| Morlock Elloi on Mon, 6 Nov 2017 13:54:12 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Autonomy |
Autonomy 04th November 2017 Olaf Arndt Social consequences of self-determining machines A complete ecosystemA good dozen times a year, when it comes to new models again, the car companies chuck their huge, million-dollar marketing mills. They grind our brains between a thousand angular neologisms, which should make us the most recent technical idea as an indispensable asset.
This trend has reached another high point with the introduction of a new passenger car class, the autonomous cars. Because now the corporations are not only going to Geneva and Frankfurt. Above all, the number of marketing spectacles has risen so dramatically that the big manufacturers are using their "software on four wheels" to make all sorts of computer fairs more enjoyable, such as the CES in Las Vegas.
But what exactly is the case with the latest CASE 1 ? Through intensive study of the campaigns we solve the cryptonym. It means "connected autonomous shared electric".
CASE, meaning the autonomous vehicle, will bring about a "true revolution" through "intuitive mobility", we learn on 25 October 2017 through a linkedin message from Dieter Zetsche. He promises us - or rather his house - "security in uncertain times".
The CASE website explains how intuition is already possible.In addition one of those videos, which make clear that the company sees itself as a new creator, a synthesis of church, state and Frankenstein, which breathe life together dead substances.
While a baby's fairy-tale hand is dazzled by the freshness of a baby, a suggestive woman's voice whispers: "Mercedes Benz intuitively identifies your needs before they even arise. (Then a pathetic techno-drama :) Our goal is to create products, technologies and Merge services into a seamless ecosystem of mobile solutions. "
Brand new is the talk of the "ecosystem car" not. 17 years ago, when visiting the "Mobility" theme park designed by Jean Nouvel at the Expo 2000 World Expo, it will be remembered that for refreshment you should tap a glass of water dripping drop by drop from the exhaust pipe of a fuel cell car. Even then, it was clear that it was easier to rebuild the brains of customers through spin-doctoring than to improve the drive technology in terms of climate technology.
Farewell to the fetish car?Corporations and politics may enter into a prosperous marriage under the hood of the four CASEs.
But what is changing on the user side? For us, who are dependent on a concept for everyday mobility that balances work, life style and the environment? How does CASE affect our everyday lives? What consequences does it have for our individual freedom of movement if, according to the EU's plan, we are only fully connected (connected) and computer-controlled (autonomous) in a good decade? To use electric cars that do not belong to us and which we therefore have to catch daily like a fisherman with the mobile phone as a trawl in the state sea? We pay only cashless, so can drive only with a bank card and after revealing our identity?
At first glance, the concept of "smart e-mobile" sounds as if we just had to say "yes" and then for us "user" is just the pleasant task of deciding what to do with the time being released , Finally visit exciting exhibitions. Drink longer coffee. Join us through wittier SMS with even more "friends". Relax us perfectly. Learn to cook better.
It is unlikely that such a booklet ideal is really the serious offer of politics and corporations that stands behind the autonomous systems. But who knows?
It rings the "Landclub Paradies", of which JG Ballard was able to report as early as 1984, after he had chugged through Germany with a caravan of historic automobiles for a Daimler anniversary in the tempo of the 19th century. In the double slow motion of being chauffeured and slowly gliding, he had become aware of sweet idleness as the ultimate hell.
Saying "yes" to CASE also means saying "yes" to the state as the owner of the autonomous city cars of the future, say goodbye to private property, to the "fetish car" , the family's favorite child. That we say "yes" to the algorithm that controls us and sends our brains and our hands to vacation. That we say "yes" to the owner's decisions about where we can go and where we can not go.
How far are we robbed of our own autonomy in the autonomous vehicle? What new dimension of repression could result from the fact that decisions about driving routes are linked to personal data?
Are there role models? Which autonomous systems are already operable and which social changes have caused them? What about drones and other lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) - are they the military model and model for civilian reuse as a peaceful leisure machine? How much covert violence is in the algorithm that decides for us?
Increasingly, people who drive unchecked, bother where they want to goAfter 130 million error-free autopilot controlled kilometers, the fatal accident happened. On May 7, 2016, the Tesla S bounces on a tractor with a trailer that crosses the main road. Worldwide, a fatal accident comes to an average of 60 million kilometers. The Tesla is not so bad in the race. If the value turns out to be stable, he would have halved the accident probability. But like every first dead man, he raises the question of domination over life and responsibility for misfortune.
The insurance companies already know the answer: they want to finally clean up with the technical two-class society, which for them has unmanageable consequences.
The classes are not just technical. Of course, conventional cars that can not log into the central administration of autonomous vehicles are disturbing. But even more - especially in a time when vehicles are increasingly becoming an ever available weapon for assassins - people who drive unchecked, wherever they want to go. Added to this is the argument that a cool computer at the wheel is superior to humans anyway. In this respect, it is understandable that old cars are considered a "security risk" when everything around them is piloted by the "better driver".
