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A sub operated by single button? Mistaken assumptions about technology invite disaster, risk lives [1]
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Date: 2023-06-23
Listen, I know most of you are sick of all this submarine coverage. Five souls lost at sea in what sure seems like a DIY submersible makes for decent-enough copy, though I haven’t caught all that much handwringing and expert analysis for the 300 Pakistani nationals that died this same week following the sinking of an overcrowded fishing boat, as noted by Pakalolo here at DailyKos.
Arguing why the media covers the things it does seems a bit Quixotic at this stage of our ongoing crash of unfettered capitalism into the brick wall of reality, so let’s set that part aside. No, there’s only one part of this I want to talk about:
The button.
That brief clips shows the late OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush pointing out to CBS News correspondent David Pogue the sole button that operated his contraption.
Stockton Rush: “We only have one button — that’s it. It should be like an elevator.”
No.
It’s oft-stated that modern technology would be indistinguishable from magic to people of a simpler time, but it’s important to realize indistinguishable is not the same as equal.
A button has long been both a wonderful way to execute a simple command, like ringing a doorbell, selecting a soft drink from a vending machine, or sending huge dumps of Chinese-manufactured ballots to voting machines in the middle of the night.
There are plenty of stories out there that get into the technical details of exactly what went wrong, but here’s a brief clip of director James Cameron giving us the straight story.
At 2:13 is the heart of the matter, OceanGate’s unconventional choice for material:
James Cameron: “I never believed in that technology of carbon-fiber wound filament cylindrical hull, I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I had spoken up, you know, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know because I’ve never experimented with that technology. But it sounded bad on its face.”
Stockton Rush clearly believed differently, as evidenced in this article from Insider:
"I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Rush said, smiling. The CEO acknowledged that he'd "broken some rules" with the Titan's manufacturing but was confident that his design was sound. "I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. Carbon fiber and titanium? There's a rule you don't do that," he told alanxelmundo. "Well, I did."
Yeah, sure -- that sounds kind of terrible now. I mean, how was he supposed to know about de-lamination of the hull and progressive failure over time, something James Cameron explained in that clip we watched above?
You know, he should have paid closer attention to that stuff.
Instead, there appears to be a lot of wishful thinking combined with the apparent belief modern technology can make the most challenging of efforts as simple as pushing a button.
James Cameron may be known as the director of our second-favorite franchise of blue folk (after The Smurfs, naturally), but he definitely knows what he’s talking about here. Not only has he worked with top-flight engineers in the field to build his own submarine, he’s used it to solo dive to the ocean’s deepest point.
Listen to Cameron describe a harrowing close-call on an early solo dive at 36:08:
“As I was going down, I think I was at around 26,000 feet, things started to fail on the sub, and it was one system after another, after another. And I was trying to chase down what was happening. I couldn’t tell if it was pressure-related, or what was going on.”
The whole story is nightmare fuel, but essentially Cameron had to work through total darkness and power loss, with no sense of where he was in relation to the ocean floor (making impact a frightening possibility).
Yeah, there’s no “elevator button” here because this isn’t a simple thing. Cameron eventually had to abandon the dive and resurface — something he was fortunate to have planned ahead for. Jump to 38:05 for the punctuation point to his experience:
James Cameron: “It made me think back to a moment about a year earlier, where I had insisted to the electronics guys that we not control the ballast system, that allows me to come back to the surface, through the PAC computer. They wanted me to do that because it would free up penetrators going through the hull by controlling it through serial data protocol. So I said no, I want that on its own dedicated circuit — and it’s a good thing I did, too, because I’d be still sitting down there.”
Should that unfortunate ending had come to pass, I suspect it would have sounded as if millions of Na’vi voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Say, speaking of ballast... how was that handled by Stockton Rush and OceanGate? David Pogue explained to the Washington Post:
David Pogue: “Some of the ballast is abandoned construction pipes that are sitting on shelves on the side of the thing, and the way you detach the ballast is you get everybody on board to lean to one side of the sub and they roll off.”
Keeping yourself alive can be fun!
Stockton Rush was born to a wealthy San Francisco family and descends from two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Wanting to grow up to be an astronaut but believing he fell short of military requirements for visual acuity, he settled for pilot, explorer and entrepreneur.
Perhaps a lifetime of wealth and privilege without accountability or penalty leads a grown-ass man to say something as stupid as this:
"You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."
It sadly does not shock me that a person with this background and world view would imagine a submersible to be as simple as an elevator so he can ferry paying customers to one of the most dangerous environments on Earth.
