Your AI in the sky

Pay no attention to the robot behind the wheel. It's the ones above our heads you need to worry about.

Next time you find yourself in San Francisco, be extra careful crossing the street. There may be a robot bearing down on you.

Earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved 400 robotaxis from Cruise and Waymo to operate on City streets 24/7. [1] It only took a few days before they started causing traffic jams, crashing into firetrucks, and running red lights like any other crappy San Francisco driver.

Things are going so well for the driverless cabs that Cruise just decided to cut the number of vehicles operating in the city by 50 percent, reducing your chances of getting creamed by a robot but also halving your opportunities to have sex in the backseat, which is apparently a thing. [2]

Listen: Statistically speaking, driverless cars are safer than human-powered ones in nearly all circumstances (though they do seem to have a real affinity for colliding with emergency vehicles). That's mostly because human drivers are easily distracted and, sometimes, just assholes.

Every time an autonomous vehicle gets into a crash, it's going to make the news. That's just how it's going to be, until we get used to the idea that the jerk in the lane next to us is actually a bunch of algorithms traveling at speed.

But it's not the robots on the ground that concern me. It's the ones above our heads.

Don't look up

Last month China launched the first autonomous AI-powered satellite, one with the charmingly benign name of The WonderJourney 1A (WJ-1A).

Which, the Chinese developer of this technology would like to assure us, is most definitely not a killer satellite with sun-reflecting mirrors that will fry us all like ants under a magnifying glass.

The WonderJourney in action. [3] Source: WhatCulture.

The WJ-1A's primary function will be collecting data on illegal logging, landslides, typhoons, and other natural disasters, though there are also plans to connect it to driverless cars and drones. Per the South China Morning Post:

“WJ-1A is equipped with high-resolution cameras, near-infrared cameras and VR panoramic cameras, allowing for various image processing tasks. Through image semantic understanding, it can recognise forests and oceans. It is also capable of target identification, lossless compression, and data cleaning.”

Nobody likes dirty data or lossy compression, but I'd feel a lot better if they refrained from using phrases like "target identification."

Mystery Science Theater art by Steve Rampton. You can buy a T-shirt with this on it here.

The brain of the definitely-not-a-solar-death-ray satellite is something called the String Edge AI Platform, says spokeshuman Chen Junrui. And we'll be able to talk to it!

Chen indicates that, in a manner akin to science fiction, “String” aims to become an “AI assistant in space”. Users on the ground will be able to talk to it in the same way people can with AI programs such as ChatGPT.

You might want to start that conversation with something like, "You're a very special satellite, and we really really like you. Please don't kill us."

Then there's this:

At present the onboard intelligent processing unit has a processing speed of 80 trillion operations per second (TOPS) – less than the 144 TOPS found in a Tesla’s Full-Self Driving chip.

So, in other words, it's about half as smart as Tesla Autopilot, which has been involved in 736 crashes since 2019, resulting in 17 fatalities. [4]

The Hangzhou-based company behind the WonderJourney, STAR.VISION [5], plans to launch 20 of these puppies by the end of next year. [6]

In over our heads

China putting a bunch of autonomous robots into orbit is not the biggest thing to worry about. There are worse things to lose sleep over.

Like this recent report in the Wall Street Journal, which reveals that the US and China are locked in an AI arms race — quite literally. Here are the first two paragraphs of that story:

The U.S. and China are accelerating research on how to integrate artificial intelligence into their militaries as part of a global race to take advantage of the fast-developing technology.

Among the priorities for both sides: weapons that can find their way to a target without human help and AI tools to identify targets from satellite images.

The good news? Researchers examining these procurement contracts found less evidence that "the U.S. or China are working on giving AI authority to independently make strategic decisions or launch major strikes, such as with nuclear weapons."

I can sleep much easier now.... in the underground bunker I've just decided to build in my backyard. [7]

So, to recap: Robotaxis with an affinity for crashing into firetrucks. Swarms of autonomous drones circling overhead, looking for something interesting to kill, aided by satellites with a gazillion cameras attached to them.

Suddenly imminent global climate disaster doesn't sound so bad. Bring it on, mother nature. Save us from ourselves.

And now, to make up for being such a downer, please enjoy this video compilation of adorable baby ducks:

Would you ride in a robotaxi? Share your thoughts in the comments, and spread the good (or bad) word by clicking the button below.

[1] Prior to this decision, the driverless fleet was only allowed to operate from 10 pm to 6 am, where they were more likely to kill homeless people and drunks.

[2] If you do decide to flag down a robocab, you might want to spread a tarp on the backseat first.

[3] Actually 'Icarus,' the solar death ray satellite from the 2002 Bond film, Die Another Day.

[4] So the odds are pretty good it will crash into something up there. Most likely that Telsa Roadster Elon shot into space in 2018.

[5] Which sounds less like a maker of AI satellites and more like a third-rate streaming service.

[6] They'll have plenty of company. There are anywhere from 2,500 to 7,000 satellites currently in orbit and hundreds of them are spy satellites. The exact number (and whether any of them are also autonomous) is sadly above my security clearance.

[7] Who really needs a septic tank, anyway?