect, which is a specific power of the human mind, relies on the use of concepts.  In the limited space I have, I can best illustrate concepts with examples.  The specific house I live in is a particular thing.  There is only one house exactly like mine.  I can remember it, I can form a mental image of it, and I can even imagine it with a different color of trim than it actually has.  And software programs can do what amounts to these sorts of mental operations as well.  In my mind, my house is a perception of a real, individual thing.

 

By contrast, take the concept of "house."  Not my house or your house, just "house."  Any mental image you have that is inspired by "house" is not identical to "house"—it's only an example of it.  The idea or concept denoted by the word "house" is not reducible to anything specific.  The same goes for ideas such as freedom or conservatism.  You can't draw a picture of conservatism, but you can draw a picture of a particular conservative. 

 

In our paper, we gave strong evidence in favor of the notion that because concepts cannot be reduced to representations of individual things, AI programs will never be able to use them.  In the article, we used examples from an art-generating AI program that in some ways resembles DALL-E 2, in that it was trained on thousands of artworks and then made to generate artwork-like images.  The results showed the same kind of fidelity to superficial details and total absence of underlying coherence that DALL-E 2's productions showed.  As one of the OpenAI researchers quoted in the Spectrum article noted, "DALL-E doesn't know what science is . . . . [S]o it tries to make up something that's visually similar without understanding the meaning."  That is, without having any concept of what it's doing.

 

The big question is whether further research in AI will produce programs that truly understand concepts, and use that understanding to guide their production of art, text, or what have you.  Klima and I think not, and you can look up our article to understand why.  But we may be wrong, and only time and more AI research will tell.

 

Sources:  Eliza Strickland's article "DALL-E 2's Failures Reveal the Limits of AI" appeared on pp. 5-7 of the August 2022 print issue of IEEE Spectrum.  "'Artificial intelligence and its natural limits" by Karl D. Stephan and Gyula Klima appeared in vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 9-18, of AI & Society in 2021.

Electric Cars and the Sound of Silence

 

Electric vehicles (EV's for short) are not so common where I live that they are even an every-day encounter, although being within 30 miles of the Austin Tesla plant, we do see Teslas fairly often on the highways.  But a problem that had never occurred to me about electric cars is currently being intensively studied by most car makers, and the result will affect how cityscapes sound in the future.

 

If an electric car moves faster than 20 MPH or so, its tires make enough road noise so that it's not that much quieter than most modern internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles.  But at speeds lower than that, but fast enough to cause injuries in collisions with pedestrians, you simply can't hear them.  The electric motors are nearly silent.  And for visually-impaired and blind people who rely on the sounds of ICE vehicles to navigate, this can be a real problem.

 

As reported by John Seabrook in a recent New Yorker article, way back in 2003 a friend came by National Federation of the Blind activist Deborah Kerr Stein's house driving a new Toyota Prius, which in its battery mode was so quiet that Stein couldn't hear it at all even as it passed within a few feet of her.  She thought at the time "We've got a real problem."

 

After numbers of experiments with different electric vehicles and investigations into pedestrian accidents involving electric vehicles, it turned out that not only blind people, but sighted pedestrians also had problems noticing electric cars because they were so much quieter at low speeds than ICE vehicles.  Statistics reported in 2011 showed that hybrids and EVs showed a 35% greater chance of being involved in collisions with pedestrians and a 50% greater chance of collisions with bicyclists. 

 

This evidence was used to persuade Congress to pass and President Obama to sign the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act in 2012, which called for a "sound or set of sounds for all vehicles of the same make and model."  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) took six years after that to devise technical specifications saying how loud and in what frequency ranges these sounds must be, and now the various car manufacturers who either sell or think about selling EVs must comply.

 

Seabrook interviewed numerous sound designers and engineers at GM, Renault, Ford, and other makers, and many of those interviewed were looking forward to contributing to an entirely new aspect of automotive history:  artificial characteristic sounds. 

 

For most of the time that people have lived with ICE vehicles, we have unconsciously learned to associate certain kinds of sounds with certain vehicles.  Seabrook even unearthed an acoustic engineer who could tell the make and model of a car just by the sound of its engine idling.  To me, most cars with their engines running just sound like cars, but the one exception that comes to mind is the exhaust noise made by the old-style VW Beetle produced from the 1950s to the 1990s or so.  It had a characteristic high note that made the sound unmistakeable for anything else.  But for the most part, automakers regarded sounds made by the car as something to be minimized, and many smaller vehicles going above 30 MPH or so don't make much more sound than an electric vehicle does.

