Rag’s Rations: Podcast (auto)Pilot Episode transcript

This is the transcript of the introductory episode of the brand new Rag's Rations Podcast, available for your listening pleasure at https://soundcloud.com/ragmanjin/rags-rations-auto-pilot-episode.
As some people prefer reading to listening, I’ll be posting each episode’s transcripts here on Steemit — and ONLY here on Steemit — as my small effort to help grow this exciting community. Thank you for your interest.
In this first episode, we take a look at autonomous cars and ponder how we might react to this new technology as artsy types. Because every realization can be an epiphany if you just plug it in.

Rag's Rations, Episode 1: Podcast (auto)Pilot Episode

So a few days ago, a Silicon Valley investor named Josh Elman tweeted out that he stopped a Waymo self-driving van by running towards it in the dark. He wrote that it made him feel like he had power over the machine. "Right now we feel like cars are dangerous," he says. What if that changes since they'll always stop?

That's a good question. And you know, I think there is definitely something to be learned from this. So, naturally, I've started a podcast.

(intro jingle)

HEYOOO. Welcome to Rag's Rations, inspiration for starving artists. Where we take a look at the world to see if we can spot a muse. Because really, what's life without a continuous series of "holy shit" moments?

Boring. That's what that is. Life as an artist should be one continuous "holy shit" from birth to death. Womb to tomb, one big mind fuck.

So in this first episode, we're going to take a look at old and new technologies. Humans and their things. Starting with cars. Check this out.

There are few things we can own that change our lives so drastically as a means of reliable transportation. In the beginning, we'd just walk our caveman asses around on our feet. Then some of us found horses, and we sat on them. That made shit WAY easier. Some of us decided floating around on bits of wood was the way to go. Eventually we came up with a bunch of methods of transport, from trains and horse cabs to canoes and bicycles. And cars.

Cars have actually revolutionized transportation a couple of times. Most importantly, when their sudden popularity led to the production line process of manufacture — and again in the 30s and 40s when the big car companies came together to monopolize and destroy America's public transit. I guess they figured we should all have to drive ourselves around. Better for everybody.

Now, people have been saying for a few years that the self-driving car is going to be the next big thing in transportation. It's not quite the flying cars we were promised in early cartoons — yet — but it's a pretty cool start. And there are a LOT of different companies out there investing a LOT of R&D money into making it go. And though production schedules are being pushed back by most of those companies — many of which said their first models would be driving themselves our way this year — this is going to be a big part of our reality pretty soon.

When I saw Josh Elman's tweet, it reminded me of an article I read in the Guardian a couple of years ago. In January of 2016, Mike Harris wrote a piece about Google's self-driving fleet — now spun off as Waymo. At that point, he wrote, the Waymo fleet had had 13 reported near-misses in the previous 14 months, in which human intervention was necessary to prevent a collision or infraction. There were also 272 other incidents where the cars had handed back control to the driver, generally for a technical issue such as a communications breakdown between sensors.

Keep in mind, this is talking about 49 cars driving 424,000 autonomous miles in testing. If you, like me, are a Canuck, that's more than 680,000 kilometres. And over that time, it's reported that the test drivers took control of the cars literally thousands of times, most where it was totally unnecessary to do so.

Later, in August of last year, Axios reported that out of 34 incidents from 2014 to 2017 in California, only one took place in which the car was both at fault, as well as still in autonomous mode at the time of the accident. The car had been travelling at less than 10mph at the time. Minor. 13 took place while the cars were stopped. There were only four total in which the car was deemed to be at fault. This is out of 36 companies testing vehicles over the course of three years, all in California where reporting all of these incidents is required by law.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the big incident in March of last year that shut down Uber's testing and totalled one of their robo cars was — surprise, surprise — caused by the driver of another vehicle. That other driver, said the local police spokesperson at the time, had failed to yield.

There are other articles and statistics out there that you can look into if you're curious, but most or all of them seem to suggest the same thing: In the hundreds of thousands of kilometres driven in testing, humans fuck up WAAAAY more often than the cars do. People caused the overwhelming majority of self-driving car accidents, and the ones the cars did cause were generally pretty tame by comparison.

So maybe that Elman guy was right? Is the advent of the driverless car going to change the power dynamic between people and cars, as cautiously suggested by Andrew Hawkins of the Verge in their response to his tweet? Or will they just make people do dumber things, as Hawkins goes on to suggest in his article?

Let's think about that.

It's hardly surprising that these cars drive better than people. According to Bryan Salesky of Argo AI, as quoted by Wired last month, these vehicles have $75,000 Lidar sensors for 3D vision, radar for long-range awareness, cameras for colour and detail; enough processing power to constantly monitor everything important to their driving and nothing else to think about. They're designed to make use of a huge gamut of the best and latest technologies and software and algorithms, ensuring they're the safest shit possible.

And you want to pit that for skill against the few pounds of wrinkly, distractable meat you keep behind your eyes? That doesn't quite seem to be a fair match.

That might be the biggest lesson people take away from this new technology as it becomes more prevalent in our lives: Like when you accidentally step too close to a rattlesnake, sometimes having the wherewithal NOT to react is, in fact, the best possible reaction to a situation.

So two big questions then naturally arise: Why does that matter, and where the hell do we get off starting a podcast for starving artists on a topic like expensive, futuristic super-toys like autonomous vehicles?

I'm going to toss one word out there for your consideration before we dive into both of those questions. And that word is Mindfulness. Hear me out for a sec.

Mindfulness is a word that's being thrown around a lot these days. It's a concept that's been around for thousands of years, and likely one that's practiced and upheld in some way or another by most or all of your own idols and role models. It's a quality we humans almost universally admire in other humans. And in dogs sometimes, I guess. But if you're not entirely sure what it means, you're not alone.

Mindfulness is that wherewithal we need to not react. It's cultivating a sense that sometimes, just maybe, control is best relinquished to someone or something outside of ourselves — just as the Waymo cars did those 272 times.

In a broader sense, it's taking the time to acknowledge your internal reality with the same level of care and attention as you give the outside world. It's being aware of your own mental and emotional reaction to something, and consciously choosing how or even if you want to respond to that. And it's taking the time to consider new information, to really internalize it and, if necessary, adjusting your perceptions accordingly.

"But who the hell are you to be giving us advice on mindfulness," I hear you thinking. Nobody. I am nobody. And as a matter of fact, my own car can hardly be deemed roadworthy unless the temperature is between five and 20ºC. But don't worry about that yet.

I'm just some guy who believes that our job in life is to learn to produce a positive internal reaction to the things and thoughts we encounter. That is essentially and by definition what lasting happiness is. And to do that, all we need to do is look at our world through the shades of mindfulness and curiosity (I wear my sunglasses at night....). Once we can learn to do that, we'll never spend another day staring at a blank page or an empty canvas or an unsolvable problem.

Now, before you dismiss all of this as socialist pseudo-hippie bullshit, know I am going somewhere with this. And it's not asking you to take it from me.

As an example, Albert Einstein was known for creating what he called "thought experiments" to help himself and others get their heads around new or difficult problems and theories that came up in his work. In that way, by visualizing and thinking clearly and logically through a new idea, he was able to forgo his own initial emotional reaction; he could skip past his mind's knee-jerk take on the way he assumed something was or should be. He found that with this mindful approach, by really taking the time to internalize new realities and integrate new ways of thinking or perceiving things, the way forward becomes much more clear.

Rather than allowing his mind — whether he realized it or not — to struggle to make the world something that it isn't — and all of the grief and frustration that entails — he took the time to really ponder and accept reality wholeheartedly. This is how he realized simultaneity doesn't exist.

