7 June 2020

Self-driving vehicles are no longer science fiction. They are on public roads. A combination of sensors, hard-coded control software, and AI-related decision-making algorithms have moved the “driver’s seat” from leather and fabric to silicon chips. Control mechanisms have become invisible.

The Future of Intelligent Vehicles

Most people understand the concept of a computer-driven car, at least in a general sense. But have they thought about where this technology might lead?

I don’t mean the more obvious aspects of reading while you’re driving, controlling the car by voice commands, avoiding accidents due to human error, or worrying about GPS bugs that might land you in a dark alley or the wrong side of town. Nor am I talking about sneaking a beer because you don’t have to worry about running into a concrete barrier or oncoming car.

What I see for the future of self-driven vehicles is a biological model based on dolphins. One that goes beyond the individual vehicle.

The Cetacean Connection

Humans can connect with dolphin intelligence. We have a place in our hearts for dolphins and they are attracted to us. But dolphin communication is still mostly a mystery. They learn our languages better than we learn theirs.

In my high-school summer-job days, one of my jobs was working at an aquarium, microphone in hand, narrating the whale shows (killer whales are not really whales, they are orcas, but we called them whales). I learned many surprising facts about whales, dolphins, and sealions that I tried to convey in an engaging and educational manner. I also observed these charming and complex animals having good days and bad days.

One day, the biggest orca was feeling under the weather. He didn’t want to do the show. He went through the motions with lackluster spirit, and then he stalled when the trainer asked him to do a giant leap. He substituted a low leap—you could barely call it a leap.

The trainer gave him a second chance, but the orca offered another sluggish hump, barely breaking the surface, and the trainer became annoyed. He had studied psychology and he knew if he rewarded the orca’s behavior with a bucket of fish, the next performance might be the same or worse, so he did something I had never seen before… he turned his back and slowly, deliberately, walked away with the fish. The audience pays for the show, so this was a gamble. The trainer would have to sacrifice one show for the sake of future customers… but he was resolute. The game was over.

I was young, still in my teens. I hadn’t thought much about the ethics of aquariums, I thought only of their educational value, but what happened next was eye-opening.

When the orca saw his dinner disappearing, he charged after the trainer, frothing up the water along the edge of the pool, with his head well above water.

The trainer pointedly ignored him and kept walking. The orca then sped to the other end of the pool, turned, swished his tail to pick up speed and executed the most beautiful series of dolphin leaps I have ever seen. The trainer didn’t even look around. He turned the corner toward the supply room.

Now the orca was seriously worried, determined to get the trainer’s attention and his reward of fish. So he sped to the far end of the pool, veering around a smaller female orca and the gray dolphins, dove as deep as he could, whipped his tail to propel his immense body up to full speed and… right next to the trainer at the far end of the pool came completely out of the water in the most incredible giant leap I have ever seen. He landed with a mighty splash that poured a tsunami over the delighted audience.

The trainer didn’t even glance around. He walked into the supply room and shut the door.

The orca hovered at the edge of the pool, nose out of the water, waiting for the door to re-open, thinking he had made up for his previous lapse. He had, after all, just given the performance of his life.

But the door didn’t re-open until it was time for the next show, an hour later.

From that point on, the orca gave his usual excellent performance. Most of the time, he enjoyed the hourly shows, but it was never the same as the adrenalin-charged series of leaps that the trainer never saw. His extra effort inspired me to learn more about orcas, and how they live in the wild, and I tried to incorporate this information into my narrative at the whale shows.

The audience seemed to enjoy the additional information in the commentary, until I started talking about dolphin sonar. Then their eyes would glaze over, so I dropped it from the narrative… but I never lost interest in the subject.

How Dolphins See

Even though we feel a kinship with these intelligent creatures, a dolphin’s world is very different from ours.

If you put a toy in a box and ask a dolphin to identify the toy, it doesn’t try to peek in the box with its eye. Instead, it sends out signals from a biological sonar to probe the contents of the box. Dolphins can tell you what’s inside by selecting a picture of the item from a set of flash cards. They can even distinguish one material from another in objects of similar shape.

This is not too hard to comprehend either, if you have a basic understanding of sound waves. It’s similar to the way bats navigate in the dark by sending out chirps that echo back to build up a ‘picture’ in their heads of their environment.

But where it gets elusive is when you consider that dolphin communication is shared. If one dolphin sends out a signal, the waves that radiate back are apprehended by all the dolphins. You can’t “secretly” probe something. It’s group-sight.

If all the dolphins signaled at the same time, it would be cacophony, with one dolphin’s signals drowning out the others. If they want to sense their world in a rational, comprehensible way, they have to coordinate those signals so they don’t all ‘talk’ at the same time.

The Concept of “Self”

This is what I was thinking when I heard that smart cars were now driving on public roads. A self-driven car is only the beginning. Inter-communicating cars—that is the future. But it’s not as easy as just adding sensors and telecommunication devices—you have to coordinate the signals in much the same way as a nervous system coordinates the different parts of a body. Then the concept of the “self-driven” vehicle becomes an anachronism, with the concept of “self” subsumed into the whole.

Maybe that’s the way VMS research is headed. Research was historically a solitary pursuit. The 1940s Study Group made a collaborative effort with the limited resources available, but there were many hurdles to medieval research in pre-Internet days.

The VMS mailing list was a good start in terms of collaboration, but the format is not as flexible as a media-ready platform. Now we have the Voynich.ninja forum, where imagery can be shared and research can be read within minutes of being posted. Nick Pelling blogged an informative article about preprint servers. Scientists are enjoying unprecedented access to information and opportunities, a blessing in a time of pandemics.

Rene Zandbergen is gradually building up a historical resource of what we know, but I’m not sure we’ve come up with the best format yet for what-we-suspect but don’t quite know—a significant challenge considering the diversity of opinions on every small detail of the VMS. I keep finding posts from a few years ago that I forgot I had written.

What might be helpful is a visual clickmap of the major areas of VMS research linked to the major threads dealing with that subject. This is not a small project. It might take the cooperation of the whole community to make it happen, but it might be a useful tool to prevent reposting of the same info that was posted years ago.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 7 June 2020, J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved