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r0B0t: Code Is My Co-pilot

On a balmy Tuesday afternoon in late July, 37-year-old attorney Joshua Neally left work early. He climbed into his new Tesla Model X to drive the 45 minutes from law office in Springfield, Missouri, to his house in Branson, Missouri. He was going home to celebrate his daughter's fourth birthday.

He steered the electric luxury SUV into the gathering rush-hour traffic on Highway 68 and turned on autopilot, a feature unique to Tesla that allows a car to pilot itself—braking, accelerating, steering—for long stretches of freeway driving. It's a feature that has drawn rebukes from rival companies and sparked investigations by federal regulators after a driver named Joshua Brown was killed in a crash in Florida while using it. Although a Tesla with autopilot is not a true self-driving car, the company's technology has become a bellwether for Silicon Valley's ambition to replace human drivers with software.

Neally knew about the Florida crash and the furor that followed. But he had already ordered his Model X after years of waiting and saving, and he was undeterred. When it arrived, he nicknamed it Ender, after the protagonist in the novel Ender's Game. By July 26, after a week of driving the Model X, he had grown to cautiously trust it to handle the bulk of his hilly, curvy, sometimes traffic-y commute. “I'm not a daredevil,” he told me. “I promised my wife I'd always be paying attention.” He doesn't drive hands-free, or play Jenga, or nod off, or watch Harry Potter movies, as Brown may have been doing when he plowed into the trailer of a semi truck. He admits, however, that he sometimes checks email or sends text messages on his phone.

Neally was about 5 miles out of Springfield, near a set of interchanges just beginning to clog with merging vehicles, when he felt something coil and stiffen in his abdomen. At first he thought it was a pulled muscle. But the pain forked upward from his stomach, he said, until it felt like “a steel pole through my chest.” When it refused to subside, Neally remembers calling his wife and agreeing through gasps that he should probably go to the emergency room.

He doesn't remember much of the drive after that.

Doctors in Branson told Neally later that he'd suffered a pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal obstruction of a blood vessel in his lungs. They told him he was lucky to have survived. If you ask Neally, however, he'll tell you he was lucky to be driving a Tesla. As he writhed in the driver's seat, the vehicle's software negotiated 20-plus highway miles to a hospital just off an exit ramp. He manually steered it into the parking lot and checked himself into the emergency room, where he was promptly treated. By night's end he had recovered enough to go home.

Did autopilot save Neally? It's hard to say. He acknowledges that, in retrospect, it might have been more prudent to pull over and call an ambulance. But the severity of what was happening dawned on him slowly, and by the time it had, he reckoned he could reach the hospital quicker via autopilot than ambulance. He also wonders whether, without autopilot, he might have lost control of the car and in effect become a deadly projectile when those first convulsions struck.

Neally's experience is unusual. It doesn't prove autopilot's worth as a safety feature any more than Brown's death disproves it. Yet Neally's story is the latest of several that have emerged since the Florida crash to paint a fuller picture of autopilot's merits, in addition to its by now highly publicized dangers. These stories provide at least a measure of anecdotal support for Tesla's claims that its own data show autopilot—imperfect as it is—is already significantly safer than the average human driver.

That's going to be a tough sell, though, to the public and regulators alike. Brown's death ignited a backlash that had been brewing since Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced autopilot in a heavily hyped, Steve Jobslike launch event in October 2014. Rival car companies felt from the start that Tesla was rolling out autonomous driving features too aggressively, before the technology was safe enough to earn consumers' trust. The skepticism intensified after Tesla activated the feature last fall, and drivers immediately began posting YouTube videos of themselves abusing it. Tesla calls autopilot a “beta” feature and requires the driver to agree to pay full attention and keep hands on the wheel while it's in use. But, despite some safety checks introduced in January, the car will still drive itself if the driver goes hands-free.

By mid-July, when a second Tesla Model S crashed while on autopilot on an undivided highway in Montana, Tesla had become the subject of three federal investigations. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was looking into the cause of the Florida crash. The National Transportation Safety Board was examining whether autonomous driving technology was a hazard to safety. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission opened a probe into claims by Fortune magazine that Musk had failed to disclose the Florida autopilot crash to investors in a timely manner, even as he sold some of his own stock in the company. (Tesla has vehemently disputed the claims.)

It added up to a grim cloud over both the company and self-driving car technology, whose future depends on drivers, bureaucrats, and chest-pounding politicians all agreeing to place human lives in the hands of potentially deadly robots. Even Consumer Reports, which has championed the Tesla Model S as one of the greatest cars ever made, called for Tesla to disable autopilot until the technology became more reliable.

“By marketing their feature as ‘Autopilot,' Tesla gives consumers a false sense of security,” Consumer Reports Vice President Laura MacCleery said. “In the long run, advanced active safety technologies in vehicles could make our roads safer. But today, we're deeply concerned that consumers are being sold a pile of promises about unproven technology.”

I'm among the critics who have suggested, both before and after the furor over Brown's death, that Tesla had implemented and publicized the technology in a potentially perilous way. Despite its name, Tesla's autopilot feature does not give the cars full autonomy, like the concept vehicles made by Google that you might spot tooling around Mountain View, California. The first time I test-drove a Tesla with autopilot, I wrote a review calling it “a safety feature that could be dangerous,” because it encourages drivers to relax while relying on them to take over at a moment's notice. After Brown's death, I wrote that the entire autopilot concept might be flawed.

Yet Tesla insists that calls for it to disable autopilot are shortsighted. In fact, the company argues that the critics have it backward: Given that its internal testing data suggest the feature drives more safely than humans do, Tesla maintains that it would be irresponsible and dangerous not to offer autopilot to its customers.

It's a typically brash stance from a company that has never backed down from a public relations battle, and it's tempting to dismiss it as another example of Musk's hubris. Yet, as usual, Tesla makes a strong case for itself. Pressed to defend autopilot's safety record, the company disclosed to me the process by which it tested and eventually decided to activate the feature to consumers.

First, the company developed the software and tested it in millions of miles' worth of computer simulations, using real-world driving data gathered by the sensors on the company's cars. Next it activated autopilot in about 300 vehicles driven by the company's own testers, who drove it every day and subjected it to challenging circumstances. (Musk was among them.) Then it introduced autopilot “inertly” via software update into the vehicles of existing Tesla drivers for a testing phase that it called “silent external validation.” In this mode, the autopilot software logged and analyzed every move it would have made if active but could not actually control the vehicle. In this way, Tesla gained millions of miles' worth of data on autopilot's performance in consumers' vehicles before it ever took effect. Finally, the company activated the feature for some 900 consumers who volunteered to test it and provide subjective feedback. Throughout the process, Tesla says, it released updates to improve the software, and by the end it was clear to the company that drivers would be safer on the road with autopilot than without it. At that point, Tesla argues, it would have been a disservice to its drivers to keep the feature inactive.

Without taking Tesla's word for it, it's tough to empirically validate Musk's contention that autopilot is already saving a significant number of lives. One confounding factor is that we're less likely to hear about it when something goes right with self-driving features than when something goes wrong. Given that Tesla says it anonymizes its tracking data for customers' privacy, there's no way for the public to know about these close calls unless drivers self-report them, as Neally did to Tesla after his pulmonary embolism. (Neally agreed to tell his story to Slate after I asked the company for real-world examples of autopilot functioning as a critical safety feature.) Even when we do know about these, it's hard to prove the counterfactual that someone would have died if the automation hadn't kicked in.

Still, Neally's case isn't the first in which Tesla safety features appear to have averted catastrophe. In Washington on July 16, a Model S was driving on New York Avenue when a pedestrian stepped in front of it. The car slammed on its own brakes, and no one was hurt. The incident was glossed in headlines as one in which autopilot may have saved a pedestrian's life. That isn't quite accurate, though: Autopilot was turned off at the time, the company told me. It was actually Tesla's automatic emergency braking system that kicked in. That's a safety feature that dozens of other car models already offer and which may come standard in all U.S.-made vehicles by 2022. Tesla deserves credit for implementing it, but not for pioneering it.

In another instance, the dashcam on an Uber driver's Model S captured a scary close call in which a sedan suddenly turned left in front of him, at night, in the rain, with no time to steer around it. Before the driver could react, the Model S braked sharply. It jerked to a stop a few feet from the car, which it otherwise would have plowed into broadside. In that case, it appears that autopilot was in fact engaged.

