Anticipating the advent of self-driving ice cream trucks.
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As a freezing cold winter begins to descend upon us, your thoughts undoubtedly turn toward a summertime pastime that will be sorely missed, namely the neighborhood ice cream truck and its bountiful offering of popsicles, Klondike bars, snow cones, drumsticks, and other frosty delicacies.
Though ice cream trucks still operate during the cold winter months in some parts of the country such as California, they generally go into hibernation as the weather turns icy. For several months you won’t hear the cheerful jingle of the ice cream truck bells and will not be drawn to the melodic chimes that call out for children and adults alike to stand at the curb and eagerly await those frozen treats.
All in all, owning and operating an ice cream truck is pretty much a seasonal business and requires the intrepid owners to work fervently during the premium months. Kids and parents are more receptive to consuming ice-cold treats when the outdoor temperatures are hottest, and the sun is shining brightly. Also, the children must be around at home and available, while during the normal school year they are sitting in classrooms and perhaps daydreaming of one day again relishing the delights of an ice cream truck coming down their local street.
Few realize that the ice cream truck business is relatively fragmented and occupied by zillions of individual entrepreneurs rather than being run by a handful of large-scale companies. The most obvious investment for any ice cream truck operator is the truck itself. Considered to be a novelty type of vehicle, most ice cream trucks are specially outfitted with cold plate freezers that stay icy cold during a driving journey. No sense in letting your inventory melt and thus become unsaleable.
These are mobile retail outlets, intended to wander around a community and sell its wares.
In addition to the cost of the vehicle, there are other apparent expenses such as the inventory of frozen treats, the automotive insurance required, the gasoline or fuel expenditures, the fees for any needed permits, and of course the labor to drive the vehicle. For most of the ice cream truck activities, there is just one driver and they serve too as the customer service representative, selling the popsicles and other delicacies to those that come up to the ice cream truck.
Consider the customer experience related to ice cream truck activities.
First, you need to realize that an ice cream truck is somewhere within your vicinity.
This means that the ice cream truck driver has to be astute enough to drive in the right areas in the right way, attempting to maximize their selling opportunities. If the driver opts to drive in the early morning hours, before the sun has fully risen, the odds are that few will be interested in clamoring for ice cream. Another potential mistake involves driving in a sparsely populated neighborhood or one that has few children. Without customers, viable ones, and desirous of ice cream, there is no market for the frozen goodies.
A driver must also make their presence known in the sense of playing a catchy tune or ringing a chime.
The sound of the ice cream truck can carry across a large swath of blocks and allow prospective customers to seek out the vehicle or merely wait on the sidewalk for the ice cream truck to appear. This can be a dicey proposition for both the seller and the buyers, since the driver might not actually drive down your street, and you likewise might be left high-and-dry by having assumed that the vehicle would be coming along to deliver its treats.
Thus, another part of the customer journey involves standing around outside of your home to await the arrival of the ice cream truck, though there is no guarantee that it will ultimately arrive. Some kids relish getting on their bikes to go and find the ice cream truck, but generally, it is a waiting game and most youngsters tend to simply stand around and hope that the vehicle will come to them. In one perspective, the waiting is half of the fun and enjoyment, offering a moment of excitement and rapt anticipation as you eye the roadway and eagerly anticipate the heroic ice cream truck sauntering down your block.
Once the ice cream truck arrives, the next part of the customer experience involves figuring out what to order, then placing your order, and inevitably making payment.
Some children insist on getting the same item each and every time that they partake of an ice cream truck service. Maybe a child is enamored of rainbow flavored snow cones or purple popsicles. Other kids seem to prefer trying something new and decidedly different upon each occurrence of visiting an ice cream truck. There is usually a sizable menu board on the side of the ice cream truck that colorfully announces the treats to be had. Ironically, parents are apt to get perturbed at the kids that delay the action by mulling over all of the possibilities, but for which this is potentially part of the delight for the youths, a rare instance of them seemingly being free to choose whatever they want.
At this point, the driver that is also the customer service rep must stand tall in terms of being able to sell the frozen goodies. If this person is an ogre and acts irritably toward the lined-up children, the odds are that the number of purchases will be lessened and the next time that the ice cream truck comes around there will be fewer customers interested in buying. Kids won’t want to bear the brunt of a surly seller and parents will likely restrain their offspring from seeking out the ice cream truck. In short, the driver as a selling person has to be sufficiently polite or civil if they want to attain any semblance of monetary success with their efforts.
There is a bit of quandary about how friendly one ought to be. It used to be that everyone in town knew the ice cream truck owner and therefore there were a lot of built-in trusts. Nowadays, the person is typically a complete stranger. As such, if the ice cream truck operator starts asking kids overly friendly questions, it is bound to get the parents on edge, even if the driver is doing so innocently and simply as a means to inspire greater purchases. Sadly, our society now has become a guarded one and parents need to always be on the watch.
After making a purchase and getting the frozen treat, the children and parents will dance away and relish their wondrous desserts. The driver then gets back into the driver’s seat and continues the driving chore to find the next set of customers. If the driver is paying attention, they will usually not revisit the same street during a driving journey due to the aspect that those living on that street are already satiated and there is no more money to be had there. An exception might be if the street was relatively vacant at the time of a visit and for which the driver might decide that trying again at a more opportune time would be prudent.
Now that we’ve covered the ice cream truck end-to-end cycle, let’s consider a more macroscopic viewpoint on the matter.
