Autonomous Cars via Version Control by Dexter Palmer
"However, one particular carmaker, not the manufacturer of Rebecca’s and Philip’s car, had announced their intention on the day of the incident to push a firmware update that, in the patch notes, only vaguely said that it was designed to “improve functionality.”
Somehow, autonomous-car aficionados had gotten hold of the update in advance and found out that it in fact decreased functionality: specifically, it cut off access to an extremely popular, remarkably addictive video game that millions of commuters played on their windshields each morning on the way to work.
So when the predictable instructions circulated on social media for how to use USB sticks and a homebrewed mod to uninstall the upgrade and revert to the prior version of the firmware, while still telling the manufacturer that the firmware was up to date, at least a few car owners took advantage.
The problem with this was that the new version of this particular car model’s AI routine did have some specific advantages, among which was a decreased latency in the constant transmission of the vehicle’s location in spacetime. However, those cars that had been hacked to run the prior version of the firmware, with its greater latency, could still communicate with the rest of the system, which in turn assumed that those hacked vehicles were actually running the most up-to-date version with the lesser latency.
So because of this, the three methods that vehicles had of confirming each other’s positions—camera; satellite; Wi-Fi—could no longer agree in the cases of those cars still running the firmware’s prior version. The difference in the transmission latency was only fifty milliseconds, but that is long enough for a car traveling at sixty miles per hour to move four feet.
Vehicles in the close proximity of those that were covertly running the obsolete firmware became confused: the location signals they were receiving from Wi-Fi and satellite agreed with each other, but not with what their electronic eyes told them, and they were unsure which to trust.
In most places, such as the rural highways that stretch across the Midwest, this didn’t matter; on crowded roads where the cars traveled fast and stuck close, that four-foot discrepancy was incredibly important.
Different makes and models of autonomous cars dealt with the perception of this discrepancy in different ways, depending on the rigors of their programming.
The smartest ones played it safe, assuming that the cars running the obsolete firmware were both in the places indicated by the cameras and the places indicated by their Wi-Fi and satellite signals, receding from them accordingly.
Other cars, among which was Rebecca’s, detected the discrepancy in the information sources but had no real idea how to process the error: in a circumstance like this the best course of action was to pull off to the side of the road, hand control over to the driver, and refuse to reactivate the autonomous systems until a mechanic had performed a diagnostic. Had Rebecca’s car been in the right lane at the time of the incident, things might have turned out relatively fine for her and Sean. Such little things only become important after the fact.
But Rebecca’s car was in the middle lane and barred from escape, which put it at the mercy of those few cars that had the poorest programming, those that, when detecting the discrepancy between the spaces where the erroneous signals said the cars were and the spaces where their own cameras said they were, assumed that the cars only occupied the positions where both those spaces overlapped. In their electric eyes the vehicles shrunk to the size of motorcycles, leaving four feet of empty space to accelerate into, to get their passengers to their destinations just a little more efficiently, just a little faster.
Suddenly—and Philip discovered that several accidents with similar causes happened within minutes of each other on the same day on the country’s most crowded roads, in Los Angeles and Tampa and Washington, DC—the badly programmed cars accelerated and rammed those in front of them at a life-threatening speed, the momentum transferring between the closely spaced vehicles and sending them ricocheting crazily against each other like billiard balls just after the break. Most roads saw no trouble at all that day, but those few where circumstances met the necessary unfortunate conditions descended into chaos."
from "Version Control: A Novel" by Dexter Palmer http://a.co/6fKZcrx