As explained by Maria Konnikova in her incredibly insightful book "Mastermind," our brains are made up of a few different parts, each responsible for different things. Most of our reactions by default come from the autopilot, the subconscious, or as Konnikova calls it, the "Watson" mind. "It's why we often forget what we were doing if we're interrupted, why we stand in the middle of the kitchen wondering why we've entered it," she writes.

Logic, clear thinking and accurate perceptions come from what she calls the "Holmes" mind. And by simply being aware of the fallacies of the Watson mind, and by doing some simple, regular exercises, we can train our knee-jerk subconscious to react in a way more befitting of the logical side.

"And," she says, "just like a muscle that you never knew you had — one that suddenly begins to ache, then develop and bulk up as you begin to use it more and more in a new series of exercises — with practice your mind will see that the constant observation and never-ending scrutiny will become easier."

If you want to be a person of near-spontaneous creative problem solving, this is almost essential.

But that's a topic for another episode. What the hell are you getting at, am I right?

So let's take a second to think about what all of this means so far. Yes, it's true that our ancient monkey minds are less good than autonomous cars when it comes to doing something like driving. Something that we as a species could not do less than a century or a handful of generations ago. As in, flying down roads at speed, controlling the trajectory of thousands of pounds of metal and explosive fuel around moving and stationary obstacles while continuously monitoring our surroundings for hazards and pedestrians and traffic laws and also singing along to Tiny Dancer and planning dinner. Then again, I'm pretty sure that if you could go back in time and tell Henry Ford that that's what we're all doing here in the future, he'd probably have you committed to one of the cruel, disgusting, underfunded insane asylums of his day.

I mean, at least if you're a woman. Back then just about anyone could drop a lady off at any loony bin with nothing more than the suggestion that she was crazy and be done with the whole business. But again, that's another topic for another episode.

So that's one takeaway from all this: Self-driving cars are amazing, and yes, someday cars are absolutely going to be better drivers than humans. Every time. That'll just be the common knowledge of tomorrow, and that's fine.

What self-driving cars are not so good at — yet, of course — is creating, designing, inventing amazing things such as self-driving cars. Think about that for a second.

So the other takeaway I see from this is that human ingenuity is fucking incredible. What our old monkey minds do exceedingly well, when we use them, is create and improve upon awe-inspiring things.

But whatever they are, and whatever they become, they are still just our inventions. Every thing that we have and use in our everyday lives was thought up, invented, built and often further improved upon by humans. If you're part of my demographic here, then you, too, are a human.

See, in the hands of humans, technology will only ever get better. That goes without saying, right? It's also good news. But let's remember that no improvement would be possible without first having something to improve upon. In that sense, previous and current technologies are ultimately fundamental to everything that follows.

That also feels like common sense, right? Stay with me here.

Driverless cars are currently prohibitively expensive if accessible at all. A lot of people can't wait to get their hands on 'em, whatever the price. They're a dream that's almost within reach. But at some point in the past, so were car tires that lasted more than a handful of trips. And "three on the tree?" Inspired, they said. Outstanding. It's true.

Every previous step in every technological progression was, at some point, a next step. At some point, it was an improvement. At some point, it was the greatest thing a human could put together using the available skills, materials, thinking and often infrastructure of their day. And in its time, it was, if nothing else, good enough for the people who used that previous step every day in their work and in their lives. Keep this in mind.

Because as shit gets better, previous versions of that shit gets, generally, cheaper and more readily accessible — collectors' items and antiques excluded, and sometimes only for long enough for those things to become a collectors' item or an antique.

We've come so far with cars now that we've not only replaced the horse, but the jockey, too. That's amazing. But it's easy to get caught up in the novelty of that, and to feel like somehow this new version of personal transportation somehow negates the brilliant thinking that went into every previous step on the long and winding road to where we are now. I mean, how will we feel about our lowly ground-dwelling autonomous cars once the Jetsons-style flying ones finally show up?

