In a piece in Uncy Rupe's doyenne newspaper yesterday (which I'm not going to link to because I'd rather not even give his firm the ad revenue) there was a breathless piece praising Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe under the streets of Paradise (not Las Vegas) and asking if such a thing could be implemented in Australia. Could is one thing because clearly with enough money, the billionaires of the world can buy whatever crazy bonkers jacknuts thing they want. A better question is should such a thing be implemented in Australia? As with any piece of journalism which is supposed to drive clickbait and ragebait, Betteridge's Law Of Headlines applies and the answer is "no".
Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe constantly gets praised by tech bros turned fanbois, who seem to not know the difference between AM which is Actual Machinery and FM which is Funky Magic. Funky Magic proposals are often seen as "the future" and there are countless FM solutions which faded away and have been blown away with the dust of the future's past. Meanwhile, the most boring and oldest pieces of technology which are AM and not FM, just seem to constantly and boringly work.
Yet again I find myself asking the question, why is it that public transport systems which carry millions of people are seen as bad because they are socialist and communist, whereas billionaires seemingly have a predilection to invent impractical and worse gadgetbahns that are always worse at the job?
Trains just work. Having a train with a designated corridor of operation, which runs to a timetable, stopping at distinct and discrete stations, is a thing which was nominally invented in a metropolitan setting with the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground in 1863. Some of the stations which are still on the Metropolitan Line are now more than 160 years old; which says that trains running in an underground pipe have been proven again and again and again; whereas Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe do the same job but magnitudes of degrees worse.
Just because you apply the magic word 'autonomous' to something, does not magically make it better. Autonomous Vehicles are fine, but Automatic Vehicles where the level of computing needed is nil, are better. Just like Colin Chapman's aphorism that if you wanted to build a better Formula One car just simply add lightness, when it comes to building the most reliable and scalable public transport system, adding simplicity is best. In practice it is possible to run Automatic Trains running almost to saturation, with no computers whatsoever. We know this because the first completely automatic and driverless lines on the Paris Metro, used cam wheels and relay boxes, to control the movement and door opening/closing systems. Automatic Train Operation on the Paris Metro, is proven technology which has been around for 70 years.
Having said that, there is a difference between Automatic Train Operation (ATO) which is what things like the Paris Metro and Sydney Metro uses and Autonomous Vehicle Operation which is what Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are supposed to use (and don't but we'll get to that later). Autonomous Vehicles generally have a big powerful computer which collects data about where it is and where everything around it is, in the environment. Autonomous Vehicles generally have things like cameras and RADAR and LIDAR, which then gets fed to the computer, which hopefully has had a sufficiently good enough machine learning regime that instead of a human meatbag being the wheel, the computer is the one to decide to drive the vehicle into a lake or into the side of an ambulance full of children with leukæmia.
ATO needs only limited electronic/mechanical inputs because everything in theory is in a very controlled environment. While there are signals on the Metro, the driverless trains do not actually look at them and do not need to. The Metro trains do not need any kind of machine learning because there is nothing to learn. The Metro trains do not need AI because they do not need to be intelligent. The Metro trains do not need to worry about errant children with leukaemia accidentally falling onto the tracks because if the system is designed properly, there is no way to fall through platform-side glass walls. With ATO, all that is needed is physical electric contact, to move the trains forward and to have a series of switches and ludicrously simple software which makes the trains stop and start, and the doors open and close at the appropriate places. Actually in theory (and in practice starting on the Paris Metro in 1952) ATO doesn't even need computers to be able to operate because the whole system can be operated on a purely electromechanical basis; in the same way that a toaster works.
Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe, even inside a rather limited environment, still need thousands upon thousands of machine learning AI hours to be able to operate in their car pipes. Heaven forbid that they get turned loose onto the streets above because we are still at the stage where that same AI will take its thousands upon thousands of machine learning before rationally and autonomously deciding to accelerate into an ice cream stand with thirty children with leukæmia (why are there so many children with leukæmia in these scenarios?).
I do not know if Elmo wants to admit this but mainline railways, with no automation and a meatbag in the driver's seat, and with a few train protection measures such as signals and dead-man braking systems both inside and outside the cab, still do a better job both in terms of frequency and capacity, than his cars in the car pipe. Elmo's Boring Company which has somehow managed to convince the city of Paradise (not actually Las Vegas) to allow him to put his car pipes under the city, has built the tunnels but even the simplest of tracked vehicles such as a bespoke tram or train, would do a better job than his blobby Teslas. At best any given Tesla on the system as it stands can hold seven people; where as a small van sized tram could very likely hold twenty. A Tesla after all is a car, which is excellent for moving a small group of people around like a family but utterly rubbish at moving anything more than about ten people.
The even more dumb thing about Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe, is that the pipes are hideously small and can only really be used for small cars. The pipes and the stations can not even really be retrofitted like the Glasgow Subway was; which runs really wee trains in really wee pipes. It would have made more sense to build a pipe to carry trams, because let's be honest, ten trams could easily replace the entirety of Elmo Mash's car pipe system.
However, at that point we start talking about buses and trams and those things very much start to look like proper public transport; which Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are not. There are 70 Tesla Model Ys in Elmo Mash's car pipes; which means that at absolute maximum, the number of people that can be transported at once is 490. Any four car set on the Sydney Trains Network can do that by itself.
Just to enforce how incredibly bad Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are, the London Underground with its electric trains in 1890, had a mechanical metal board which would pop up on the side of the tracks after a train had passed. The accompanying signal went red; which indicated that not only was the driver to stop the train but that there was a train inside the block section ahead. On the underside of the train was a glass bulb; which if it hit the metal board would smash, thus creating a leak in the vacuum breaking system and stop the train. Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe are still not actually smart enough to have any kind of automatic system which stops them in the event that there is a blockage ahead. The stopping of all the cars in the car pipe is still dependent on the AI making a rational decision to stop. The big difference between AI and a meatbag in the driver's seat is that AI does not have the fear of being fired and losing their job if they mess up. AI does not of itself care about accidentally turning those errant children with leukæmia into something resembling chunky salsa.
The super fun bonkers thing about Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe, is that they're not even Autonomous. Companies like Uber and Lyft dream of Autonomous Vehicles because that means that they'd be able to get rid of the meatbags which are otherwise called drivers, who demand horrid things like wages because they need to eat. In what surely was an amazing act of hubris, in 2016 Lyft announced that they would actually have Autonomous Vehicles by 2020 and that they expected that 80% of all vehicles on the road would be Autonomous by 2025. Well, here we are less than 12 weeks away from that data and the number of Autonomous Vehicles that Lyft actually owns, is nil.
I get it. People like the shiny thing. People's eyes glaze over with wonderment and actual dumbfounderdundament when they think about the possibilities of the future. I also think that the future is always designed by people who are to dream big and bonkers. But why is it though, that in dreaming big and bonkers that people with clearly more money than actual sense, just invent variations on gadgetbahns which never worked in the past, which don't really work in the future, and which end up lasting exactly as long as the company which supplied the original bespoke cars/pods/viehwagens last. Long after people like Charles Yerkes in London, or John Bradfield in Sydney, have long since been dead and buried, the train systems which they helped to forge are still left behind and work amazingly boringly. Elmo Mash's cars in the car pipe will probably go the way of the of the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit System in Virginia; where pod things travel around on limited tracks, long after the original company which invented the system went bankrupt. Elmo Mash's car pipes will continue to exist long after he has numptied his way into whatever bonkers hatstand future he imagines has been blown away with the dust of the future's past. Meanwhile, things like the Sydney Metro will just continue to work properly.
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