Meanwhile, the NHTSA has concluded that the fatal Florida crash should not set back efforts to make the roads saver through automation. The auto industry “cannot wait for perfect” to develop and deploy potentially lifesaving technology, NHTSA head Mark Rosekind said.

It's fair to remain skeptical when Musk claims that autopilot would save 500,000 lives a year if it were deployed universally. Unless the company were to release all its testing and tracking data, which it declines to do, we can't possible verify its calculations. One of the few specific figures that the company publicized in its blog post was that autopilot had been safely used in more than 130 million miles of driving before the first fatality, which is a higher ratio of miles to deaths than the U.S. or global averages. But just one more autopilot-related fatality tomorrow would undermine that claim. The math required to demonstrate conclusively that autopilot is safer than human drivers would be more nuanced, examining injury accidents as well as fatalities and controlling for biases such as the recommended use of autopilot predominantly on highways under favorable driving conditions.

What we know at this point is that autopilot can hurt or kill people if used improperly and that it also has the potential to save people. It's also fair to assume that the technology will get safer over time as Tesla and other companies study and learn from its errors. The only question is whether the public can or should tolerate its rare mistakes in the meantime.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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r0B0t: Suicide Squad Fans Who Want to Shut Down Rotten Tomatoes Want The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason

Uproxx reported Wednesday that a possibly tongue-in-cheek petition on Change.org to shut down critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes was attracting sincere support from fans of Suicide Squad, who were unhappy about the film's overwhelmingly negative reviews. To be precise, the petition, which now has more than 17,000 signatures, said:

We need this site to be shut down because It's Critics always give The DC Extended Universe movies unjust Bad Reviews, Like

1- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 2016

2- Suicide Squad 2016

and that Affects people's opinion even if it's a really great movies

There's a lot wrong with this petition, from the idea that Rotten Tomatoes somehow controls the opinion of the critics who didn't like the DC movies to the idea that a bad review should spoil the fun of an individual viewer who likes these films. But I'm shocked to report that I've found common ground with of people who believe that critics care in the slightest about DC vs. Marvel. I, too, think Rotten Tomatoes is a terrible thing for films—and not just Suicide Squad. Not because it “Affects people's opinion even if it's a really great movies,” or even because of problems with the model (a three out of five star rating is marked “fresh,” instead of “mediocre”), but because it uses a model at all. Rotten Tomatoes encourages a math-driven approach to something that is inherently personal and subjective. If your opinion about a work of art can be expressed as a number, it's not a very interesting opinion.

This is not to say that math has no place in writing about art; in fact, critics would greatly benefit from using it more. There's no music without rhythm and harmony, no poetry without meter, no prose without structure. In film, editing, shot composition, and story structure are all well-suited to quantitative criticism, to seeking to answer the question of how a film works or doesn't work. By the same token, we could probably spend more time talking about the qualitative aspects of math: Cantor's diagonalisation proof is a beautiful castle built on air; the Pythagorean theorem's various proofs by rearrangement are so grounded they don't need language at all. Our personal aesthetic and qualitative responses to great works of mathematics, like quantitative formal analysis of great works of art, can help us understand them better. But there's little value in assigning a number to how much we liked them. The interesting questions are “Why?” and “How?,” not “How much?”

There's nothing wrong with the question “Should I see this movie?,” and criticism can definitely help answer it. But the right way to find an answer is to consult one or two critics whose taste you trust, not a thousand critics you don't know. In fact, a review that talks about why and how a film works written by a critic whose tastes are completely different from yours will tell you much more about whether you, personally, might enjoy it than a “fresh” or “rotten” rating. Things don't get better by adding more voices to the din, they get worse. One of the greatest harms aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic do is convincing people that there's value in aggregation to begin with, that by asking enough people the same dumb question, a Rotten Tomato score will approach some mythical asymptote of objectivity. This is the logic that says that one shitty mortgage is a bad investment, but a thousand shitty mortgages are solid gold. Once you buy that, attacking critics whose opinions are “wrong” is an easy step to take. They're out of step with objective reality, as determined by math, so they must have an ulterior motive. The problem with the Rotten Tomatoes petition isn't the goal, it's that the person who wrote it has clearly internalized all the faulty premises the site is based on.

