I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues.
There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for their car to always favor the people in the car no matter what?
If the self-driving software is completely open source, you can exploit the collision avoidance algorithms to favor aggressive driving with your car. For example if the software tries to keep a 15 foot buffer between cars, you can"tune" your software to use a shorter buffer and cut in front of traffic more easily.
Law enforcement will campaign for a remote "pull over" command to prevent people from fleeing police.
The answers to these types of questions will be very important for open source going forward.
I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. The odds of being in a situation where there's any sort of ethical choice to make are so remote as to not really be worth considering. 99.9999% of the time, the correct choice when faced with an impending crash will be to brake as hard as the driving surface allows and steer to avoid obstacles as much as possible.
In any case, tinkering and commons already intersect to an extent, for example with emissions. It's not uncommon for emissions to be favored over performance, for example, and some people hack their cars to favor performance instead. Or they just like being polluting assholes, as is the case with "rolling coal." But it's not a big deal, some jurisdictions do periodic testing and others just rely on the fact that such people are relatively rare.
> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown.
Agreed. At least at the level these cars are likely to enter the market, the whole concept of what the car "knows" isn't likely to extend to "other people", "my passengers", "inanimate objects" and a probability matrix of injury/death/damage among these categories. Instead of this heavily anthropomorphized view, cars are much more likely to have a highly simplified, "bug-like" level of information to work from.
This isn't harping on a "technology is neutral" vibe, which I view as obviously false. Just that many of the high-minded philosophical models presented to date don't appear to map well to a likely actual embodiment of "ethical" decisions that may get embedded into vehicular software. If the model is a bad fit for the real-world problem(s) encountered, it's simply not going to be very useful for informing solutions to that problem.
> Instead of this heavily anthropomorphized view, cars are much more likely to have a highly simplified, "bug-like" level of information to work from.
Not even close to "bug-like". At the top of modern AI, we've got deep-learning and reinforcement learning.
You probably underestimate the very complex brain that even a bug still has. Maybe also overestimate what today's AI is capable of. You can't build a house with two lego-bricks, just as you can't build a (real time) bug's brain with current-day AI.
It's a humbling process, AI research, finding that even quite "simple" organisms are still miles ahead of our technological state of the art.
A car traveling the same direction swerves into your lane, crowding you off the road.
Does your self-driving car allow the collision and push the offending car back in order to hold your lane? Or does it avoid the collision and run you off the road?
(As a person who drives in the mountains, this could have deadly results. If you live in the plains of Kansas, maybe not so much.)
Yes, this situation is in the realm of the plausible, which has little to do with my comment. I'm not arguing against an analysis of the decisions made by a self-driving system. That's essential. I'm arguing against applying ethical models that utilize knowledge outside the realm of the knowledge or "reasoning" capacity of the drive algorithms.
To continue your example, I'll pose that any system with unilateral behavior of self-endangerment is extremely problematic. Motivating example: assume that self-driving cars will always avoid head-on collisions with other vehicles, even if there's no safe alternative. Including driving off a cliff. Attack: manual driver drives down the wrong side of the road (or maybe the middle of a two-lane road), forcing all of the self-driving cars off the cliff during evening commute hours to a hillside residential neighborhood. I suspect all systems that don't hew to some baseline of self-preservation are subject to similar modes of attack.
There's a whole kind of unpleasant but interesting topic about attacks against behavior of self-driving cars. I think I saw an earlier HN thread that suggested that they might put occupants at greater risk of kidnapping because the cars could refuse to take evasive actions that endanger or injure a kidnapper (or just violate a traffic law). This risk might be farfetched, but it may illustrate the concern about people knowing the limits that self-driving cars will respect and then exploiting those limits in some way.
> I think I saw an earlier HN thread that suggested
I might also have heard about some of these problems from Brad Templeton, who describes "Abusing robocar collision-avoidance" among many other interesting problems at
>I think I saw an earlier HN thread that suggested that they might put occupants at greater risk of kidnapping because the cars could refuse to take evasive actions that endanger or injure a kidnapper
What alternative would a human take? Would they kill the kidnappers by driving over them?
I guess that's the simplest one that a self-driving car's software might not approve of. Or intentionally collide with a kidnapper's vehicle, or just make a prohibited turn or run a red light to try to escape.
These scenarios are kind of vague because they don't make it clear whether the self-driving car lets a human driver take over and take full responsibility.
I think a human would drive over a kidnapper. Say your car is bullet proof. A man in a ski mask wielding a machine gun jumps in front of the road and orders you to stop. You refuse, he starts shooting at your car as you get near him (this is why I made your car bullet proof, to keep you alive but unequivocally demonstrate clear and present danger to you). In such a scenario, if your only escape route is over the dead body of the man in a ski mask, I bet a human will take that option.
> Does your self-driving car allow the collision and push the offending car back in order to hold your lane? Or does it avoid the collision and run you off the road?
Neiter of those. The first and foremost rule in traffic is to act predicatable. And the only predictable reaction to something blocking your way is to BREAK!
Seriously, what is it always with people that makes them think that a change in direction (swerving) was a good collision avoidcance strategy?
Newsflash, it's not! When swerving you don't change your momentum, you just redirect it (apart from friction losses, of course, the the teensy bit of angular momentum transferred to the planet). More importantly, swerving combined with braking may cause loss of control, which is where there are Anti Break-lock Systems. But ABS will increase your stopping distance, so modern ABS will kick only if the steering wheel does not point into the forward direction.
Of all the scenarios thrown at self driving cars ethics, none of them is an issue if basic traffic rules are followed. And the first and foremost one is, that you always keep so much distance in front of you, that you can come to a full stop within that distance by breaking. And the other first and foremost rule is you never drive faster than road conditions, and more important visibility allow. TL;DR: Don't speed and Don't tailgate!
Any suddenly appearing obstacle in a vehicles way poses the same problem for a human or a computer driver. The computer driver may have the shorter reaction time, but physics is physics and the best course of action remains the same: Braking!
Not always. I've been in a scenario where I swerved into an open breakdown lane because someone swerved into my lane at high speed to avoid running into the car in front (because they had slammed on their brakes after being inattentive). Lots of swerving high-speed vehicles but no one ended up colliding.
But I agree as a general rule. A lot of this trolley problem stuff is way overblown. Far and away the best action in the vast majority of cases is going to be to slam on the brakes. Even if someone or something still collides, the energy is going to be reduced and therefore the consequences of the collision.
I certainly don't want my car flying off the pavement to avoid hitting something on the road without a really good model of why that's a safer approach for me.
Do you have a specific example of this situation occurring as you've described it? If so, was there an ethical dilemma when a human was in control? If not, don't worry about it.
Wow, I just looked up "rolling coal". I can maybe get the political protest aspect---even if I disagree, but blowing the smoke at pedestrians, cyclist or even just other cars seems like one of the most dickish things ever.
I've seen it happen firsthand a couple of times. In both cases it was done after the cyclists stayed two abreast instead of singling up to let traffic pass.
Cyclists, especially in a group should stay two or three abreast as it significantly reduces the passing length for overtaking cars. The only reason people complain about cyclists two abreast is that they want to overtake when it's not really safe to do so.
Of course not. The law typically requires slow traffic to pull over when safe and allow faster traffic to pass when there are more than a few cars backed up behind, but that's a bit different. But naturally the lack of legal standing doesn't stop drivers who think they have the right to pass all bicyclists as soon as possible.
A police officer once told me his favorite traffic ticket to write was "excessive visible emission".
I've noticed a difference in the approach to enforcement of many minor regulations between the US and Germany, where I've spend a considerable amount of time. In the US, it's common for things like vehicle emissions and safety to be subject to many regulations, but only checked if somebody complains or the police happen to notice. In Germany, cars are regularly subjected to fairly strict inspections.
So people in the US do a lot of things with their cars that aren't technically legal. For the most part, this doesn't seem to be a major safety issue. In an analysis by the Department of Transportation[0], 4.9% of crashes were found to involve a tire/wheel deficiency and 1.9% involved some other vehicle deficiency. Tire pressure monitoring recently became mandatory on new cars sold in the US, which should have a significant impact on the most common maintenance issue. It's likely that a comprehensive vehicle inspection program would not have a particularly good cost/benefit ratio relative to, for example improving traffic flow and signaling at intersections. 36.2% of crashes involved intersections.
It's not legal. Even in states without emissions controls, you're still violating federal EPA regulations. But the feds have much bigger fish to fry and don't care to enforce stuff against individual car owners.
Depends on the state. Some states do emissions testing that fails such people, and officers are on the lookout for vehicles that are visibly violating the standard. Other states are indifferent as long as you aren't assaulting others with it.
Obviously, seeing as how they're doing it for attention, it's very unlikely that someone would roll coal with the intention of not blasting someone with soot.
No, it's not legal, but AFAICT it's usually activated with a switch, not always-on, so the cops would have to actually catch them in the act. Also, this kind of thing is surely almost always done in areas where there's no emissions testing (such as the South), so it's just not that easy to catch violators.
> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown.
Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving software, thus killing thousands of people.
"Per hour" is rather ridiculous. I'm talking about per crash. There are a couple million vehicle crashes in the US each year, so if it really is 99.9999%, that's two or three ethical crises per year here. Among a billion vehicles it would be maybe ten per year. And honestly I'd be surprised if it's that many. When have you ever heard of a crash where there was any kind of ethical dilemma in the response? People keep imagining scenarios, but I've never heard of one happening in real life.
As for speed limits and such, I'm talking about the car's ethical choices in crashes, not the ethics of the programmers.
I'm actually familiar with a situation like this, the person was on a highway at night and came around a corner to see a deer lying in the road and a crowd right behind the deer. There was a couple of people off to either side. They couldn't brake in time to stop and not harm the people on the other side of the deer.
The people crowded behind the deer ought to have sent a person off in either direction to warn approaching traffic of the obstacle.
I recently attended to an echidna sitting in the middle of the other lane in on a blind corner. I reversed until I could see straight road for 60 meters, stopped with my car at an odd angle on the side of the road with the hazard lights on to give an indication to approaching vehicle something unusual was occurring ahead, namely my partner and I were on the road on a blind corner. Then we listened carefully for approaching vehicles while we got the echidna off the road.
The ethical dilemma lies not with the driver, who is otherwise driving to the conditions, but with the people who have put themselves at risk by performing a task in a dangerous environment without appropriate hazard protection.
Those computers probably won't get into situation like this in the first place, being able to stop or react preventive. Anyway, it will be so rare an occasion with no guaranteed outcome (it's all about probabilities), so it's not really matters as much as it's discussed. With same kinda of attention you could ask if making and selling ladders is ethical, because people fall from them and hurt themselves.
> Those computers probably won't get into situation like this in the first place, being able to stop or react preventive.
It will always be the case that circumstances can change faster than something with the momentum of a fast moving car could adapt. Somewhere between "you're boned" and "your car saves the day" lies room for a scenario such as this, with potential room for a large amount of thinking.
> Anyway, it will be so rare an occasion with no guaranteed outcome (it's all about probabilities), so it's not really matters as much as it's discussed.
I agree that it will be rare, and that the concern is overblown. That said, "it's all about probabilities" is no reason something can't be vitally important.
> With same kinda of attention you could ask if making and selling ladders is ethical, because people fall from them and hurt themselves.
I think there is a substantive difference between the two. We're not asking whether selling a car that has a chance of injuring the user is ethical - we're fine with that. We're not even asking whether selling a car that has a chance of hurting others is ethical (already meaningfully different than the ladder case). We're asking about the ethical ramifications of making particular tradeoffs in "chance to hurt the user" versus "chance to hurt others". It's an interesting question, so it gets a lot of attention. I don't think most of those involved see it as a reason to prevent self-driving cars - long before the dilemma is really relevant, self-driving cars are already safer than human driven.
> It will always be the case that circumstances can change faster than something with the momentum of a fast moving car could adapt. Somewhere between "you're boned" and "your car saves the day" lies room for a scenario such as this, with potential room for a large amount of thinking.
I think it's possible that with improving AI of self driving cars, making overall safety better, there will be ≈0 occasions when car simultaneously 1) doesn't have time to react to some sudden problem and 2) has time to make informed decision (and physically perform it) on how many people to save. Especially if pedestrian airbags become popular.
Even if, the car will have to calculate whether it has enough clearance to deploy the wings so that it doesn't cut down a pedestrian, or whether there's anyone that could be caught in the engine wash.
Interesting as it may be, it's only shifting the problem ;).
Yes, but perhaps less than you think. I fly small aircraft, and the one we fly gets ~15 mpg in cruise carrying up to 6 people at just over 200 mph. There are cars/trucks on the road that get less than that. If I slow it down to 150 mph, I can get over 20 mpg.
A properly designed self driving car would never out drive its sensors in the first place. This is just basic defensive driving. If there's a blind corner coming up then it would slow down sufficiently that it would be able to come to a controlled stop if there's a stalled car or other static obstruction around the corner.
Human drivers can already get information about that sort of problem, e.g. by using Waze. This requires that a human who uses the app has reported a hazard (the act of which could sometimes result in distracted driving), however, I would expect autonomous cars to tell each other about such things in the future.
True, but seeing as the article was about the ability of people to modify their car to for instance not do that I see where there could be a dilemma here.
They're pretty much one and the same, how can you allow someone to repair something without allowing them to modify it as well? What if they repair it badly?
>but it's illegal to make certain modifications to it, right?
That's correct in the US. For instance, you can repair an AR-15 back to factory specs, you can modify it in certain ways (adding different sights, etc.), but if you modify it for full-auto operation (which is quite feasible actually), you can be thrown in jail IIRC and be subject to a gigantic fine.
This system works well: people can repair and modify their property to a certain point, but making specific changes are highly illegal, and the penalties are extremely severe, so almost no one does it. The same can be done for other things if the case for public safety warrants it. So repairing your robo-car should be completely legal, but modifying it to blatantly violate emissions laws or to run cyclists off the road can be punished harshly with vehicle confiscation, $1M fines, lengthy prison sentences, etc.
I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction. Human drivers routinely flout this due to poor risk assessment, but an AI driver would easily be able to to do it.
I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction.
Do you actually practice this? Setting aside legality concerns (many freeways have minimum as well as maximum speeds), if you truly did this at every curve and corner you'd be more likely to cause than to prevent an accident. The number of times there will be something you avoid by slowing down will be outweighed by the number of times your speed differential relative to surrounding traffic causes an accident (and it is speed differential, not speed itself, which is responsible for virtually all "speed-related" accidents).
For truly blind corners, yes. However, I don't have great faith in my ability to correctly judge all partially blind corners, and occasionally find myself surprised.
I don't advocate slamming on the brakes seconds before the turn, there's such a thing as slowing down safely as well.
All of this is something AIs will be nearly infinitely better at doing safely than even a minimally impaired (tired, distracted) human driver.
Let me clarify: the topic here is specifically the ethics of whoever in a crash where the car may be able to get different people killed depending on what actions it takes. Speed limits and DRM are an entirely different topic.
I happen to think that a rate of one in a million crashes is realistic (even if far from accurate, it's roughly in the ballpark) while a rate of one in a million hours is absurd on its face.
> I'm talking about the car's ethical choices in crashes, not the ethics of the programmers.
There is no practical difference. Computers do what we tell them to do, whether what I tell it to do has a conditional in code (the computer chooses), or instead always chooses one option because I left that condition out is a completely irrelevant distinction.
You realize that the common `debugging caveat' applies: computer do indeed do what we tell them to do. That doesn't mean than anyone understands what the computer are going to do.
To me the question is relatively uninteresting because it seems obvious.
As long as cars belong to individuals they have the responsibility to favor the interests of those individuals as far as law permits. Where and how much the community is to be preferred over the individual, the community should specify in laws. People running code that breaks those laws should be liable for that codes actions. (I could imagine an ethics slider settable at the owners choice within the legal limits that allows them to discount the lives of the passengers compared to the lives of others, on the condition that they notify their other passengers).
It's possible that ultimately the right choice is to move to a different model, but in that case, the AI should not be owned by the individual who bought the car and has a reasonable expectation that it work on their behalf.
The ethical decision on the car is no different than the ethical decision that we ask the human driver to make in similar situations (which as the gp noted are incredibly rare), or that we trust the human driver to make when we are passengers in their car. In fact I even doubt that it makes sense to legislate it, since we haven't so far for e.g. uber drivers, but perhaps testing will indicate that we should.
In terms of the speed limits, society has already decided to accept a huge number of deaths per year that would almost all be preventable with a speed limit of 35mph, so I don't see how the introduction of AI drivers affects this question.
I would like to see laws that say that all source code for self driving cars must be publicly auditable and pass tests before being approved for road use. Running code that has not been safety tested by the state will leave you uninsurable and personally liable for its actions. We should aim to make running the test suite as accessible as possible in order to allow innovation, but it should still give us a high confidence that the driver behaves correctly according to the law.
I take pretty much all of this from analogy with human drivers: when we're driven by someone else, we have relatively little control over their ethical slider setting, we have high speed limits for humans because we think the convenience of the many is more important than the lives of the few, we don't let brand new humans drive without having some indication that they'll make the right decisions. None of these problems seem to be particularly changed by the introduction of AI.
> As long as cars belong to individuals they have the responsibility to favor the interests of those individuals as far as law permits.
Well put. I would not buy a car that wasn't designed to protect its occupants first and foremost. My family is more important to me than abstract, unlikely to occur ethical dilemmas.
Having that choice programmed in actually makes it easier for self-driving cars to predict the behavior of other cars on the road. It's simple and probably at least a near-global maxima for optimal car fitness.
Have you even been in a Taxi? Or a bus? Or any situation where someone who is not you is driving the car?
You have put your life into their hands when you do this.
No matter what algorithm the self driving car is running, it is going to be 100 times safer than you driving the car. Yes, YOU are a worse driver than a self driving car, NO MATTER what "ethics algorithm" it is running, because any of the ones that could be running will be safer than you or the taxi driver.
What you are basically saying is that "I don't trust any braking system in my car that isn't 100% perfect, therefore I am going to drive my car without ANY braking system! I'll physically stop the car myself if I ever need to brake!"
No matter what algorithm the self driving car is running, it is going to be 100 times safer than you driving the car.
And yet, I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles over many years under all kinds of road conditions without ever having an accident. Statistically my record is better than many, but it's hardly a unique achievement among experienced drivers who are careful.
Tesla's Autopilot probably has done more than 100x the miles I have by now, but it's also had several accidents, some of them fatal. As I understand it, it has also only been used on highways, which are statistically much safer and have much less challenging driving conditions than places like winding rural roads or inner city residential areas.
As another example, Google's self-driving cars have apparently done less than 10x the driving miles I have, but under somewhat more challenging conditions than highways. They too have had accidents, and they too reportedly still can't cope with anything close to truly realistic driving conditions on their own.
So no, it appears that the state of the art in self-driving technology today is not 100x safer than me driving a car. If anything, it's looking considerably more dangerous. Of course there is potential there -- no matter how skillful and careful I am, I still only have two eyes and human reaction times -- but automated driving is still a long way from outperforming good human judgement as things stand today.
But are self-driving cars better drivers than some identifiable other group of people than you? E.g. Legal but elderly drivers with poor sight.
Are the algorithms a useful helper for some drivers?
I really really want all our rental vehicles to remind the drivers if they are on the wrong side of the road (we get multiple deaths every year from Americans and Europeans driving incorrectly in our small country).
I expect that with time these self-driving algorithms will become safer than an increasing proportion of human drivers. I'm just very wary of assuming they are better than most or all human drivers prematurely.
We as a society have a habit of putting too much faith in technology. Most of us aren't knowledgeable and unbiased enough to assess its risks objectively, particularly in areas where there is a very low chance of something happening but it will be very bad if it does happen.
If you get into a taxi or a bus, there's still a human driver who has the same survival instinct that you have. If he has to run someone over so that he can survive, he likely will, saving you too in the process.
This isn't about systems being perfect, it's about whether the system should err on the side of protecting the car's occupants or on minimizing casualties overall.
Programmers are not going to decide what is an acceptable MPH vs posted speed or if the car will use DRM. Much like how programmers at Volkswagen, Audi, etc are not the ones that chose to cheat emissions tests.
The real choice is going to be what to do about soft obstacles. Hitting a person or deer can easily kill passengers and hitting trees is actually normally safer thus making the discussion fairly moot.
People are going to want to hack self driving cars so they can speed, which is more inline with this moral discussion. Not because it's safe for passengers, but because it's also dangerous for other people.
Programmers have to make decisions about those things all the time. It isn't like the product team defines every nitty-gritty detail of implementation -- especially for machine learning and AI algorithms.
A lot of AI is based around training sets not traditional Algorithms like your thinking of. There are simply to many edge cases to deal with by hand. Yes, there is also a lot of hand coding in these systems, but good training sets are very critical.
The choice of those training sets, including their contents, their size, how they are consumed, and the algorithms they are fed to, affects the output. Therefore, programmers make decisions. It is unavoidable.
Even if they weren't, it is unrealistic to assume that programmers have no input into the decisions that go into building the training set, which in this case involves where, and in what conditions, the prototype cars are driven.
Granted, though plenty of Uber drivers are probably also programmers, and I have made plenty of business decisions I probably should not have. But, I would hope this is held to a higher standard.
If the cars obey the posted speed limit and slow down and split-the-difference when on curves or near hazards (such as children running on the sidewalk), the hypothetical moral dilemmas shouldn't even happen. So far, I've only heard of one accident involving a Google car, and there wasn't a fatality.
Natural environment/human/animal behaviour related issues kind of throw a wrench in that idea.