 

But now we're going to have to get used to the different sounds devised by car makers to characterize their individual EVs.  Presumably, the EVs on the road now meet these requirements, but Tesla, the current leader in numbers on the road, has had run-ins with the Feds regarding some acoustic options that were installed for a time.  After a 2020 software update, Tesla drivers could play goat bleats, ice-cream truck music, and various less presentable noises through the external speakers installed in every Tesla.  The NHTSA clamped down on it and thereby earned the title "fun police" from Elon Musk, but Teslas are presumably still compliant with the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act.

 

This set of developments presents a relatively rare case in which a potential engineering problem was noticed and headed off before the number of potential problem vehicles got too large to deal with conveniently. This benign outcome was enabled by an alert "mediating institution"—the National Federation of the Blind—which was accustomed to dealing with governments and helping to draft legislation.  And it has the side benefit of making EVs safer for everybody else too, as many accommodations for the disabled tend to do. 

 

The mediating institution in this case is a privately owned and operated organization, and the profession of engineering has many such entities dealing with largely technical matters:  setting standards, organizing new protocols for new technologies, and so on.  Those who would want all such operations conducted by government agencies need to consider the fact that one of the strengths of American society is its proliferation of vigorous, competent, and useful mediating institutions.  Government power was involved in this case, and many times that is an appropriate outcome, but it was not government by itself that dealt with the problem, but government prompted by the private mediating institution that got the job done. 

 

Fortunately, the issue at hand was not subject to much political pulling and hauling, as neither Republicans nor Democrats wanted to look like they were opposed to helping blind people.  So while a new technology presented a new potential problem to a certain group of people, they noticed it soon enough to deal with it in a way that is not overly burdensome on car makers, and has actually led to a considerable amount of creativity on the part of sound designers.

 

I have not had the opportunity to listen to an EV at low speed to find out if I can hear it coming if I 'm looking the other way, but if I can, I'll have the National Federation for the Blind, the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, and the sound designers working for whatever car company made the car to thank.  And so will you.

 

Sources:  John Seabrook's article "On Alert" appeared on pp. 24-29 of the Aug. 8, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.

Get Real with Vaclav Smil

 

The headline doesn't really rhyme, because Professor Smil's last name is pronounced "smill" to rhyme with "will."  But getting real is what Vaclav Smil does in his latest book, How the World Really Works.  And the reality that he presents, with incontrovertible evidence in the form of wide-ranging statistics and little-known but vital processes and connections among global economic flows, show that the highly-touted future of a fossil-fuel-less economy in ten or even thirty years is a pipe dream.  Not that it shouldn't happen—Smil tries to avoid the familiar political grandstanding beloved by both sides of the climate-change issue, with fairly good success.  What he excels in is showing in great but fascinating detail how essential but little-known industries such as ammonia synthesis play critical roles in sustaining the eight billion or so people on the planet, and that realizing a global zero-carbon economy any time soon would cause mass starvation.

 

Who is Vaclav Smil?  In reading his columns in the professional journal IEEE Spectrum, I wondered that myself while admiring his unorthodox but always fact-based take on various technical issues of the day.  He recently retired from a distinguished professorship in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba.  He is the only academic I have come across recently who can lay some claim to being a Renaissance man, having published in areas as disparate as population demographics and energy policy.  In whatever field he chooses to write about, however, he likes to start from the facts.

 

For example, if you were asked what are the four material pillars of modern civilization, what would you say?  Silicon, because it's used in virtually all computers and information technology?  Glass, because it forms the material backbone of the Internet?  Smil would disagree.

 

His choices for the four pillars are steel, concrete, plastics, and—the oddest member—ammonia.  Why ammonia?  Because ammonia synthesized from nitrogen in the air and natural gas is the source of the vast majority of chemical fertilizers used throughout the world.  German chemist Fritz Haber figured out how to do that by 1911, and the Haber process still provides most of the world's supply of nitrogen fertilizer, without which you get things like the recent collapse of Sri Lanka, which was caused largely by an out-of-touch government ordering all the nation's farms to switch immediately to non-chemical-fertilizer farming.  But the Haber process needs hydrogen, which comes from natural gas.