There's a larger argument here about the way aggregate scores dovetail neatly with our technocratic urge for assigning metrics to everything, which inexorably leads toward miserable people crying in their cubicles and collapsing from heatstroke—but it's probably unfair to lay scientific management at the feet of Rotten Tomatoes. Although Taylorism may be a garbage idea from a garbage culture, profit is undeniably quantifiable: artistic value just isn't. And from that initial category error, misery flows like blood from a wound, from fans who are genuinely sad and furious that someone is hurting their film's score to critics who have to deal with their harassment campaigns. Video game companies are even linking compensation to Metacritic scores: It looks like some kind of objective way of measuring the work a developer did; coincidentally, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than sharing profits. And so the loop of bullshit closes: The same internet hordes who attack critics who pan a big game can, correctly, say that those critics are hurting the game's creators financially. (To my knowledge, no critic has asked to be part of any company's human resources system, nor are any of them being paid for writing employee evaluations.) But in the HR spirit, here's some data-driven results-oriented analysis: The New Soviet Man this system produces is not James Agee but Milo Yiannopoulos, quantifying the value of other human beings like a deranged Nazi robot. (Not coincidentally, he's also an internet terrorist who allies himself with actual Nazis.) No thanks.

This is not to say that using Rotten Tomatoes will necessarily turn you into a Nazi. It's an aesthetic choice like any other. You can choose to understand the world around you by boiling down very complicated, personal responses from a wide variety of people to a single number. You can choose to be offended when your own response to something doesn't match the “objective” rating you've conjured out of thin air. But like any aesthetic choice, this too can be qualitatively described. So here's how I, personally, respond to Rotten Tomatoes, a website that assigns aggregate numbers to works of art. It's uninspired. It's boring. It's ugly. You can be on the side of Cogentiva or you can be on the side of Enlightened. I know which one I choose. After all, it's 86-percent fresh.

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r0B0t: Project Murphy Is Microsoft's Latest Artificial Intelligence Robot, And It Wants To Photoshop Pictures For You

Microsoft's recent Artificial Intelligence robot Tay didn't exactly make headlines for the right reasons, after Twitter users somehow managed to trick it into becoming a Nazi. But the computer giant is probably hoping their latest venture will steer clear of any controversy.

Project Murphy is described as a “robot with imagination” - you can talk to it through your Facebook Messenger app and ask it to dream up funny pictures for you.

For example, you could ask Murphy “What if Donald Trump was a fish?” and it would automatically edit the presidential candidate's head onto a sea creature.

Naturally, people are devoting a lot of time to finding the funniest possible combinations.

Here are a few of our favourites:

My best masterpiece so far with #ProjectMurphy. pic.twitter.com/G53KFmaWbE
— Jeremy Nielsen (@Jnn575) July 12, 2016

Идеально #projectmurphy pic.twitter.com/BoB753SQ5z
— Maxim Vakulich (@vma392) July 8, 2016

Having way too much fun with #projectmurphy @ThePoke pic.twitter.com/hpgAjF2fC9
— Tom Nightingale (@Tomn_1986) August 5, 2016

What if Davey Cameron is a pie? #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/ySfvvewwLK
— Ryan Barrell (@RyanBarrell) August 5, 2016

Oh dear. #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/O1pNGzwpTc
— Jason Wilson (@WhizzoUK) August 5, 2016

#ProjectMurphy is easily the best thing Microsoft has done in recent memory. pic.twitter.com/qVR9uBEeMd
— Matt Kremske (@Kremdog28) July 10, 2016

Rather happy with my first question to #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/5s1iHbaOQu
— Jason Wilson (@WhizzoUK) August 5, 2016

#projectmurphy pic.twitter.com/vsNhYGbqEy
— Chris Dyson (@ChrisLDyson) August 5, 2016

"Do you ever sit back and ask yourself what you're doing with your life?" - Saru, 2k16 #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/jGj1mGnmRX
— Animus (@cinderskull) July 25, 2016

#projectmurphy what if Donald Trump was Miley Cyrus? pic.twitter.com/OEPoQULMeb
— Jack (@JackMeeOff) July 22, 2016

#ProjectMurphy is amazing pic.twitter.com/OyTsMcPKHt
— Jeremy Nielsen (@Jnn575) July 12, 2016

Although they don't always work out:

#projectmurphy What if Sunderland had an airport - I'm genuinely not sure how to respond to this pic.twitter.com/rt3jGO3EWn
— Chris Swinton (@Keawyeds) August 5, 2016

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