Yes, in normal conditions you shouldn't ever be in a situation where the 'trolley problem' is relevant. But it's also quite easy to imagine external factors that might make it unavoidable. Like say, a car running out of power in the middle of the road, falling trees, buildings, fences or other obstacles, people or animals in the road, natural disasters or freak weather conditions.
All of these situations open up a possibility that the car won't have enough time to stop regardless of the speed limit.
Welcome to America, where a big chunk of the population thinks that caring about the environment is a scam, and pollution regulations are just a way for liberals to acquire power.
I respectfully disagree. Car crashes killed 38000 people in 2015, and injured around 8 million in the US alone. Designing any vehicle involves ethical choices about safety and the US has developed traffic laws over time to try to protect the safety of drivers.
Autonomous vehicles will surely save lives compared to thier manual counterparts, but we shouldn't discount the ethical questions involved.
Everyone has the Right to own property and to modify the property that they own. If I wanted to tear my car's muffler out and remove the break lights, that would be my constitutional right. However, the above right does not allow me to go driving on public roads at nighttime - because that would be violating other Driver's rights to safety.
It is the same concept with self driving cars, and our legal system will eventually develope an enforceable code which (hopefully) will protect the rights of everyone in an equal measure.
I totally agree that there are plenty of ethical choices in general for self-driving cars. I'm only addressing the idea that self-driving cars will need to make ethical choices about who to kill in a crash. That specific ethical conundrum is constantly brought up in discussions about autonomous vehicles, and I really don't see it happening with any frequency.
OK, but given that there will likely be vast numbers of self-driving cars (tens to hundreds of millions), 99.9999% leave room for a small but steady stream of horrific cases where the machine and its maker are called into question.
In wildly litigious societies like the USA, this could very well go beyond "not worth considering" and land firmly in the "existential threat" territory as far as self-driving car makers are concerned.
There are about 30,000 traffic fatalities per year in the US. If ethical problems come up 0.0001% of the time, then that's one ethically questionable fatality every 33 years. I think the industry can withstand this. Especially when self-driving cars drop the annual fatality rate from 30,000 to 3,000, or whatever it ends up being.
I (and the person I was responding to) was being loose with the 99.9999 % figure. That number was pulled out of thin air.
The point is there are "a lot" of cars and "many" accidents "some" of which will present an ethical challenge to self-driving cars.
It does not take many accidents for these concerns to become a big problem for auto-makers given the litigious proclivities of places like the USA. Admittedly, if it really was every "33 years" that would be a good place to be. At this point, however, it remains to be proven that self-driving cars will even lower fatality rates.
Of course it's loose and pulled out of thin air. My point is that I think the "some" crashes which present an ethical challenge will be extremely rare. One in a million is pulled from my ass, but I think it's in the right ballpark.
It's true that it's not proven that self-driving cars will lower fatality rates, but I'm perfectly comfortable with assuming they will. For one thing, nobody is going to put them in service until they're at least as safe as humans, so it's pretty much a tautology that they'll be safer; the relevant question is actually whether they'll ever be put in service. And considering how bad human drivers are, and how easily preventible many traffic fatalities are (about a third of traffic deaths in the US involve alcohol, another 10% or so involve distractions, and many others are due to something ridiculous like driving on the wrong side of the road), the bar is not really all that high. As long as self-driving cars don't get drunk, don't take their eyes off the road to text, and can reliably follow basic rules of the road, they'll already have a huge leg up.
True. But pollution does not have a direct consequence _today_. If someone were to mod so that their vehicle would make every effort to protect the occupant regardless of fault, then that could have immediate grievous consequences, although rare they might be.
Another more annoying aspect would be to mod your vehicle to have emergency vehicle preference, among other vehicles. I.e. impersonate/invehicleate (?) an emergency vehicle to get a nice right of way.
There are 109,277 workers in the US who drive to work and back on their own[1]. 6 nines means a quandry once every 10 weekdays...which I guess is actually pretty rare all things considered. Okay carry on.
Getting to your destination faster. Driving slightly faster than the speed limit, keeping less distance from cars, cutting them off, etc.
I'm not sure if anyone would be willing or able to reprogram a self driving car to do that. But I do think its plausible people would abuse self driving cars. E.g. carelessly walking into traffic knowing the self driving cars will reliably still stop and be passive.
Keep in mind that self-driving cars will be loaded with sensors. Car's will basically be running continuous surveillance on their neighbours, and any "rogue" car will probably be reported by surrounding vehicles.
>I think the ethical question is greatly overblown.
I agree, especially since when I sit on my porch I see every other person on my street texting and driving, yet no one cares about this much greater hazard.
We already have some of these issues without open source. People today modify their cars to make them perform better at the expense of violating emissions standards. It's a very tiny number of people that actually end up doing so, and they sometimes get caught and are then fined appropriately for emissions violations.
My feeling is that if there are regulations that require certain ethical behavior for self-driving cars, then there will also be periodic testing to make sure your car is in compliance. In the case of aggressive driving, we might also start to see traffic cameras doing automated detection of violations – if it sees that the gap between cars is less than 15 feet it'll take a picture of your license plate and send you a ticket (or even suspend your license until you can prove your car's software is in compliance).
But I suspect that on the whole people are going to stick with the defaults. The same sort of people who like to jailbreak their phones might mess with the software on their cars, but it will be an even smaller percentage of the population that engages in this behavior – after all, if you mess up you may not just brick your car, you might get yourself killed.
I think the smaller percentage is very time specific thing. What today looks like small percentage, over the period of time won't be the same. Need to think beyond the current scenario. As push for coding, awareness around tech growing, the future force won't be same.
I think it is pretty likely that the full self driving system will be the thing that gets licensed.
If that were the case, your exploited systems would not be licensed for operation on public roads. This can be completely orthogonal to whether you are able to modify the vehicle or not.
How would you detect these changes in a licensed system if you are allowed to modify the vehicle? If you do behavior based testing - the person will just hide the features behind a backdoor so the testing looks normal. If you do some type of checksum based testing, you have defacto made modification illegal, and it is bypassed by doing a "factory reset" prior to the licensing check, and loading the modified software after the licensing check.
If you try to do some type of remote real-time detection of an unlicensed system, software that is modified can masquerade as unmodified.
What's to stop someone from driving without a license under the current system? A bunch of cops looking for illegal and unsafe behavior. If you're driving without a license but in a manner that cannot be detected then you're not likely be causing harm anyway, so letting you "slip through the cracks" is no great loss to society.
If someone modifies their car's software to tailgate and pass other vehicles at speed on the shoulder they'll likely be detained, investigated, and prosecuted. If someone hacks their firmware causing their car to always travel 5mph under the speed limit to aid fuel efficiency then they might not get caught, but we have no reason to want to catch them anyway.
Realistically, you handle such things via deterrence. When an accident happens, the car's software can be dumped (in some cases), and criminal/civil liability can be assessed based on the results. The risk of heavy fines or jail will probably keep most people from hacking their self-driving cars to be more aggressive.
Because that threat today keeps people from modifying their cars by cutting springs, installing lift kits, putting on ridiculous wheel/tire packages, and changing to poorly "engineered" HID retrofit lighting kits.
I see unsafe modified cars almost every week right now.
Realistically, the simple fact that it will be hard to modify in fashion that doesn't break the car completely is a huge deterrent. Of course it is possible for a single individual or small group to hack the software and then distribute it like consoles hacking
The economic case for hacking them is much different, the hacker risks prenablently bricking their device, in fact it might be nessacary to destroy a couple to learn about them. It is going to be harder to do this to a $20,000 device you rely on to go to work/school. Secondly the varsity of car models is going to dwarf the number of console versions.
These two factor combine to make the hacking much more expensive and riskier.
It feels more prudent to wait and see if this becomes a problem and from that poin look at how/if to solve it. After all if a hack modifies a car's software to dive faster, accelerate faster, or something similar. You can do as the OP suggested and set up cammeras to record traffic and see who is driving a car that behaves out of spec and go arrest them.
Those kinds of modifications are of a completely different category than modifications to an autonomous driving system. There aren't serious civil or criminal penalties to deter "ridiculous wheel/tire packages" because they don't really have the same potential to cause serious problems.
I don't think it is really that complicated. On boot, a piece of embedded software (that can't be overwritten) does a checksum of the current software installed. If the checksum doesn't match the original, then it sets an internal bit to 1 to mark that the software has been changed. That internal bit can't be set back to 0, so the car is essentially marked as non-licensed and now can't be legally driven on the road.
Checking for non-licensed modifications is simply checking if that bit is set. Implementation would be a little more complex then the above, but similar technology already exists and is in use. The result is that modifications would be possible, but driving the resulting car on public roads would not.
A system for allowing new software to be placed on a car could be setup, but it would still require re-licensing the whole car so it wouldn't necessarily be an easy process.
This wouldn't solve that problem either. The way around it would be to make a look-alike module that replaces the current driving system entirely (hardware and all) and lets you swap them around during license checks. It'd also impede legitimate updates from the manufacturer, and violate laws that many states have that require that cars be fixable by non-dealer mechanics.
Those issues also exist with human driven cars. Every driver today already controls how their car is driven. Many of them do not maintain a safe following distance and some refuse to pull over upon police request. We have systems to deal with bad drivers.
A police remote engine kill switch doesn't even require a self-driving car. Limiting engine power upon receipt of a radio signal has been technologically possible for decades.
On a liability case, wouldn't it potentially be to the company's advantage to encourage people to set those settings themselves and not to have a default?
I mean, if a company programs the car to do something in a certain situation, then I suspect any resulting court case would be against the company. If the customer sets it up, then presumably people would be more likely to sue the car owner.
I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect no self driving car company would want to make any decision here. Not least because they don't want to be sued into oblivion for it.
Also, a lot of those situations you mention are avoidable for open source. Well, avoidable in that you simply write the laws to specify the buffer space or what not. Then it doesn't matter whether it's an open source user or hacker that's ignored them.
I think it should be expected that once the software/firmware of a self-driving car has been modified by someone not authorized by the car maker, it should be expected that the car maker is not responsible for that car any more. Of course it brings up the problem of whether it is possible to detect such a modification.
Liability is the least important part of this problem. It doesn't matter who is liable, the problem is a conflict of philosophies. On one side we want to ensure the safety of the public, on the other we want to have full control over the equipment we own.
This isn't the first time this question has come up. It comes up with firearms for example, regarding how you can and cannot modify on a firearm you legally purchased.
IMO you should be able to modify your car's autopilot however you want to... at the expense of being able to legally drive it on roads. We already have fairly strict legal requirements in place for you to be able to take a 2+ ton death machine on wheels and travel in it at high speeds on public roads.
And also whether the modification is relevant the the problem. I can imagine court cases where the driver argues that the change they made was irrelevant to the accident that occurred.
This sort of issue has already been tested in court and, at least here in Europe, generally seems to follow common sense. For example, if a new top-of-the-range smartphone suffers a hardware failure after 3 months, the manufacturer can't disclaim any responsibility for that and exempt themselves from our normal consumer protection standards just because the owner had flashed custom firmware onto their device (unless the custom firmware was actually a causal factor in the failure, presumably, though I'm not sure that scenario has been tested in court yet).