Alexander Ehmann concludes: "If you start from the premise that a dangerous machine should be operated by the one who does it best, then you have to leave the driving to the computer ... in the end, money will become the decisive vehicle to convince users of the new technology. " This means increased "risk" contributions by the insurers for self-drivers and higher tax rates.
Almost a year after the first serious accident with a Tesla Elon Musk has learned a lot from the fatal incident. End of August 2017 signed an open letter to the UN, warning against the uncontrolled use of autonomous technology. Musk is making headlines as saviors of humanity for the third time since 2015. At the same time , he establishes a new company, Neuralink Corp, that encourages customers to access their brains to make control systems more efficient, error-free, and overall healthier. "The car speaks to other ecosystems outside the car"
Mercedes also open their contribution to the IAA in September 2017 with a look into the brain . Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, reports that man "has an average of 60,000 individual thoughts every day". The "good idea" that falls off is that in five years the entire portfolio of the car manufacturer would be electrified. This is intended to absorb the massive loss of confidence in the innovative power that circulates under the beautiful "diesel gate".
The limit-Beschiss opens the door to the future: How clean, however, the electric car looks. He has no exhaust, which could emit a "Watergate emissions". For example, the life cycle assessment evaporates in the complex structures of a globally distributed production and is increasingly difficult to attribute to the producer.
Its visible pollutants segregate the electric car rather in the ideological area, where a machistic motorist society violently blocks the "incapacitation" that progresses with the comprehensive digitization "of course" - one would almost think: like a law of nature.
The future CEO, Ola Kaellenius, Board Member of Daimler AG, now responsible for Group Research & Mercedes-Benz Cars Development, sees digitization as a "huge opportunity". On September 12, 2017, inspired by his own enthusiasm, at the launch of the autonomous Smart, he says, "The car talks to other ecosystems outside the car and can provide plenty of use cases for the customer."
The "Robo-Taxi" is certainly the first "natural business case" for fully autonomous driving: "As a robo-taxi you can save the driver's costs" and thus "relatively quickly amortize this technology". Anyone who has not switched the same before understands quite well what is meant by "ecosystem": "natural" fields of sales - the landscape of our future.
Zetsche expects "four to five years": "At the beginning of the next decade, fully autonomous driving will be a reality." As long as the market is still open for beastly burning and "real people" at the wheel, Mercedes offers for € 2.7 million unit price the AMG "Hypercar", which with 1000 hp combined Formula 1 electric motor power and 2.5 seconds of 0 to 100 km / h is more likely to think of a projectile than a passenger car.
The autonomous projectileToday, the estimated number of people intentionally killed by drones is 5500 since the technology was first introduced. There are certainly innocent civilians on a suspected terrorist - that's not just a high collateral damage coefficient. It is certainly also the tool that is unique in the history of mankind in terms of the physical decoupling of hangman and executed, the decoupling of guilt and punishment.
Never before has the verdict been enforced so far in the forefront of a debt analysis under conditions of the rule of law that are fundamentally functioning. Never before has an unlawful act of this kind been so firmly anchored in the state instruments of action. Sure, there are precursors for killing on suspicion, in exceptional historical situations such as revolution or war.
But it does not seem foolish to say that digitization, which allows distanced execution from the War Room, favors this structural change. The "huge opportunity" seized by the US to eliminate confounding factors in the political "ecosystem" and to divert one's own guilt is a fundamental violation of human rights. The goal discovery and tracking method brings together search engines, databases, and the actors in the computers in a seemingly clean process.
The politics of the listsJutta Weber states that the "disposition matrix", a killing database, is the main tool with which the US government is leading its global "war on terror" and is more and more institutionalized by targeted executions. The "materiality of the databases and the thematic or personal data evaluation algorithms" are subject to "recombination-based techno-rationality" which favors the "production of possible future goals for a data-based killing apparatus in which human and non-human human decision-making processes are intimately interwoven ".
Targeted killings have so far mainly occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Outside conventional theater of warfare, drones are used to kill in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. Many scientists, such as Weber, are therefore working on strategies to ban so-called LAWS (lethal autonomous weapon systems). Their largest association worldwide is called ICRAC .
The technical principle of using databases and algorithms for path-and-destination decisions and associating a strong non-human component with human decision-making, as well as intentionally inextricably blending decision-making levels and the resulting abandonment of legal foundations and privacy rights are autonomous vehicles and " lethal autonomous weapon systems "are structurally more closely connected than at first glance.
At the end of September 2017 , Stiftung Warentest warned against "connected cars" and the automakers' apps: they were "data snoopers". Who turned the apps, would be the "glass users". By E-Call, the obligation to equip all new cars with an emergency call system from March 31, 2018 on a mobile SIM card, the door is open to data outflow. In Tesla, for example, the "Customer Privacy Policy" already announces that information "may also be obtained through third parties, such as public databases, marketing companies, garages, and social media such as Facebook." The onboard camera also helps collect data and , if necessary, transmits it to authorities or employers.
The politics of the lists and their rasterization fundamentally change our way of life, which so far has always been based on human autonomy and decentralized individuality. It puts the centrally steerable life in its place.
The opacity attested by Weber, the inextricable data jungle that grows around us, blurs the line between suspicious and unsuspicious action. One is potentially guilty of behaving deviant from the norm of the database.
It is therefore questionable whether the use of autonomous devices is at all compatible with our ethical ideals and statutory requirements for self-determination. The technical autonomy could easily us an unconditional militarization of the civil register. evolution gap
In the 1980s, that felt already distant time of infernal pile - ups with more than 100, sometimes even up to 300 vehicles, a Franconian highway master, a true philosopher, who had advanced from years of view to theoretical consolidation, once remarked he fear that humans are not yet ripe to switch from the "two-day metabolic system to the car".
Floor 1, the horse, must always think along, possess co-decision power, otherwise in the upper room where the directing person perspires, too much would be wrongly decided. If you build a gasoline engine for the centaur, he rushes to his ruin out of sheer joy in the hunt. The horse as a pilot system and built-in fuse for the unrestrained Hasardeur on his back.
This fatal evolutionary gap has closed the autonomous car. Its users can turn their attention away from steering to other things. But not quite: They need to keep part of their "brain interface" open to "voluntary telepathy" with the automakers and their technical abilities. This is exactly what the mighty Tesla owner Elon Musk, the luminary of future movement, demanded in June 2017. Release your head. The corporations need him for the next revolution of locomotion!
mutation processSteam, electricity and gasoline - whatever has driven us over the past two centuries - every new stage of humanity's motorization has initiated a mutation process. From a historical perspective, all the technical innovations that mark the transition from the horse to the automobile seem to radically change all the accompanying changes, hardly compatible with the existing society.
On September 24, 1921 Hugo Stinnes opened the automobile and practice road Avus in Berlin. It was the world's first piece of highway. Who would have believed that this is the nucleus of the largest global structure that no pedestrian would ever cross without risking his life? That their sand construction material would soon become a scarce resource? That their by-products of noise and exhaust gas would significantly change the lives of future crops, and even of the entire ecosystem?
Who would have thought that for the centenary of this epoch-making act almost only electric cars would glide noiselessly over the Berlin city ring, a good third of them without a driver? And yet it could happen like that.
It may seem equally absurd in a hundred or two hundred years, when we look back on the 21st century. In 2017, the call for release of the central nervous system, for transmission of thought in the service of advancing automobiles, seems to us to a certain extent presumptuous. Maybe it's because we sense that we are not far from it anymore and can be sure that when that happens we will decide about our heads and we will not even know what the effects might be.
Critical contemporaneity is always a good advisor, if you want to resist the dissolution of existing conditions. Once you get used to the changes, you tend to judge the collateral damage as acceptable and celebrate the benefits of the "new freedom".
How much personal energy is released when you are not driving around the area yourself? What do you use them for? That sounds promising - but only if you're not on the subway and you see that the people being driven spend their time in front of small glowing notebooks, in which they apparently invest much of their vital energy. The ignorance that enables the destruction of nature to its current extent is only possible in a seemingly schizophrenic circularity through the tools that are its result.
The end of the space of the human species?In his text "Driving Driving Driving" 2 , the French philosopher Paul Virilio asked: "What will we wait for when we no longer have to wait to arrive?"
Virilio is the final accident philosopher, an Orwell student with a penchant for apocalypse. His answer is, "The end of the world will undoubtedly come with the generation of technical vehicles that are abolishing the space of the human species, necessitating a rigorous management of travel times, and the Ministry of Spatial Planning will follow this for scheduling." Today, 40 years after the publication of the text, the site reads like a prediction Googlescher data "administration" for autonomous cars.
But what does "abolishing the space of the human species" mean beyond the bleakly defeatist prophecy, which prohibits denial in its biblical-bombastic tone and thereby challenges it?
Have not we been warned 100 years ago of household and factory robots replacing the human worker, taking their place? Are not we already sensitized by Jules Verne, Karel Capek and Isaac Asimov to the fact that we no longer steer when we control the machine, but are only part of their "gear", vicarious agents of their machine logic?
Nevertheless, it remains a central question in the age of capital, the "Capital Oceans" 3 : do not we still chauffeur people whose political or social status is fragile, cheaper and thus replace the robot? Are not migrant workers still picking from the respective eastern or southern areas of cheap cucumbers, pricking the asparagus cheaper than the picking and lancing robots? Admittedly, the robot is already sowing and mowing in the large fields, thus shifting rural wage laborers into the misery of urban temporary work, this new slavery. The scheduling and her sleepless 24/7 4 has long served the shifters. But there is no end to the world.
Regime of the machinesWith a comprehensive autonomization of private and freight transport, a NATO project of the mid-1970s is moving back into focus: the satellite-based universal planning of all goods and person movements, in which several generations of US presidents have worked. Ronald Reagan projected it into space, Bill Clinton wanted to use it to find and neutralize the enemies of America around the globe within 5 minutes, Barack Obama has the 3F program ("find, fix, finish") perfected. All the expense of vehicles, logistics and control technology - according to Virilio solely and "to question any human movement on earth." The drone regime, propagated by the USA as the only efficient protection of Western societies, illustrates this idea impressively.
Communism questioned the freedom of movement because he thought he knew better than his citizens what was good for them. In order to position themselves against this, industrial capital has suggested to the citizens of the Western Hemisphere that good is only what gives them the most personal advantage. The most useful is the purchase of complex extremely expensive means of transportation.
Neo-liberal finance capitalism, the economic system belonging to the authoritarian-military, post-democratic state and its autonomous vehicles, considers that the movement must be better controlled.
For anyone who moves freely is difficult to control, and thus hardly subordinate to the ubiquitous sales interests. In the autonomous vehicle, this Internet access with algorithmically generated motion, the human being is nailed down in a single position. Every movement of the links primarily created for it is shut down. The vehicle forces man to continue to sit low, providing him with a visual representation of reality, a supposedly more colorful than the real world, at the place of "frantic stagnation."
No longer does the limb replace the vehicle - it is not a prosthesis - but the whole world, which in its crude, original form offers too many variables, too much uncertainty, too much non-marketing choice, leaves too much to chance economically "does not contribute anything".
The absurd supreme ideal of this nailed-down position: a brainless body that "shops visions", the environmental impressions prepared against payment of a certain amount of companies and licensed by the government, just as drugs are used up to "total" satisfaction.
Autonomous driving is an elite projectThe project seems ideologically-free because it has replaced the system of beliefs with the much more lucrative principle of efficiency. The technical capacity of digital zoning inherent in autonomous driving, the division of the world into allowed and forbidden zones, makes the autonomous driving project an elite project unlike Rudyard Kipling ("Transport is Civilization") could subdivide the world into sunken and excluded by traffic: a new barbarism, if civilization means that people are treated equally irrespective of their origin and their income.
This, of course, applies to the exercise of personal autonomy, not to the acceleration of the body, which, as shown above, is objectless, inconsequential, nothing more decisive. In this respect, autonomous driving in its ambivalence between moving and moving shows the essence of power as domination over and closer determination of freedom to come and go at will. Fascism of happiness
The success of the automobile was originally explained by a democratic component ("Free Ride for Free Citizens") and by an "amplifier" effect. Marinetti transfigures this as a "metallic dream of the human body in perfect strength".
What does the autonomous car add? The absolute positivity, so to speak a fascism of luck. In the consenting society, everything is to be affirmed, nothing to decide: everything is clear from the outset, because it can be predicted and calculated.
If the thesis is true that vehicle types are the history of the conquests, subjugations, exploitations following their invention, then the following picture can be drawn for the autonomous car: The territorial body becomes irrelevant together with the animal body. The vector that penetrates the continent, the surface dissolves, is replaced by a segmentation, fragmentation or artificial scarcity, at least restrictive management of time, the new currency. Place, body, presence disappear. It is replaced by (data) flows, (capital) flows, immaterial representations of a vital social structure.
It is not by chance that the autonomous car first appears in rolling Hollywood prison in the 21st century (Minority Report) or as a mobile stockbroker's place (Cronenberg's Cosmopolis). The vehicle is no longer used for traveling. It's the tool that allows access - to new, permanently open markets. The autonomous car serves to increase sales.
It is not by chance that RAND Corp. puts this thesis right at the beginning of its more than 200-page "autonomous vehicle technology" report published in 2016 : "AVs have an enormous potential to allow more productive use of time ... and ... may old models of vehicle ownership and patterns of land use, and may create new markets and economic opportunities. " The locomotion is thus no longer necessary in the long term. The machine-readable landscape
On the way there, we can already see to which concrete future shape autonomous driving is changing the landscape.
RAND shows in the chapter "land use" how our cities will change in no time: no parking cars on the side of the road, all vehicles always in motion, parking garages disappear completely or are banned in "satellite cities". This frees up 31% of the space previously devoted to parking unused vehicles in major cities. We, too, are disappearing into a straightforward "scattering": "Just as the rise of the automobile led to the emergence of suburbs and exurbs, so the introduction of AVs could lead to more dispersed and low-density patterns of land use surrounding metropolitan regions. "
Mechanization and computerization has much wider implications. Let's take a look at how fast the landscape changes at the moment depending on political decisions.
Due to the massive distribution of subsidies according to square meter keys, farmers are currently working in a devastating manner. This is how it works: the subsidies are paid on the basis of the areas that are currently being measured by a drone. The timing of the measurement flights is not based on natural cycles such as seasons or breeding periods of birds. Flown is when the budget is activated, the budget is available.
The farmer knows when the drone is coming. He strapped the big branch chopper to the tractor and shaved the margins of his fields bald, because the drone rated visibly ordered soil as eligible. Surfaces covered by the foliage of the trees are not included. For a few euros more - and this, although perhaps the same "farmer" from the nature authority receives money from the so-called margins program, a subsidy for the establishment of protective and protective areas on the edge of commercially used sowing - he cleans all retreats for Insects, birds and rodents away. He prepares the landscape "readable" for the mechanical eyes of the autonomously flying surveying equipment. Politics sets the course for this.
Now if the same policy promotes the acquisition and spread of autonomous machines because "innovations" (and later the elimination of the damage they have caused) are a gigantic source of revenue, avenue trees will fall - they have long been a thorn in the side of insurance - Hedges exploded because in the distance measurement vehicles could disappear behind them. The entire landscape is being prepared for the dead eyes of the new machines of God and their steel swords.
What remains is a barren, inhospitable environment, dominated by the dust and storm that stirs up the filthy remnants of our civilization, empty plastic bags, any paper packaging of worn-out fast food parcels, and crumpled coffee-to-go cups that begin right now, the image of the highway dominate. We'll call it "climate change" and shrug our shoulders, "We can not stop it." The disappearance of the environment
We will not have to see the world any more soon. Still the crew of the Apollo 16 demanded of the NASA engineers the installation of a window. They did not want to sit in an all-capsule. Technically, it was superfluous, because they were flown and could "see" with their instruments. It even means a weak spot in terms of tightness of the cabin. Although the bull's eye in space is as useful as a goiter, the men of the mission did not want to "fly in a coffin".
Even the autonomous car would need no windows. Its only purpose is to project a crosswalk onto the street for passers-by identified by the sensors to signal that you have right of way. It would be able to orient itself like a "windowless fuselage", the "blind" passenger tube of future jets, without slices. In the holeless aircraft fuselage, rounded OLED foil screens create the impression of a glass outer skin. The "reality" visible on them can be arbitrarily "polished": The trash of the fast-food chains simply flies out of the presentation.
The outward orientation is based entirely on well-rehearsed "information": the avenue trees, if we absolutely want them, can be digitally replanted as we whiz through the empty landscape. Everything is processed, filtered, evaluated. The "relevant" data are exaggerated for clarity, graphically clarified. As clear as on the screen, the environment has never spoken to you. She says: you do not need my sight anymore.
autonomy feelingsBut why, if for 150 years from Jules Verne to Yevgeny Samjatin to Paul Scheerbart, the wittiest and most far-sighted authors of the 19th & 20th century, if they are all from autonomous (air) taxis (read: Google car drones ), why do not you drive then? Where exactly is the acceptance problem in humans? What is the image deficit of car drones?
Critics and proponents of the autonomous vehicle agree on one issue: its widespread introduction, which revolutionizes individual mobility and freight transport, is not a technical but primarily a social problem.
How do people live who perceive an autonomous vehicle as incapacitation, even as castration? To pick up the last cue: the robot simply lacks the eggs. Driving yourself is as exciting as having sex without a condom, as the TV philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who was responsible for any topic for the day, diagnosed this many years ago when he declared the car a "rolling uterus" and discovered phallic components on the accelerator pedal at the gearshift: "... overtaking in which the other, the slower, almost like in the case of a bowel movement, is made a rejected excrement ". Beyond such Freudian word spectacles, Sloterdijk maintains that "self-agility is associated with feelings of autonomy."
The deer roars from the exhaustSloterdijk's sexual metaphor of the car can be pushed further - and explains quite a bit in its Kalauer-affine associations: the story of driving has not accidentally begun with a sublimated act of mating, with the rise of an animal, which is taken between the thighs to "tame" it = impose on him the will of the rider, which way it has to go.
Riding is the end of the wild, self-determined freedom of the animal, which is now from now on a carrier animal and whose multiplication even the rider controls, with the aim to secure and improve his own mobility by breeding. In the act of climbing and conquering, a conceptual pair is revealed that is central to the question of mobility. Authority stands against autonomy and makes it immediately clear that freedom of movement can only be understood as "at the expense of". One would like to complete with Virilio: All this happens in the moment in which the "openings of the car start to live", when clear secretion from the rear muffler runs, hammer the connecting rods, groan axles, sweat the bushes and suck the nozzles greedy: a warlike-futuristic apotheosis of the machine, as a manly-hard, never-tiring, priapes flesh that is constantly under pressure, "gas gives", with the roaring exhaust as a shallow trigger from the image of the stag-roaring male ejaculating. "We handle everything!"
Anyone who wants to revolutionize individual mobility does not only have to work on technology. He has to subject the human being, more precisely, probably, in particular, to the man of a horse cure, so that he fits into the autonomous car.
Resistance will only rain if the transition is made abruptly. If "incapacitation" takes place gradually through slow habituation, it will be comparatively silent. The self-determined driver has to mutate into a cyborg and feel the car as an indispensable part of himself, something that fits so seamlessly into him that he is so determined that he does not even think, whether he wants the car or the car him obeys.
But who builds humans? The true pioneers of autonomous driving, the avant-gardists in the renovation of the concept "car" are not automotive companies, but in the Internet business experienced companies. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, formerly Google, now Alphabet Inc. and the Paypal billionaire and electric car king Elon Musk. It is no coincidence that the alphabet corporation has X, the research company of Alphabet, built by Sebastian Thrun, who developed the autonomous VW Touareg "Stanley" with the Stanford Racing Team.
