Chapter 1: What is the in-car surveillance technology being discussed?
I wrote about this in-car surveillance thing. It's going viral. It's sort of fake news. We've got to sort of truth zone it, but also it's coming, and it might not matter because if you get in a robo-taxi, there's definitely going to be a camera on you.
But the fear is centered around this idea that there will be a requirement from the federal government that every new car sold in the United States will be required by law to have technology that puts constant surveillance on the driver. And this is happening sooner than you think by 2027. That's just 12 months away.
AI in your car will determine if you're sober and fit to drive, automatically turning off the vehicle.
John, it's almost May, by the way.
I know. We're, what, eight months away, I guess, from 2027? This is the real AI 2027 problem. This is a big deal.
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Chapter 2: How will federal regulations impact surveillance in new cars?
We are having audio issues. It's most likely a nation state issue. Potentially. It's very possible we are under attack, but we are working on it.
It's like watching a dubbed foreign film. Well, maybe we can play this video of what happened the last time America tried to pull back on driving a car while intoxicated and some of the response, some of the backlash.
from the community.
Can we pull this up? Okay. We're working on it.
Anyway. Production team is being humbled this morning.
Humbled. Anyway, let me read through some of my take and then we'll play that funny video. So, sounds scary. Yeah, let's play this video.
Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic. It's kind of getting common is when a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink one or two beers. They're making it laws where you can't drink when you want to. You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving. Pretty soon we're going to be communist country.
Communist country.
When was that?
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Chapter 3: What role will AI play in determining driver fitness?
Apparently that's real. I've seen that video before. I always thought it was fake. I didn't realize that that was real. That feels like 80s, 70s, something like that. 80s. 80s, okay. Well, there was backlash then and there's backlash now. Some of it's a little bit overblown. This sounds very scary, you know, constant surveillance. The real crazy version is camera that's watching you at all times.
The government, the police, and the automaker can just turn off your car whenever they want. That sounds bad. What's actually being proposed? What's actually on the timetable? So the rationale for this is good. And I think most people would agree that it is a reasonable thing to do to try and curb alcohol-related vehicle accidents, drunk driving.
There's more than 10,000 alcohol-related deaths each year on U.S. roads. That's a ton. Anything we can do to stop that, reduce that, totally worth... working on, totally worth pursuing as long as it doesn't violate a whole bunch of other liberties or create more problems than it solves, right? We want net positive impact here.
Technology is getting better at detecting intoxication, and it's getting a lot cheaper, so why not just ship drunk driver detection system with every car from the factory? That's the proposal. There are a bunch of potential downsides that we can get into, but it's important to set the facts straight about where we actually stand today. So the core concept here is generally correct.
Congress did pass a mandate directing the NHTSA to create a standard for advanced drunk driving prevention technology in new passenger vehicles. Now, the 2027 date that people are citing, that's not a hard deadline. The law was passed back in 2024, and in the actual law, it basically allowed for delays.
So they said the NHTSA will only issue a binding mandate requiring automakers to actually roll out this tech when the tech is ready, and the NHTSA currently says the technology is not ready. So in theory, the tech feels close, but the scale of the problem is so big, you can see why there's a delay here. Alcohol detection systems exist and are typically deployed for drivers with DUIs.
You're familiar with blowing in the tube, probably, hopefully not personally. But the problem is that those little hoses that you blow into, those are active systems. They require you to actually sit there and do that for a minute. The government doesn't want that. That's not what the proposal is. They want passive. They want passive, which means breath sensing.
So there's just like smell-o-vision, basically. If it smells alcohol, it doesn't turn on the car. The other one is fingerprint reading. So you put your finger on the start button and it scans into your finger and sees how many alcohol particles are inside, I guess. That sounds sci-fi, but we're close, I guess. There's a couple other ways you can solve that.
And then camera system, just look at the driver. If they look drunk, then don't turn on the car. So all of these seem like they could be close to being roughly accurate right now. Like you can imagine an AI startup or a university lab putting something together at a hackathon that's 90% of the way there, maybe 99% of the way there, maybe even 99.9% of the way there.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential downsides of constant surveillance in vehicles?
And what that means in practice is that if this system is 99.9% accurate, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results every year. And the fact that probably 99.9% of these trips are not inebriated, like drunk driving is not 50% of trips. It's not 1% of trips. It's a very small amount.
Think about how people would abuse this new system. It'd be like students being like, sorry, I couldn't make it to the exam. Exactly.
Dog ate my lunch. My car wouldn't start because of a false positive on this. And so even if you're at 99%, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results. The vast majority of those are going to be people who are sober. Somebody wants to get in their car for their morning commute. They're a little sleepy or they wore some cologne that triggered some sensor.
system flags them as intoxicated and prevents them from starting their car. And it's infuriating. The tech will probably get there with enough time and effort. So it's worth looking into who supports this and opposes it. The mandate was actually bipartisan, but there's starting to be a backlash from libertarian conservatives who are worried about Orwellian government controls.
There's an idea that there will be a remote kill switch, which leads to a bunch of dystopian possibilities. That is not in the current provision. That's not what's actually being proposed right now. But, you know, it's possible that at the end, that the end result of this process of back and forth, you do wind up with that exact capability.
And so people are worried about the system going off while you're driving at speed on the roads, and then the car just shuts off and you get in a crash. And that's like actually more dangerous than potentially the alternative. And so the middle ground seems to be what's called pre-drive lockout.
We need a tinfoil expert. The tinfoil enthusiasts have been saying that the sort of remote- Are you using- Tinfoil enthusiast?
You mean conspiracy theorist? I've never heard that before.
That's a new one. Yes. So tinfoil enthusiasts. Yes. Have been claiming. Yes. That the remote shut off button has existed forever.
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Chapter 5: How accurate are current alcohol detection technologies in cars?
Raccoons.
Yeah, ogres are in there. Trolls, ogres, pigeons.
And so in- They had to counteract this, right? You have to put in the system prompt not to do this. Where is this? Creatures?
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. This reminds me of those old image prompts where there would be a negative prompt that specifically said, do not put six fingers on the human's hand. But what a weird one and what an odd...
What an odd line to throw into a coding agent. Do we know anything else about this if people dug into what is actually going on here?
I mean, it might not be just the coding agent. It's probably just the model in general.
It's the model itself. It's goblin mode. The model itself yearns to discuss creatures, goblins, raccoons. It is an emergent property of super intelligence.
But Vi says, they had to put this in due to my effect on the company. Goblins, creatures sort of followed me in through the front door when I joined. And we are only just now starting to understand the downstream effects of their presence. And Tebow says, never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it's absolutely not.
There's so many. If you know, you know. Somebody says, my 5.5 codex said goblin with a flashlight when referring to a bug fix. yesterday.
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