Right, and unlike a lot of other cases with software, how this was decided might actually result in jail time. For example if a modification was deemed negligent and resulted in the death of a person, whoever made/authorized the modifications could be charged with manslaughter/murder.
> A manufacturer can hardly argue that they have a safety reason to keep you from repairing your TV, printer, or cell phone.
The safety argument can easily go the other way. If you see your car misbehaving then you should have the right to understand why and fix it before it kills someone.
And if you find a legitimate bug you may end up saving a thousand lives.
A manufacturer can hardly argue that they have a safety reason to keep you from repairing your TV, printer, or cell phone.
I believe this is not the strongest argument to make. There are plenty of products that do have legitimate safety or other regulatory concerns, where there is a good reason to prevent someone who doesn't know what they're doing from meddling.
However, the relevant point is whether they know what they're doing, not whether they have the blessing of the manufacturer. I tend to think that saying devices in regulated fields can only be modified by someone suitably qualified and experienced is reasonable, but that in such a case the owner and the qualified person modifying the owner's device should not be artificially constrained through things like unnecessary regulation or intellectual property laws.
There are also ethical and economic questions around supporting fair competition in markets for replacement parts from alternative sources or examination and modification of source code in the case of software. On the one hand, we do have IP laws to encourage creators to create and to protect them from someone ripping off all their hard work the day after their multi-year, multi-billion R&D exercise finishes. On the other hand, those laws aren't supposed to be there so an inventor can sell an artificially crippled product and then charge extortionate rates for servicing , replacement parts or essential updates to correct defects in the original product. There's a lot of room for progress in this kind of area today, IMHO.
> There are plenty of products that do have legitimate safety or other regulatory concerns, where there is a good reason to prevent someone who doesn't know what they're doing from meddling.
Some of the high voltage tubes in old televisions could generate dangerous amounts of x-rays and so the manufacturers had to include shielding to keep those x-rays from escaping from the television.
Someone futzing around in there without understanding this could damage or remove that shielding making that TV dangerous for those who are merely trying to use it.
In the mid 1960s, GE sold about 90000 televisions that had a manufacturing problem with the shielding. These televisions were emitting something like 10000 times more x-rays than were considered acceptable for a consumer device. They were mostly emitted downward toward the front so most adult users of these televisions would not have been harmed, but kids often sat right in front of the TV and so were right in the path of the x-rays. GE successfully recalled and fixed most of these televisions.
This incident is probably the origin of the myth that sitting too close to the television is bad for children's eyes.
Why on earth should society allow (i.e. license) a randomly-modified software agent to operate a motor vehicle? The idea that any "hacker" has the right to arbitrarily change vehicular self-control software and deploy that on a public roadway is laughable.
Like the steering wheel that's deployed on all public roadways right now?
I'm struggling to see the substantial difference between "self driving car with modified software should be disallowed because safety" and "manually driven car should be disallowed because safety".
I find this to be an absolutely ridiculous statement. Software as we know it today is incredibly brittle. What will eventually be put on the road as fully autonomous vehicular control software will have been HEAVILY QA'ed, and will be continuously QAed by telemetry. Random people modifying that software invalidate any proof-of-safety from the upstream QA and monitoring processes.
> The human attention span is incredibly brittle as well.
I think that's sort of proving their point? Like the point should be to replace brittleness with reliability, not replicate it with software.
I thought the entire point of computer driven cars was to reduce the dangers of driving. What exactly is the point if we give everyone with a self driving car a steering wheel like they have now?
If that is the entire point, I'd rather they be illegal altogether, and we could avoid the debate by saying that we only license human drivers. I thought the entire point was to lower the costs of transportation and lower the number of cars on the road. The dangers of driving are not great enough to give up individual agency to that degree.
Oh yeah they only kill over 30,000 people a year needlessly. Those lives don't matter I guess. Licensure doesn't stop drunk drivers and cost cutting isn't nearly a good enough incentive. Plus if you're lowering the number of cars on the road that suggests a certain level of centralization for the purposes of routing optimization. At that point, why not? Is your individual agency worth multiple other peoples' lives? You seem to be privileging fate over human life.
And I'm not saying your agency isn't worth other peoples' lives, but the argument that this doesn't matter because it would be rare is silly. It's still a decision that will have to be made and it's an interesting question nonetheless.
> I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues...
I think those issues are red-herrings. We already have the tools to deal with bad actors in the commons. We already allow people to 'tune' their non-AI cars (and in the process its possible to exceed the pollution limits). The solution is to allow modification, but in an auditable and measurable process similar to Android's "fastboot oem unlock". AI cars should possibly be able to mark human-driven & non-stock-AI-driven cars and respond accordingly. This is assuming all cars will have a standard AI, otherwise the AIs will need to treat all the other AI-cars as black boxes - if a Toyota AI can't predict the behaviour of a Dodge AI car, then a 'tuned' AI shouldn't be treated any different.
> There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for their car to always favor the people in the car no matter what?
How does this differ from those people making the same choice behind the wheel?
To me, the issue isn't the trolley problem: we haven't come up with a definitive answer for that since it was proposed in 1967 and I doubt we will before self-driving cars are commonplace. The question for me is: when my car is confronted with the trolley problem (and many others), is the decision made by me or by a corporation?
With regards to cars, the right to have an independent shop perform routine maintenance and repair without violating warranty does need to be preserved. As to modify, well I would think that should vacate any warranty and possibly liability as it is now beyond the manufacturers control. This will mean preventing manufacturers from creating costly interfaces to retrieve status codes from cars and their self driving systems.
The issue with modifying self driving algorithm's is that will be so complex as to be nearly impossible to modification and since they are so tightly linked to the safe operation of the vehicle I can expect we will see legislation to prevent it. However such legislation should not preclude being able to view it.
* disclaimer to right of repair comments, I work for major after market supplier to consumers and business in the automotive sector
Would you be the first to volunteer to have your car sacrifice you to save other people's lives? Of course they should not kill the driver, but an alternative shouldn't be to plow into a crowd or another car. My guess is the algorithm can simply be coded to minimize damage and death as best as we can do, and the robot will see it that way, not as "sacrifice the driver to save other people", and hopefully the law will see it that way too.
It strikes me that once we get to a point of autonomous driving why won't law enforcement be autonomous, a network of sensors along our road network that receive pings from all passing vehicles. Anything that causes your vehicle to deviate from its specification e.g. modding would flag you on the system.
More than this -- what even is software? A lot of the work we've seen with self driving cars is based on "AI" (machine learning). Much of the software is useless without the model, or the training data. I can certainly see a company making the case that it is not software even if the rest is OSS.
"In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for their car to always favor the people in the car no matter what?"
... which would return us to the "software" that we're all already running.
"In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for their car to always favor the people in the car no matter what?"
Wait a sec....isn't this what human drivers do already, favor their own vehicles?
Realistically no. Human drivers react based on instict often on a subconscious level where they don't have time to think about all the possible outcomes.
Companies are spending billions of dollars in r&d to build self driving cars and you think a hobbiest is going to modify his car with his own "aggressive" self driving system?
If you don't want a catalytic converter on your car for performance or intentionally running rich a/f mix etc.. you can put the O2 sensor into a "spark plug tool" that'll trick the O2 sensor into thinking all is well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqDmmLQ4pGk
Hacks are not required to be sophisticated to be effective and people will find them. Maybe for example if you place a 1/4 inch of extra plastic in front of the front facing radar it'll make the car follow more aggressively then it's calibrated for, who knows! that's a made up example but I expect this stuff is going to happen as it already does.
This was a hugely frustrating thing for me recently.
I picked up a used Pioneer AVR on eBay a few years ago and had no issues with it until I decided to plug my wife's older plasma television in because my main TV decided to take up an unusual smoking habit. It refused to connect to the new TV, indicating an HDCP error, despite working when plugged directly in to any of the attached devices. A quick google search yielded the likely culprit: my firmware was out of date. This model was one version behind but, unfortunately, was one model-year behind the ones that allowed for online updates. So I called Pioneer and was told they do not provide firmware updates directly to consumers and I could only get a firmware update from an authorized repair center. Besides the added frustration of having to disconnect the 30 or so cables, cart this thing across town, then come back at a later date to pick it up and plug it all back in, the fee was going to be half of what I had paid for the thing in the first place. So DRM caused a product I'm using legally to fail and the simple software fix was not allowed to be applied by me.
After following several dead links, I managed to find a forum where someone posted a Dropbox link to the firmware, making me a firmware pirate (aaarr!). This incredibly technical process that can only be performed at an authorized service center? Extract a file to a USB key, insert said key, turn on device while holding down two buttons and wait until the screen says it's done.
Pioneer's approach here succeeded in making me a "former customer" at some point in the future since the firmware update fixed my problem.
Capitalism is the art of getting as much money out of you as possible without getting a class action lawsuit.
We hope most Pioneers customers do the same as you but I bet they don't, they think a year is enough value for the product. Pioneers work is to further reduce the time their products are expected to function.
Nearly sent milk out my nose with your quote, though it got me thinking.
Planned obsolescence, as highlighted by the article, is certainly nothing new but it seems to be an ever growing trend in parts of the CE space that once valued reliability. As customers have become more used to replacing expensive gadgets (smartphones/PCs come to mind) every few years because the new ones are faster and more capable, they've begun to value reliability less. The problem is that there are large and growing segments in the space that don't warrant replacement so frequently. My AVR is seven years old, does 9.1 audio, decodes every major format[0] and supports all of the HDMI features of the television I have plugged in to it. My 1080p plasma television is among the final generation, doesn't suffer from screen burn despite being used 90% of the time for gaming, produces a better picture (color and screen consistency) than the LCD it replaced and is nearly impossible to find a "new" replacement for. It was also among the least expensive 1080p televisions available at the time it was purchased since plasma was on its way out.
Arguments that "these things are much more complex to repair these days" are no longer true with the hundreds of YouTube videos, web sites and forums dedicated to repairing products so it really does appear to be manufacturers imposing artificial constraints on product lifetime in order to encourage high repair fees or premature replacement with newer models in categories of products that don't have a natural replacement cycle beyond the failure cycle.
The ability to repair a device and its reliability is quickly becoming a required feature in this home. Assuming it's a product I won't replace until it fails, this experience has caused me to research products over a certain price more thoroughly to identify those with a large community behind them, a long warranty, and a flexible repair policy.
[0] Nearly every new device I plug in causes the receiver to jump to PCM mode because the decoders are being built in to the devices. Considering the ability to decode every common audio format was a major feature I purchased it for, and a feature that would cause me to replace it, it's going to remain in my living room even longer if it doesn't fail. Unless I replace the television with something that requires an HDMI spec beyond what the device can handle (and I don't see getting a 4K TV for that room, so that's safe), grow ears that can discern a tenth channel (or the room changes in some unexpected way allowing a tenth or eleventh speaker to fit somewhere), or end up buying four more devices to plug in to it, it will be replaced only when it fails.
I used to do after-market repair medical equipment (MRI's, CT's, X-Ray, etc). One of the biggest frustrations was:
$manufacturer wants $5000 to repair a CT. We'd charge $1000.
We'd repair the CT, and it would pass all the built-in diagnostic tests. But then when the customer went to make a scan, a pop-up would appear saying "Unauthorized Repair! Call $manufacturer to fix!".
$manufacturer repair tech would come in, plug in a usb-key, type a code, and charge $1000. They didn't run any of the diagnostics, and were basically paid to keep the usb-key available.
I believe in the right to repair, because preventing it just causes artificial monopolies and price-gouging.
(note: I don't remember actual prices. Numbers were just made up)
So, if you do an after-market repair on a medical device, and a patient dies as a result of poor device performance, who does the FDA usually come after, you or the device manufacturer?
I suspect the liability for medical device mess-ups is at least partially responsible for that situation. The tech who didn't run any diagnostics would be in serious shit if a patient died after he did nothing aside from typing in the error-clearing code on your repair.
In many cases, the FDA requires the device manufacturer to maintain training records and updated repair procedures for any repair shop doing repairs on their devices. This could be the source of that error message.
To be honest, I'm not sure. I was a level-of-separation away, so I never really had to worry about it personally. I'd imagine both will end up in the lawsuit, at least partially.
FWIW, we did keep updated records on all the work that was done on the machine, for this exact reason. We also had to have records of passed diagnostics.
> So, if you do an after-market repair on a medical device, and a patient dies as a result of poor device performance, who does the FDA usually come after, you or the device manufacturer?
I don't know the answer to that question. But I do hope it is "the party that was negligent".
>$manufacturer repair tech would come in, plug in a usb-key, type a code, and charge $1000. They didn't run any of the diagnostics, and were basically paid to keep the usb-key available.
How is that legal? I sincerely hope that would not survive a civil suit. Though it could be that hospitals are weary of suing their suppliers for various reasons.
Pretty scary that they don't run a diagnostic pass - I wonder, if the repair was bad and caused human injury/death, who would be liable? Company X did the repair, but $manufacturer basically certified it.
It could be that the unit keeps track of when diagnostics were performed and the results, and the "Unauthorized repaid, call manufacturer to fix" only happens on units that already had diagnostics performed after the repair and passed.
Sure, in this case. But remember, the $1000 is made up (because I don't remember), and completely arbitrary. Paying $1000 for no actual work being done is BS IMO.
I think electronics should be designed for repair and easy recycling as a main design goal.
For example a cell phone, you could build it with an aluminum back
with small phillips screws instead of glued back. Open the phone up with a standard screw driver and you will be able to replace the battery, main board and screen yourself.
What kind of environment do you want to leave for future generations. A big pile of electronic garbage or a world as clean as it could be? What about the carbon foot print of upgrade phones every two years?
If we can reuse electronics components the garbage foot print should be smaller.
Why do we have to throw a working screen and battery in a cell phone if you just want to upgrade the cpu speed or camera of your phone?
How about laws that require that consumers should be able to repair their things, average life time.
Good projects on the right path so far
Google has Project Ara
Fairphone2
I don't mind them gluing things like the battery in since it make for a more rigid phone provided they use a glue that a moderate amount of heat can greatly weaken.
The problem with upgrading parts of something like a phone is that the components interfaces change frequently. Even desktop cpu/memory sockets change every few years.
Compact form factors are worse as you dont have room for the connector, and for the larger components they are like the engine in a F1 car, a important structural piece.
I do like the concept of Ara, but I don't think it will be practical anytime soon.
>For example a cell phone, you could build it with an aluminum back with small phillips screws instead of glued back. Open the phone up with a standard screw driver and you will be able to replace the battery, main board and screen yourself.
You don't need screws on the back. The Samsung Galaxy phones (particularly the S4, S5, and S7) do just fine with a snap-on back. The S5 in particular is nicely water-resistant, even though the back is snap-on and can be removed with your fingernail.
I guess an aluminum back might be nice for ruggedness, but as Samsung shows, screws aren't really necessary. It's entirely possible to design something made of inexpensive plastic that works great, is waterproof, and just snaps together, and can be opened and re-snapped together countless times without breakage.
As someone who came of tinkering age in the early 70s and spend lots of time taking apart and repairing old machines, I wish to express another concern. How do we expect to hook the next generation of engineers if there is no opportunity to tinker as a child? For me that spark (excuse the pun) definitely came from those early "break it/fix it" sessions. Is tinkering going to be relegated to playing with the public APIs of our devices? I assume that most devices don't have public APIs - you need to get a dev license and sign an NDA. What ten year old is going to do that? Will only the children of engineers at major tech companies be able to tinker? I see bad unintended long term consequences for our society.
This is a very important point. Children can't learn from magical slabs that can't be opened.
That said, my personal view is that you should never buy toys. You should build them. There are two important reasons for this: first, as you say kids need to learn how to disassemble and reassemble things. Home-made toys are going to fit that bill nicely. Second, kids need to not learn consumerist habits at a young age. Toys are easy (and fun) to make at home, and, like food, much better (and better for you).
As for computers, I'm not excited about my kids even seeing a screen, which obviates the problem of disassembling a magical, sealed slab in the first place. When they are old enough (10+) perhaps I'll let them play with discrete electronics on a breadboard. :)
I definitely agree with your point, but I must say that I would have loved to be able to play with Arduinos and Android programming when I was a kid.
There are so many amazing things you can do nowadays for not much money that it is still so much better for kids now in terms of tinkering IMO. You can order so many cheap boards on ebay from China, it's crazy. When I was a kid it was impossible to find datasheets for anything, now you can find more information than anyone can handle on the internet for free.
You can even watch youtube videos on how to hack all those NDA locked things.
It's not just tinkerers who suffer. At our university research group we're doing ultra high speed OCT imaging research. Without going into full details, let it just sink in that were're fully saturating two PCI-E x8 Gen3 toward GPU cards in a continuous stream. Since CUDA-5 there's an API that allows direct DMA between the GPU and whatever device you can write drivers for.
This opens an interesting opportunity: Put the ADC and the GPU into an external PCI-E enclosure with a PCI-E crossbar switch (PLX/Avago makes those). Unfortunately there are no existing enclosures that support the number of slots and the PCI-E generation required for that.
But what the heck, we've got all the tools here required to design, and more importantly troubleshoot such a design. I've got a 4ch 35GHz bandwidth Oscilloscope at my disposal here and there's be a >60GHz one at the lab soon, too. Also all the kinds of probes required. And being a radio amateur with interest in microwave operation there's also the technical background. A quick search at Mouser and Digikey reveals, that they even have all the right ICs in stock. So all I need is electrical specifications for what to keep in mind, pin outs, and some programming manuals for the controller.
Now there are two options to go about this: Using External-PCI-E connection (adapters for which for some reason have become hard to come in the past 2 years) or Thunderbolt. So I thought, hmm, it's worth a try getting in touch with them (heck, some guy at HN actually suggestest I should get in touch with the Thunderbolt groups). Here's the reply in verbatim:
> Dear Wolfgang,
>
> Thank you for your interest in Thunderbolt™ technology. Due to resource
> constraints we are not able to approve Individuals or institutions to sign
> the Thunderbolt Technology License that is required for access to Thunderbolt
> Confidential documentation. As our resources improve we hope to be able to
> allow individuals or educational access.
>
> You may find the attached Intel Developer Forum presentation from August 2015 helpful.
>
> If there is a specific Thunderbolt product you are trying to bring to market please let us know.
>
> Thank you and best regards,
> Thunderbolt Admin
Yeah, thank you very much.
It always puzzles me why hardware companies, who want to _sell_ their stuff or proliferate their newest kind of technology makes it so awfully hard for independent developers, engineers, researchers and tinkerers to actually make use of it in their products.
As far as I can tell there's not really much on the Thunderbolt market available right now. A few storage enclosures, NICs, single slot PCI-E enclosures and the occassional novelty audio interface. You can, in fact, enumerate all existing products that use Thunderbolt technology on the Thunderbolt website itself.
In a broader sense the same problems also hold for PCI-E and PCI (fortunately the specifications for those float around the web, you can find them if you want to) and "standard" links like DisplayPort and HDMI.
And apart from the whole hardware building aspect, there's also the software aspect. Hey you various printer and scanner manufactureres out there (I'm looking at you EPSON, Canon, Samsung, Brother, Kyocera, etc.) you want me to buy your stuff. So how about you also tell me how to talk to it, once I've bought it. You know, drivers are not really terribly complicated things. Yes I understand you may have some secrets in your drivers. I don't want to get the sources to _your_ drivers, I want to write my own. Oh I could damage my hardware you say? What problem is that for you, you should be happy, I might buy another pice from you. I think it has to do with the fact, that you're selling the very same piece of hardware in different feature editions for different prices and you don't want to tell people that plainly.
That article doesn't mention leasing, but that seems like a reasonable compromise. If you, as a manufacturer, are hell-bent on locking down your firmware and parts supply, then you have to stop pretending that you're selling anything. Only providing leasing is a way to be honest with customers about your intent.
I am super hardcore stallman-esque pro openness, but I also have somewhat libertarian views on how people should be allowed to operate.
My thinking is: let them lock them down and after a few years, someone who genuinely values openness will come in as a competitor. If you pass a law requiring some kind of openness, companies against openness will just hang out at the edge of what is legally permissible.
I am curious what the HN crowd thinks of this, if a legislative solution could be desirable, and why.
"My thinking is: let them lock them down and after a few years, someone who genuinely values openness will come in as a competitor."
To me this is akin to "let them do the bad thing, someone will surely come in in no time and the problems will disappear on their own"! Well, first, this is not (at least to me) an issue that we're not sure yet if it's good or bad and will know only when we'll have a competitor doing it differently to serve as a comparison base. This is a clear cut condemnable practice from the manufacturer's part, which does not have a positive impact for the society at large. We don't have to wait and let it happen. Second, if we'll let it be long enough, it'll get ingrained into culture. Then, even if future competition is to pop up, they won't have to only deal with an existing powerful monopoly living off a large margin or system, they'll have to also deal with how things got accustomed to be done (and a successful full scale disruption is never easy nor guaranteed). If you need an example for this, just look at the struggle electric vehicles manufacturers had (or still have) to endure.
> let them lock them down and after a few years, someone who genuinely values openness will come in as a competitor.
I once read somewhere that it takes 13 years to bring a new combine to market, which I can believe. They are complex machines that can only be tested in real world conditions during the relatively short window of harvest. So, in reality, it might be more than a few years before a competitor can arise (assuming none of the existing players are willing to be that competitor) even with sufficient investment.
I think it is tricky. One outcome would be, like you said, a competitor showing up, offering more open goods. Another is no competitor showing up at all. People won't suddenly stop buying tractors or phones just because they're in fact being leased. They'll adapt, and in few years people will honestly say there's no demand on the market for owning products. People choose only from what's available.
The problem is already a legislative one. Copyright law is being abused to deny ownership of physical objects. The problem is already directly caused by law.
This is a good point. I am generally anti-copyright but that view is somewhat recent and I still sometimes have an internalized belief that copyright is natural. However we invented copyright and I do think we should either go to something like 5 year terms or eliminate it completely.
I completely forgot that without copyright, this issue would be dramatically different. They could still use obscurity to a point, but we would have the legal right to discover what they are doing and reproduce it.
The problem is that, like most libertarian ideas, this just doesn't work in the real world. There's a such thing as "barrier to entry", so for something like a really simple smartphone app, this kind of thinking works decently because it's easy for a college student to code up an alternative program in his spare time, but for something like a giant piece of farming equipment, there just aren't many companies able and willing to jump in there, and put up a ton of money and then develop a good product fast enough to overcome the incumbents' first-mover advantage and inertia.
In short, if this theory actually worked, someone would have already done it. Instead, large established incumbents are mostly moving to this kind of behavior, because it's more profitable for them, even though it screws over their customers. When the customers have no viable alternatives, the customers aren't going to stop being customers. This is basically why we need laws for things in the first place: you can't trust people to act in the best interests of society (they don't: they're greedy), and the real world is too complex for "the invisible hand" to solve these problems through competition.
A good example of all this is Tesla cars: some people have been screaming for electric cars for decades, even resorting to building their own. The incumbent automakers did some half-assed attempts, mainly to please regulators in California, but never invested any serious effort into it. So finally an independently wealthy guy comes along and decides to make his own car company. (And even here people have a lot of complaints: Teslas are extremely locked-down and they'll threaten you for plugging into the Ethernet port.) Building a modern car just isn't that easy, even if you eliminate the gas-powered engine, and not many people or companies have the resources to jump in and have a go at it, so competition is naturally limited.
So yes, a legislative solution is highly desirable IMO. We've been down this road before: carmakers refused to honor warranties on vehicles if they were repaired or maintained outside of official dealerships, or with non-OEM parts. This necessitated passing the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, which forbade this practice, and only allowed manufacturers to refuse to honor warranty claims if they could prove that an owner's modifications or use of improper parts directly caused the problem. There is also a "right to repair" law in Massachusetts, which forces the aforementioned Tesla to make available factory repair manuals in that state (at a ridiculous cost though), but they only make them available within that state, and no other. What we really need is a federal law that goes much further than MA's law. Small business is the largest employer in this nation by far, and independent repair shops are being forced out of business by these consumer-unfriendly practices. The right to repair isn't just for end-users, it also gives end-users the ability to benefit from competition among repair shops, something you don't get if you can only go to official manufacturer shops. Anyone with libertarian leanings should appreciate this, and the benefit to small business.
I know a John Deere dealer in Northern Ireland who is considering moving to another brand because of this.
As he puts it the people he deals with "would burn him alive" if they couldn't fiddle around with their own equipment. Farmers with livelihoods on the line tend to get rather angry when their equipment plays up.
For me, Apple devices are always what come to mind when thinking about ability to repair and modify. I used to not mind when I couldn't open my iPod Classic to replace the battery, because failures like this rarely occurred and when they did Apple repaired them easily. Today however, when something as trivial as a computer memory upgrade is restricted, and the Genius Bar is overloaded with iPhone screen repairs, I find myself wanting some sort of standards with regards to repair rights.
You can replace your battery, it just takes a bit of time and effort. Ditto the screen. RAM is tough because it's soldered in, but at least they have a good excuse for making the batteries and RAM that way: they want to make their stuff smaller.
Right to Repair did show up pretty loudly with Apple devices when the Error 53 controversy happened, where people's phones would refuse to boot after having the home button replaced. Thankfully, it appears this was an honest mistake and it has been fixed. It does show how losing the Right to Repair would actually look, though: not just stuff that's hard to replace because of design constraints, but devices which arbitrarily refuse to accept unauthorized replacement parts.
iPhones are reasonably easy to repair some of the major components still, but Apple laptops have been getting worse in that regard, with batteries glued in and unserviceable, etc.
Right or wrong, if consumers have the choice between a thinner, lighter laptop with better battery life and a more clunky laptop that is easier to repair, most appear to be choosing the former over the latter.
Consumers have very little choice. Especially with Apple, which releases whatever it wants and people buy it anyway. But with laptops and smartphones and other electronics, the "choice" often is that some phone operator or big electronics store chain randomly decides it's "Thin Device Era™" or something, and discounts a particular subset of devices. And people don't wait forever to buy a new device, they usually need one "right fucking now", so they choose from what's available.
Glue allows them to attach battery to the body. Macbook's battery is not single piece, rather is few batteries connected with each other shaped in a ways that allow them to fill all empty space within the body.
Some other current models achieve this in a different manner, with a molded cage that holds the individual batteries in place throughout the body but can be removed.
There are tons of third party repair shops for iPhone. It's also easy to do at home, I replaced my battery not too long ago.
Apple definitely has that reputation, but I don't think its deserved in my experience. They user manuals for machines with replaceable parts often describe exactly how to do it. For other things that require a tiny bit of skill or where an unskilled person could easily mess things up, they put up a minor barrier like a different screw head, the tool for which will often ship with replacement parts.
It's absolutely deserved. The things that are officially user serviceable now are very minimal, and the tamper-resistant screws and glues used aren't to protect devices from their users (which would also be a bad idea), they're to prevent people from taking advantage of a cheaper alternative to paying Apple for out of warranty repair service. You cannot buy things like batteries from Apple, and Apple will not provide you with tools to bypass their tamper-resistance efforts. Only third party sources will do that.
Even when others cared and decried the walled gardens...
...I used to not mind when I couldn't open my iPod Classic to replace the battery, because failures like this rarely occurred and when they did Apple repaired them easily...
...then when I started to need to care, there were no brands left that cared for me.
I've never gone to the genius bar to get stuff done because of this. There is always an enterprising college student (often ex-Apple) willing to get just about anything done on the cheap, on my time.
Honestly, most products are becoming so integrated, and so delicate, that "repair" means "replace the one expensive bit."
Couple that with every lighter, ever thinner, ever flimsier, glue based laminated construction, needed to hit market size and weight requirements, and you get absolutely no economic sense in designing for, or supporting, repair.
In a sense, it's our growing skill at mass fabrication, and the growing cost of skilled human knowledge workers, that is driving this "not economically repairable" phenomenon.
Do we really want heavier, clunkier, more expensive things, that can be repaired? The planet may approve, but the Wall Mart shopper sure doesn't!
Wall Mart shoppers are reactive, they buy what they're told to buy.
The funny thing about mass fabrication is, that it can make pretty much anything equally well. It's disconnected from the actual "meaning" of the product being manufactured. So if someone were to design a phone that's fully user-serviceable, with all components replaceable and swappable for third-party products, Chinese factories would not care. They'd make it just as easily as they make iPhones now.
I'm pretty sure people would buy such a phone if a big enough company decided to do that and put their marketing department to work. General population buys what it is told to buy.
No need for a "Right" to repair. What is needed is abolishment of intellectual property laws which allow companies to claim what you think is your legitimately purchased property. The core problem with intellectual property is that it trumps physical property.
Companies shouldn't be forced by government to make repairable devices. A better way would be some sort of "Repair Coalition" of consumers and companies which agree to boycott unrepairable products and respectively produce repairable products with instructions.
That's the point of invented rights in a nutshell, to weaken the real actual rights, while bribing people into the illusion that they are better off that way.
If substantial numbers of consumers are demanding fixable/open electronics, a manufacturer could comply and fill a great need! My guess is that market is v small. Regulation is unneccessary here.
If the market has failed to protect a right that is important, that's exactly when regulation is necessary.
Handling the constant failures and disasters created by the market to the detriment of the populace is the purpose of regulations and the entire justification of the mixed economy model every modern society operates under.
You do not have a right to require manufacturers to create repairable items. If you think such a right exists, prove it.
That's what this "right" to repair really is -- it is forcing manufacturers to make things that they don't currently make, and that most people don't want to buy. (If people wanted to buy them, someone would already be selling them and making money on that segment of the market.)
In effect, this would be the government taking action to promote the personal preferences of a small number of consumers. (If the number of consumers who wanted repairable products was not small, manufacturers would already be making such products by choice, and government action would not be necessary.)
When the government starts forcing manufacturers to make things that people don't want to buy, something has gone pretty wrong.
The right to complete ownership of an item you paid full price on. More and more manufacturers want to erode this right and make it "illegal" for people to repair products they paid for. Did you not read the article?
Ownership is not all-encompassing. For example, it would be illegal for me to make and sell copies of the books I own. It would also be illegal for me to drive over the speed limit in the car I own. If I owned a gun, I couldn't just shoot anyone I wanted.
What makes you certain that the right to repair something is a built-in feature of ownership, when ownership clearly does not confer all possible rights?
So first, you produce an example that literally has nothing to do with repair. Then your point about the gun is even more absurd. Depriving somebody else of their right to life has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about here. Sorry, you will have to excuse me as I have better things to do and do not wish to engage you further.
Those examples demonstrate that ownership does not automatically give one the right to do whatever they want with the things they own. Therefore, one cannot assume that any right, including one to repair the things you own, is in the category of rights automatically granted by ownership. After all, not even making copies is in that category. Why would repair be?
Shooting someone is not "doing whatever you want with the things you own". Neither is copying a book. Both require that you commit an unrelated crime -- one by creating an entirely new object which violates the law, the other by committing assault with this object as you could with any other.
Isn't that the parent's point? If copying a book you own can be a crime, so can repairing an item you own. Both restrictions are equally arbitrary. While only one of those may be illegal today, there is no reason they couldn't both be illegal tomorrow. There is nothing inherit to ownership that prevents the latter from becoming a crime at some point.
Why do you think the government regulates food labels? Clearly, no one wants to buy food with standardized labels, the government is just forcing it on us poor citizens, right?
If you are actually arguing that any government policy that requires companies to modify their products in a way that they weren't already doing is bad, you have created a very difficult position for yourself to defend.
> If you are actually arguing that any government policy that requires companies to modify their products in a way that they weren't already doing is bad, you have created a very difficult position for yourself to defend.
I don't know why you interpret my argument that way. It's not a blanket statement against government regulation of products, and none of what I wrote can logically necessitate or lead to that position. Government regulations can be good or bad, and it is entirely logical to oppose some and not others.
My argument is that the government should not regulate products on the basis of made-up "rights" that are really proxies for personal preference, e.g. "I like to be able to repair products I buy, therefore the government should force companies to make their products easy for me to repair, because so few consumers share my preference that the companies won't do it on their own volition."
The "right" to repair one's own stuff is as made-up as the "right" to encumber products with repair-resistant features.
This is not a question of what's etched into stone tablets somewhere, it's a question of what we value as society. When what people want to do conflicts with what companies want people to do, who gets to win? The simplistic answer is to just throw your hands up and "let the market decide." But the market is not always correct, which is why we have warning labels on cigarettes and why companies can't dump industrial waste into the closest river. Society decided that we have a made-up right to be informed about dangerous products and a made-up right to not have to drink arsenic.
