GM Patents A System That Will Tell You When You Need To Take Away Grandma’s Keys

You know what people, especially older people, really love? When some faceless entity tells them what to do with their lives, especially regarding restricting their lives and reducing their autonomy. When has an older person not loved that? Who among us is not looking forward to the day when our loved ones gather around us and tell us that we need to hand over our car keys, because we’re becoming a danger to ourselves and others? I’m being a jerk here, of course; no one likes any of this, though it’s something that may be necessary. It seems that GM is thinking about the problem of people aging out of driving, and have applied for a patent to let a car make that determination for you, with all of the cold rationality we’ve come to expect from GM cars.

Like the Vega. That car was a cold-hearted bastard.

The patent is titled, poetically, SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING A DRIVER RETIREMENT SCORE, and it pretty much delivers on that title, providing a system and – get this – a method for deciding when a driver is too damn old to drive. Here’s how the patent introduction describes the problem:

In general, aging can be associated with physical and psychological declines. These declines can make driving a vehicle difficult or frustrating for some older individuals. However, deciding to retire from driving a vehicle can be difficult as driving can provide a sense of freedom and/or independence that many rely on to perform day-to-day activities. Some systems and methods may evaluate performance of a driver, but they fail to provide objective assessments to the driver for further evaluation. These shortcomings, among others, are addressed by aspects of the present disclosure.

The GM kids have done their homework here; aging can be associated with physical and psychological declines. I say this as someone who has been aging for multiple decades now, and I have direct evidence of both sorts of declines. Not all these declines translate into issues with driving, of course. Some just make people annoyed with me when I ask them to repeat things in a noisy crowd, or when I find myself entering a room and not having any idea what the hell I went in there for. But plenty of these declines do affect driving, and the GM patent seeks to evaluate those, using a lot of sensors to evaluate driver control inputs, sensors to evaluate driver physiological statuses and behaviors, and machine learning algorithms that can vary how much weight these various data points have in the overall evaluation.

The kinds of inputs from the person that the proposed system will take in seem to be divided into two categories, manual and observed:

• Manual Inputs (self-reported):

  • Medical condition quantity/type

  • Complaint status

  • Path-following ability

  • Road sign compliance

  • Driver confidence

  • Physical ability

• Observed Inputs (collected via sensors):

  • Fatigue, distraction, squinting

  • Speed-limit compliance

  • Honking frequency

  • Turn signal usage

  • Lane straddling, drifting

  • Reaction time, following distance

  • Driving record, posture, speed control

  • Accelerator/brake usage

  • Navigation deviation, dangerous behavior

Honking frequency feels like one that should be taken with a grain of salt. What if there’s a car with a bumper sticker in front of you imploring you to, should you be sexually aroused, honk? What are you supposed to do then? Not honk? Please.

And what if you’re squinting to make yourself look tough and cool to the driver next to you when they pull up to a light and inevitably look into your window? There’s a lot of nuance here that I hope is being respected.

The strangely broad nature of patent applications can definitely be seen here, as one can see in this section about how the accumulated data can be shared with the user, which takes pains to include such outdated tech as cathode ray tubes and strange methods of user interfacing, like tactile feedback:

To provide for interaction with a user, one or more aspects of the disclosure can be implemented on a computer having a display device, e.g., a CRT (cathode ray tube), LCD (liquid crystal display) monitor, or touch screen for displaying information to the user and optionally a keyboard and a pointing device, e.g., a mouse or a trackball, by which the user can provide input to the computer. Other kinds of devices can be used to provide interaction with a user as well; for example, feedback provided to the user can be any form of sensory feedback, e.g., visual feedback, auditory feedback, or tactile feedback; and input from the user can be received in any form, including acoustic, speech, or tactile input. In addition, a computer can interact with a user by sending documents to and receiving documents from a device that is used by the user; for example, by sending web pages to a web browser on a user’s client device in response to requests received from the web browser.

That’s all tangential to the main point of the patent, of course, which is something that will ostensibly tell you when you’ve become too old to drive. Of course, most of the metrics that are being tested for could be applied to determine if any driver is being impaired, if not by age, then perhaps by alcohol or distractions or even just a poor grasp of the task of driving itself. If age is the real factor here, there would need to be evidence that the driving issues detected were consistent over time and unaltered by other outside driving conditions.

Really, what GM has described here is more of a general shitty-driving detection system that you’d think could be applied to anyone regardless of age. I’m not exactly sure why they decided to couch it in terms of aging drivers specifically, but perhaps that’s something that’s easier to market than a judgmental, always-on system that evaluates how everyone drives, all the time. It’s a lot easier to sell something that you may just think will help you avoid a painful conversation with an aging parent.

Of course, at this point, a system like this can only tell you that it thinks you’re too old to keep driving, and can show you the data it has collected that led it to such a conclusion. I’d think you’re still free to ignore it. At this point, the patent makes no mention of disabling the car if consistently poor scores are met, and there’s no law on the books anywhere that would give a car the authority to prevent you from driving because its algorithms determined you’re too damn old.

And, honestly, I think that’s good. The idea of a computer buried somewhere in my car that can make the call if I can drive or not gives me hives, and it’s far too easy to imagine how such a system could either perform poorly, not fully understanding the complexities of human existence, or be co-opted by capitalist urges, like being connected to your insurance carrier who may choose to raise your rates if you fall into certain categories of scoring.

Sure, older people driving and the resulting troubles they may cause are a real issue, and one that deserves attention. However, I think evaluation systems like these just open a can of worms; I’d rather see semi-automated driving systems that watch in the background and are ready to take over and help if driving behaviors become dangerous. If technology should be applied to this problem, it should be focused on avoiding accidents and keeping drivers safe, as opposed to making judgements on something as fundamental as access to the privilege to drive.

Top graphic images: depositphotos.com