The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
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.
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.
As you say, if it is open source it may well be modified, and likely the remote pull over will be removed.
I can't really imagine a scenario whereby the remote pullover is implemented, and then allowed to be removed by individual owners.
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.
The safety of themselves or others?
Potentially both, but I think either is sufficient argument for reasonable regulation.
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.
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.
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.
If you try to do some type of remote real-time detection of an unlicensed system, software that is modified can masquerade as unmodified.
But for instance, other systems could record and report vehicles with anomalous behaviors.
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.
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.
I see unsafe modified cars almost every week right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: I expect company's to punt with a user selectable: how much to speed buttons.
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.
As for speed limits and such, I'm talking about the car's ethical choices in crashes, not the ethics of the programmers.
At least, they will if we don't screw it up.
Because the article was completely about people REPAIRING technology they purchased, and not at all about mods, modding or modifications.
how can you allow mechanics to fix brakes without allowing them to break brakes?
I dunno... laws maybe? Like, the same laws that can require manufacturers to allow aftermarket competition.
even more, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you can repair a gun, 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 don't think human drivers have the reaction time to make these decisions, not sure why so many expect computers to be able to.
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.
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.
Interesting as it may be, it's only shifting the problem ;).
Ascribing ethical decisions to the driver in such a situation is not rational nor ethical.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Formally verified code is not unheard of.
Ideally in practice, that problem is simpler than "Does our code what we want?
In theory in the abstract, of course, the problems are the same.
Cars are not entities to which ethics can be ascribed; the humans building, designing, and programming them are.
Apparently there has been some disagreement as to whether cars can be moral agents?
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.
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.
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.
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!"
That seems very suspect.
Being better than a human driver is a very low bar to pass.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
What kind of ethical dilemma should it have on that example?
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.
What alternative would a human take? Would they kill the kidnappers by driving over them?
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.
Of course, in many countries that would count as self defense (if kidnappers were armed and pointed guns towards your car).
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
http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/downsides.html
I don't remember if he also mentioned the kidnapping scenario when I heard him present about this.
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!
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.
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.
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.
(In any case, the law doesn't provide for this case of vigilantism. And two wrong wouldn't make a right.)
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.
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.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
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.
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.
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.
Amazing. Intentional, premeditated, assault and battery and vandalism carries a penalty of just $5,000.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
"Targets of coal rolling often include owners of hybrid vehicles (hence the nickname "Prius duster") as well as bicyclists and pedestrians."
People really do shit like this out of spite?
I have no words.
*I am an Environmental Law professional.
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.
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.
[1] page 7 of https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2014/acs-32.pdf
But I'm talking about crashes, not normal drives. I think ethical considerations will be one-in-a-million events for crashes, not for normal drives.
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.
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.
Hobbyist.
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.
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".
The former is still strictly safer.
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.
You have drunk drivers, texting drivers, distracted drivers....
The human attention span is incredibly brittle as well.
In terms of QA'ing a manual driver in the US? You take a 10 minute driving test when you're 16 and you're licensed to drive for the rest of your 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 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.
Wait a sec....isn't this what human drivers do already, favor their own vehicles?
Obviously, not everyone agrees that this is a problem that needs to be fixed - that's where the debate is.
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
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.
... which would return us to the "software" that we're all already running.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I don't know the answer to that question. But I do hope it is "the party that was negligent".
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.
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
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.
Amusingly, AMD seems to manage fine without nearly as many socket changes as Intel...
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.
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. :)
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
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.
/rant
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
That's what this fight is.
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...
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?
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?
Ownership is clearly not what you think it is.
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?
I was more than impressed by their confidence in their hardware.
[0] http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/03/21/apple-hypocritical-...
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...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2015/mar/03...
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.
http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guar...
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.
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.
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.
We are talking about our "right" to force other to do something rather than protecting ourselves from being forced.
It should be business issue, not an actual human right issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro-retina-d...
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).
> I have a company Dell that's horrible.
Aren't company computers pretty generally crap? I'm not sure that's a fair comparison to draw...
Not to mention the $200 premium they charge for RAM. I can get 16gb of crucial RAM for the older MBPs for $56.99.
I'll pay to play eventually but I'm not happy about it.
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.
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.
Therefore, advocating the existence of some bureaucracies and not others does not contradict my argument, nor is it inconsistent with my argument.
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.
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).
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.
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?
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
They cannot if the DCMA denies repairs. The market no longer decides, the courts decide you lack the right to use the market.
This includes repairing devices that are required to be reliable for public safety.
[1] http://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/news/070905_p10_hynix.jpg
I don't need to repair individual transistors on the silicon, it would just be nice to be able to replace the battery or screen if I need to.