And that applies to all of our shiny new shit. It's all fundamentally based on the very same supposedly outdated garbage so many people drop in their never-ending quest to own all of the very best things. It takes a second sometimes to realize that amazing things, mundane things, it was all done using whatever was there up until there was something better. And can still be done with those things. That's where we find that perfect human balance between adaptability and ingenuity.

I'm going to drop an oversimplified summary of everything we've covered so far so you can let it soak into your subconscious as we move on. Alright? Here we go: The status quo of things is amazing because people are amazing. You are a person. You are amazing.

Both adaptability and ingenuity are wholly admirable traits, and when we recognize them, we can reinforce our faith in the inherent wisdom of human beings. You see, mindfulness is seeing when it's best to cede control of a situation and to lean on the genius of your fellow human beings and their brilliant inventions. But it's also being totally aware that you, too, are a human. As such, you, too, have inexhaustible stores of resilience, adaptability, and wisdom.

Now that we've got that all wrapped up nicely, let's throw one last cog into this machine: It's often said that time is money. You can, then, as an amazing human, spend one or the other on things and problems in your own life. Is that fair?

I mentioned my shitty, shitty car earlier and I'd like to use that as an example. Don't get me wrong: Personally, I right now could not make my car drive itself. That's not the point I'm trying to make with all this. I don't know anything about cars. Almost at all. I know what the hood is and often how to get it open, but that was literally the extent of my knowledge of automobiles for many years. When that's your reality, it's pretty easy to freak out when your shitty early-90s poverty-wagon picks up a dirty habit like smoking at stop lights. Especially if you're in a tough spot financially.

Just take a breath, though. This is one of those times to skip the initial emotional turmoil and choose your reaction. To choose to remember that nobody was ever born a mechanic, and that you are no better, no worse, no less a human than any of the people you might otherwise pay to solve this problem. Once you get your head around this fact, all that stands between you and a cheap fix is time and knowledge.

And in this day and age, we are absolutely DROWNING in knowledge.

Again, I'm not saying I could build or create even my car. Not right now, and not without a substantial investment of time and money, for learning and for parts respectively. But see, I'm mindful of this limitation, and curious to find the knowledge necessary to fix my car. And when you remember people just like you are literally turning cars into fucking robots, it becomes a lot easier to face your overheating '91 Suzuki with confidence.

It becomes a lot easier to see that the first step is a phone call or a web search. That leads to handful of simple tests to narrow down the problem, such as checking the gas lines, carefully smelling for exhaust where it shouldn't be or watching the levels in the radiator as your car warms up. In the end you find all you need is a wrench and a $12 thermostat or a $9 bottle of stop leak fluid to make your car give up smoking. Maybe you find a deeper issue and realize you shouldn't be driving your car at all.

And newer cars are easier still, considering computer diagnostic machines are readily available for dirt cheap on eBay.

This is part of the beauty of older technology: Generally, parts and even replacements are cheaper, and knowledge much more widely available. Using established or previous steps in the tech progression often makes it easier to create things or solve problems with time rather than with money.

The caveat being that, if it were a brand new car, might not have had this problem. Then again, I wouldn't have learned anything.

Case in point: The vast majority of the work that went into writing this podcast took place on a typewriter that's a good decade older than I am. I've had it for years. Wrote several sections of my first book on it, too. This was all uploaded to the internet from a 20lb pig of a laptop with a "Made for Windows XP" sticker prominently displayed next to the keyboard.

This old technology can still be incredibly useful if you want to do amazing things without the desire or ability to pony up for the latest and greatest. All you have to do is take the time to apply and, if necessary, adapt these previous-generation gems into your life with the same thinking and ingenuity as those who both used them every day in the past, as well as those who eventually improved upon them.

Personally, I'd much rather take something supposedly outdated and customize it to suit my needs. It's cheaper, and the constant stream of projects keeps me sane. As a starving artist, just thinking about how and what and why I'd adapt and customize these things helps to stave off the boredom of abject poverty. It lets you take inspiration and perspective from the new stuff and put that thinking to work yourself. Plus, there's an entire class of patents devoted to new uses for old technology. Let that really sink in for a sec.