In 2013, Elon Musk introduced the company Hyperloop, a company for passenger and freight transport for long-haul routes: in a double tube, completed capsules for 28 people are to be accelerated to 1220 km / h by air cushion, thus becoming a kind of speed pills. Hyperloop may well be the first step in redeeming Musk's goal of transforming humans into a "multiplanar species."
In 2015, the $ 1 billion OpenAI was created as a nonprofit corporation dedicated to researching artificial intelligence; This should serve the public, that is, the whole of humanity. To strengthen the charitable nature of OpenAI, companies such as Amazon Web Services and the owner of venture capital firm Founders Fund, the right-wing conservative tea party supporter Peter Thiel, also oppose the aging and the work of Aubrey de Gray to overcome the aging process engaged in human beings.
If, according to such "corporate philosophy", aging is considered as a kind of illness that can be cured by appropriate means, how much more likely that belief would be for the accident. While researching the drug against aging, the recipe against the accident is already known: to relieve people of steering.
The supercharger stations for Tesla are 20 meters high obelisks. The grounds surrounding these spiers of free-floating capital include SolarCity , the company of Musk's cousins ​​Lyndon and Peter Rive, into the - sic! - Alphabet Google has entered with $ 280 million. "we handle everything!" states imperative SolarCity marketing jargon.
Those who would like to "think ahead" of where the Google Paypal hybrids like to take us (to the chain-owned restaurants) and where they will never drive us (in the residents zone, where the average salaries are significantly higher than the current user), at least he knows exactly where the data come from, with which this social differentiation was underpinned: from "your buyer profile".
So you can elegantly move from (technical) flexibility to (social) immobility, into a digital caste system. Another SolarCity marketing sentence puts it in a nutshell: "We can give the gift of power." Power is everything. Without power you are nothing. That's not a gift. Rather a threat. The "Sartre Project"
But not only American companies are working on the "gift of freedom" that they want to make their customers. The European "Sartre Project" is characterized by the almost ruthless use of the name of the French philosopher. With Volvo as partner and money from the framework program 7 of the EU, the feasibility of so-called "road trains" or - somewhat more militarily - of "platoons" is examined.
The eminent existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, author of "Being and Nothingness", a leading figure of European intellectuals since the 1960s, once remarked that only Frenchmen who did not have Joseph Goebbels as ministers had the word "total "In terms of self-determination, man can only want one thing," namely freedom as the basis of all values, so in the name of the human condition, I can make judgments as freedom over those who seek, the autonomy of their existence and to hide their total freedom. "
Time to break down the term autonomy, language-historically and philosophically: Autonomy is composed of two Greek components: "cars" (self) and "nomos" (law). It means self-determination, independence, independence, sovereignty, self-government or freedom of choice.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) describes autonomy as an essential feature of dignity, as a special, God-given gift of man, which distinguishes him from the animals. Immanuel Kant expands the idea in his typical diction: "The autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws ... Thus the moral law expresses nothing but the autonomy of pure practical reason, that is, freedom. " According to Kant, autonomy depends on the overcoming of given forms of dependence and alien determination. Theodor W. Adorno adds: "Autonomy: the power to reflect, to self-determination, to not participate."
As far as the philosophical word explanation. Disintegrating Sartre's name as "Safe Road Trains for the Environment" is unquestionably beyond admissible cynicism - more or less as if Mercedes were deciphering the new autonomous Smart, which premiered at the IAA 2017, "Kant" - as "spherical." Autonomous Naturally-friendly means of transport ".
According to the official level classification from 0 to 5 (Level 5 is: "The complete autonomy of the vehicle. The vehicle is equipped without steering wheel, the vehicle can move without driver.") Has the Sartre project for the better of "environment, safety and comfort "a Level 3 procedure for implementation in 2020 worked out:" Highly automated, the driver does not have to constantly monitor the system, the vehicle autonomously performs functions such as triggering the turn signal, lane change and lane keeping. "
As an animation on the website sartre-project.eu shows, the inmates of units connected to a "digital tiller" actually devote themselves to enjoying coffee or music, talking on the phone, reading or eating while sitting at the back of a truck seem to stick.
driving pleasureThe transformation of man, his preparation for the world of autonomous systems is not only a fight against "travel sickness in a robot car" , but also very closely tied to the access to the brain - and that is certainly not an invention of Elon Musk.
The "Decade of the Brain" (1990-2000, initiated by George W. Bush) followed at the beginning of the new millennium a whole "Century of the Mind": two powerful initiatives to intensify neuroscience.
It is not surprising that the strategy departments of the big car companies were looking for the seat of the "joy of driving". At the beginning of the nineties, VW's futurology put a subject under the brain scanner, with the declared aim of not only locating the seat of driving pleasure in the brain, but in particular to optimize the vehicle so that the zone concerned is more stimulated.
"Attention control" is mentioned in this context: A vehicle should steer without pedals and hand sticks purely by the will and the concentration. For this purpose, "non-invasive brain scanners" would have to be installed in the car, as they were already in circulation for starfighter pilots in the form of helmets with electrodes. But how would the car look like that would still have a driver whose legs and arms suddenly become unemployed?
