Who’s Afraid of Self-Driving Cars?
Who gets punished when self-driving cars kill people?
Dr Tomaž Slivnik
"Who goes to jail if a self-driving car kills a pedestrian?" There is no good answer to this question. If it's the car's owner, nobody will buy them. If it's the manufacturer's CEO, nobody will build them. If it's the software writer, nobody will write the software. The inevitable conclusion is: nobody will go to jail. Self-driving car advocates suggest accidents will be purely an insurance (financial) matter.
Unfortunately, this is the worst possible answer to the question. The prospect of going to jail creates an incentive, much greater than financial cost, and which cannot be delegated, to drive carefully. The absence of this incentive creates a moral hazard.
Insurance-based solutions will lead to perverse incentives. Razor-razor blade markets teach us that buyers prefer products which cost less upfront even if later recurring costs are higher. Especially if the upfront cost is high. Initially, regulators won't allow self-driving cars on the road until their safety record exceeds that of human-driven cars. Eventually, human-driven cars will be displaced and only self-driving cars will remain. With human-operated cars and driving skills and non-financial incentives (jail time) gone, market forces will favour cheaper cars over lower insurance premiums (=better safety). Eventually, the safety record of self-driving cars will become terrible. Incentives eventually always win out, even if it takes time. Regulation is no substitute for private actors' incentives.
Self-driving cars are underpinned by AI. AI has had its successes - games, financial markets, search, etc. Its greatest success (and main raison d'etre) is big data analysis and mass surveillance. What do all areas where AI has been successful have in common?
1) they are non-mission-critical: no single wrong decision has catastrophic consequences;
2) in a single iteration, the AI algorithm beats other solutions on average;
3) the outcome is measured by running the algorithm many times.
AI, being a black box solution, is not such a good fit for mission-critical applications.
Will self-driving AI be "tweaked" in the same way search AI was "tweaked" to downgrade or cancel political opponents?
Current self-driving cars are electrical. The average UK household has 2.4 members and consumes 4000kWh of electricity p.a. A typical Tesla consumes 0.24kWh-0.30kWh per mile. The average UK car travels 7500-9000 miles p.a. In 2020, the UK had 32,697,408 licensed cars and 67,886,011 inhabitants. If every car were replaced with a Tesla, electricity consumption would increase by 2000-3000kWh p.a. per household, a 50%-75% increase. The grid is already stretched. Where are the power stations and distribution lines to generate and deliver all this additional electricity?
Tesla started as an electric car company, but, perhaps realising the above problem, diversified into solar energy and switched strategy to "local generation and charging". A fast 400kW electric car charger refuels an electric car in 11 minutes. A 7kW domestic charger (requiring a 70m^2 solar panel installation, fully dedicated to it, on a sunny day) takes 10.5 hours to refuel it. That's longer than overnight - and overnight, there is no sunshine. How's that going to work?
Dr Tomaž Slivnik is a technology entrepreneur and angel investor.
Improving safety without the punishment
Dr Anton Howes
I do not think it would ever be as simple as the CEO of a car manufacturer going to jail, and nor should it be. There are better approaches.
We have a potential model in the aviation industry, for example, where systems do occasionally fail and cost lives, but where manufacturers or airline CEOs do not end up in jail. Instead, aviation has developed a culture of learning from each previous failure, in which faults and shortcomings are openly reported without fear of punishment.
A different example is factory safety. Before the 1890s it was widely regarded as a worker's own fault if they got hurt when operating dangerous machinery — and not just by managers and owners, but by workers themselves. If they really thought the injury was due to their employer, they would have to sue them, which few could afford to do. This changed with the creation of workers' compensation: workers received automatic compensation for injuries, according to a fixed schedule of rates, but in exchange they lost the right to sue for further damages. This arrangement meant that both employers and employees avoided costly lawsuits and it re-focused employers from shifting blame towards preventing injuries. The change, and its benefits are documented here.
