My internet has been flaky all week and today nothing at all for 8 hours. Computers have glitches at unexpected times. What you did yesterday and 20 times before may quit working at any moment, right in the middle of your task. I pulled into the pharmacy lot to pick up a prescription for Joyce. Turned the engine off, came back out and the car radio would not work for the next 2 weeks until 3 days ago when it started work as soon as I started the car.
There is a new French car, a Peugeot that drives itself. You get into the car, tell it where you want to go and it takes off using GPS. The entire dashboard disappears as a wide-screen TV drops down and you watch a movie while the car drives down the highway. What happens if all of a sudden the multi-computer processors in the car stop working properly?
Cars here now have automatic braking, lane change alarms to correct the vehicle. What happens when you are driving down the interstate at high speed on a crowded highway such as I-44 and a deer skitters across in front of your car a few hundred feet away and the car locks up its brakes, but the cars behind you don't see what happened? As close as they follow around here it might be a multi-car pileup.
I watched a recent documentary with 3 college engineering students who wondered if they could program a computer transmitter to take control of a moving car. They went to a race track and one got behind the wheel and started going around the track at a high speed. The others radioed the driver they were about to take control of the car if possible. They succeeded and got the car's brakes to lock up. It turned out there is no security system built into the car's computer system and they could do anything they wanted to the moving car. What happens when some malicious computer hackers decide to go up to a freeway and have some fun?
We are overly reliant on technology these days. In 2017 the USS John McCain collided with a tanker ship out of Singapore. The navy did an investigation and found the the ship's lookouts were not keeping as attentive as they should have been and the computer control systems were too complex for sailors on steering watch to keep up with and one of the ship's radars had failed. The training on those complex systems was not what it should have been. The results were 10 sailors died and 5 more were wounded. The ship was partially flooded in several compartments. There were 3 other incidents like that in 2017. The navy has projected removing those complex control systems starting in 2020.
Copyright Bill Weber 2006-2019 and beyond.
There is a new French car, a Peugeot that drives itself. You get into the car, tell it where you want to go and it takes off using GPS. The entire dashboard disappears as a wide-screen TV drops down and you watch a movie while the car drives down the highway. What happens if all of a sudden the multi-computer processors in the car stop working properly?
Cars here now have automatic braking, lane change alarms to correct the vehicle. What happens when you are driving down the interstate at high speed on a crowded highway such as I-44 and a deer skitters across in front of your car a few hundred feet away and the car locks up its brakes, but the cars behind you don't see what happened? As close as they follow around here it might be a multi-car pileup.
I watched a recent documentary with 3 college engineering students who wondered if they could program a computer transmitter to take control of a moving car. They went to a race track and one got behind the wheel and started going around the track at a high speed. The others radioed the driver they were about to take control of the car if possible. They succeeded and got the car's brakes to lock up. It turned out there is no security system built into the car's computer system and they could do anything they wanted to the moving car. What happens when some malicious computer hackers decide to go up to a freeway and have some fun?
We are overly reliant on technology these days. In 2017 the USS John McCain collided with a tanker ship out of Singapore. The navy did an investigation and found the the ship's lookouts were not keeping as attentive as they should have been and the computer control systems were too complex for sailors on steering watch to keep up with and one of the ship's radars had failed. The training on those complex systems was not what it should have been. The results were 10 sailors died and 5 more were wounded. The ship was partially flooded in several compartments. There were 3 other incidents like that in 2017. The navy has projected removing those complex control systems starting in 2020.
Copyright Bill Weber 2006-2019 and beyond.
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