Personal essays
Remaking the painted tunnel gag
An old-fashioned deep fake
The first Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon was released a little more than seventy-five years ago.
The cartoon, “The Fast and the Furry-ous” featured the now classic painted tunnel gag.
That’s the one where the coyote takes some white paint and paints the center strip of a road off of the road, across the dessert and up to a mountain of solid rock.
The coyote then carefully paints a tunnel on the side of the rock. It includes the road and the correct shadows and the light at the other end and the white center line so it looks like the road safely goes through the tunnel.
“Beep beep.”
Hey it’s the road runner.
The coyote ducks behind a rock and the road runner approaches the tunnel and continues on through like it’s a real tunnel and safely exits the other side.
Seeing this, the coyote backs away from the tunnel and takes a running start towards it and, of course, crashes into the side of the rock. The tunnel isn’t real.
“But Daniel,” you say, “the road runner got through safely.”
Yeah. It’s a cartoon.
It’s also a metaphor.
Saving money over saving lives
In the past, Teslas used a combination of radar and cameras for their self-driving technology.
At one point they decided to get rid of the radar (really lidar) and just rely on the cameras.
In his latest video, Mark Rober compares how lidar based collision detection does compared to the camera based system.
Although Rober gives the Tesla system the benefit of the doubt in many of the situations, the lidar is clearly superior.
In fact, the cameras are fooled by a Wile E Coyote style painting of a road on a sheet across the highway while the lidar vehicle comes to a stop in plenty of time.
Tesla executives claimed that removing the radar would reduce complexity in their systems and would definitely reduce the costs.
Subsequent reporting revealed that many Tesla engineers argued that removing the radar system would make the cars less safe and that their objections were overruled by Musk.
I feel like I owe you a content warning - I’m about to get political.
Fooled again
We (collectively) are taught these myths that many of us believe.
The lead up to the 2016 election was filled with stories about what a great businessman Trump was and how having someone who had been so successful would be great for our country.
Somehow, people ignored the stories about his bankruptcies, failed businesses, practices of not paying contractors, and history suing anyone who tried to get what they were owed. Instead the myth of the star of The Apprentice gained momentum that caused many to ignore the word salad that spilled from his mouth every day.
And now we’ve done it again.
We’ve fallen for the myth of Musk this time.
Many are surprised that he’s busy doing to the American government what he did when he took over Twitter. Cutting people who provided essential services and making quick changes without understanding the implications.
People ignore the number of his rockets that aren’t succesful and focus on the ones that land safely back on the launch pad.
They don’t seem to notice that he hasn’t met any deadline he’s set for a new car release or the implementation of technology such as completely self-driving cars.
Removing lidar to save money, bullying people who had issues with his cars, and hiding crash and safety statistics should have told us that he would cut science, weather, health organizations and any of the many government agencies that are actively investigating him or his companies.
Finding out
One of my least favorite, post-election phrases is FAFO.
It is supposed to refer to all of the Trump voters who are in the “Find out” stage of the process.
Those voters followed the politicians who drew the white line through the desert up to the solid rock wall.
They went to rallies and watched their leaders paint the tunnel on what they knew was solid rock.
But here’s where the metaphor reverses.
Those politicians who painted the line and the tunnel and all of their rich friends were able to run through the tunnel and gather riches on the other side.
Their voters were stuck in the “Find out” stage running into the wall and finding out that, “hey, it’s a wall. That tunnel is just a painting.”
And those of us who didn’t vote for them? We aren’t running into the wall. But we also can’t get to the other side where the money we put into our Social Security and retirement savings is.
We can’t seem to get out of this desert and return to where our democracy was.
Meanwhile the climate is changing and it’s getting hot out here.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 261. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe