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Innovation vs. Safety in Self-driving Technologies

November 11, 2008 by

Over at Ars Technica, the final installment of my series on self-driving cars is up. In this installment I focus on the policy implications of self-driving technologies, asking about regulation, liability, and civil liberties.

Regulators will face a difficult trade-off between safety and innovation. One of the most important reasons for the IT industry’s impressive record of innovation is that the industry is lightly regulated and the basic inputs are cheap enough that almost anyone can enter the market with new products. The story of the innovative company founded in someone’s garage has become a cliche, but it also captures an important part of what makes Silicon Valley such a remarkable place. If new IT products were only being produced by large companies like Microsoft and Cisco, we’d be missing out on a lot of important innovation.

In contrast, the automobile industry is heavily regulated. Car manufacturers are required to jump through a variety of hoops to prove to the government that new cars are safe, have acceptable emissions, get sufficient gas mileage, and so forth. There are a variety of arguments for doing things this way, but one important consequence is that it makes it harder for a new firm to enter the market.

These two very different regulatory philosophies will collide if and when self-driving technologies mature. This software, unlike most other software, will kill people if it malfunctions. And so people will be understandably worried about the possibility that just anyone can write software and install it in their cars. Indeed, regulators are likely to want to apply the same kind of elaborate testing regime to car software that now applies to the rest of the car.

On the other hand, self-driving software is in principle no different from any other software. It’s quite possible that a brilliant teenager could produce dramatically improved self-driving software from her parents’ basement. If we limit car hacking to those engineers who happen to work for a handful of large car companies, we may be foregoing a lot of beneficial progress. And in the long run, that may actually cost lives by depriving society of potentially lifesaving advances in self-driving technology.

So how should the balance be struck? In the article, I suggest that a big part of the solution will be a layered architecture. I had previously made the prediction that self-driving technologies will be introduced first as safety technologies. That is, cars will have increasingly sophisticated collision-avoidance technologies. Once car companies have figured out how to make a virtually uncrashable car, it will be a relatively simple (and safe) step to turn it into a fully self-driving one.

My guess is that the collision-avoidance software will be kept around and serve as the lowest layer of a self-driving car’s software stack. Like the kernels in modern operating systems, the collision-avoidance layer of a self-driving car’s software will focus on preventing higher-level software from doing damage, while actual navigational functionality is implemented at a higher level.

One beneficial consequence is that it may be possible to leave the higher levels of the software stack relatively unregulated. If you had software that made it virtually impossible for a human being to crash, then it would be relatively safe to run more experimental navigation software on top of it. If the higher-level software screwed up, the low-level software should detect the mistake and override its instructions.

And that, in turn, leaves some hope that the self-driving cars of the future could be a hospitable place for the kind of decentralized experimentation that has made the IT industry so innovative. There are likely to be strict limits on screwing around with the lowest layer of your car’s software stack. But if that layer is doing its job, then it should be possible to allow more experimentation at higher layers without endangering peoples’ lives.

If you’re interested in more on self-driving cars, Josephine Wolff at the Daily Princetonian has an article on the subject. And next Thursday I’ll be giving a talk on the future of driving here at Princeton.

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Bandwidth Needs and Engineering Tradeoffs

November 5, 2008 by

Tom Lee wonders about a question that Ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need?

I’m suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more video resolution revolution — HDTV2, let’s say (pending the invention of a more confusing acronym). But to go beyond that will require video walls — they look cool in Total Recall, but why would you pay for something larger than your field of view? — or three-dimensional holo-whatnots. I’m sure the latter will be popularized eventually, but I’ll probably be pretty old and confused by then.

The human fovea has a finite number of neurons, and we’re already pretty good at keeping them busy. Personally, I think that household bandwidth use is likely to level off sometime in the next decade or two — there’s only so much data that a human body can use. Our bandwidth expenses as a percentage of income will then start to fall, both because the growth in demand has slowed and because income continues to rise, but also because the resource itself will continue to get cheaper as technology improves.

When thinking about this question, I think it’s important to remember that engineering is all about trade-offs. It’s often possible to substitute one kind of computing resource for another. For example, compression replaces bandwidth or storage with increased computation. Similarly, caching substitutes storage for bandwidth. We recently had a talk by Vivek Pai, a researcher here at Princeton who has been using aggressive caching algorithms to improve the quality of Internet access in parts of Africa where bandwidth is scarce.

So even if we reach the point where our broadband connections are fat enough to bring in as much information as the human nervous system can process, that doesn’t mean that more bandwidth wouldn’t continue to be valuable. Higher bandwidth means more flexibility in the design of online applications. In some cases, it might make more sense to bring raw data into the home and do calculations locally. In other cases, it might make more sense to pre-render data on a server farm and bring the finished image into the home.

One key issue is latency. People with cable or satellite TV service are used to near-instantaneous, flawless video content, which is difficult to stream reliably over a packet-switched network. So the television of the future is likely to be a peer-to-peer client that downloads anything it thinks its owner might want to see and caches it for later viewing. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it would improve the user experience. Likewise, there may be circumstances where users want to quickly load up their portable devices with several gigabytes of data for later offline viewing.

Finally, and probably most importantly, higher bandwidth allows us to economize on the time of the engineers building online applications. One of the consistent trends in the computer industry has been towards greater abstraction. There was a time when everyone wrote software in machine language. Now, a lot of software is written in high-level languages like Java, Perl, or Python that run slower but make life a lot easier for programmers. A decade ago, people trying to build rich web applications had to waste a lot of time optimizing their web applications to achieve acceptable performance on the slow hardware of the day. Today, computers are fast enough that developers can use high-level frameworks that are much more powerful but consume a lot more resources. Developers spend more time adding new features and less time trying to squeeze better performance out of the features they already have. Which means users get more and better applications.

The same principle is likely to apply to increased bandwidth, even beyond the point where we all have enough bandwidth to stream high-def video. Right now, web developers need to pay a fair amount of attention to whether data is stored on the client or the server and how to efficiently transmit it from one place to another. A world of abundant bandwidth will allow developers to do whatever makes the most sense computationally without worrying about the bandwidth constraints. Of course, I don’t know exactly what those frameworks will look like or what applications they will enable, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that we’ll be able to continue finding uses for higher bandwidth for a long time.

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iPhone Apps Show Industry the Benefits of Openness

August 4, 2008 by

Today’s New York Times reports on the impact of Apple’s decision to allow third-party application software on the iPhone:

In the first 10 days after Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone, consumers downloaded more than 25 million applications, ranging from games like Super Monkey Ball to tools like New York City subway maps. It was nothing short of revolutionary, not only because the number was so high but also because iPhone users could do it at all.

Consumers have long been frustrated with how much control carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and the like — have exerted over what they could download to their mobile phones. But in the last nine months, carriers, software developers and cellphone makers have embraced a new attitude of openness toward consumers.

The App Store makes a big difference to me as a new iPhone user – the device would be much less useful without third-party applications. The value of third-party applications and the platforms that enable them is a commonplace outside the mobile phone world. It’s good to see it finally seeping into what Walt Mossberg famously calls “the Soviet Ministries”.

But before we declare victory in the fight for open mobile devices, let’s remember how far the iPhone still has to go. Although a broad range of applications is available in the App Store, the Store is still under Apple’s control and no app can appear there without Apple’s blessing. Apple has been fairly permissive so far, but that could change, and in any case there will inevitably be conflicts between what users and developers want and what Apple wants.

One of Apple’s reasons for opening the App Store must have been the popularity of unauthorized (by Apple) iPhone apps, and the phenomenon of iPhone jailbreaking to enable those apps. Apple’s previous attempt to limit iPhone apps just didn’t work. Faced with the possibility that jailbreaking would become the norm, Apple had little choice but to offer an authorized distribution path for third-party apps.

It’s interesting to note that this consumer push for openness came on the iPhone, which was already the most open of the market-leading mobile phones because it had an up-to-date Web browser. You might have expected less open phones to be jailbroken first, as their users had the most to gain from new applications.

Why was the iPhone the focus of openness efforts? For several reasons, I think. First, iPhone users were already more attuned to the advantages of good application software on mobile phones – that’s one of the reasons they bought iPhones in the first place. Second, Apple’s reputation for focusing on improving customer experience led people to expect more and better applications as the product matured. Third, the iPhone came with an all-you-can-eat Internet access plan, so users didn’t have to worry that new apps would run up their bandwidth bill. And finally, the fact that the iPhone was nearer to being open, having a more sophisticated operating system and browser, made it easier to jallbreak.

This last is an important point, and it argues against claims by people like Jonathan Zittrain that almost-open “appliances” will take the place of today’s open computers. Generally, the closer a system is to being open, the more practical autonomy end users will have to control it, and the more easily unauthorized third-party apps can be built for it. An almost-open system must necessarily be built by starting with an open technical infrastructure and then trying to lock it down; but given the limits of real-world lockdown technologies, this means that customers will be able to jailbreak the system.

In short, nature abhors a functionality vacuum. Design your system to remove functionality, and users will find a way to restore that functionality. Like Apple, appliance vendors are better off leading this parade than trying to stop it.

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What's the Cyber in Cyber-Security?

July 24, 2008 by

Recently Barack Obama gave a speech on security, focusing on nuclear, biological, and infotech threats. It was a good, thoughtful speech, but I couldn’t help noticing how, in his discussion of the infotech threats, he promised to appoint a “National Cyber Advisor” to give the president advice about infotech threats. It’s now becoming standard Washington parlance to say “cyber” as a shorthand for what many of us would call “information security.” I won’t fault Obama for using the terminology spoken by the usual Washington experts. Still, it’s interesting to consider how Washington has developed its own terminology, and what that terminology reveals about the inside-the-beltway view of the information security problem.

The word “cyber” has interesting roots. It started with an old Greek word meaning (roughly) one who guides a boat, such as a pilot or rudder operator. Plato adapted this word to mean something like “governance”, on the basis that governing was like steering society. Already in ancient Greece, the term had taken on connotations of central government control.

Fast-forward to the twentieth century. Norbert Wiener foresaw the rise of sophisticated robots, and realized that a robot would need something like a brain to control its mechanisms, as your brain controls your body. Wiener predicted correctly that this kind of controller would be difficult to design and build, so he sought a word to describe the study of these “intelligent” controllers. Not finding a suitable word in English, he reached back to the old Greek word, which he transliterated into English as “cybernetics”. Notice the connection Wiener drew between governance and technological control.

Enter William Gibson. In his early novels about the electronic future, he wanted a term for the “space” where online interactions happen. Failing to find a suitable word, he coined one – cyberspace – by borrowing “cyber” from Wiener. Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer popularized the term. Many of the Net’s early adopters were fans of Gibson’s work, so cyberspace became a standard name for the place you went when you were on the Net.

The odd thing about this usage is that the Internet lacks the kind of central control system that is the subject matter of cybernetics. Gibson knew this – his vision of the Net was decentralized and chaotic – be he liked the term anyway.

All I knew about the word “cyberspace” when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

Indeed, the term proved just as evocative for others as it was for Gibson, and it stuck.

As the Net grew, it was widely seen as ungovernable – which many people liked. John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” famously declared that governments have no place in cyberspace. Barlow notwithstanding, government did show up in cyberspace, but it has never come close to the kind of cybernetic control Wiener envisioned.

Meanwhile, the government’s security experts settled on a term, “information security”, or “infosec” for short, to describe the problem of securing information and digital systems. The term is widely used outside of government (along with similar terms “computer security” and “network security”) – the course I teach at Princeton on this topic is called “information security”, and many companies have Chief Information Security Officers to manage their security exposure.

So how did this term “cybersecurity” get mindshare, when we already had a useful term for the same thing? I’m not sure – give me your theories in the comments – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it reflects a military influence on government thinking. As both military and civilian organizations became wedded to digital technology, the military started preparing to defend certain national interests in an online setting. Military thinking on this topic naturally followed the modes of thought used for conventional warfare. Military units conduct reconnaissance; they maneuver over terrain; they use weapons where necessary. This mindset wants to think of security as defending some kind of terrain – and the terrain can only be cyberspace. If you’re defending cyberspace, you must be doing something called cybersecurity. Over time, “cybersecurity” somehow became “cyber security” and then just “cyber”.

Listening to Washington discussions about “cyber”, we often hear strategies designed to exert control or put government in a role of controlling, or at least steering, the evolution of technology. In this community, at least, the meaning of “cyber” has come full circle, back to Wiener’s vision of technocratic control, and Plato’s vision of government steering the ship.

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The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies

July 18, 2008 by

Public policy, in the U.S. at least, has favored localism in broadcasting: programming on TV and radio stations is supposed to be aimed, at least in part, at the local community. Two recent events call this policy into question.

The first event is the debut of the Pandora application on the iPhone. Pandora is a personalized “music radio” service delivered over the Internet. You tell it which artists and songs you like, and it plays you the requested songs, plus other songs it thinks are similar. You can rate the songs it plays, thereby giving it more information about what you like. It’s not a jukebox – you can’t find out in advance what it’s going to play, and there are limits on how often it can play songs from the same artist or album – but it’s more personalized than broadcast radio. (Last.fm offers a similar service, also available now on the iPhone.)

Now you can get Pandora on your iPhone, so you can listen to Pandora on a battery-powered portable device that fits in your pocket – like a twenty-first century version of the old transistor radios, only this one plays a station designed especially for you. Why listen to music on broadcast radio when you can listen to this? Or to put it another way: why listen to music targeted at people who live near you, when you can listen to music targeted at people with tastes like yours?

The second event I’ll point to is a statement from a group of Christian broadcasters, opposing a proposed FCC rule that would require radio stations to have local advisory boards that tell them how to tailor programming to the local community. [hat tip: Ars Technica] The Christian stations say, essentially, that their community is defined by a common interest rather than by geography.

Many people are like the Pandora or Christian radio listeners, in wanting to hear content aimed at their interests rather than just their location. Public policy ought to recognize this and give broadcasters more latitude to find their own communities rather than defining communities only by geography.

Now I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be local programming, or that people shouldn’t care what is happening in their neighborhoods. Most people care a lot about local issues and want some local programming. The local community is one of their communities of interest, but it’s not the only one. Let some stations serve local communities while others serve non-local communities. As long as there is demand for local programming – as there surely will be – the market will provide it, and new technologies will help people get it.

Indeed, one of the benefits of new technologies is that they let people stay in touch with far-away localities. When we were living in Palo Alto during my sabbatical, we wanted to stay in touch with events in the town of Princeton because we were planning to move back after a year. Thanks to the Web, we could stay in touch with both Palo Alto and Princeton. The one exception was that we couldn’t get New Jersey TV stations. We had satellite TV, so the nearby New York and Philadelphia stations were literally being transmitted to our Palo Alto house; but the satellite TV company said the FCC wouldn’t let us have the station because localist policy wanted us to watch San Francisco stations instead. Localist policy, perversely, pushed us away from local programming and kept us out of touch.

New technologies undermine the rationale for localist policies. It’s easier to get far-away content now – indeed the whole notion that content is bound to a place is fading away. With access to more content sources, there are more possible venues for local programming, making it less likely that local programming will be unavailable because of the whims or blind spots of a few station owners. It’s getting easier and cheaper to gather and distribute information, so more people have the means to produce local programming. In short, we’re looking at a future with more non-local programming and more local programming.

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