Greenhouse Gas Abatement that Makes Some Sense: Methane-Sniffing Drones

 

Bad old carbon dioxide is not the only gas that contributes to the earth's net heat balance by trapping heat in the atmosphere.  Another commonly used gas—methane, the chief constituent of natural gas—is more than 25 times as effective as CO2 in trapping heat.  Fortunately, methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter:  about 12 years as opposed to the hundreds of years it takes for CO2 to go away.  So doing something about methane emissions promises to have much more of a near-term effect than anything we do with CO2. 

 

Enter Percepto, a company founded in Israel which recently moved to Austin, Texas to market their services of sniffing out emissions of methane and 14 other gases using artificial-intelligence (AI)-equipped drones.  Their target market is refineries and petrochemical plants, where methane and other hydrocarbon gases can escape in leaks that can take days or weeks to find by technicians walking around with hand-held detectors.

 

Percepto's system, as outlined in an article that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, consists of a drone equipped with a wavelength-selective camera.  Most hydrocarbon gases emit and absorb characteristic infrared wavelengths, and a cleverly-designed imaging spectrometer can present the user with a photograph showing a cloud of methane made as visible as a cloud of red smoke from a cherry-bomb firework. 

 

Finding and fixing such a leak is not only good safety practice.  In 2024, the Biden administration will begin to implement the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, a combination of over a billion dollars of funding to pay for programs like Percepto's, combined with steeply increasing fines for emitting methane and other greenhouse gases.  Ariel Avitan, co-founder of Percepto, saw a business opportunity in providing large firms with a means of tracking leaks that is faster and more comprehensive than the older methods.  So now, his firm is poised to help track down leaks and other sources of methane that have previously gone undetected.

 

Percepto is to be congratulated for seeing a market niche and exploiting it.  Methane itself is not a particularly valuable gas.  When the cost of transporting it from a wellhead to the market exceeds what it can be sold for, producers typically flare it by burning it at the source.  The government is coming down hard on flares, too, which may lead to other expensive issues, as even flares don't burn 100% of the gas they consume. 

 

In an ideal world we wouldn't waste or release any methane at all through oil and gas operations.  But even if we had a magic wand to do that, it would decrease the world's budget of methane release by only 14%.

 

According to the International Energy Agency in Paris, France, the most profligate source of methane emissions worldwide is a natural one.  Methane is emitted in wetlands by natural decomposition, and unless we are willing to drain all the wetlands, there's nothing we can do about the 32% that nature produces.  The next largest source is agriculture, at 23%—think flatulent cows (there aren't any other kind).  Oil and gas come next at 14%, then coal operations and something labeled as "waste," which probably means methane produced by landfills. 

 

If anyone thinks that we're going to stop global warming by fixing all our methane leaks, this means that there is a disappointment in store.  But in the current state of climate rhetoric, few people are going to think beyond the one step that can be summarized as "Greenhouse gases bad—must stop at any cost." 

 

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the climate has slowly been warming and the ocean levels slowly rising (we're talking millimeters here) since the early 1800s.  And now that CO2 levels have risen as much as they have, whatever effect that's going to have on the climate will be with us for the next couple of hundred years, even if we stopped 100% of all human activity that emits CO2, including breathing.  And stopping the breath of the 8 billion or so humans on the planet is exactly what some "deep ecologists" would like us to do—the folks who regard humanity as some kind of evil infestation of an otherwise pristine Earth.

 

The sensible thing to do—the thing that would let most of those 8 billion people enjoy some of the benefits of modern technology that we in the U. S. have enjoyed for many decades—is to figure out how to adapt to the relatively minor and certainly gradual changes that global warming is going to make, while picking low-hanging fruit with regard to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.  If there's a six-foot hole in a dike in one place and a three-inch crack in another, the only reasonable thing to do is go after the six-foot hole first.  And if you can more easily deal with the water over the dike than fix the dike, maybe that's the best thing to do.

 

Unfortunately, the debate—or more accurately, accepted doctrine—about global warming has left such notions behind.  Most world leaders and their cadres of experts have bought into the easily-propagated notion that if we don't do really drastic and painful things about greenhouse gas emissions right now, we're all going to die horrible deaths as the globe imitates an egg in a frying pan.  The fact that highly reputable people such as Steven Koonin have shown this oversimplification to be mostly false has no effect on something that has become the mass-psychology equivalent of a kind of hypochondria.  It's like a patient that comes to a doctor with a pimple on his nose and says it's cancer and he's sure it's going to kill him.

 

We would try to talk reason to such a person, but it's easier than trying to talk sense to an international community that has bought into a severely distorted picture wholesale, and created huge institutional incentives to keep the delusion going. 

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Percepto saw their opportunity and took it.  People have a right to profit from laws that, however misconceived, do some incremental good.  And it's certainly a good thing to stop methane leaks, even if it costs millions of dollars to do so.  But one can still question the reasoning behind the laws, and wonder whether succeeding generations (if there are any) will scratch their heads over the strange panic about climate change that we are currently enduring.

 

Sources:  The article titled "Company using AI to detect gas leaks" appeared on page 1F of the Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The International Energy Agency's website https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change provided me with statistics about methane lifetime and sources.  Physicist Steven E. Koonin's book Unsettled? was published in 2021 by BenBella Books, Dallas.

AP Faces AI

 

The Associated Press, one of the most respected news organizations worldwide with a history dating to 1846, has taken on the issue of how its writers and editors should deal with generative AI, represented by chatbots such as ChatGPT.  Since its release late last year, ChatGPT has been used by everyone from elementary-school children to Ph. D. scientists, and most observers would agree that the results reach a new level of sophistication, human-like qualities, and accuracy—most of the time. 

 

Other forms of generative AI can produce audio segments, photos, and videos that look genuine but are in reality fabrications that never happened.  The AP has now taken a clear stance that such AI products should not be used unless they are clearly labeled as fabrications.  In this the AP is following the example of Wired, which flatly forbids any AI-produced content in their site unless the story is explicitly about AI and is used in examples. 

 

An Associated Press story by David Bauder quoted Amanda Barrett, AP's VP of news standards and inclusion, as saying, "Our goal is to give people a good way to understand how we can do a little experimentation but also be safe."  Editors can use AI to come up with headlines or interview questions, but the final product presented to readers must be "vetted carefully."  In other words, just because ChatGPT says something doesn't mean it's so. 

 

Such rules leave a fair amount of wiggle room.  For example, I can imagine a lazy reporter assigned to look into an obscure topic such as ball lightning, who might start by asking ChatGPT to write two or three paragraphs summarizing the subject.  The reporter would be obliged to check any alleged facts that ChatGPT comes up with, but that is a lot easier than looking for examples and writing the summary yourself. 

 

If the question comes up as to how much of a story was written by AI and how much by the human reporter, it won't be easy to answer.  When two people collaborate on a joint work that is repeatedly revised and re-edited, sometimes they lose track of whose sentence was whose, and the same will be true of AI.  Despite the AP's intention to keep AI in its place—namely, as simply another tool reporters can use—I suspect more and more content production is going to involve AI at some point. 

 

But the intent is clear:  when a reporter puts a byline on a story, the reporter is taking ultimate responsibility for every word.  And that is as it should be.  Nobody likes to get personalized letters from entities such as "The Google Team" or "Your friends at Acme Collection Agency."

And so the AP's insistence that however reporters put together a story, they must stand behind it instead of blaming AI for mistakes is only reasonable.

 

Still, we may be farther down the road of AI involvement in news reporting than you think.  In the same article describing AP's policies on AI, we learned that OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has agreed to a deal with AP to "license" AP's archives going back to 1985.  Apparently this means granting OpenAI complete access to those archives, which may not be publicly available otherwise.  This has annoyed some content providers, who see it as an unfair use of their work without compensation.

 

The problem here is that to most people, often including the developers of generative AI themselves, exactly what the AI systems do with the trillions of bytes of data they scrape from various Internet sources is not clear, except that without those sources, the AI system would be as useful as mammary glands on a boar hog. 

 

Back in the olden days of plain plagiarism, if Author A wrote a certain book and Author B came up with a different book in which several verbatim pages of text from Author A's book appeared without attribution, you had an open-and-shut case of plagiarism. 

 

But if we allow an AI system to look at work created by humans, and then ask it to come up with something similar, and the work it produces doesn't have significant word-for-word copying of the original works, how is that any different from Thomas Mann reading the Bible and then writing Joseph in Egypt?  Mann was a human being, of course, but the process itself is in question here.  Clearly there are issues that our legal and ethical systems are going to have to come to grips with, and we are only beginning to do so.

 

The NewsGuild, a 26,000-member union of news reporters that includes many staff members of AP, has expressed concern that AI may replace human reporters in ways that will work to the detriment of the whole industry, not to mention the reporters whose jobs will disappear.  Nobody has been talking about walkouts, and in general the legacy media such as newspapers are in such parlous financial straits that organizations like the NewsGuild realize you can't get blood out of a turnip.  But they are right to worry that many outlets with less of a reputation to uphold than AP will grab onto ChatGPT and use it instead of live human beings to produce stuff that is good enough to attract clicks.

 

The AP itself is a non-profit cooperative supported by member news organizations, and so can take a somewhat above-the-fray view of things compared to an outfit that has to make a profit.  They are to be praised for addressing the public's concerns about AI-generated news, and I hope they can make their rules stick about how AI should and should not be used.  It should be easy enough to avoid blatant howlers of the type that ChatGPT seems prone to come up with—things like an entire legal brief full of citations that turn out to be imaginary.  But what concerns me is the more subtle effects of relying on ChatGPT for drafts, for instance.  All its written productions I have seen have had exemplary grammar, which is more than I can say for some news items written by humans.  When you take a hundred encyclopedias' worth of verbiage and put it in a digital blender, the words that come out may be arranged in correct grammar.  But they will lack that ineffable something that goes under the name of style.  And we may miss that more than we think. 

 

Sources:  David Bauder's article on AP's rules regarding AI can be found at https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-guidelines-ap-news-532b417395df6a9e2aed57fd63ad416a.  I also referred to related articles at https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/07/writing-guidelines-for-the-role-of-ai-in-your-newsroom-here-are-some-er-guidelines-for-that/ and https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-associated-press-ap-f86f84c5bcc2f3b98074b38521f5f75a, and the Wikipedia article on NewsGuild.  As always, no AI tool was used in the writing of this article, you can rest assured. 

The Lahaina Fire: A Failure to Communicate

 

We think of Hawaii as being the stereotypical island paradise, where the weather is always ideal and nothing major can go wrong.  But on Monday, Aug. 7, the weather forecast on the island of Maui for Tuesday included near-hurricane-force winds of up to 65 mph (105 kph).  Combined with an unusually dry summer, this forecast meant that any fires which might start would spread, well, like wildfire.

 

Sure enough, shortly after Tuesday began, a little after midnight a fire in Maui's central Upcountry region was reported, and emergency management officials ordered some evacuations.  This fire attracted the attention of safety and fire officials throughout most of the day Tuesday.

 

In comparison to most other parts of the U. S., Hawaii is well equipped to notify its residents of emergency situations such as fires, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions.  An extensive network of alert sirens blankets the occupied parts of the islands, as well as electronic notifications that can be given through legacy media such as radio and TV as well as social media (Facebook, X—ex-Twitter‚ and so on).  So one would think that even a rapidly-spreading wildfire would not be able to keep residents from evacuating promptly.

 

Think again.  The historic town of Lahaina sits on the western coast of Maui and is accessible by only three main roads that go along the coastline.  Nestled between the ocean and the mountains, Lahaina was an attractive tourist destination with historic structures.  The following timeline was reported by the Associated Press.

 

When a second fire started near Lahaina before 7 A. M. Tuesday, firefighters converged on it and reported that it was contained by 11 A. M.  However, the fires had knocked out power to much of Lahaina and surrounding areas, which may have included cell towers.

 

The Upcountry fire continued to occupy the attention of officials even after the Lahaina fire escaped containment some time after noon.  By 3:30 PM, the fire's progress made officials decide to close the Lahaina Bypass road, one of the three main routes out of Lahaina. 

Around that time was when the Lahaina fire exploded.  Very few residents reported receiving any warning about the fire before it showed up at their doorstep.

 

Survivors describe cars in the downtown area being surrounded by flames, smelling smoke one minute and seeing their houses engulfed the next, and fleeing along the Lahaina Bypass only to be turned back by the roadblock.  Up until 4:30 PM, virtually nothing appeared about the Lahaina fire on any communications medium, and residents report that the sirens never sounded. 

 

At 4:30 P. M., residents of an inland subdivision of Lahaina were instructed by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to evacuate to a civic center north of town.  But by then, much of the damage had been done, and the fire continued to spread toward the coastline.  By 5:20, the Lahaina Bypass roadblock was lifted, but by then many residents of Front Street near the coast had fled to the shoreline and were either treading water in the ocean or hiding on the shore away from the worst of the flames.  More announcements came warning residents of Lahaina to shelter in place, but if your place is going up in flames, that's not good advice. 