So I think it is a mistake to assume that only the threat of punishment, jail or financial penalties, provides enough incentive to promote safety in self-driving vehicles. There are other options.
I think Dr Slivnik’s view of a cost-safety trade-off is also mistaken. Airline customers certainly demand a (high) minimum level of safety, or at least of safety regulation. Though airline prices have fallen markedly over the last 70 years, safety has risen markedly too. Nor do I accept that AI will never be safe for "mission critical" applications. Indeed, the whole point of using AI is to go beyond very simple robotic decisions and learn to deal with a growing multitude of less expected events — and it is getting better all the time.
Lastly, on the power needs of electric cars, we need to be aware of price signals. If the grid becomes over-stretched by electric cars, then higher electricity prices, or even the expectation of them, will strongly incentivise the development of a better supply. It sounds like a big job, but we have gone through much more capital-intensive technological changes before. Just think of all those Victorian plumbing, sewerage and gas networks!
Dr Anton Howes is a historian and author of ‘Age of Invention’.
Today in people not understanding markets
We’re not in favour of child labour in cocoa plantations. But we’d also like to point out that paying farmers more isn’t the solution.
Joanna Ewart-James, executive director of Freedom United, an international organisation campaigning against child labour in the cocoa supply chain, said: “Child slavery and child labour have plagued the industry in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana – which produce 60% of the world’s cocoa – for decades. Cocoa farmers are not earning an income that enables them to recruit the labour they need.”
That doesn’t make sense.
The campaign group says Mondelēz has invested in community initiatives to combat child labour but, along with other leading companies, needs to pay farmers more money for its cocoa.
Nor does that, nor does this:
Martin Short, president of the World Cocoa Foundation, said: “Dealing with child labour abuses as a standalone issue will never work until we deal with the root cause of child labour, which is farmer poverty.”
The farmers find child labour profitable. So, if the price paid to farmers rises they will still employ child labour and increase their profits.
Child labour is, per hour, of course less productive than adult labour. What makes it profitable is that child labour is considerably cheaper, making productivity as measured by the wage bill equal or better than that of adult labour.
Paying the farmers more does not solve this. Making child labour more expensive does. Given that it’s already illegal then more laws about it don’t help. What is necessary is that the place become richer - not the farmers, the place - so that parents won’ t send their children out to work.
As has happened everywhere else, the cure for child labour is an industrial revolution. Which also means the killing off of smallholding peasant farming - because people are making so much more in that industrial society.
As we've been saying, there is no gender pay gap
For some years now, decades even, we’ve been pointing out that there isn’t, in fact, a gender pay gap. It’s most certainly true that there was, there was direct discrimination in employment against women. It’s simply one of those things that isn’t true any more.
What we actually have is a motherhood - or if you prefer, primary child carer - pay gap. The difference is that if employers are not discriminating against women to produce the observed difference in pay then action to stop employers discriminating will not move that observed difference in pay. If it is primary child care producing the gap then it is the perhaps more difficult societal change in who becomes the primary child carer within a child producing human unit - that thing we often call “a family”.
At which point further evidence of that original contention - it’s a child care pay gap:
Women in the United States continue to earn less than men, on average. Among full-time, year-round workers in 2019, women’s median annual earnings were 82% those of men.
The gender wage gap is narrower among younger workers nationally, and the gap varies across geographical areas. In fact, in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.
Interesting, especially when added to this:
First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it’s half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21, according to the analysis, which was of all birth certificates in the United States since 1985 and nearly all for the five years prior.
The mapping of women under 30 outearning men near exactly coincides with that of average primagravidae being at or later than 30.
It’s about children and their care, not women specifically. Now, true, that does most often devolve to women and given the sexual dimorphism in our human species it might be some time before that changes.
