Yes, I am a Luddite when it comes to deploying sophisticated technology to carry out mundane tasks, like the accelerator pedal in my car.
While I don’t go as far as Ned Ludd might have by ripping ‘brain boxes’ from underneath the seats of automobiles and handing the horrified owner’s a hefty stick and bobbin of yarn, in return, to do the job, I do manage a serious aversion to this technical overkill. No pun intended.
Our pioneer/forward time traveler mindset has us all believe that we live in times which are more advanced; more complicated, and more harried than those who went before us. And, it is this very reason that we seem to be accepting runaway automobiles as part of the process.
The potential causes read like a blog post from a conspiracy theory site: electromagnetic interference; cell phone signal or bluetooth interference; partial gate opening on processors (I don’t understand that at all..), or those atomic-sized stalagtites (-mites?) that bridge processor pathways and are undetectable or, the tried and true: just bad code.
Be assured that the ultimate culprit will be less exciting than we expect and the cure may be quite simple.
Unintended Acceleration is not a new topic for the automobile industry. Follow this link to read about earlier instances of this phenomenon and the industry dealt with the problem.
I believe that the culprit will be a weakness in messaging protocol between the request broker and the object receiver. In other words, the pedal is pushed down and the car accelerates but when the accelerator returns to it’s initial state, the unexpected happens.
For this reason, Luddites like me prefer mechanical linkages.
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