The argument put forward here is that our made-up right to be able to repair our own stuff is more valuable than some company's made-up right to stop us.
All rights are manmade. Rights are social constructs. I'm not looking for stone tablets anywhere. But simply saying that a right exists does not make it so. If that is all it takes, please excuse me for a moment while I go declare, and then exercise, my right to rob a bank.
Like any social construct, a right exists when it is broadly accepted as a fact and is operational within society. It helps if you make it a law, too.
Don't provide truisms about why the market is not always correct. That doesn't prove anything. You need to prove that this particular circumstance, of repairability in products, is one of the times when the market is not correct.
On the contrary, a company's right to encumber products with repair-resistant features is not a imaginary or asserted right -- it is protected by laws which have been passed for that purpose, such as the DMCA in the case of DRM, which have been challenged and upheld in court. So this is really about an imaginary right to repair versus an actual, legal, broadly recognized right to encumber.
For the entire history of the United States, it has been the case that when you buy a product, you may repair it. You may disassemble it. You may do as you like with devices that you purchase. It was never illegal to take apart a musket. It was never illegal to fix a broken wheel on a carriage. It was never illegal to replace a piece of the electronics on a radio with a new piece. But now it is. What is "broadly accepted as fact" is that if you purchase an item, it belongs to you, and you may take it apart, fix it, modify it, as you like. It is fundamentally "weird" and new to people (and the only people aware of these laws are the ones unlucky enough to run up against them), the notion that you can simultaneously own an item and be locked in a cage for taking it apart. It disassembles and redefines ownership in a fundamental way, and ownership is a fundamental concept in our society and has been for hundreds of years. We should not let companies redefine it for their profit overnight without our notice or a fight.
As you say, all rights are social constructs. Therefore you don't "prove" a right exists, as you demanded, you make a right exist by discussing it and lobbying for it. That's what happening here. I say that the market is not correct because it leads to bad outcomes. You seem to be saying that the outcome isn't bad because the market doesn't lead to it. I'm making an assertion that I believe the right to repair is a positive (for many reasons.) You seem to be making an assertion that markets are always right. I just have to convince - because I'm making a statement about what I think we should prefer in society. You have to prove, because you're making a claim of objective fact.
What is happening here is that people are claiming that the right to repair already exists, and is being violated by companies. If they think it should exist, that's what they should have argued. But that isn't what they wrote. They wrote that the right does exist. Almost everyone in this thread used that language. That's what I'm arguing against.
I'm not saying that market outcomes are good or bad in general -- they are just there, as the pre-existing default position that may or may not demand a regulatory response. Any action taken should be on the basis that the default position is suboptimal in some way, and that regulation will make a positive difference. Otherwise, it is best to leave things as they are by default, especially when you consider the expense and unintended side effects that accompany regulation.
It seems to me that the only problem with the market outcome in this particular discussion is that some people aren't happy that the products being produced do not have a certain feature they like, namely repairability. This is clearly not the personal preference of most consumers, because if it was, companies would produce products to appeal to that preference. So clearly we are dealing with a small number of consumers who want this feature. That's not a strong case to change the outcome.
What you're saying is that might makes right(s), pun intended. And that's just as silly as it gets, that's the reason people get all sort of authoritatians systems...people decided to call them witches and kill them so they were on the right...
I don't mind manufacturers making design decisions that, as a side effect, impact repairability (phones with removable batteries being the main example here). But it's another thing altogether to add tamper indicators, DRM, etc for the express purpose of preventing people from doing things with items they own.
Why shouldn't manufacturers have the right to include tamper-resistant features and DRM if they want to?
If you don't like those features, don't buy the products. If enough people share your preferences in this matter, companies will start tailoring products to those preferences. If too few people share those preferences for the companies to change their products, how is that anything other than the free market at work? You are not entitled to exactly the products you want, no matter what the market for those products is like.
The market isn't demand driven. People may be complaining, but as long as nobody fulfills the demand, people will keep buying the stuff they buy now. Which happen to be more profitable for manufacturers than fulfilling the demand would be.
I think that measures like planned obsolescence and preventing consumers from repairing the devices that they own should not be legal. They should be treated similarly to anti-competitive practices.
I'm wary of making things illegal, but I do think requiring full disclosure is in order so buyers can make up their own mind and suppliers willing to offer more reliable/repairable products can use it as a competitive advantage.
I once had to fix a fairly complex piece of electronics and when I asked the company for a repair, they told me the directions over the phone. Unscrew this, take that out, check this, boom.
I was more than impressed by their confidence in their hardware.
I don't really understand this fight. Why not let the market sort it out? I for one stopped buying Macbooks as soon as they were being glued shut. My 2011 MBP can be opened, I put 16 GB of RAM in there and a TB SSD. I know Apple thinks it is ridiculous [0] to use a 5 yr old PC but the thing is blazing fast. I'll never buy a laptop that is unusable in 5 years time when there are also models with up to 3 m.2 slots available at only a slightly increased size. Vote with your wallets people, that is the only way to do fair fighting in this case!
Because market cares about majority, and majority makes their choice as a combination of what seems more cost-effective right frikkin' now and what the combined marketing of companies tell people to buy. Things like whether this purchase will turn out to be more expensive over the next year, or whether this purchase is a step in a wrong direction for future of technology, are things that are distant considerations, if they're considered at all.
I think people underestimate the power with which the market steers itself, as opposed to listening to consumers. Ford's (mis)quote about faster horses comes to mind...
Because not everyone is perfectly informed about the consequences of their purchase at the time they make the purchase. I'm glad you do your research, but with this kind of law, you wouldn't need to do that research and could instead spend your time doing something you enjoy. Similarly, you don't need to research your grocery store's meat selling policies to ensure you're not getting rotten meat.
"Similarly, you don't need to research your grocery store's meat selling policies to ensure you're not getting rotten meat."
That is a poor analogy. There actually is a lot of research needed in order to get right the edible food, including meat. We just did it in time, collectively, over many generations; then each of us just learned it all from others (parents, mostly). That's how we come to figure out that that piece of meat is not safe to eat if it smells bad and a lot of other important cues. And despite all that, dilettante individual observation can give us only so many results, and that's why there actually was necessary additional professional research that in time got institutionalized and the selling policies - rigorously regulated.
What? I meant as individual consumers. There's a whole lot more to food safety than whether it smells OK. We have regulations so end consumers don't have to study the history of every company involved in the retail chain or risk illness. Similarly, we can have regulations to prevent customers from unknowingly buying artificially unrepairable objects.
As I said, as individual consumers we had a lot to learn about what is safe to eat. It just happened as we grew up. We learned that knowledge from others instead of tasting everything and see what happens. The food culture however, was developed before us and now it's mature enough to be, more or less, taken for granted. This can not be said to be similar to other areas like that of digital gadgets, developed only recently and for which the community lacks common knowledge.
But let's not be naive, the fight happens because the some people want the government to step it and make some of those things illegal. Be it to turn illegal to modify the car you own, or illegal to not allow to modify your electronics.
People don't just have views on that, they want to force their views on others.
The French have an approach to this problem as well "forcing manufacturers to tell consumers how long their appliances will last. French companies will also have to inform consumers how long spare parts for the product will be available"[1].
IMHO, because it would only apply to French manufacturers, it will drive any manufacturing outside of France. Similar to the 35 hour work week: interesting principle, bad outcome.
This is a great place for EU to shine. You can move your manufacturing out of an European country, but you can't really ignore whole EU as a market.
It's probably why we're successfully "getting away" with things like mandatory 2-year guarantees and ability to return faulty products bought remotely (on-line, phone, door-to-door, etc.) for 14 days, no questions asked.
Did you know that in Victoria, Australia it's illegal for you to change your own light bulbs unless you're a registered electrician? Not kidding. When I moved there I went to the local supermarket and then electronics shop to buy a replacement phone wall jack and they looked at me funny and both asked 'you're not going to install that yourself are you?'. It's insane!
I can remember my mum changing bloody power outlets in our house in New Zealand when I was young, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to turn off the breaker for that circuit then screw three cables into an outlet faceplate. Only thing some people don't know is that it's a good idea to make the earth wire a little longer if it's not already so it's the last to disengage if ripped out / whatever.
Another Victorian here. The light bulb thing isn't actually true. The legislation and exceptions are a little more convoluted than other states, but you're ok to swap out your own bulbs.
That's fine, and not in conflict. Repair information just needs to be available to prevent them from continuing to be in power over your devices at their end of your business relationship. How hard did we have to fight for unlocking 2 year old phones? That was just them trying to be in power, not protect revenue or IP.
While I hate companies suing people for repairing their own properties, "right" has been overused so many places. What a sensational word! I have the "right" to not being sued! What?
I would advocate companies certify other entities as repairing authorities or just do a good job themselves; providing the support. Of course it will reduce their product sale and that would be a huge deal to us consumers as well because we want them to do well and providing better product next round.
However, it is dangerous that we use sale as THE primary measure. I believe companies should take pride in the quality of their products and services. They should inspire customer loyalty, not unethical growth to please Wall Street.
> While I hate companies suing people for repairing their own properties, "right" has been overused so many places.
I don't think it is outrageous to claim ownership to something that I bought. If a company does not want me to repair my own property, put a big "not for sale, only for lease" label on the package.
I can't believe we're having this discussion over 40 years after the passage of Magnuson-Moss, which covered similar ground. (Okay maybe a stretch, but thematically similar.)
If we go down this road, you'll be at the behest of all manufacturers. It's injurious to the consumer and environment alike, assuming more people will simply dispose of items rather than repairing them.
Of course it could give rise to disrupters who don't use these practices and win market share over the entrenched interests.
To me the key thing is this: if we lose the right to repair virtually all manufacturers will include some IP that precludes independent repair. The first battleground would be auto makers. Prepare to pay a lot more.
The real problem is that to the average consumer, an electronic device is nothing more than a black box. There is zero chance of them ever being able to repair it, so they have no interest in whether or not it is repairable... Until the battery fails just after the warranty period is up.
I wish people would vote with their feet, but maybe there needs to be some kind of regulation since companies can't be trusted to play nice.
It would be nice to even actually own some of what you're repairing. Can you resell your itunes purchases? I guess that battle is assumed lost, so we can beg for the right to repair that which we use to consume what media we do not own and can't resell.
we shall, as a society, realise that software is some cross between literacy and legislation and that the right to read (and write back) software that affects us is fundamental to the good operation of society, and we will advance together.
Or we won't and we will end up like North Korea, pretending reality is somewhere it's not.
Nature is not going to care if we don't board the clue train.
A lot of issues surrounding the move to make anything and everything a "Service" are starting to become very clear. The issues with IoT devices being bricked, Tesla 'ownership', and so on really do need scrutiny from a functional body with a hint of the public's interest at heart.