If you're wondering how this could matter to us artsy types, consider one last point. I used to run a photography company, and in my spare time, I would often visit photography-related forums online. And each and every time there was some new camera body or some new lens released — especially if it was less than $1500 — people would inevitably start complaining about the reported speed of that equipment's autofocus. Without fail, the concern would always be raised in the comments of the release articles.

"Why does autofocus speed need to be lightning-fast?" I'd ask them. And they'd say something like "for sports" or "for my toddlers and my cats," or something along those lines.

And what always blew my mind was that most of the people on these forums were much older than myself. People from the generation who know, for a fact from having been there, that autofocus wasn't even really available in a consumer-grade SLR camera until Pentax dropped that shit on the world in 1981. Nikon took till 1983. In the grand scheme of things, that's basically fucking yesterday.

Do you know how many times the Olympics happened between the advent of photography and the 1980s? Even then, many pros stuck to manual lenses they had already been using as nascent autofocus was nowhere near fast enough to keep up with action. That would be like expecting the first generation of autonomous cars to compete in Formula1 races. Leica even had autofocus in the 70s, but completely abandoned it before it ever reached consumers. It wasn't good enough for their discerning customers. Besides, manual focus was good enough for every photographer — not even just the famous ones, but every single photographer who took every photo and video you've ever seen of not only the world wars, but also the wars in Vietnam and Korea. They were still using manual focus for school portraits when I was in grade school.

But now, hardly 30 years later, it's suddenly become impossible to photograph a man on a bicycle without blazing fast automatic focus.

Of those videos I've shot for the PurpleRung Foundation, the first was shot using a toy pinhole body cap lens that cannot be focussed closer or further than it is set. The others were filmed using a manual focus lens that was actually made for security cameras. For a couple videos, that lens was actually attached to the camera using a body cap with a hole drilled in it, a cut-up piece of a film canister lid to space out the flange distance, and some electrical tape. It was like $20 and a half hour of tinkering, and it's now easily the brightest lens I've ever owned. One of the sharpest, too. I've personally shot weddings and portraits involving young children with manual-focus lenses. Some of them on film, too. And I'm nobody, remember. Just a human like everyone else. You could do that.

All I'm saying is, yes, autofocus is handy and nice. Yes, self-driving cars are amazing and exciting. But the fact that they exist doesn't suddenly make us worse as photographers or drivers. Not unless WE let it. New toys don't make people dumber; automating a process doesn't make impossible to do manually. People were talented enough to shoot all-manual cameras and to drive themselves around for the entire history of being able to do those things at all, right up until an alternative was invented. Right?

So Might it be better instead to find inspiration and perspective in these new things, and to apply that to our lives with mindfulness and curiosity? Rather than wishing we could have these shiny new things and live a whole life of automation, would it not be more fun and more fulfilling to grab the thing from yesterday, and with attention and the desire to learn and grow as people, see how we might use or improve on them ourselves?

And that's essentially what this podcast is. It's my reminder to you that anyone can do anything, problems are a matter of perspective, and you can take inspiration from life rather than intimidation. But more importantly, it's an exercise in a thought process that will help you to see depth and story in everything around you, and to never waste a minute moping or lusting when you could be having your mind blown. Rations of inspiration for my fellow starving artists.

Just as with creative problem solving, it's taking a second to step back, break down a situation, a theory, idea, thought process or concept or whatever to its most fundamental parts, and seeing then what can be learned, what thoughts arise, what solutions or new inspirations come up. It's through this mindful process of examination and reflection that we can gain new insights into our world. That, to me, is art fuel.

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, be sure to check out our next episode in a couple of weeks. Bread is going to teach us some shit about the creative process or whatever.

G'BYYYYEE.

(outro ditty)

Thank you for taking the time to read my podcast. I look forward to posting again soon.

Cheers,
Ragman Jin.

All content Copyright © 2018 by Rag Jin. All rights reserved.