 

Plastics, the second pillar of modern society, are made mostly from petrochemicals or sometimes what used to be called "coal-tar derivatives."  Either way, they come from fossil fuels.

 

Concrete, without which we couldn't build most of the large-scale built infrastructure we have, is made with Portland cement, which in turn has to be manufactured with large amounts of coal, or sometimes natural gas.  Anyway, you need fossil fuels to make cement.

 

And steel is made in blast furnaces fired with coke, which is derived from coal.

 

Besides these four pillars, which have to remain in place if the six billion or so people who live less-than-average-income lives hope to improve their lot, all airplanes and nearly all ships burn fossil fuels.  Battery-powered planes or ships to carry even a small fraction of the vital international trade on which modern society depends will not be available for many decades, if ever.  So for the foreseeable future, we are stuck with using fossil fuels for a wide variety of essential processes and products without which most of us would have to crawl away somewhere and die of starvation. 

 

So what do we do, just give up on fighting climate change and get used to wearing bathing suits in the winter?  No, Smil says there are some practical things we can do.  Conservation is a big one.  A surprisingly large fraction, on the order of 40%, of food worldwide is simply wasted—spoiled somewhere along the transportation chain, or simply not used before it goes bad.  And there are tons of opportunities to conserve energy around the world, starting with displacing coal-fired plants (which China is still building like there's no tomorrow) with natural-gas-fired ones, going to smaller cars rather than SUVs and electrics where possible, and building more solar and wind-generation facilities.  But here is Smil reacting to claims that we could decarbonize at least 80 percent of the global energy supply by 2030:  "Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization . . . will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030; they merely assert that it could be so."

 

Smil's book is full of cold-shower moments like that, but he is also refreshingly free of the tendentious us-versus-them tone that dominates most public pronouncements on these matters by politicians and other leaders.

 

He does not deny that global warming, or climate change, is happening.  In fact, he shows how the essentials of the connection between carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and global temperature were worked out over a century ago, long before it became a contentious political issue.  When he sees global leaders convening an endless series of summits and proclaiming unrealistic and unreachable goals while letting things just go on as usual, he gets irritated that no one is working toward a more systematic and engineering-driven approach to the problem. 

 

What is needed, and what is so often lacking, is the wisdom to choose the right path, or combination of paths, and the courage to put the decisions into action.  That is the real problem Smil portrays in his book:  the fact that a truly global issue—climate change—will have to have a truly global solution.  And we haven't figured out how to do that yet.

 

Sources:  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published in 2022 by Viking.

Hacking the French Internet—With a Saw

 

In the early hours of Wednesday, April 27, some highly informed and determined individuals uncovered conduit boxes at three locations to the east, north, and south of Paris.  Inside these boxes were the inch-thick fiber cable bundles that make up the highest-density long-haul backbone of the Internet.  Probably using battery-powered saws, they cut each cable in two different places and ran off with the chunk in between, making the break much more difficult to repair.  Splicing fiber-optic cables is a delicate laboratory-style operation that has to be carried out with very specialized equipment, and the physical repairs to the cables occupied technicians for reportedly "several dozen hours."

 

In the meantime, ten different Internet services suffered various degrees of disruption before workarounds were figured out to bypass the cuts.   Individual users saw some problems:  loss of connections or slowed service.  But once the bypass routes were in operation, service returned to normal. 

 

This incident is of concern not so much for the actual damage it caused—hardly any for users and just some extra repair work for the Internet operators—as for what it says about the people who carried it out.  For one thing, they knew exactly where to go.  While some companies unwisely publish maps of their networks, most do not, and the public maps are scarcely at the level of detail needed to locate particular junction boxes in a street.  In mystery-story parlance, this vandalism was an inside job, perpetrated by people who knew exactly what they were doing and how to access the most critical part of the Internet infrastructure. 

 

For another thing, the attacks were coordinated at three points simultaneously.  This says at least three, and probably more, people were involved.  One wacko or disgruntled employee with a battery-powered Saws-All is one thing, but three cool knowledgeable operators is something else again.

 

Pardon my amateur sleuthing, but this doesn't sound like a one-and-done attack to me.  It looks more like a dress rehearsal for something bigger.  And the something bigger could be very big indeed.