After all, were it not those very signers of the Declaration, the same men who eventually brought us a Stockton Rush, also consumed with dreams of a button-pushing, modern life? Was it not Thomas Jefferson who invented the dumb waiter for Monticello, a marvel for his guests? Press a button and presto -- wine, even plates of food appear as if delivered by invisible hands.
Turns out the button is far more convenient for the one pressing it than the ones who actually do the labor that carry out its function, as explained by Smithsonian Magazine:
The mansion sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves, unseen, hurried back and forth carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine and linens, while above them 20, 30 or 40 guests sat listening to Jefferson’s dinner-table conversation. At one end of the tunnel lay the icehouse, at the other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another. During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson’s abundance.
Push a button, don’t think about what goes into it. Get the result you want with none of the effort. Just push it!
Again, Stockton Rush tempted fate with numerous complaints of pesky, restrictive regulations over the years:
The founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions complained that the US submarine industry’s “obscenely safe” regulations had been holding back his “innovations” years before his submersible went missing — with experts alleging that he skirted regulations by operating in international waters. Stockton Rush, who is among the five who vanished aboard his company’s Titanic tourist sub Sunday, aired his grievances against the strict rules in 2019 — the same year his company began advertising trips to the bottom of the Atlantic. “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations,” Rush told Smithsonian Magazine. “But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations.”
OceanGate refused to certify their sub and sued a former employee who questioned the submersible’s integrity. This is starting to sound a little familiar to me. You know, Stockton Rush got into diving when his dreams of going to space ended… hmm.
Perhaps now would be a nice time to reflect on some of the statements and attitude of our Martian big daddy, Elon Musk.
What, you thought I was going to drag Thomas Jefferson into this but leave Elon out? As if. Let’s take a memory tour of his hilarious Hyperloop hoopla:
“I know that there’s various companies that are trying to create the Hyperloop, and honestly I think it’s a lot easier than people think.” … “It’s like a tube with an air hockey table. A low-pressure tube with a pod in it that runs on air bearings, on air skis, with an air compressor on the front that’s taking the high-volume air buildup on the nose, and pumping it through the air skis. It’s really… I swear, it’s not that hard! [giggles]”
Not that hard! Easy as pushing a button, one could say. Simple!
As it turns out, the Hyperloop technology was so easy, Las Vegas leapt at approving the Boring Company’s plans to connect Sin City with the transportation of the future. From GeekWire in 2019:
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s board of directors today approved a recommendation to have the Boring Company build an underground express tunnel that could connect downtown Las Vegas, the city’s convention center and airport, and other points of interest. It’s the latest roll of the dice for the tunneling company founded by tech titan Elon Musk a little more than two years ago.
It will not shock regular readers of these diaries that Elon’s Las Vegas Hyperloop proposal included an extremely nifty and futuristic artist rendering that in no way resembles what eventually opened to the public, as we can see in the video below:
That’s right, the Las Vegas Hyperloop are Tesla sports car being driven by human beings in tunnels and definitely failing to deliver the numbers Las Vegas was sold on. The video raises a great question:
“Please consider for a second, whom does this system really serve? With all this tunneling, with all this construction, all this effort, all this money so a couple of Teslas can drive around in a tunnel where Metro trains could travel holding up to 1,000 per train set, but instead we have expensive sports cars holding five.”
Funny enough, the OceanGate Titan was described as a vehicle about the size of a minivan that holds five. And no, I’m not suggesting numerology was at play, so put your little numbers apps down.
What I find a shade more eerie here is one could say Elon Musk treats the people who traverse his Las Vegas tunnel with the same spirit of care Stockton Rush did with his passengers visiting Titanic. From The Independent:
The Las Vegas Loop managed by Elon Musk’s The Boring Company has been called a “death trap” after a video of congestion in the convention centre tunnel was shared on Reddit. The clip, filmed in the backseat of a Tesla, was shared on the subreddit “f**kcars” and shows the vehicle stopping behind a line of other cars in the tunnel located 40 feet (12 metres) below the ground. “It’s just a matter of time before a tunnel like this becomes the site of a horrible accident with a bunch people stuck in a narrow tube with no ventilation and a burning battery producing poisonous fumes,” Reddit user RimealotIV said
YouTuber Thunderf00t notes in a video essay the Vegas Hyperloop has a pedestrian crosswalk choke point, no apparent fire suppression systems, and it’s unclear the cars (with gull wing doors) have the clearance to even open if riders had to exit the vehicle in an emergency.
