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[wierd]

Who does the laundry, and does the pod double as a shower?

[Reelya]

Yeah, you shower while in transit.

But the pod attaches and detaches to other pods which have more specialized uses such as a laundry robot pod.

Flying robot pod cars would fundamentally change the way we use space, I think, because you can make much more use of verticality than before. e.g. if you live in a hi-rise, why waste time and deal with congestion on the ground when you can have a balcony level over pod bay?

[wierd]

But then you could lose the laundry!

OR-- Get the WRONG laundry! 

Imagine-- showing up to that important meeting NOT in an Armani business suit-- But in fishnet hose, and black leather halter top!

I mean, you CANT just stay in the pod--- OTHERS will be waiting to dock!

[Reelya]

Don't we all already have that problem with laundromats?

BTW you do stay in your pod, it's your office chair as well. Many pods come together to make up the meeting space as needed.

[wierd]

But in this scenario you paint, "just in time" delivery means you DO NOT HAVE TIME to fix said problems.

[Reelya]

Saving time means you have more time, not less.

You're just an idiot if you ordered your laundry to be done 5 seconds before the meeting. It would still be up to the human to give parameters for the scheduling.

[wierd]

Try getting dressed in a tiny little sleeping pod! 

No no-- you would have to schedule not only the laundry delivery, but also the rendezvous with the dressing pod, and there might be queueing issues is there is a mishap. Getting a new timeslot might not be so easy.

[Reelya]

With a fleet of laundrybots serving a whole city block / area of hi-rises, there should be no problem getting that sorted.

I mean the problems would clearly be different to having one washing machine and having to deal with that if it broke down, but certainly not any worse than that.

I could equally imagine someone who lived in a world where their laundry job was automatically scheduled by a laundry-drone to a bank of machines saying the same thing about owning your own dedicated washing machine: if you own a machine, it gets nothing like capacity use, therefore you're wasting most of it's value, also if it breaks down you have to wait and get someone to fix that, and it clogs up space in your apartment, while also being noisy and inconvenient.

[wierd]

There is always the "misguided youth hacks the pod network, hilarity ensues" aspect to consider too.

[Reelya]

I think those issues would be sorted out with robot cars which actually have to carry humans without being killed by hackers. We can assume that robo-pod security will be an offshoot of that technology. Things like digital signatures are already pretty hacker-proof. Nobody's managed to crack that for BitCoin yet, despite it clearly being a profitable scam if you could.

[wierd]

You mean, like the automotive industry, they do the least amount of work to secure it as is possible, refuse to open the systems for proper interoperability or repair/audit, and generally make IoT devices look secure by comparison?

Gotcha.

(Seriously, more than 2/3 of the attacks on smart cars get in through exploiting the entertainment system computer-- because they all live in the same network, because "gosh, privileged network design is hard George!")


Essentially, they treat the various networked components as safe instead of hostile, because it is cheaper and easier to design that way.

Gaming platforms and banking systems KNOW better.

[Reelya]

No, I'm saying the trial by fire which is coming up is going to be a survival of the fittest thing for robot-car/drone technology. Current flaws aren't going to cut it within 5 years from now. Anything that's not rock solid won't be around very much longer as soon as anyone important needs to rely on that shit for their life.

We know self-driving cars are coming, and we know people will hack that shit. Of course, the whole industry dies if they don't solve that specific technical issue, and make unhackable robot cars, so we can assume they have in any conjecture of what such a future looks like.

[wierd]

I think that is too naive--

Much like the serious emissions scandal, I expect it will more than likely be the case of "How can we best hide the blatant malfeasance we have engaged in to appear compliant while actually not doing so?" school of thought.

See for instance, many of the outstanding security bugs in major IT infrastructure packages. Reporting a bug either gets you stonewalled, or sued, more often than not.

[Reelya]

Nope, because here the fundamental tech is in competition with another established tech: human-driven cars.

Basically it only takes 1 hacked car scandal and the whole thing is on hold until they sort that out.

IT tech that isn't 100% secure or is buggy gets away with that because the tech it replaces is sneaker-net, which is far less efficient. Even with bugs, MS Word is fundamentally more efficient than a manual typewriter.

A hackable robot car is worth 0% in comparison, because it's basically like the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 which explodes and sets your house on fire. You'd rather just use a pen and paper than an exploding phone any day, the same with hackable robot cars vs human-drive cars.

[wierd]

Last I checked, there were more than 4 known exploits for Tesla vehicles, and several more for the other smart cars out there.  Most of them center around attacking the entertainment system because it has to connect to the outside world to play streaming content, and the idiots ***STILL*** have not learned that the entertainment system should not be physically connected to the drive control and engine diagnostic systems in any way whatsoever.

That means your normal fodder of things like TIFF file exploits, and the like, can get you right in, and allow you to start shitting fake packets into the drivetrain control system over the local network inside the vehicle.