 

One of the operational strengths of the Internet is its robustness in the face of failures in individual connecting cables.  Any network that conveys traffic like the Internet does will show this kind of robustness as long as there are few or no "isolated" nodes:  important terminals carrying a lot of traffic that have only one way of connecting to the network.  The original design of the ARPANET, the Internet's military predecessor, built in the ability to withstand considerable damage to individual connections and nodes with a war in mind.  This was in the late 1960s when the Cold War and the prospect of nuclear bombs taking out large chunks of infrastructure was a very real possibility.  So if you imagine a real net, like a fishing net, and judge its ability to hold fish, this ability will not be severely compromised if you take a pair of scissors and randomly snip a few strings here and there.

 

But if someone who knows what they're doing plans a careful attack intended to isolate a particular critical part of the network from the rest of it, the fishnet—or the Internet, for that matter—is not so invulnerable.  Depending on the age and history of certain important nodes, this sort of attack might or might not be that easy. 

 

In a place like New York City, where cable conduits have been in place since the late 1800s and myriads of permissions and keys and God knows what else has to be got through to gain access to cables, such a plan might be well-nigh impossible.  But what about some of these fairly new giant server farms in rural parts of Idaho, or wherever Google chooses to put them?  I'm sure they have physical security as well as the usual IT security measures in place.  But simply by the necessity of the case, most of the huge gobs of data that goes in and out of those places travels by fiber cable.  And somebody, somewhere, knows where all those cables are buried.  And not even Google can afford to have armed patrols of all their cable routes 24/7. 

 

Such an exploit would have to be coordinated in a way similar to the 9/11 attacks, with recruiting of traitorous insiders, rehearsals, and need-to-know coordination among the members of the conspiracy.  I will let any novelists among my readers take it from there, because the story could be a good one. 

 

The main question that remains unanswered by the investigation of the French incident, and which would have to be answered before we have to worry about anything like that in the U. S. or elsewhere, is:  why would anybody want to do such a thing?  Speculation in France has focused on "radical ecologists" who are simply protesting the existence of the Internet and want to cause symbolic trouble.  Thinking more along the lines of money, one could hardly hold a whole server farm for ransom without first carrying out one's threat, because announcing it in advance would instantly alert the intended victim to mount security measures to prevent the attack. 

 

Politically, there wouldn't be much percentage in knocking out, say, the internet service of a government-intensive place like Washington, unless you intended to mount a conventional-war attack at the same time.  And now we're getting into conspiracy-theory territory, a swamp I do not wish to penetrate. 

 

All I'm saying is that while such attacks on the physical structure of the Internet are possible, in the nature of things they do little practical harm.  And to cause a truly major disruption of service either to a specific geographical area or to a specific server farm (all of which have "mirror" or duplicate sites that could probably take up the slack without too much of a problem), the attackers would have to pursue a truly military-style and utterly secret plan that might be foiled by law enforcement anyway. 

 

So while it's bothersome that parts of the Internet can be foiled by something as simple as a circular saw, it doesn't look like you need to put this near the top of your worry list any time soon.

 

Sources:  Wired carried the story "The Unsolved Mystery Attack on Internet Cables in Paris," on July 22, 2022 at https://www.wired.com/story/france-paris-internet-cable-cuts-attack/. 

Road Taxes: A Drag on Electric Cars

 

As you probably know, most states rely on a tax on every gallon of gasoline sold for on-road use to pay for a good fraction of the expensive job of maintaining roads, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure.  The fraction varies from state to state, but a 2019 Consumer Reports study showed that about 28% of highway funding came from fuel taxes on average, 22% from registration fees, and the rest from a variety of sources such as tolls and bond funding.

 

I don't know when it occurred to me to wonder what will happen to this source of money when most of the cars on the road use electricity instead of gas, but probably not before it occurred to the state legislators, who have mostly decided to pursue a single remedy for this looming problem:  an annual fee specially assessed on every electric vehicle (EV). 

 

My own state of Texas has proposed charging up to $200 per car, and other states either plan to implement such a fee or already have done so.  While an annual fee is simple to administer, it loses a virtue that the gasoline tax had.  Under the old system, if you drove more, or drove a bigger vehicle, you paid more.

 

Beyond that, the same Consumer Reports study showed that the vast majority of proposed or existing EV fees were unfairly high, penalizing EV drivers compared to people who drive old-fashioned internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles. 

 

The way the analysts figured this out was to calculate something they called a "maximum justifiable fee" for each state, which took into account the average vehicle miles traveled, the prevailing fuel economy standard, and the state's fuel tax rate.  This calculation essentially determined the average fuel tax drivers paid in that state, and assuming EV owners drive about as much as ICE owners, it's not fair to charge the EV owners more than the maximum justifiable fee.