How could the brain activity that leads to attentive attention be maintained at a consistently high level for a long time? The American Air Force has already a solution for this: Pilots who did not take any metamphetamine (the so-called "go-pills") were in the last Iraq war already no more use orders and had (at worse wage conditions) on the bench, while the doped Colleagues nonstop through the sky. Such methods seem impractical for road users in everyday life. You can certainly not sell them to health insurance. But how long?
Dripping psychotropic drugs to combat boredomThe pattern for a rethinking in terms of chemically augmented attention increase has been developed by NASA in the 70s: the "Osmomouse", the first cyborg. A psychiatrist and a drug expert, the Team Klines and Clyne, had to solve for the space agency the problem how astronauts could physically and psychologically survive the long flight times in space without losing focus on the complex scientific assignments.
Their proposal was revolutionary: not the space in the capsule should be adapted to the needs of the living being. On the other hand, humans should be compatible with the spatial conditions, the narrowness and uneventfulness of the space shuttle. As a sample, they attached an osmotic pump instead of the tail to a live rat, from which low doses of psychotropic drugs dripped into the body for a long time. While the comparison animals died of boredom without drugs, Osmomouse was always fresh and alert.
In analogy to this successful experiment, one drives in the future his boring boots through the area, strung on the clock of the GPS-based traffic coordination and is persuaded not to have to drive, because the driving pleasure center is irritated by a harmless drug to exaltation. Algorithms under suspicion
We all live long ago in the "sun state of the doctor herald" (mirror 25/1979) - a Bonmot from the time of the dragnet investigation against the RAF. To know that, it did not need a NSA scandal. It was already in the newspaper 40 years ago that we are all "glass".
To escape this requires a tremendous effort - and probably it is not really possible without a radical exit from the system of capitalist commodity circulation. But who ultimately wants to renounce all the benefits, the lubricated current system of permanent daily help through performance-enhancing products and services, the enrichment with beautiful things and convenient solutions for all situations that make capitalism so attractive, so indispensable?
What do we lose if we give the steering wheel out of our hands? By comparison, nothing essential - but only as long as the machine responds to commands and provided that not Zalando, Amazon and consorts privatize all the ways in the world and deny us access to certain zones.
For while the autonomous vehicle puts an end to the exclusion of users of backward or inferior systems, it also makes smart apartheid on wheels possible.
>From a technical point of view, it is no problem to break down the entire surface of the earth into zones, and indeed very finely. Each branch could be locked with a digital license. This option becomes interesting when it becomes the common method of social segregation: "We see in your user profile that you are knee-deep at the dispoop. Your route ends before the quarter of the better-off."
Thus, the algorithm is suspected of violence of previously unknown quality. And the machine on which the supposedly neutral arithmetic operation is taking part in a socially relevant decision.
Because - let's not fool ourselves, especially no "democratic control". Kurt Schwitters hits the nail on the head: If there is a screw, will find one who turns it. The idea is undoubtedly oppressive: in a sense, version 2.0 of the exclusion described above, inherent in any centrally-monitored technology. It is a good idea to look carefully at whether autonomous driving is not a seductively smart key to open the door to new totalitarianism.
"Meaningful Human Control"The matter becomes very critical when it comes to defense technology autonomous mobile. The July 28, 2015, Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers on Autonomous Weapons , signed by Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky, and another 20,027 scientists, states, "Once the world's first military power of global importance launches the race for artificial intelligence weapons
"Autonomous weapons could be tomorrow's Kalashnikovs."Under the "computational regime" , the dissolution of borders between military and civilian applications will quickly fade, weapons will become "tools" in no time, free of any negative connotation. Autonomous weapons migrate from the field to everyday life, where they are indistinguishable from non-violent digital hardware and software.
AI is supposed to give autonomy to the military vehicles equipped with it. Land-based, flying and diving vehicles, robots, drones and submarines are to make their own operational decisions in the near future: with "artificial intelligence". Algorithms-the name given to what a computer-machine machine should do, step by step-are considered by proponents of autonomous technical systems to be a safe solution to the problem of efficient command execution, which no longer requires human surveillance.
It is agreed, as with the selection of a record in a jukebox, beforehand, which program you want to hear. Everything else then runs off like clockwork. Algorithms are also capable of learning: they automatically incorporate error solutions into their program and thus to a certain extent lead a "life of their own".
It all sounds very practical, safe and humane - the death and injury of soldiers in war seem to be reduced to a minimum by "cybernetic systems". In addition, the feeling of security increases when one is protected by "highly intelligent" devices rather than dull firearms.
But what happens if several such "independently controlling" systems meet? What chances does a human being have to intervene if, after activating the weapon, he realizes that unforeseen problems occur? Finally: Can smart machines really do a socially responsible, humanitarian crisis management? To what extent can and do you really want to give personal responsibility to software?
The scene of the critical scientists, who in November 2015 in Berlin for "parliamentary breakfast" under the patronage of MdB Ute Finkh-Krämer, head of the SPD in the Subcommittee on Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Transformation and Network Action and Deputy Chair of the Subcommittee on Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation did not call for a preventive ban on such systems, but rather a meaningful human control, an internationally binding definition for the licensing of such systems exclusively under "human control".
But when and where should she start? Are not there any people who design the algorithms for the machines?
Algorithm is the name of the new barbed wireIn times of crisis one hears daily the call for protected zones and lockout of unwanted new arrivals. It is just a tiny step from the guarded housing estate to the "Fortress Europe". The "gated community" seems to be the model for the continent as a gigantic castle with digital drawbridges: drones, autonomous robots designed to hunt down refugees in packs of hunting dogs, and hyper-fast IT hubs that connect everything.
Suddenly we realize that the border is ubiquitous: We find their structure again in malls, at airports, in smart homes and at the barriers in front of the restricted zones: the same social selection patterns everywhere. Algorithm is the name of the new barbed wire.
This is not a dystopian vision. We quote here from current ongoing EU-funded science and research programs such as Talos, the robot dog program, and Horizon 2020: Just three years ahead, the horror is based on the clever plan of European self-bunkering engineers.
Stimulated by the ever-increasing dose of images of ever-increasing flows of migrants, and the constant threat of terrorist attacks and civil unrest following Europe's sovereign debt crises, smart border management programs promise a pragmatic response to the pressing issue of safeguarding property and life.
We are witnessing the rapid growth of an industry that is capricious to private and state security, engaging in the lucrative war arena in the cities and the "asymmetric warfare" along the Schengen outer border. The concomitant use of "intelligent" digital tools perfectly masks the brutal violence of current developments as a "life-sustaining surgical operation."
Declaring migration and a balanced society to be a "technical problem", and weapon manufacturers and the financial community are joining forces to deliver the solution: what can be technically resolved spares new laws and, more than anything, a social program that only costs instead of entering - like the purchase of security technology.
Those who are protected behind the walls of the fortress feel that law and order are maintained. Surviving today means taking care not to get on the other side of the wall!
What we have so far relatively abstractly called the "digital age" is now taking on a physical form. The promise of endless welfare, based on confidence in the reliability, one might almost say, in the "steadfastness of the algorithm", can not be put into action without a complete deconstruction of the traditional economic order (already in full swing) is) not without the use of structural violence and not without massive outflow of possessions from all the less wealthy parts of society towards "rich". This, argues the well-known sociologist Saskia Sassen, is the true essence of the "exclusion" that supersedes the old concept of "inequality".
The machinic milieuIf democratic states, with the full digitization of all access, their financial operations, and their culture of service, install a "total" machinic environment that is designed to guarantee complete security by capturing all non-belongings without exception and unsentimentally, then machine efficiency ultimately eliminates the human factor.
The "softe" (as in software) cements the class as racial segregation.Algorithmically controlled weapon systems are no longer used exclusively in the "war on terror". They are already in the arsenal of democratic states, and for their comprehensive work "for the good of the nation", it is only necessary to expand the concept of terrorism.
Algorithmically controlled, therefore (partially) autonomous weapon systems are already at the gates of Europe and should help seal the 50,000-kilometer Schengen border in advance. This horror scenario is not a dream of the future: in June 2016, Yeni Safak, via ICRAC (the British NGO International Committee for Robot Arms Control), announced that the Turkish military had begun construction on the Syrian border and erected a tower every 300 meters , which is equipped with fully automated products from Aselsan. Anyone entering the "wipe out zone" in front of the tower, coming from Syria to Turkey, could thus be executed by machines, regardless of the person.
It seems downright grotesque and yet one can not avoid reminding that, in the face of such installations for the protection of the European Community, the question of compatibility with human rights must be raised - not as an academic-philosophical issue but as a matter of course political consequence. Are Aselsan towers the redemption of our idea of ​​a smart, secure future? Are we ready to accept their existence?
The technology policy of exclusionIn the face of dramatic environmental change and societal upheavals of a tectonic dimension, both last but not least the result of a long history of exploitation of human and natural "resources" as a process accelerating in the cybernetic age and through the transition of the analogue into the binary world In view of this, the ruling class decides to use exactly the means that have brought about and intensified the conflict.
They are pulling up the digital drawbridges around Europe.The "have-nots" knock on the gate. They do not have what they need to be admitted: no papers, no money. Consequently: no access. Unless their almost free work is needed on the plantations in the fortress. 6
Egalité, once one of the three combat concepts of the French Revolution, equality now becomes a trap for the "unequal".
Digitality allows policymakers to hide behind gleaming technologies. The inherent violence of the algorithm remains invisible at first sight. With stoic "fairness" the code decides to ignore every individual fate and to shake up all and everything. At first this looks like equal treatment.
But the "techno-politics of exclusion" (Steve Wright) merely manifests the political will to sing out the "excesses" from the Civilization program. In order to give the selection a humanitarian touch, it takes place according to clean criteria, according to those that lead to the same result in every machine.
State-owned autonomous cars could, technically and analogously to the digitized autonomous weapons systems, provide the perfect, distributed throughout the country platforms with which the "new world order" installed.
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