Astronauts, take note that Elon Musk carries forward this philosophy to his proposed spacecraft, as there is no abort system on Starship, nor one for the lunar lander NASA contracted SpaceX to build (ho ho, bets on if that’ll ever happen…?), as Jim Hillhouse explains in AmericaSpace:
Whether the Starship test flight failure will force a delay in the launch of Artemis III depends on whether the Artemis III mission itself is already delayed so much that a delay in Starship is meaningless. NASA has no Plan B to the Starship lunar lander. For the first time in American spaceflight history, the goals of the space program, in the case of Artemis III to land astronauts once again on the Moon’s surface, are hitched to the progress of a single space company over which NASA has little or no control. It is worth reminding that the Starship lunar lander has no descent abort capability. That means that should anything critical go wrong on the Starship lander during descent to the lunar surface, the crew would be forced to wait for its Newtonian-determined end. Anyone thinking NASA is not capable of taking risks certainly doesn’t appreciate the unprecedented risks it is taking in getting the Artemis III crew to the lunar surface over 339,000 miles away.
Okay, let’s return to Earth, because this same notion that technology is magic and grifters can simply continue repeating that something unlikely is going to happen until it eventually does — or they maybe end up in prison.
Elon’s Tesla appears to think the safety of their customers comes after pushing the limits of what driving automation is capable of:
A Tesla whistleblower has leaked 100GB of data to the German outlet Handelsblatt containing thousands of customer complaints that raise serious concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features. The complaints, which were reported across the US, Europe, and Asia, span from 2015 to March 2022. During this period, Handelsblatt says Tesla customers reported over 2,400 self-acceleration issues and 1,500 braking problems, including 139 reports of “unintentional emergency braking” and 383 reports of “phantom stops” from false collision warnings. Some of the incidents mentioned by Handelsblatt include descriptions of how cars “suddenly brake or accelerate abruptly.” While some drivers safely gained control of their vehicle, Handelsblatt says others “ended up in a ditch, hit walls or crashed into oncoming vehicles.”
According to Elon, just like his amazing Hyperloop technology, Full Self Driving will be driving Americans into the future... any day now.
Elon Musk: “Tesla A.I. is like… I’m not even sure who’s second, frankly.” … “I think Tesla will have a ChatGPT moment. If not this year, I’d say no later than next year. … Suddenly three million cars will be able to drive themselves without no one. And then five million cars and then 10 million cars.”
We've discussed before how Elon’s most persistent hype may be around FSD. The imminent arrival was promised in 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020 and doesn’t even work in the closed-loop Las Vegas tunnel system, as we noted above requires human drivers.
Yet Elon insists this technology is possible, that it’s as easy as the Hyperloop he never was able to successfully build. One day, very soon, Elon will push a button and three million Teslas will dance to his tune like so many brooms in Mickey’s workshop.
To listen to Elon tell it, one might come away with the sense that if the pesky regulators (just like the ones that plagued Stockton Rush’s Titanic scheme) would step out the way, fully autonomous vehicles would be speeding down every street in America.
Yet Tesla lawyers say something entirely else, as seen here in Car and Driver:
The key correspondence comes from December 28, 2020, between Tesla’s associate general counsel Eric C. Williams and California DMV’s chief of the autonomous vehicles branch, Miguel D. Acosta. A letter details the capabilities of both Autopilot and FSD: “Currently neither Autopilot nor FSD Capability is an autonomous system, and currently no comprising feature, whether singularly or collectively, is autonomous or makes our vehicles autonomous,” Williams states. This a departure from Musk's messaging about FSD's capabilities. During a July 2020 video interview with the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the CEO stated, "I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level 5 autonomy. I think I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year." But Williams paints a different picture of FSD’s capabilities in his letter to the California DMV. “As you know, Autopilot is an optional suite of driver-assistance features that are representative of SAE Level 2 automation (SAE L2). Features that comprise Autopilot are traffic-aware cruise control and autosteer. Full Self-Driving (FSD) capability is an additional optional suite of features that builds from Autopilot and is also representative of SAE L2.”
One might point out to the various government agencies overseeing Elon’s enterprises that unlike Stockton Rush and OceanGate, Boca Chica, Texas is not international waters. The predictable destruction of the launch pad during his silly, doomed 4/20 Starship launch shows how cavalier Elon can be with the safety and health of anyone in the path of the dust cloud of crushed Fondant.
Technology is not a magic wand, and leaps in technology are hard-earned and often carry heavy costs.
Stockton Rush believed underwater diving should be as simple as allowing any idiot to push a button. He’s not the only grifter out there making grandiose claims. Will this fresh tragedy spur government officials into taking a closer look at the conduct being carried out under their noses?
Tax Musk. Fund the IRS. Get a different result.
Okay, it’s Friday. Go out and have a wonderful weekend, I’m through. See you in the comments.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/23/2176952/-A-sub-operated-by-single-button-Mistaken-assumptions-about-technology-invite-disaster-risk-lives
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