 

Well, guess again.  Of the 28 states the report studied which had either a proposed or existing fee for EVs, only 8 wound up charging EV owners less than the maximum justifiable fee in a projected 2025 case study.  All the rest charged more, and three proposed fees (those in Missouri, Arizona, and Texas) that were more than twice the maximum justifiable amount. 

 

As of today, Texas is still mulling over the proposed fee, so at this point, all the EV drivers in Texas are freeloading on the gas-tax-paying majority.  But the legislatures won't let this go on indefinitely, and it's not clear how the situation will be resolved.

 

The federal government has recently muddied the waters further by making hundreds of millions of dollars available for EV infrastructure, mainly more charging stations.  While EV owners will be grateful for this boon, it throws a big monkey wrench in the economics of charging EVs, which is already skewed by such things as Tesla Motors' offer of free charging for the lifetime of some of its cars, although that policy appears to be fading into the sunset.

 

Nobody pays Exxon or Valero to build a new gas station, so if we're looking at fairness in the energy-supply area, the fossil-fuel people could call foul in the case of federally-subsidized charging stations.  So that makes the picture even more complicated.  If you own an electric vehicle, you may have received free electricity to charge it in the past, you may drive up to a government-subsidized charging station now or in the future, but you may get socked with an annual fee that makes you pay more for road maintenance than your ICE-driving friends.

 

The ethics of paying for public-use infrastructure such as roads, gas stations, and charging stations gets political pretty quickly.  But we can think of some extremes that almost everybody would say are wrong, regardless of their political persuasion.

 

It would not be fair, for example, to let EV drivers totally off the hook with regard to road maintenance, and simply increase the gasoline tax on those few retrograde ICE-driving troglodytes who insist on warming up the planet, until they simply quit in disgust—or bankruptcy.  I say it wouldn't be fair, but I can imagine that this squeeze-'em-dry solution might appeal to certain progressive sectors who would like to see all fossil fuel use cease tomorrow. 

 

On the other hand, if we make fairness the paramount issue, it would seem that those who use the roads more ought to pay more.  And those whose vehicles are harder on the highways should pay more than people who drive Mini Coopers or motorcycles.  Most new vehicles are equipped with wireless Internet connectivity, electronic odometers, and GPS sensors that can easily be made to calculate how many miles have been traveled and on what kinds of roads.  The technology exists to come up with some kind of road-use fee schedule that would truly proportion one's taxation to the actual amount of use one made of various state and city roads. 

 

From a libertarian point of view, this approach would have the virtue of extreme fairness.  The gas tax never was more than a rough-and-ready attempt to do this kind of proportioning at a time when more exact methods were unavailable.  Under this scheme, if you drove a certain weight of car on a certain road, you would pay the same amount whether it used electricity or gasoline.

 

The problem with this idea would be its unpredictability.  In effect, every road would now be a toll road, and the more you drove, the more you'd pay.  But if the maximum justifiable fee is less than $100 on average, most drivers might not even notice it, especially if it was paid once a year along with the registration fee.  Somebody would have to pay for the software, but software is cheap once it's written.

 

I don't know how this is all going to turn out, but fairness seems to have been neglected up to now, and I hope justice prevails, or at least gets a word in edgewise.

 

Sources:  The 2019 Consumer Reports analysis is available at https://www.atlasevhub.com/resource/rising-trend-of-punitive-fees-on-electric-vehicles-wont-dent-state-highway-funding-shortfalls-but-will-hurt-consumers/.  The information on Tesla's free-electricity offer is available at https://electrek.co/2021/07/21/how-to-tell-if-your-tesla-qualifies-for-free-supercharging/. 

Abortion and Data Privacy: New Cause for Concern

 

With the June 24 Dobbs decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey, the U. S. Supreme Court withdrew the nationwide blockade against the intention of many states to ban abortion to a greater or lesser degree.  Depending on where you live, abortion may already be illegal or will shortly become so. 

 

Texas, where I live, is one of the more aggressive states, having effectively banned most abortions since last fall by authorizing private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion.  To the best of my knowledge, the penalties for performing abortion focus mainly on the providers.  But any woman who wants an abortion now faces a new forest of legal complications, including the possibility that law enforcement agencies may obtain extremely private information such as data from period apps in building a case that an abortion was performed.

 

In a recent Vox online piece, Sara Morrison pointed out that although women concerned about keeping their possible pregnancy status private should probably get rid of their period apps, that is not the only way you can be spied on, although period-app companies have a rather poor record when it comes to data privacy anyway. 

 

Most media companies have a boilerplate clause as part of that agreement everybody pretends to read (and nobody does), which allows them to share information with legally constituted law enforcement agencies that have a reason to obtain it.  So even if a woman sent a private text message to her closest friend saying that she thought she was pregnant, and a state police investigation thought it was relevant in prosecuting an abortionist, they could legally obtain that message. 

 

The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters these days for anyone who spends any amount of time online, which is pretty much everybody.  While the Fourth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution guarantees the right to be secure in one's "persons, houses, papers, and effects," it does allow searches (presumably including online ones) in cases where a crime is suspected and a warrant for the search can be justified. 

 

What is so different today from the circumstances in 1792, when the Bill of Rights was enacted, is that all of us leave electronic trails that are in legal gray areas in many cases.  Simply being on social media and using one's mobile phone creates gobs of data that clever analysts with adequate resources and access to commercial databases by means of search warrants can use to create an incredibly intimate portrait, including one's pregnancy status or attempts to obtain an abortion. 

 

Morrison says the ultimate solution is better data-privacy laws.  And she may be right.  The problem with this is that the entire economic basis of social media relies on the violation of the kind of privacy that data privacy laws would protect.  So unless the Big Tech giants figure out an entirely new revenue model, their heavy hands on the scale of justice will outweigh any desire on the part of the general public to be more private online.

 

This is not an easy column for me to write, because I am personally opposed to abortion.  At the same time, I realize that trying to enact (or revoke) a law that creates a situation which is hugely unpopular among a large segment of the public leads to situations in which law either loses respect or unduly harsh measures are used to enforce it.  Probably some of both will happen in the coming months as the nation readjusts to the new circumstances surrounding abortion.

 

Judging from the way Morrison wrote her article, she seemed to take the point of view of a woman who finds herself pregnant against her intention and wants to get an abortion, but lives in a state where abortion is now illegal.  What are the options?

 

Over half of current abortions are achieved by means of medication, which means the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol taken to induce a spontaneous abortion.  Many states are or will shortly take steps to make such medications illegal for use in abortion, and the natural first thought of many—to order them online—leaves one open to surveillance as explained above.

 

The next option would be to travel out of state to a place where abortions are still performed.  But in a state like Texas, even helping someone with travel arrangements could be grounds for a lawsuit—remote grounds, maybe, but who wants to do something that leaves their friends liable to be sued?  And everyone's whereabouts are being tracked 24/7, or at least the whereabouts of your phone, unless  you turn it off.  So as things stand, there are really not many places to hide.

 

Far from solving the problem, the Dobbs decision has brought abortion into the spotlight of public consciousness and debate in a way that perhaps hasn't been equaled since the original 1973 decision that legalized it by judicial fiat nationwide.  The real problem, the one that lies deeper than online privacy, or legal decisions or codes, is a cultural one.

 

We live in a hypocritical culture which both promises untrammeled freedom, and withholds from nearly everyone the means to realize that freedom, which is illusory in any case.  The culture has convinced millions of women that pregnancy and childbirth is simply not an option compared to all the other treasures of the world, and if a woman becomes a mother without meaning to, she must correct the error even if it means the death of an innocent being. 

 

This is a serious distortion of how the world is, and correcting it is going to take more than the passage or revocation of a few laws or judicial rulings.  But if Dobbs and its fallout get us to thinking about these things, there is at least hope that the truth will eventually emerge.  And it is only the truth that makes people truly free.

 

Sources:  Sara Morrison's "Should I delete my period app? And other post-Roe privacy questions" appeared on Vox at https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/7/6/23196809/period-apps-roe-dobbs-data-privacy-abortion.  I also referred to a list of what many of the states are doing about abortion laws at https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-states-a767801145ad01617100e57410a0a21d.

Crouch's Razor: Device or Instrument?

 

If our modern culture ever had a honeymoon with technology, the honeymoon's been over for quite a while now.  From nuclear bombs to carbon emissions and social media, we are at least as aware of the drawbacks of technology as we are of its benefits, especially when it comes to what communications and information technologies have done to the way we interact and govern ourselves.  But what can an individual do to make things better? 

