Slashdot | NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota
Paul D. Fernhout
"Slashdot | NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota"
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/23/2022204/NHTSA-Has-No-Software-Engineers-To-Analyze-Toyota
"""
An official from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told
investigators that the agency doesn't employ any electrical engineers or
software engineers, leaving them woefully unable to investigate correctly
what caused the most recent Toyota recall.
http://www.thecarconnection.com/marty-blog/1042836_nhtsa-has-no-software-engineers-or-ees-to-analyze-toyotas
A modern luxury car has something close to 100 million lines of software
code in it, running on 70 to 100 microprocessors. And according to
consultant Frost & Sullivan, that number will rise to 200 to 300 million
line within a few years. And the software that controls the 'drive-by-wire'
accelerators of Toyota and Lexus vehicles is one potential culprit in the
tangled collection of issues, allegations, and recalls of many of those
vehicles for so-called 'sudden acceleration' problems.
"""
Related to that is my essay here from ten years ago, sent to the Markle
Foundation. The relevant excerpt:
"On Funding Digital Public Works"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"""
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some
streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was
primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally
own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are
related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to
the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the
knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it
(plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly
funded software and selling modified versions of such software as
proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid
automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is
funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving
vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies
leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the
suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection
and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their
employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of
a larger free and open community development process?
"""
So, not only does the government hand over public tax dollars to non-profits
and for-profits to make private proprietary automotive technology shrouded
in patents and secrecy, then another part, the NHTSA, apparently can't even
be bothered (or funded?) to have people on staff who deeply know anything
about electronics or computers. As I said, so unbelievable it has to be
true. :-)
And people wonder why embedded software engineers like Joe Stack, who
apparently had trouble making a living, are flying airplanes into
buildings... :-(
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1558016&cid=31222780
Who are the people even more mentally ill than Joe Stack who are involved in
organizing all this?
How can our society do better than all that?
Perhaps they hire contractors occasionally at the NHTSA? There is only so
much contractors can do, because the first problem is, how do you know you
have hired a good contractor? That was a problem in this movie, too, what do
farming villagers know about what makes a good Samurai?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Samurai
Anyway, could we ever see any the "stimulus package" to put a lot of
software developers and electrical engineers to work in the NHTSA to make
sure cars manufactured in the USA and abroad are safe? I don't know. But
clearly to try to oversee product safety of complex things with know
institutional knowledge of fundamental aspects of the things being certified
seems problematical.
It's clearly not for lack of money; we just spent trillions of two or three
needless wars, and trillions on bank bailouts. And, as I suggested here
before, our taxes would even go down if the US government just gave everyone
a safer luxury electric car:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
And that analysis did not even consider the value in using the cars as part
of a smart grid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
Nope. Must be something else other than money. Money is really just a tool,
ultimately. Maybe it is how the money is used based on scarcity ideology?
Or political ideology? One comment to that story I found of interest:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1560688&cid=31251002
"I don't why I even respond because I'm sure to get a troll mod but I'd just
like to point out that one of the major political parties solution to bad
government is no government at all."
Here is something I just stumbled across when someone else use the term and
I searched on it:
"The American Tapeworm"
http://solari.com/articles/the_american_tapeworm.html
"""
The tapeworm -- a parasite that over time eats its host ---can more
accurately describe the demonic patterns of stripping places of intellectual
capital that come with American imperial conquest. The �dumbing down� so
often complained about within America�s borders is a phenomenon that our
military appears to be implementing globally. We seem intent on removing
spiritual power and intellectual IQ as we depopulate globally, moving out
the honest and competent and putting the corrupt and bureaucratic in charge.
One of the things that is most disturbing about the American tapeworm is
that it has organized its leadership around private banks and defense
contractors and its governance and intellectual air cover around think tanks
and private universities and their tax-exempt endowments.
In so doing it has done a marvelous job of getting the intellectual
resources of the nation disengaged from dealing with what is happening and
engaged �if not financially dependent on--- producing chemicals for
injection into the body politic through a highly centralized corporate media
that will feed the tapeworm's desire.
The Harvard Watch reports description of Harvard academics creating the
public policy justifications for Enron's frauds while the Harvard endowment
fed at the trough illuminated a perfect example of how the tapeworm gets the
host to act against its own self-interest.
"""
But really, it is not about individuals. I think not so many people would
aspire to be tapeworms if we did not have so much 19th century scarcity
ideology prevalent in the 21st century. (James P. Hogan talks about that in
Voyage From Yesteryear). I hope, by example, open manufacturing helps change
that for the better.
And, at least is one worthwhile US government program in that direction, too:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
(Although they have less that 20 FTEs when they should have 20,000 or more,
IMHO.)
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.