The chairman said it best “regulators are still stuck in ‘mechanical mode’ while the car industry has gone ‘electronics.'”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100226/ap_on_hi_te/us_toyota_electronics
And as anything else, the solution is more funding, more hiring of experts etc…
Transportation on steroid. At this rate of “unintended acceleration”, we might as well build “runway” not “highway”.
And the NHTSA will have merged under NASA (flying cars, just like my kid’s imagination).
It will be the age of flying, and not driving, thus ” make the world your galaxy”, not playground (as an earlier Ford ad espoused).
Besides the digitization of automobiles and its unintended consequences, I noticed social change during the Toyoda hearing as well.
I used to work with people who covered C-SPAN. Thus naturally, I notice camera staff in the background.
We got a chairman/woman of the hearing (person of color), then we got people of the mike (from Japan), then we got camera woman wearing of all things bright green
with headset on in the back.
Things have changed a bit since those Watergate hearings. Can you imagine a similar scene during the Oil Embargo? With Arabs being questioned about the safety of gasoline for instance? The protest that would be on the streets? Goodbye, we won’t DRIVE. Goodbye, we won’t DRIVE. The French would love this: one bicycle for every man, woman and child in America (Tour de France).
They have worried about computers in cars. How about mini-computers in the hand of drivers while driving? People smoke, text, talk, chat, listen to music or news, and eat their Happy Meal (that comes with a toy). Cars that went through Mc Donald’s drive-in used to be big and safe. Now, they are lightweight and computerized, and drive themselves. The closest you can feel this effect is at a car wash, when they ask you to shut down the engine and let the washing machine does the moving.
You feel “unintended acceleration” in reverse (the trains move past each other at 200 miles per hour, in what direction would the monk’s hair fly? Monks shave their heads. Thus, it’s a trick question).
This is not intended to be funny. With each human progress there are sacrifices (Challenger’s failure of management info flow, Hiroshima and Agent Orange).
I am glad to see hearings. Not only because it’s tax dollars well spent. But also because that is what a smart nation should question: are we going to fast, or too slow.
In which direction? And most importantly, are we taking everyone on the boat?
I am glad there is intended digitization with unintended acceleration. It slows things down for us to focus on quality vs speed of execution (get it fast vs get it right).
We all see unintended acceleration in finance (trading companies had their servers co-located right next to the office for a-few- millisecond- faster trades).
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100224/cm_csm/282709_1
They did that in the years leading to the bubble busted (WS version of “unintended acceleration). I don’t think Washington has been theatrical enough. These days, there is no need for a conspiracy theory.
The machine does not reproduce itself fast enough for us: we want to be “up to speed”, and more speed. You see, this is nothing new. It’s been in place to replace the “mechanical mode” we were talking about earlier. We have reached the point of no return. Kids want wild online and adults Wild on E. And they are obese. And we helplessly watch our kids being ” accelerated” into the digital future, because parents are stuck in “mechanical mode”. You see, they have earned points on those games, and obviously they were multi-tasking. What else can we ask for? Think? Isn’t that what “smart” machines are supposed to do for us?
Melanie Griffin once had a famous line “Oh, my head hurts when I think”. Just let the pedal and acceleration system do the driving and thinking for you. If it crashed, blame it on them.
Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just pin this whole incident on one man, and let him jump. In pre-historic era, that’s what we would do to explain away what we now know: a mathematician (Indian) came up with “zero”. An engineer invented 1 and 0 “wax on, was off” after Marconi. And another engineer (Asian) noticed the speed of optical transmission. Then another (Moore) about the doubling of the speed of chip. Then another (Metcalfe) about the Network effect. Voila. We have a new Age of wonder. (see more on Economist Special report on Data Deluge).
Let the Chinese do the manufacturing. And the First World stays with software design. And then we farm some of that out as well. Somewhere, it got lost in translation.
You see, you can always blame it on the translator, who I am sure , is at a loss for words to describe this phenomenon. Speed shock? Sir, I don’t have a dynamic equivalence for that concept. I am sorry committee, can we have a recess to huddle. Long flight back to Japan.
Thang Nguyen 555 