However, science is not just about observation, it is to use observation to construct an hypothesis which can then be tested against further and different evidence to see whether it stands up. It’s even considered good practice for those who propose such an hypothesis to point to where evidence might be gathered to prove - as in the meaning of test - their hypothesis.
So, we shall do so. That glorious expansion of liberty which is marriage equality has expanded the number of same sex marriages. Some to many of those are having children by the usual variety of means biology makes available. A study of such families might well be able to identify the primary child carer in such and then look at wage incomes. If the result is that the primary child carer achieves a similar reduction in earning power as that gained by mothers in heterosexual relationships then that would be supportive of the claim that we have a child care, not women’s, pay gap.
It would even be interesting to see whether there is a difference in results across countries - especially between those that have free child care, sorry, taxpayer provided child care, and those that do not. Just to test whether that policy is a solution or not.
It is, of course, up to those who wish to shoot down our hypothesis to go and do that work. We look forward to discussing the results.
If only Owen Jones could understand the statistics he trails
From Owen Jones:
No excuses for the Tories, no place to hide: that poverty and economic insecurity kill is an incontrovertible fact. Some may flinch when they hear that the government’s failure to address a worsening cost of living crisis will tip many of its citizens into premature graves, but the macabre nature of a fact does not make it less true.
New research published by the Office for National Statistics is merely the latest addition to what has been understood by anyone with a sufficient interest in matters of life and death for centuries. The ONS figures show that avoidable deaths account for four in 10 male deaths in England’s poorest communities: in the least deprived, that figure is less than half, at 17.8%. For women, the figures are lower, but the gap barely less acute: 26.7% and 11.9% respectively.
Does deprivation kill? Most certainly it does, yes. Deprive someone of water and they die very soon. Deprive them of food and it takes a little longer. And so on. But what Jones is describing here is not deprivation - it’s inequality. This is some having less than others. Inequality does not, in fact, work in the same way as deprivation.
The actual ONS figures:
Alcohol and drug-related disorders; the only category of causes where the age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) has shown statistically significant increases since 2001 for males and females in the most deprived areas and males in the least deprived areas.
Neoplasms (cancers); the largest cause of avoidable mortality for females in the most and least deprived areas and for males in the least deprived areas in 2020.
Those are the two big issues.
Booze and drugs runs up against that long standing criticism we’ve had about the Sir Michael Marmot numbers. Marmot insists that it is the poverty - inequality, sorry - which drives the health inequality. As we keep saying, this could be possible but it’s vital to also note that health inequality will drive, to some extent, the economic inequality. Those drinking themselves to death - or injecting etc - are rather likely to have made themselves poorer in the process and thus be living in cheaper areas.
Until and unless this is unpicked then the numbers are valueless. Certainly, we cannot say that inequality leads to cirrhotic livers if it’s the exploding livers which lead to the inequality.
The other part, the cancers. Well, yes, this is a measure of “mortality amenable to health care” as ONS says. As is also true in all of the international surveys of health care systems among rich nations the NHS does worst in “mortality amenable to health care”. In those studies from the likes of the Commonwealth Fund the NHS is great at equality of access, equity of funding and so on. And, of rich world systems, worst at actually treating people - that mortality amenable to health care.
Both ONS and Jones have just noted that people making themselves poorer through addictions tend to live in cheaper areas. Plus, the NHS as a health care system isn’t very good at actual health care. But important, even vital, points to make. But not the point that Jones chooses to make which is a pity. For reducing inequality isn’t going to solve either of those issues yet inequality reduction is Jones’ preferred policy.
Ah well, it is only a Guardian column after all.
Falklands - 40 years on
Forty years ago, on April 2nd, 1982, Argentine forces invaded and seized the Falkland Islands, a British protectorate peopled by people who overwhelmingly wished to be British. The Argentine junta calculated that there was nothing the UK could do from 8,000 miles away in the North. Margaret Thatcher’s advisors were of the same opinion, but at the end of an exhausting and dispiriting day for the Prime Minister, the First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, was shown in, not having had time to change out of uniform.
The prime minister asked him, “Could the Falkland Islands be retaken militarily?” He replied, “Yes they could, and should be taken.” When she asked him why, he replied that if not, Britain would become “a different country that counted for little in the world.” He told the prime minister that he could have a task force ready to sale within 48 hours.
It sailed, and the Falklands were retaken. The Admiral knew that ships would be lost, but thought the price would be worth paying. General Galtieri and his junta utterly failed to appreciate the degree to which the British would fight back. They also failed to appreciate the hostility that would be shown by the Falkland islanders to their Argentine invaders
Forty years on, and another dictator, Vladimir Putin, has made the same mistake. He thought his superior forces would have a walk-over and be able to take over Ukraine and impose a Moscow-leaning puppet government within four days. He, too, underestimated the opposition and the fighting spirit of the people he was up against.
They have met with stubborn resistance and taken heavy losses. They have failed to take their key objectives, and it seems certain that they will not succeed in subjugating Ukraine. The morale of their conscripts, like that of the Argentine conscripts four decades ago is at rock bottom. They have poor leadership, inadequate supplies, and know they are fighting a war not to liberate a people, but to subjugate a proud people determined to retain their freedom.
The similarities are clear, including one fact about Britain's behaviour. Forty years ago Britain behaved honourably and regained its pride. Similarly, in the case of Ukraine, the UK has played a part in leading the campaign to assist the Ukrainian defenders diplomatically, with sanctions against their enemy, and with the armaments that make their resistance possible.
Just as Britain was able to secure the freedom of the Falkland islanders 40 years ago, it now looks very likely that the Ukrainians, by their bravery and resistance, will secure their own freedom aided by all the help that the UK can give them short of a military intervention that would plunge the world into an unimaginable war.
The UK did the right thing then and now and can take a justifiable pride in standing up to tyranny on both occasions, and helping those who want freedom.
The price cap has, of course, increased energy prices
That the British Government decided to copy the grand mistake of the California deregulation debacle does not come as all that much of a surprise. Government does seem to decide that it’s the mistakes, rather than successes, of others that should be copied. Or perhaps it’s that political inability to understand markets which is the universal.
The mistake being to fix retail prices. With wholesale left free this will, in any time of dearth, lead to the mass bankruptcy of the intermediaries, the retail companies. This has happened here as it did to the once mighty PG&E.
There is more though. That very fixing of the retail price, that price cap, has led to prices now being higher than they would have been without the cap. For prices do in fact lead to changes in demand. People see prices rising and they curb their demand for that item rising in price.
As ever in economics this is something that happens at the margin. How much it happens is the elasticity - the price elasticity of demand. But unless we’re talking about Giffen Goods - and no, domestic energy is not one - then rising prices curbs demand.
So, what has the price cap done? Along with bankrupting the intermediaries in the system it has protected retail consumers from the rise in prices. So too it has protected them from the signal that energy is becoming more expensive and so should be economised upon. Energy demand is - up until midnight last night perhaps - higher than it would have been without the price cap. Higher demand means higher prices.
The very existence of the price cap has made prices now higher than they would have been without the price cap.
Yes, we’re aware of the date, no, it isn’t. It’s not even some clever attempt at a reverse ferret on the foolishness traditional. Price caps, by protecting demand from price rises, increase demand and so the price level once the cap is lifted. Energy prices today would be lower than they are if the price cap had never existed.
There’s a lesson here too, one worth remembering next time someone has some bright idea about bucking markets. That is, don’t mess with markets because if you do they’ll most assuredly mess with you. You can compensate for market prices and that can often be a very good idea. You can construct markets and that’s often necessary. But attempts to fix prices in markets always do fall apart. Simply because the price is an outcome of the market itself and to change it you need to change the market interactions, not just declare that different result.
It really is true that prices for domestic energy today are higher as a result of the past price cap than they would have been without that past price cap. So, you know, thanks guys, that was really helpful of you.
George Monbiot and the things he doesn't know
We get treated, again, to a Monbiot column outlining the things that George doesn’t know.
But to suggest that the public assault on truth is new, or peculiarly Russian, is also disinformation. For generations, in countries such as the UK there was no epistemic crisis – but this was not because we shared a commitment to truth. It was because we shared a commitment to outrageous lies.
Well, yes, lying is bad, truth is better. But what, specifically, do we need to correct?
Nearly everyone who appears in the media, across almost the entire political spectrum, seems to accept that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely on a finite planet.
The finity within which economic growth is constrained is the knowledge of how to add value. For economic growth is the adding of value, not the consumption, nor even use of, any particular physical supply. Therefore the agreed finity of physical supply is an interesting, but not conclusive, constraint upon economic growth.
Almost all believe that we should take action to protect life on Earth only when it is cost-effective.
Doing things which use more resources than they save would be an odd way to save those finite physical resources, no? But these two are arguments that we’ve all had before with Monbiot and he simply will not accept the truths being told to him.
But this one really does take the biscuit:
Research by the Indian economist Utsa Patnaik suggests the inflation that pushed food out of reach of the poor was deliberately engineered under a policy conceived by that hero of British liberalism, John Maynard Keynes. The colonial authorities used inflation, as Keynes remarked, to “reduce the consumption of the poor” in order to extract wealth to support the war effort. Until Patnaik’s research was published in 2018, we were unaware of the extent to which Bengal’s famine was constructed. Britain’s cover-up was more effective than Stalin’s.
Patnaik is the activist who claims that Britain sucked $45 trillion out of India during the Raj. Less than connected with reality we’d say.
But this idea that no one knew. That it has all been under-researched. Total codswallop. You see, they gave the Nobel in Economics to the laddie who studied that Bengal Famine. Amartya Sen. His foundational work was on precisely that famine.
George is trying to tell us that the groundbreaking research by the guy they gave the Nobel to is all hush hush stuff unknown. No George, no. Funny as it may seem other people have examined the world too.
LME nickel, energy companies and the FTT
The wounds at the London Metal exchange over the nickel contract are, in our view, largely self-inflicted. Cancelling trades is not a good look for an exchange. But the effect is that:
The plunging liquidity represents an escalating crisis for producers and consumers who rely on the exchange to hedge their pricing risk.
If the speculators disappear then there’s no one to take the risk being shifted by the real world market participants. This not being the purpose of such exchanges, but it is the economic function. The purpose is just to allow people to buy and sell in a regulated manner. The effect is to risk shift.
All those energy companies went bust because they didn’t shift their risk onto such exchanges. Partly because some of them were just silly, partly because such risk shifting was expensive - not enough speculators in the market to make the risk shifting cheap.
Which brings us to those varied ideas for a financial transactions tax. The Robin Hood Tax and so on - the aim of all of which is to make such speculation in futures, options and other financial markets more expensive. Which has the knock on effect of making the risk shifting more expensive, so people will do less of it.
The deliberate aim of the FTT is to make all markets work as badly as LME nickel or the retail electricity companies. And why would we want to do that?
P&Oh Dear
“I completely hold up our hands, my hands, our hands”, remarked the disgraced chief executive of cruise liner P&O. Hauled in front of a Commons Select Committee testifying why he fired 800 staff without notice, Peter Hebblethwaite was a man overcome by repentance. His merciless slashing and burning of staff through pre-recorded Zoom calls stays true to Mr Hebblethwaite’s name being apt for a Charles Dickens villain.
There was little hiding for poor Hebblethwaite. The Chair of the Committee, Darren Jones (Labour, Bristol North West), hurled across at him “are you in this mess because you don’t know what you’re doing? Or are you just a shameless criminal?” A deserving comment given his intentional breach of the law, with many, including the Prime Minister, calling upon his resignation.
Alarmingly, this fiasco has also reignited much support for the age-old foe: nationalisation. Iain Dale took to his LBC soapbox and called upon the British Government to take ownership of P&O, a sentiment shared by hundreds of protestors throughout the nation. Even with the rightful outrage against P&O we must not stoop to think nationalisation is a desirable alternative.
In doing so, we find ourselves in a similar position. Introduced by then Secretary of State for Industry and dashing crown prince of the far-left, Tony Benn, the Government nationalised the shipping industry, marking a radical turning point for British industrial history.
Soon became apparent was its severe inability to turn a profit. Like a toddler evading their mother’s attempts to smear them with sun cream, the state-owned industry agonisingly resisted breaking even or showing even a mere slither of feasibility.
With the dawn of Thatcher’s government, a more hardline stance was taken. By 1982 the industry had closed more than half of their shipyards, and yet the widespread losses still persisted, losing some £251 million/year when adjusted for today’s rate. This situation became so perverse that each new vessel was built at a loss. With the great cost combined with low quality, it is little wonder that so few Brits chose to buy domestically built ships. In 1983, around 44% of orders from within the United Kingdom were placed with domestic producers – compared to the long privately-held maritime industries of West Germany and Italy, standing at 82% and 95% respectively.
Outcompeted by foreign rivals, maritime nationalisation did little besides undue harm. Despite intending to save the industry it created a hostile environment for wider business and squeezed away what little demand there was left.
In recent weeks, these fickle ideologues are once again rearing their heads. We must strongly reject their demand for the government to prod its bony finger into the market once again. Instead, the true culprits of this debacle should be directly targeted – the P&O executives. Mr Hebblethwaite’s decision to not consult with the trade unions prior to the mass culling was a conscious breach of the law, and he should be punished as is necessary. Nationalisation would spread punishment not just across the entire organisation, but also onto investors and consumers. Calls to do so are neither proportionate nor reasonable – and will bring great harm for punitive reasons.
The reason we do not act like fascists is because we are not fascists
There’s an ululation out there, a shouting, that we should just nick all the money of these people because they’re the bad guys. That cash can then be put to such good uses:
Oligarchs' superyachts and mansions must help fund a new Ukraine
No, really, just no:
A prized painting by Russian master Wassily Kandinsky that was sold under duress during World War II has been returned to the descendants of its former Jewish owners.
The oil painting, Bild mit Häusern (Painting with Houses), was just one of a treasured art collection inherited by Robert Lewenstein and his wife Irma Klein, which, at one point, also included works by Van Gogh, Renoir and Rembrandt. But the pair was forced to auction off the Kandinsky painting in October 1940 as they fled the Nazis five months after they invaded the Netherlands.
Records show the director of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum bought the Kandinsky for a fraction of its value at the time. Het Parool reports: "He paid 160 guilders for it – a pittance of the original value at the time, 2000 to 3000 guilders."
We are not attempting to compare this current war with the Holocaust. We are also not comparing the stripping of assets from any passing Russian with those events of 1940. We’re not comparing, we’re insisting they’re the same thing.
It’s entirely possible to freeze assets for the duration, is probably sensible to do so as a method of putting pressure on the system in The Russia. But to actually take the assets - a clear requirement before they’re then spent on doing something else - requires a more than passing reference to that rule of law thing.
It’s necessary to convict, in a fair trial, in a court of law, of something that was a crime at the time it is claimed it was committed, in the jurisdiction of the law being applied. Even, the penalty in the law that applied at that time must include the confiscation which is the sentence.
Nicking houses and boats on the basis of passports does not meet these standards. Therefore we should not be doing it.
The reason we do not act like fascists is because we are not fascists.
It’s reasonably well known that I have extensive business experience in The Russia. Just for the avoidance of doubt I have no business, assets, interests, contracts nor anything else in the country and have not done for well over a decade.