 

At this writing (Sunday morning Aug. 13), the death toll stands at 80, making this natural disaster one of the worst in Hawaii's recent history.  While it is too soon to make a thorough assessment of what went wrong, experience and the little we know now can help us make some preliminary judgments.

 

First, the Lahaina fire wasn't the only emergency happening that day.  The earlier Upcountry fire engaged the attention of emergency management personnel to the extent that information from Lahaina may not have been acted upon as fast as it might have been otherwise.

 

Second, the widespread power failure may have crippled a number of electronic communications systems.  Sirens may or may not have backup power sources so that they will work when utility power fails.  If the ones in Lahaina didn't have backup power and the power was out, this would explain why no one heard sirens before the fire.  Also, although most cell tower stations have some form of backup power, the emergency power source doesn't always work properly.  And a cell tower with its ground-level equipment engulfed in flames is unlikely to be of much help anyway.

 

Third, it is pretty clear that some well-intentioned actions of officials actually made things worse.  Closure of a road that has smoke from fires crossing it is a prudent measure, as tragic traffic accidents on interstates suddenly enveloped in smoke attest.  But when the people needing to use the road are fleeing for their lives, that should take precedence over lesser considerations, if the officials in charge know what is going on.  It looks like the Lahaina fire moved so fast that it was hard for officials (or anyone else) to know what was happening. 

 

One reason that overall global deaths from natural disasters have been declining for the last several decades is that electronic communications can give advance warning to people who would otherwise be in harm's way.  Tornado fatalities in the U. S., for example, can be averted by timely warnings of specific storms that include likely localities to be affected.

 

Unlike tornadoes, fires can't be tracked by radar, at least not yet.  Until such technology is available, fire and safety officials have to rely on eyewitness reports to take appropriate actions, whether that consists of warnings, evacuation orders, or dispatch of fire-fighting resources.  The speed with which the high winds spread the Lahaina fire is unusual, but not unprecedented.  Clearly, the system of fire warning and protection was unprepared for what happened. 

 

Lessons learned from the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks about the failure of electronic emergency communications led to widespread improvements in interoperability and design of first-responder communications systems, as I wrote in a paper published in 2007.  We can hope that the sad lessons learned from the Lahaina fire will lead to upgrades in equipment and changes in policies that will make the emergency response to the next wildfire in Hawaii more robust, leading to more lives and property saved.

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP report published by PBS at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/as-death-toll-of-maui-wildfires-rises-to-80-a-timeline-of-failed-communications-emerges and a map of the fire extent at

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/satellite-images-show-scale-hawaii-wildfires-devastation/.  My paper "We've Got to Talk:  Emergency Communications and Engineering Ethics" was published in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 26, no. 3 pp. 42-48, Fall 2007.

Uber Backup Driver in Self-Driving Car Fatality Pleads Guilty

 

When Elaine Herzberg started to cross a dark street in Tempe, Arizona on Mar. 18, 2018 with her bicycle, she didn't see the Volvo approaching.  Unfortunately for her, it wasn't an ordinary Volvo.  It was an experimental self-driving vehicle operated by Uber, and behind the wheel was Rafaela Vasquez, whose job was to monitor the car's performance and intervene before anything serious went wrong.  The Volvo was equipped with factory-installed safety features such as automatic braking, but Uber had disabled those features because they interfered with Uber's own self-driving system.  It was Vasquez's job to stop the car if it was about to run over something—or somebody.

 

Video footage recorded at the time showed that Vasquez was looking at something in her lap instead of watching where the car was going.  Prosecuting attorneys said it was a TV show she was streaming on her phone.  Her defense attorney claimed it was a messaging program on a work cellphone.  Whichever it was, it distracted Vasquez enough so that by the time she noticed Herzberg only a few feet ahead of the car, it was too late to do anything.  Herzberg died in the accident and Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide.  Last Friday, she pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to three years of supervised probation.

 

Most sources agree that this was the first fatal collision involving a fully autonomous car.  As such, it presented something of a puzzle to the prosecutors.  Clearly, Vasquez was not just an ordinary driver—her role was to monitor the car's performance and intervene only when it looked like it was getting into trouble.  Numerous other parties were involved as well:  Volvo itself, whose automatic braking features were disabled; Uber engineers who developed the self-driving features being tested; and Uber supervisors who issued orders and instructions to Vasquez. 

 

More than five years have passed since the accident, and the charge Vasquez pled guilty to is not the one she was originally charged with.  In a plea deal, she agreed to plead guilty to an "undesignated felony," which apparently can be converted into a misdemeanor if she successfully completes three years of supervised probation.  Vasquez is a convicted felon, having served prison time for attempted armed robbery, so she is no newcomer to the criminal justice system.  While Uber deserves credit for employing ex-convicts, their judgment may have erred in this case.

