Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  Tyler and Yusuf watched the drama unfold on the news, sitting five miles away in their law office sanctuary. Once the three men exited their vehicles, Tyler wiped the cars’ memory and disconnected. The cars probably streamed performance metrics back to their headquarters, but even so, he didn’t think there would be any way to prove their involvement. Mercedes would suspect, to be sure, but he doubted they could prove it in a court of law. The TV stations he had called knew, but he doubted they would give him away.

  Tyler could barely keep his eyes open, but neither could he tear them away from the screen. The story quickly went national on all the major stations and turned into a social media firestorm. The news channels repeatedly showed Berkowitz in court, denying the existence of a remote control, followed by shots of him in his car, pounding on the windows to be let out. A lot of the public response was anti-autocar, nonsense like “You can’t trust a robot to do a person’s job,” which wasn’t surprising. He was pleased to see how many of the comments included the real issue, though, asking why algorithms that made life-and-death decisions for millions should be secretly held in the vaults of big corporations.

  Tyler had expected to be flamed online. He had expected his inbox to fill up. He had even expected the visit from the Seattle PD, asking that he answer a few questions. What he hadn’t expected was the dozens of calls for interviews from morning talk shows and mega-follower news bloggers. It seemed that everybody knew, or at least assumed, that he had been the one to hack the car. Overnight, he became something of a celebrity.

  He accepted all the interviews, and started doing one a night, sometimes more. It was fun. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know what he thought about the self-driving car industry. Mostly, they wanted him to talk about the evils of big business and how terrifying it would be to have your car taken over by someone else. TV ratings came from scaring people, not from talking about solutions. They did let him give his ideas, however, on how to make an open source approach work, and of course, his own blog’s followers went through the roof.

  He wrote about the details there, guidelines for how to collect and implement a public consensus about the rules that should govern cars’ decisions. He conducted polls on his site with ethical questions. Should a car value its own passengers’ lives more than others? Should children’s lives be valued more than adults? Should law enforcement have the power to take control of a car without its passengers’ permission? The answers to the questions weren’t right or wrong as much as subject to public opinion. He published statistics about the results. He recommended coding practices and configuration standards that would allow a non-programmer to tell what rules were being implemented in a given software version, without having to take a course in machine learning algorithms. He published articles in major tech magazines.

  Yusuf made out well from the publicity, too. He landed a high-paying software development job on Honda’s self-driving car team. Before long, he was publishing articles and seemed to be making a name for himself. Tyler just hoped he could manage not to sleep with his boss’s wife this time.

  As for Andrea Copeland and her suit, investigations into potential conflict of interest on the part of Judge Carter had brought the trial under scrutiny. Rather than face another trial, Mercedes had chosen to settle. Tyler didn’t know the amount, but he was sure it must have been substantial. Berkowitz had been fired along with several other scapegoats as Mercedes tried to backpedal from what was turning into a public relations disaster.

  Two months after the trial, Tyler answered the phone to hear a voice he’d never expected to hear again.

  “Mr. Daniels, this is Aisha al-Mohammad. I’ve been reading a lot about you lately.”

  Tyler didn’t know what to say. He knew what this call could mean, and he felt his heart beating right through his chest. “You have?”

  “What I want to know is, are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?”

  “I don’t have any money,” he said.

  She laughed. “I guess I mean my money, then,” she said. “And your time, reputation, and hard work.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  She made a dismissive huff. “You can’t guess? I’m offering to invest in your company.”

  “I don’t have a company.”

  “Stop playing dumb, Tyler. Your friend Brandon needs some competition, and I like your perspective on the open source issue. I’m giving you a chance to start a company of your own, take your ideas and make them real. Do you want it or not?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Of course I do.”

  He could hear the smile over the phone. “Well, then. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Tyler thought, briefly, of sticking with the name Yotta Cars. He hadn’t liked it much when Abby had first suggested it, but the name had grown on him, and he liked the idea that he was continuing what they all had started back at Penn. Ultimately, though, he knew the name wouldn’t work. For one thing, Brandon would take it as an intentional provocation, rubbing the tragedy in his face. As far as Tyler knew, Brandon still blamed him for Abby’s death, and pretending that Yotta didn’t have bad associations would probably not be a sensitive move. Besides that, as in the trial, there was a good chance his detractors would use Abby’s death to undermine the reliability of his cars. He needed a new name.

  Aisha called several times a week, tracking his progress and giving advice. He soon found he had vastly underestimated the details required to start a new business, especially one of this magnitude. The tax regulations to become a corporation, the insurance required to transport people, the city business license, the license to operate automated equipment, the application to the vehicle-for-hire regulatory authority, contracts for maintenance: all of it was incredibly time-consuming and expensive. Tyler started to think the laws were set up specifically to prevent anyone from opening a business at all.

  And that was just the paperwork. Besides that, he had to design an advertising campaign, actually buy and outfit the cars, and write a ton of software.

  “You can’t do it all yourself,” Aisha told him. “That’s what money is for. Hire lawyers for the paperwork. Pick an advertising firm. Reserve your time for what you do best.”

  “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” Tyler said. “Don’t stress,” Aisha told him. “I didn’t fund you because of your business acumen. Do what you can, and I’ll make sure you don’t miss anything important. I’m going to come out there and pay you a visit.”

  “You’re coming to Seattle?”

  “I have to come out for a family thing anyway. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  Aisha asked to meet at Highland Park, and she didn’t come alone. Accompanying her was a little girl, her thick black hair twisted into pigtails and held with hair ties like tiny clusters of gold balls. A black skirt and a T-shirt with gold lettering that read “Little Miss Sassy” completed the look.

  “Tyler, meet my daughter, Jada,” Aisha said. “Jada, say hi to Mr. Daniels.”

  Jada rocked back and forth, swinging a little gold purse by its strap. “Hi.”

  “Hi, Jada,” Tyler said. “How old are you?”

  “Five.”

  Now Tyler understood why she wanted to meet at the park. They walked over to the playground, and Jada climbed and slid and ran around with the other kids while Aisha and Tyler sat on a bench and talked.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Did you see that Brandon published an article trashing my open source architecture for self-driving car software?”

  “I didn’t see that, no. I did see that he’s expanding his service to Philadelphia and Baltimore.”

  “Yeah, he’s a bit ahead of us,” Tyler said.

  “The article?” Aisha prompted.

  “Yeah. Showed up in WIRED magazine this morning. He also did a talk show where he defended his proprietary algorithms as a crucial discriminator for his company. He argued that if he had to make his algorithms public, he
’d have no chance against the big corporations.”

  “It’s probably true. Naomi’s one of the best; she probably did come up with something that gives Black Knight a competitive advantage. They’ve got a big market share in New York already, mostly because their pickup time is half what it takes Uber and Lyft, and the price is half what it costs to take a taxi.”

  “Wait, Naomi? What does Naomi have to do with this?”

  “She’s Black Knight’s chief programmer,” Aisha said. “Didn’t you know? It’s all her software. She wrote all the important parts, would be my guess.”

  Tyler leaned back, stunned. He felt a keen sense of betrayal, though he couldn’t say exactly why. Maybe the fact that Brandon had hired Naomi, but hadn’t even asked Tyler. But Brandon’s animosity toward him wasn’t anything new. No, he felt hurt by Naomi. She had disappeared without a word, and he had let her go, because it seemed clear she needed to be away from anything that reminded her of Abby. Apparently that need didn’t extend to Brandon, however. Did they both blame him for Abby’s death?

  “That wasn’t all Brandon said,” Tyler added sourly. “He also attacked me personally, said my ideas were born of lack of experience with a real company. ‘Hopelessly and dangerously naive’ were the words he used.”

  “Only one way to respond to that,” Aisha said. “Start a real company and do it better. Have you come up with a name yet?”

  Tyler shook his head. “I was thinking of something that emphasized the self-driving concept,” he said. “Like ‘Auto-driver’ or ‘Autobot’ or something.”

  Aisha made a sour face.

  “What, no good?”

  She shook her head. “First of all, ‘autobot’ is from the Transformers. Even if it’s not strictly a copyright issue, you’ll have everybody thinking Optimus Prime, and I don’t think that’s the image we want to aim for. Besides which, just ‘automated’ by itself doesn’t sell. Why does automated make it better? Because it’s safe? Because it’s fast? What is it you want consumers to think of?”

  Tyler sighed. “I don’t know. The fact that I’m making my algorithms publicly available is a discriminator, hopefully. So maybe something like OpenRide?”

  Another face. “Boring.”

  “OpenShare?”

  “Worse. Sounds like a software module, not something you trust to get your kids home from soccer practice.”

  “SafeRide.”

  “Better, but still boring. You need something with some zing to it. Something memorable. Safe isn’t memorable.”

  “Bodyguard,” Tyler said. “As in, ‘Travel everywhere with your own Bodyguard.’ The commercials could emphasize how the car would protect you and your loved ones.”

  “Makes me think of deodorant.” She sniffed at her armpit. “Phew. I didn’t put on my Bodyguard today.”

  “You’re a hard sell.”

  Aisha shrugged. “Welcome to capitalism.”

  They watched Jada clamber around on the playground, joining games with other kids with the ease of a five-year-old. At that age, they didn’t even bother to tell each other their names. Clothes and culture and skin color didn’t make much difference; they just played together.

  “Escargot,” Tyler said. “Get it? Car? Go? Escargot?”

  “Next you’ll tell me the logo will be a snail.”

  “Sure. A cute, colorful little snail. Kind of a counter- expectations name. You’d expect some kind of fast animal, so a snail is attention-getting.”

  “Attention-getting, maybe. But snails mean slow. There’s no getting around that—it’s what people will think of. Besides, the whole ‘escargot’ image is for elitist white folks. You have to be rich to know what escargot is.”

  “How about something that communicates speed, then? Dash or Zip or Dart.”

  “Speedo,” Aisha said.

  “Now you’re just messing with me.”

  She grinned.

  Jada charged up a ramp, holding hands with another little girl. The two of them slid down a slide on their stomachs and fell into a giggling pile at the bottom. A pleasant breeze was blowing, which in Seattle meant that rain wasn’t far behind.

  “What about magic Carpet?” Tyler asked.

  Aisha paused and looked thoughtful. “Magic Carpet,” she said, as if letting the taste of it roll around on her tongue. “Not bad. Definitely better than the others. Got a bit of a racist bent to it, though.”

  “Racist? What do you mean?”

  “It sounds Arab, and there’s already a thing about guys in turbans driving taxis. It might sound like you’re playing off that stereotype.”

  “The guys in turbans who drive taxis are mostly Sikhs. They’re from India. They’re not Arabs at all.”

  “I think you’re better off avoiding a name with any kind of ethnic stereotype vibe. You want something simple, clean, classic.”

  Tyler threw up his hands. “And just what name would that be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Aisha laughed. “The creative part is your job.”

  “You just get to veto all my ideas.”

  “Pretty much.”

  The rain started, a light shower. Most of the local moms just put up the hoods of their sweatshirts and let the children play. A little rain was no reason to interrupt an outing. Aisha, however, stood and called out to Jada, who, to her credit, came running and took her mother’s hand. Jada’s pigtails glistened with tiny drops of water.

  “This place is fun,” she said, with a smile to melt hearts. “Can we come back again tomorrow?”

  They ate dinner at an American place, burgers and fries and milkshakes. Jada put away almost an entire quarter-pounder by herself, and used a few French fries as an excuse to down a cup full of ketchup. Tyler made her laugh by putting a dab of ketchup on his nose and trying to lick it off with his tongue.

  “How about AuTomato?” he said, after he wiped off his nose with a napkin. “All the cars could be red, and the logo could be a giant tomato.”

  “You’re regressing,” Aisha said.

  “Roadrunner. We could give them all little ‘meep meep’ horns.”

  Aisha rolled her eyes and shook her head. “What? Roadrunner’s really fast. And nothing ever stops . . . him? Her?”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s a small copyright problem with that plan.”

  “Hmm. MyDriver. Or MeDrive. Something with chauffeur . . . Chauff? No, too ‘rich white guy’, right?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

  “Or—hey—they’re electric, right? How about Electric Slide?”

  “Sure. Or Electric Boogaloo.”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  “You are not naming your company Electric Boogaloo,” Aisha said, laughing.

  Tyler polished off the last of his fries and slurped at the watery Coke at the bottom of his glass. He was feeling good. There were a million ways for this enterprise to fail, but right now, at the beginning, anything was possible.

  “Jada,” he said. She looked up from the mayonnaise packet she had been flying like an airplane around her cup of milk. “I have a question for you. What do you call something when it’s safe and fun and goes really fast?”

  Jada swooped the mayonnaise packet over her plate and then up toward the ceiling, as high as she could reach. “Zoom!”

  Tyler laughed and then stopped, thoughtful. He glanced at Aisha, who had a considering look that melted into an amused smile. She shrugged, her eyes dancing. “Zoom,” she said. “That’s actually not half bad.”

  Tyler held out his hand to shake, and Jada took it. He pumped it gently up and down. “You’re hired,” he said. “Zoom it is.”

  Zoom took off as fast as its name. Tyler didn’t have Naomi’s brilliance, and so his deep learning algorithms didn’t perform nearly as well. He had seen the statistics, and he had no idea how she managed to get her cars to anticipate customers’ needs like that. What he lacked in the strength of his algorithm, however, he made up with his commitment to publ
ic openness. All of his navigation and decision-making software was open source, available to anyone to read or improve, and the public— at least a good number of them—showed their appreciation by choosing Zoom cars to get to where they were going.

  Open source software had a long tradition in the industry. Communities of programmers made updates to publicly available code for free, on their own time, or else paid by companies with an interest in seeing the software improved. They checked and tested each other’s work and self-organized to generate reliable releases. It blurred the lines between software creators and software users, allowing users with the right skills to add new features to meet their needs, or else to fix bugs that got in their way. Some of the most widely used application platforms, operating systems, and security programs in the world were open source.

  The San Francisco Bay Area was the perfect place for such a company, and demand for Zoom cars drove Tyler to expand there before the service in Seattle was more than a few months old. The number of contributors to the project soared as Silicon Valley programmers joined their efforts to help improve their own commutes. The problem was of personal interest to millions, and so thousands added their time and creativity to the project. Tyler found himself just one of many contributors to a piece of software that was rapidly becoming one of the most active in the open source community. He purchased and outfitted new cars by the dozen, but still had trouble keeping up with demand.

  Other entrepreneurs started their own services, of course, using the same code base, but Tyler’s profits still rolled in. Since the cars from different companies all used the same software, they communicated readily with each other, allowing them not to interfere in wasteful ways. At least for the time being, there were plenty of fares for all, and the software maximized profits for everyone by distributing their cars efficiently. As Brandon’s Black Knight expanded along the East Coast to Boston and Atlanta, Zoom expanded along the West Coast to that quintessential of all traffic disasters, Los Angeles. Everything Tyler touched seemed to turn to gold, and the company grew faster than he would have thought possible. His dream was finally coming true.