> The issues with IoT devices being bricked, Tesla 'ownership', and so on really do need scrutiny from a functional body with a hint of the public's interest at heart.
Oh great, another bureaucracy.
Why should manufacturers be forced to make their products repairable by users? Why don't they have the right to make a non-repairable product, and let the market decide whether or not it succeeds? If people really want repairable products, some company will be able to make money by selling them. The market is an excellent way to track consumer preferences -- far better than a bureaucracy telling companies how to make their products.
Okay, but to be consistent you have to argue for getting rid of copyrights and patents as well. It makes no sense to regard these devices as "creative works", yet then deny that the end user has been sold an instance of this abstract structure.
It is certainly not a logical conclusion of my argument that all bureaucracies that interfere with the market ought to be abolished, or that the market should be free in all cases. My point was that in this particular case, the market would be a better way to solve the problem than a bureaucracy.
Therefore, advocating the existence of some bureaucracies and not others does not contradict my argument, nor is it inconsistent with my argument.
In general, while market dynamics are quite important, "the market" doesn't actually constitute a valid argument for anything (as said thing would happen anyway), and usually indicates an attempt to stubbornly ignore differing opinions.
The point is that companies are already asking for state intervention to protect their products as being a creative endeavor. So this is no longer some noble two-party private transaction. (Which I would be all in favor for, but we're just not in that realm!)
Demanding the protections of their creative work while shirking the responsibilities (an end-user accessing and modifying the whole creative work that they've purchased) may not be definitively inconsistent, but it's extremely one-sided.
Of course market dynamics are a valid argument! They matter very much, because changes in the market affect peoples' quality of life. Policies that distort the market in a way that adversely affects peoples' quality of life should not be implemented without very good reasons. Even policies that are not expected to introduce such distortions often do, so it's good to be cautious about any proposals which could have unintended economic consequences.
Copyright and patent protection are not one-sided. Consumers benefit from them, because copyrights and patents incentivize the creation of things which would not have been created otherwise.
Many lifesaving medicines never would have been invented if pharmaceutical companies would not have been able to protect them via patents and get rich. Similarly, much of the music, movies, books, etc. that consumers enjoy never would have been created if their authors and publishers were not able to protect them via copyright, and thereby get rich.
A lot of medical, technological, and cultural progress has been made by people trying to get rich. Patents and copyrights are ingenious because they channel peoples' desire to get rich into outcomes that are overall beneficial to society. The benefits compensate for the market restrictions they accompany, and overall, patents and copyrights have made society better off than it would have been otherwise.
Finally, what responsibilities do you think companies shirking? A responsibility to make products repairable by the consumers?
No such responsibility exists. Nor do you have the right to demand that a company design its products to include a feature you like, such as repairability. If you think such responsibilities or rights exist, prove it.
If you think they don't exist, but should be created, prove that the benefit they will bring to society will compensate for the market distortions they will produce (which will be quite significant if you think through all of the extra development, support, and liability costs that manufacturers will have to endure).
You're simultaneously wed to copyright because it's here, and arguing against a "right" to repair because it is not. So you're just repeating rationalizations for the current status quo.
For the third time now - copyright and patents presume to create a type of creative product wherein it is not the manufacture of the product that is really being sold to the consumer, but the design of it. A person buys a cell phone not for the plastic and doped silicon it is made of, but ostensibly for the abstract structure of the way that they are arranged.
Since the person is buying an instance of a design, it stands to reason that they should have the ability to service the physical manifestation and otherwise directly interact with that design.
It's not surprising that companies want to have their cake and eat it too - implementing only the half of an abstraction that takes away a consumer's rights while ignoring the second half and leaving them subject to law-of-the-jungle. They successfully wrote law like this for scratched cds, binary software, and DRM. But that hardly implies that their land grab is in the public's interest, appeals to "trickle-down" benefits notwithstanding.
> You're simultaneously wed to copyright because it's here, and arguing against a "right" to repair because it is not. So you're just repeating rationalizations for the current status quo.
Oh, so you're a mind reader who can figure out my motivations? By the way, those are arguments, not rationalizations. They are pretty good, too.
> For the third time now - copyright and patents presume to create a type of creative product wherein it is not the manufacture of the product that is really being sold to the consumer, but the design of it. A person buys a cell phone not for the plastic and doped silicon it is made of, but ostensibly for the abstract structure of the way that they are arranged.
So what? Nothing in this logically necessitates any conclusions about repairability of products.
> Since the person is buying an instance of a design, it stands to reason that they should have the ability to service the physical manifestation and otherwise directly interact with that design.
How exactly does your previous statement logically necessitate this? Show your work. Otherwise, it is a handwavy "stands to reason," "it's just obvious" kind of assertion.
> It's not surprising that companies want to have their cake and eat it too - implementing only the half of an abstraction that takes away a consumer's rights while ignoring the second half and leaving them subject to law-of-the-jungle.
What rights are being taken away? In your first sentence, you argued that a right to repair is not "here." How then can it then be violated or taken away by companies? How can anyone violate a non-existent right?
It doesn't take an ability to read minds to characterize a comment. In a universe with no copyright, arguments about its benefits would fall flat. In a universe with a right to repair, all the consumer benefits would be "manifestly true" in the way you're treating the arguments for copyright. You're demanding a level of proof that can only be met by having the condition already existing, and thus just defending the status quo.
> show your work
So you've expressed your arguments in terms of ZFC or whatever? Coming up with new concepts is obviously intuitive work - I've laid out what I see as a simple deeper abstraction behind copyright, which you've done nothing but ignore along with every other argument.
> What rights are being taken away?
Rather than get into semantics over the word "right", let's say lawful ability. In the case of a CD,
what has been taken away is your ability to simply make copies of that CD. Instead, the publisher purports to sell you a license to only listen to the music. Yet they conveniently forget the second half of that abstraction - if the CD is scratched, they don't send you a new one!
> In a universe with no copyright, arguments about its benefits would fall flat.
They must not have, because we once lived in a universe without it, and now we don't. How do you suppose that happened?
Similarly, when the US patent system was created, arguments very similar to mine were presented in its defense, even though patents did not already exist. They worked. The arguments in favor of the status quo predate the status quo, and were convincing in a world without the status quo. That's because they are good arguments.
> Coming up with new concepts is obviously intuitive work - I've laid out what I see as a simple deeper abstraction behind copyright, which you've done nothing but ignore along with every other argument.
Intuition is not a valid or convincing argument. It does not deserve to be considered.
Because if consumers wanted repairable devices, companies would make them. To not do so would be to ignore an opportunity to sell products and make money.
So, if people really want repairable devices, they would exist. The fact that they do not exist in large numbers indicates that consumers don't really want them very much. If consumers don't want them, why should companies be forced to manufacture them?
Requiring and enforcing repairability in products would therefore cause the government to take action to promote the personal preferences of a small number of consumers. That does not seem justifiable.
Lemons (the economical model, not the fruit) would argue against that claim. People want cars that work, but they also want pay as little as possible. Since customer can't easily determine the additional costs of not being able to repair a product outside of "approved dealers", the market will favor cheaper products even if they are less desirable for the customer. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Here is a solution: Lets have a mandatory class in every public school that teach children the cost difference between an "open" market where anyone can repair a product, and a closed monopoly where only the approved shops are allowed to do the after-market repairs. Then customers will be armed with the knowledge to compare products. Do you think companies will keep making products that you can't repair, or will the market promote the preferences of the majority?
Alternative solution: Add a market requirement that the sticker price include the price of repairs and failure rates over the expected life cycle of the product. This allow the customer to directly compare products and decide if they want to pay a cheaper car that cost 10x to repair and the owner is prevented to do it themselves, or a more expensive car where anyone can do the repair, including the owner. Again we would see a shift in market behavior, both by customers and manufacturers.
Those are all definite issues, but even in the case of simple computer hardware there's a problem when the manufacturer tries to lock the owners out of repairing with special screws, glue, etc., so that they can make money off the repairs themselves. New MacBook Pros have their batteries glued in and they can't really be replaced without replacing the entire top case they're glued to at the same time. They claim this is necessary for the thinness they want, but the MacBook Air is thinner and doesn't have a glued battery.
My older MacBook Pro has a screwed in battery which uses tri-wing screws to keep people from replacing it themselves, but a $5 tool online can let you replace it anyway, and it takes literally just a couple minutes.
They're doing it physically, or they're doing it legally, but through one avenue or another they're all starting to do it. 'Surface as a Service', all of what you said about Macs and their batteries, and so on.
MacBooks and MBPs are becoming throw away devices after 3 or 4 years. In 2013 I upgraded my 2011 MBP to have more RAM and a larger SSD. The new ones have the RAM soddared on so I guess I'll need to max it out when I buy and forfeit the possibility of a future upgrade. The custom SSD is expensive and only one maker seems to have decent quality ones.[1]
I know laptops aren't increasing in power/abilities like they used to be. It's still nice to be able to add more to an old laptop and get a couple more years.
I still have a 2011 as well, and have no intention of upgrading beyond it for the foreseeable future. It still works great, I've maxed out the RAM and added a 750 GB SSD, it does everything I need to do with the performance I need, and I'm happy. I've replaced the keyboard myself, and replaced the battery as well with an aftermarket replacement. I don't need anything newer, and I like being able to repair it myself for minimal cost.
I doubt it's as fast but the flash is made by Samsung and if it's using triple layer cells I'm worried about the longevity of the drives.
In 3 years of heavy use will the drive still have the same amount of space? The olds ones I could pop a new drive in as advancements are made in the SSD space, which I have done twice.
I have a company Dell that's horrible. Had many Vaios in the past that were great but the new ones aren't that great. Don't want a tablet or a touch screen as my main device or an Internet only device (chrome book).
Well, this is common sense.
Remember the "Ecce homo" painting? there are some things that will likely go wrong if you do them by yourself. Sometimes with consequences that are not desirable for "the common good".
This includes repairing devices that are required to be reliable for public safety.
This is carburetor nostalgia, from a time when everything was human scale and adjustable. Look at how chips are stacked and interconnected within packages in modern design[1], that trend will only intensify. Software is also getting more complex, with deep learning the system develops its own if/thens.
Wrong, this is not trying to mandate that simpler designs be used to make things easier to repair, but that companies stop trying to lock people out with tamper-resistant screws and glue; and that they stop cracking down on "unauthorized" repair shops, etc.
AFAIK, this sort of stacked die thing has barely started to reach actual commercial products. It's been an idea for a long time, but quite hard to get right. Anyway, it's no different than another IC of considerable complexity -- obviously there's no ability for an end user to repair what's inside it.
There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for their car to always favor the people in the car no matter what?
If the self-driving software is completely open source, you can exploit the collision avoidance algorithms to favor aggressive driving with your car. For example if the software tries to keep a 15 foot buffer between cars, you can"tune" your software to use a shorter buffer and cut in front of traffic more easily.
Law enforcement will campaign for a remote "pull over" command to prevent people from fleeing police.
The answers to these types of questions will be very important for open source going forward.