 

When I blogged on this accident back in 2018, the autonomous-vehicle landscape was very different.  Self-driving cars were a novelty and found mostly in experimental trials in a few cities.  Since that time, things have progressed in that field, but probably not as fast as its promoters wished.  Tesla, which has probably fielded the largest number of partially self-driving cars of any U. S. manufacturer, is currently under scrutiny by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration for accidents involving its so-called Autopilot feature, which drives the car without direct human-driver intervention but should not be used without constant monitoring for bad behavior.  I can testify that these days, I see at least one Tesla almost any time I'm out on the road for any length of time, and maybe several.  As Autopilot is an expensive option for an already costly car, I don't know how many drivers have it or use it, but so far I haven't seen a Tesla tooling down the expressway with nobody at the wheel—yet.

 

Simply because the current driving environment is so complex, the ultimate vision of so-called Level 5 autonomous vehicles, which could drive anywhere a human could without any human intervention at all, may not ever come to pass.  Fully autonomous vehicles can work in highly restricted and controlled environments such as open-pit mines, but the average city street is full of so many surprises and hard-to-determine obstacles that current technology cannot be trusted to navigate it without human help. 

 

If we are to realize the dream of totally autonomous cars, we might have to accept some geographic restrictions that will not be popular.  For example, if certain streets or blocks were designated for autonomous vehicles only, and no-jaywalking laws were strictly enforced, the environment could be modified enough so that fully-autonomous Level 5 cars would work with reasonable safety.  But that would require a coordination among local, state, and national governments, besides car manufacturers, that is so far lacking, and may never be achieved.

 

A few people have always enjoyed the equivalent of fully-autonomous cars:  those who can afford to hire a chauffeur.  The fact that some rich folks are driven around by hired drivers has had negligible impact on the transportation system so far, and if such an experience never makes it to prime time via the development of Level 5 autonomous vehicles, it will not signal the failure of transportation technology in general.  The only people who would really benefit in a major way from Level 5 vehicles are those who cannot drive:  the handicapped and disabled, the elderly, and children.  I am told that children used to ride the New York subway system unsupervised all the time, and some may still do so.  But we have a long way to go before anyone would trust their five-year-old to get in an autonomous vehicle for a ride to day care.

 

That dark night in Tempe, Rafaela Vasquez unwillingly made history through her negligence in trusting too much to the self-driving capabilities of the experimental Uber-modified vehicle she was hired to supervise.  The same mistake is being made by people who don't follow instructions to keep their hands on the wheel of an Autopilot-equipped Tesla, and the unfortunate thing is that they often get away with it.  But sometimes they don't, and that's what the NHTSA is looking into.  Uber was not charged in the Tempe accident, probably because there was evidence that they had told Vasquez to be vigilant and she clearly failed to do so.  But it's human nature to assume that if you can get away with something for a long time, you'll be able to get away with it indefinitely.  And the temptation to do that with advanced self-driving features is too great for some people, who should be held responsible, along with their car's manufacturer, when something goes wrong.

 

Sources:  The AP report on the Vasquez trial can be found at https://apnews.com/article/autonomous-vehicle-death-uber-charge-backup-driver-1c711426a9cf020d3662c47c0dd64e35.  I also referred to a CNBC report at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/06/nhtsa-presses-tesla-for-more-records-in-autopilot-safety-probe.html.  I blogged on the Tempe accident here and here.

Is AI Better Regulated After the White House Meeting?

 

The easy answer is, it's too soon to tell.  But for a number of reasons, the July 21 meeting between President Biden and leaders of seven Big Tech firms, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, may prove to be more show than substance.

 

Admittedly, there is widespread agreement that some sort of regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) should be considered.  Even industry leaders such as Elon Musk have been warning that things are moving too fast, and there are small but real risks of huge catastrophes lurking out there that could be averted by agreed-upon restrictions or regulations of the burgeoning AI industry.

 

Last Friday's White House meeting of representatives from seven leading AI firms—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, and OpenAI—produced a "fact sheet" that listed eight bullet-point commitments made by the participants.  The actual meeting was not open to the public, but one presumes the White House would not publish such things without at least the passive approval of the participants. 

 

Browsing through the items, I don't see many things that a prudent giant AI corporation wouldn't be doing already.  For example, take "The companies commit to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before their release."  Not to do any security testing would be foolish.  External testing, meaning testing by third-party security firms, is probably pretty common in the industry already, although not universal. 

 

The same thing goes for the commitment to "facilitating third-party discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities in their AI systems."  No tech firm worth its salt is going to ignore an outsider's legitimate report of finding a weak spot in their products, and so this is again something that the firms are probably doing already. 

 

The most technical commitment, but again one that the companies are probably doing already, is to "protect proprietary and unreleased model weights."  Unversed as I am at AI technicalities, I'm not sure exactly what this means, but the model weights appear to be something like the keys to how a given AI system runs once it's been trained, and so it only stands to reason that the companies would protect assets that cost them a lot of computing time to obtain, even before the White House told them to do that.

 

Four bullet points address "Earning the Public's Trust," which, incidentally, implies that the firms have a considerable way to go to earn it.  But we'll let that pass. 

 

The firms commit to developing some way of watermarking or otherwise indicating when "content is AI generated."  That's all very well, but the answer to such a question is rarely just yes or no.  What if some private citizen takes a watermarked AI product and incorporates it manually into something else that is no longer watermarked?  The intention is good, but the path to execution is foggy, to say the least.

 

Perhaps the commitment with the most bite is this one:  "The companies commit to publicly reporting their AI systems’ capabilities, limitations, and areas of appropriate and inappropriate use."  The wording is broad enough to drive a truck through, although again, the intention is good.  How often, how detailed, and how extensive such reports may be is left up to the company.

 

The last two public-trust items commit the firms to "prioritizing" research into the societal risks of AI, and to use AI to address "society's greatest challenges."  If I decide not to wash my car today, I have prioritized washing my car—negatively, it is true, but hey, I said I'd prioritize it!

 

So what is different about the way these firms will carry out their AI activities after the White House meeting?  A lot of good intentions were aired, and if the firms happened to enjoy a lot of public trust in the first place, these good intentions might have found an audience who believes that they will be carried out.

 

But the atmosphere of cynicism which has gradually encroached on almost all areas of public life make such an eventuality unlikely, to say the least.  And this cynicism has arisen due in no small part to the previous doings of the aforementioned Big Tech firms—specifically, their activities in social media.

 

When you compare the health of what you might call the body politic of the United States today with what it was say, fifty years ago, the comparison is breathtaking.  In 1973, 42% of those U. S. residents surveyed said they had either a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress.  Only 16% said they had "very little" confidence.  In 2023, the number of people with either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence is only 8%, and fully 48% say they have "very little" confidence in Congress.  While this trend has been happening for years, much of it has occurred only since 2018, after the social-media phenomenon overtook legacy media as the main conduit of political information exchange—if one can call it that.

 

Never mind what AI may do in the future.  We are standing in the wreckage of something it has done already:  it has caused great and perhaps permanent damage to the primary means by which a nation has of governing itself.  Not AI alone, to be sure, but AI has played an essential role in the way companies have profited from encouraging the worst in people. 

 

It would be nice if last Friday's White House meeting triggered a revolution in the way Big Tech uses AI and its other boxes of tricks to encourage genuine human flourishing without the horrific side effects in both personal lives and in public institutions that we have seen already.  But getting some CEOs in a private room with the President and issuing a nice-sounding press release afterwards isn't likely to do that.  It's a step in the right direction, but a step so tiny that it's almost not worth talking about. 

 

Historically, needed technical regulations have come about only when vivid, graphic, and (usually) sudden harm has been caused.  The kinds of damage AI can do are rarely that striking, so we may have to wait quite a while before meaningful AI regulations are even considered.  But in my view, it was already high time years ago.

 

Sources:  The White House press release on the July 21 meeting of AI firms with President Biden can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/07/21/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-secures-voluntary-commitments-from-leading-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-manage-the-risks-posed-by-ai/.  I also referred to a PBS report on the meeting at

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-biden-announces-ai-safeguards-after-meeting-with-tech-leaders.  The Gallup poll historical data on confidence in Congress can be found at

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.

Air-Condition Texas Prisons!

 

An Open Letter To:

 

The Hon. Greg Abbott, Governor of the State of Texas

The Hon. Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate

The Hon. Members of the Texas Senate

 

A July 9 editorial in the Austin American-Statesman alerted its readers to the fact that of the 128,000 or so prisoners incarcerated in Texas prisons, only about 42,000 sleep in air-conditioned cells.  Only 31% of the state's prisons provide air conditioning for prisoners as of May of this year, which has been one of the hottest ones in recent memory.

 

Just a few weeks ago, facing a $32 billion state surplus, the Texas House voted to spend less than 2% of that sum on the project of air-conditioning most Texas prisons.  At long last, the state which witnessed the first air-conditioned church building (First Presbyterian in Orange, Texas in 1914) and the first custom air-conditioned automobile, was going to extend the benefits of that characteristically Texas technology to its prisoners.

 

But to your shame, Texas Senators and Lt. Gov. Patrick, you declined to act on that measure, and to the extent Gov. Abbott failed to make it a priority during the special sessions, he shares some of the blame. 

 

Here are some objections I can think of to air-conditioning Texas prisons, with the rebuttals to each:

 

* It costs too much to retrofit old structures to be air-conditioned.  It didn't cost too much to retrofit the nineteenth-century pile called the Texas Capitol so that legislators can work in air-conditioned comfort back in 1955.  And 2% of the surplus doesn't strike me as "too much."

 

*  Prisons haven't had air conditioning before now, so why change? By that argument, we should never have installed indoor plumbing or electricity in them either.  If primitive conditions are what we want prisoners to have, why not make them go to the bathroom in open latrines and rely on kerosene lanterns?  Then we can add plagues of cholera and fires to heat prostration and the other hazards prisoners experience already.

 

* Many prisoners work outside in hot conditions anyway, so they're used to it.  Some people got used to living in Nazi or Soviet prison camps, too, but that doesn't mean it was a good thing.  Most farmers and other outdoor workers manage to work in air-conditioned equipment and environments whenever possible.  Withholding air conditioning all of the time because it can't be experienced some of the time is illogical.

 

*  Prison staff have to endure the heat too.  I am willing to wager that the chief official of each prison has an air-conditioned office.  The Statesman cites a 40% turnover rate for lower-level prison employees, which the lack of air conditioning surely contributes to.  If we simply passed a law that the average temperature in the warden's office cannot be more than two degrees less than that in the hottest cell, we would see a revolution in prison budgets overnight, even those operated by contractors, directing funds toward air-conditioning prison cells.

 

Many of you legislators make much of your Christianity.  Do you think God wasn't looking when you neglected to take up the prison air-conditioning bill?  Didn't Jesus say, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was . . . in prison and you did not visit me"?  Air conditioning isn't mentioned by name in that list, but I don't think any of you are literalist enough to miss the implications.

 

I lived in Massachusetts for many years before returning to my native Texas in large part because of the Christian-influenced culture that in many ways reflects my deepest beliefs about life and the universe.  And I still think Texas is the better place to live, at least if you're not in prison.  But if anyone from out of state asks me why Texas, of all places, the leader in the development of air conditioning, has failed to apply this blessing of humanity to some of its most neglected residents—its prisoners—I can only hang my head in shame. 

 

Besides the moral aspect, there are practical ones too.  Sooner or later, confinement to an un-air-conditioned cell in South Texas will lead a lawyer to convince a judge and jury that such is "cruel and unusual punishment," and the Feds will take over the prisons.  Nobody wants that, not even the prisoners, probably.  So before it's too late—and as your average age is 60, too late may be sooner than you think—remedy this sin of omission, and air-condition Texas prisons.

 

Karl D. Stephan, Professor

Ingram School of Engineering

Texas State University

Is the Bloom Off the Self-Driving Rose?

 

Pardon the mixed metaphor—roses don't drive—but I couldn't think of another way to summarize the current prospects for truly autonomous vehicles.  For several years now, we have been promised that self-driving cars are just around the corner.  In particular, Tesla has marketed an expensive option for their electric vehicles called "Full Self-Driving Capability."  But as the NHTSA is asking Tesla for ever more detailed information about how it has deployed and modified its autonomous-driving software since 2014, it's beginning to look like the promised future of leaving all the driving to robot chauffeurs while we nap or play cards in the back seat is nothing more than hype.

 

What is reality right now regarding self-driving cars?  The Society of Automotive Engineers has established six levels of autonomy, ranging from 0 (what a Model T had, requiring you to do everything yourself) up to Level 5.  A Level 5 car could drive you anywhere that is physically accessible by a car without your having to lift a finger. 

 

The most advanced self-driving systems currently on the market are Level 3.  A Level 3 system such as that in the Honda Legend, which was introduced only in Japan in limited quantities, really does drive the car without human intervention, but reserves the right to ask the human to take over if things get too hairy.  "Hairy" in this case can mean something as mild as a rainy day, which sets up weird reflections on streets and can confuse even deep-learning AI systems. 

 

Tesla's much-publicized "Full Self-Driving Mode" is only a Level 2 system, because the occupant is supposed to be prepared to start steering at any time.  People routinely violate this rule, however, which is how several accidents involving supposedly self-driving Teslas have happened.

 

Computer scientist and engineer Anthony Levandowsky ought to know the self-driving score if anybody does, as he got into the business way back in 2003 when he teamed with some fellow U. C. Berkeley engineers to enter a self-driving motorcycle in DARPA's 2004 Grand Challenge.  He went on to work for Google, left Google for Uber amid lawsuits charging theft of intellectual property, was convicted of same, and pardoned by President Trump on Trump's last day in office.

 

If anybody has an insider's perspective on self-driving vehicles, Levandowsky does.  What is he up to now?  He runs a company that converts giant open-pit quarry trucks to be autonomous vehicles.  And in an interview with Bloomberg News, he says that the kind of highly restricted environment in which such trucks operate may be the best that truly autonomous driving can do for the foreseeable future.

 

While there have been numerous technical advances in sensors, computing power, and AI in the two decades or so that Levandowsky has been in the business, self-driving cars are up against a truly astounding opponent:  the average driver.  As the Bloomberg article points out, suppose you see a couple of pigeons on the road ahead.  As an experienced human, you know that pigeons almost always fly away before your car lands on top of them.  And even if you are contending with a particularly dopey or hung-over pigeon whose situational awareness isn't up to snuff, running over a pigeon is not going to ruin your car.  So it's no big deal to see some pigeons in your path if you're driving.

 

But to an autonomous vehicle system that may never have encountered these particular pigeons on this particular stretch of road under these particular lighting and weather circumstances, it's a totally novel experience.  And most prudent programmers will insert a default "brake when in doubt" operation when the system encounters something that might be dangerous.  So what may well happen is that the car suddenly brakes, and the driver following you may not notice in time, leading to a rear-end collision or even a pileup on a busy freeway—all because of a pigeon.

 

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of other ones that come up all the time, and you begin to understand why self-driving taxis are found only in highly restricted areas of certain cities, and why so many of the demonstrations of self-driving cars take place in California, Arizona, and other places where clear skies can be counted on.  Levandowsky takes the position that every so-called self-driving car out there is really just a pilot project, and Tesla even makes this condition explicit, calling their system a "beta version," meaning it's still under development. 

 

So when, if ever, are we going to get to have our little cocktail among friends in the back seat, heedless of the weather or the traffic?  I can picture only two situations in which even some people can get to experience this in what remains of my lifetime.

 

One is if cities establish self-driving-only zones in which only self-driving cars with similar operating systems are allowed.  This type of operation will never be a mass-market phenomenon, but it essentially transfers Levandowsky's self-driving quarry trucks to dense downtown areas, where the environment can be controlled, perhaps with strictly-enforced rules on pedestrians.

 

The other would extend this principle to an entire region or country.  Maybe we should start with Lichtenstein.  Only self-driving cars would be allowed on the roads.  This will probably never fly in the U. S., but it might take place in some dictatorial environment such as China or North Korea—assuming North Koreans ever get rich enough to buy their own cars.  And even then, the rest of the environment is still going to cause lots of problems—pigeons can't read highway laws, and they're going to land on the road anyway. 

 

It's kind of a shame, really.  Part of me was looking forward to handing the whole responsibility of driving over to some system that had proven itself at least as trustworthy as your average taxi driver.  (Not the taxi driver I wound up with in Amherst, Massachusetts once, who had been out "fishing" with a six-pack and hit a curb, blew out a tire, stopped at a gas station, got the tire fixed, and still got us to our flight to China somehow.)  But now it looks like that's going to go the way of other Jetson-inspired dreams, like personal flying saucers.  Of course, if they do get batteries good enough to operate self-flying one-person drones, we could rewrite the FAA rules a lot more easily than redoing all the traffic laws.  But you'd still have to deal with those pesky pigeons.

 

Sources:  The Bloomberg News article "Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere" appeared on Oct. 5, 2022 at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere.  I also referred to the J. D. Power website for the SAE's six levels of autonomous-vehicle operation at https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/levels-of-autonomous-driving-explained

and https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tesla-autopilot-driver-assist-system-nhtsa-seeks-details-recent-changes/, as well as the Wikipedia article on Anthony Levandowsky.