 

Andy Crouch, a Christian author and entrepreneur, thinks he has some answers.  A few years ago he wrote The Tech-Wise Family:  Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place.  And now he's broadened his scope with another book:  The Life We're Looking For:  Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, which I learned about in a review published in The New Atlantis, a journal of technology and society.

 

The reviewer, a professor of theology at Abilene Christian University named Brad East, wasn't entirely happy with Crouch's latest.  And having just read the book myself, I tend to agree with some of his criticisms, namely that while Crouch offers some first-rate analyses, he is a little weak on specific solutions. 

 

This may be because Crouch is not a terribly systematic thinker.  But where he excels is in brief, pithy aphorisms, one of which I want to highlight today.  You may have heard of a thing called Ockam's Razor.  It refers to William of Ockham, a 14th-century monk and scholar who had a major influence on the progress of medieval thought.  His "razor"—a thing for cutting off needless fuzziness, as you may say—is summarized in the Wikipedia article on him as "one should always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible causes, factors, or variables."  Scientists have seized upon Ockam's Razor as a way to choose among several different explanations for a given physical phenomenon.  While no more infallible than most of philosophy, the Razor has come in handy numerous times as an argument against a needlessly complicated explanation of something that can be explained much more simply.

 

All this is preliminary to Crouch's Razor, which I shall state as follows:  In considering the purchase or use of a new technology, ask whether it is a device or an instrument.  And of course, you need to know what the difference is.

 

Crouch attributes to the philosopher Albert Borgmann his special meaning for device:  a thing that replaces earlier tools or means of doing something by making the activity so much easier that human beings are not really required at all.  A good example of an early device is a phonograph used to play music.  Formerly, to hear a symphony orchestra, you'd have to go to a concert hall with a lot of other people (unless you were rich enough to afford your own orchestra), and the musicians would have to put in years of practice and rehearsal to produce a decent-sounding piece.  But after the device called the phonograph was invented, a ten-year-old could wind up the crank and put the needle on the record and hear something that approximated the same symphony.  And now, of course, it's infinitely easier to hear music at any time or place, and public spaces are filled with music (of a sort) for the production of which no human being's services are immediately required—the Muzak-makers play themselves.

 

An instrument, on the other hand, is something that augments human ability but also requires of us a certain amount of effort, concentration, and practice, keeping us in the loop as humans, so to speak.  A ukulele is an instrument in this sense.  I can testify from personal experience that a ukulele does not play itself.  You have to practice on it until the fingers of your left hand (if you're right-handed) have little calloused patches that make it less painful to hold down the strings (notice I didn't say painless!) so the chords come out clearly.  And you also have to learn which strings to hold down where.  In the hands of a good musician (which I am not), the ukulele can be a thing of joy, or at least happiness—if you like ukulele music, that is. 

 

As a Christian, Crouch has a clear anthropology in mind:  he says, "Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love."  Any new technology that helps people use or develop one or more aspects of that complex on its way to its designated purpose is to be sought, because it's an instrument.  On the other hand, if a new technology resembles a "superpower"—reducing what used to be the complex human achievement of one or more skilled workers to the programmed machinations of gears and bits—it's probably just a device, and you use it at your peril.

 

Crouch is not so simplistic as to issue blanket condemnations of things like mobile phones.  While he recognizes that the profit-driven social-media system that uses phones as its primary interface is probably one of modernity's worst devices in many of its aspects, he highlights an instrument that uses phones: an app developed by a friend of his to help sick people organize networks of helpers during their illnesses.  He urges users to ask, in effect, "Why am I getting this new piece of technology?  Will it help me become more of what I ought to be?  Or will it just let me satisfy my animal urges more easily?" 

 

Even if you can't quickly categorize an innovation as purely a device or purely an instrument, these are good questions to ask, and they aren't asked frequently enough.  As reviewer East noted, Crouch has no industrial-scale solutions to the problems caused by our embrace of devices that move the world ever closer to a single buzzing, clacking process with humans playing the roles of cogs in a machine.  The next time you are invited to take up or buy a new kind of technology, try applying Crouch's Razor and ask yourself:  is this a device or an instrument?  And if it's a device, think twice before you proceed.

 

Sources:  Andy Crouch's book The Life We're Looking For:  Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (Convergent, 2022) was reviewed by Brad East in the Summer 2022 issue of The New Atlantis, pp. 81-92.