Some indicate that the ice cream truck phenomenon was started by Harry Burt, considered the creator of the Good Humor bar, during the 1920s as a clever way to sell his wares. Interestingly, prohibition apparently helped out, allowing people that otherwise could not get a cold drink of whiskey tended to turn their attention toward substituting ice cream and sodas that conveniently were offered by the burgeoning use of ice cream trucks. Lore has it that the reason we nowadays associate a chime or melody with an ice cream truck is due to Burt putting his son’s bobsled bell onto his vehicle.
Fascinating history and worthwhile as an idle form of entertaining theatre, as it were.
Let’s next turn our eye toward the future.
We know that there are erstwhile efforts to craft self-driving cars and self-driving trucks. These vehicles will be bereft of a human driver since none will be needed.
Here’s today’s intriguing question: What will ice cream trucks be like in an era of self-driving cars and other self-driving vehicles?
Time to unpack the matter and see.
Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars
As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.
These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).
Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).
For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.
Self-Driving Cars And Ice Cream Trucks
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.
All occupants will be passengers.
The AI is doing the driving.
The first place to start our discussion of the future of ice cream trucks is the apparent fact that there can readily be AI-based self-driving ice cream trucks, assuming that we’ve also been able to achieve self-driving cars (the same technology applies).
You could even make an argument that a self-driving ice cream truck does not need to be as capable as a self-driving car.
Here’s why.
Assuming that the self-driving ice cream truck would be kept to low speeds, this turns out to make the AI-based driving chore a bit easier overall. The slower the speed, the more time for the computer to calculate what to do, and the greater amount of time allowed for making a quick stop. This is partially why you’ve perhaps heard about the tremendous progress in self-driving cars in say retirement communities, wherein the speed limits are kept very low, and in self-driving delivery vehicles that plod along at slower speeds.
In any case, there are certainly dire consequences if a self-driving ice cream truck were to somehow ram into or strike a child. Besides the potential injuries, the other qualm would be that this could cause a massive backlash against using self-driving capabilities in the use case of an ice cream truck. We all know or should acknowledge that an ice cream truck is a magnet for children. Meanwhile, one of the hardest aspects of AI detection involves being able to spot little children. The youngsters do not necessarily realize the dangers of running out into the street to catch-up with or run toward an ice cream truck, regardless of whether human-driven or AI-driven.
I think it is sensible to state that any ice cream truck that gets embellished with self-driving facilities had better be darned good, nearly fault-free. The entirety of the self-driving realm would undoubtedly get crushed if a self-driving ice cream truck did something astray.
Let’s assume that the self-driving ice cream truck is going to be safe enough to be reliably and appropriately utilized in our neighborhoods and communities (this is yet to be shown), and consider what else this portends.
The driver of the self-driving ice cream truck is the AI system. There is no need for and presumably no allowance for a human to be driving the vehicle.
You can then assess the situation in two ways. One approach would be to have a human on-board that now can completely be provided solely for selling purposes and no longer has to also incur the effort of driving the vehicle. Another alternative involves ditching any human being on-board and instead entail an utterly AI-run operation.
I’ll concentrate on the AI-only instance, allowing us to mull over what this mobile retail outlet will be like when devised in that manner.
The AI would be driving the vehicle and could potentially make use of modern-day data science techniques in devising the optimum path throughout a neighborhood. Based on demographic data that would indicate the nature of the households, such as the number of children at each home, the estimated household incomes, and so on, the AI would be able to try and systematically determine the best route to take. This would involve ascertaining the likelihood of who might be at home, who would be likeliest to buy from an ice cream truck, and so on.
We can also take into account that the ice cream truck ought to “learn” from its various journeys.
A human driver would likely remember where the hotspots in the community are in terms of the most kids and the most purchases. The AI system of an ice cream truck would similarly be collecting this data, though in more precise detail, and then upload the data using the OTA (Over-The-Air) electronic communications from the self-driving vehicle into the cloud of the automaker or self-driving developing entity. Using the latest in Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), this customer data could be routinely analyzed and used to better guide the direction and pace of cruising in a community.
On the exterior of the ice cream truck would be a menu board, though this could be amped up in this space age. The board could be an electronic one, displaying the ice cream delights and showcasing what they look like. Cartoons and various animation could be used to further enhance the displays and attract the desired attention. Etc.
Speaking of modern technologies, the AI could be sending out electronic messages, a type of beacon, indicating where the self-driving ice cream truck is and its specific GPS coordinates. Children and parents would be able to consult their smartphones to know when the ice cream truck is nearby. Presumably, preorders could be electronically placed, rather than waiting until the vehicle arrives.
When picking up the order, the self-driving ice cream truck might dispense the frozen goodie via some kind of robotic arm, or might make use of a set of vending machine caged slots that open when you showcase your smartphone electronic receipt.
Some are crestfallen to think that the old-fashioned ice cream truck is being turned into a seemingly vacuous experience for kids.
Well, it depends upon your point of view.
The AI system could speak with those that come up to the self-driving ice cream truck, welcoming them and offering a dialogue akin to what a human operator might have done. Via advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), akin to Alexa and Siri, the AI could almost seem human-like in terms of focusing on the act of selling the ice cream delights.
Perhaps some enterprising operators will provide downloadable video games that enable kids to play a game on their smartphone while awaiting the arrival of the self-driving ice cream truck. Also, it could be that children will no longer have their desires shattered due to an ice cream truck that never came to their block, since the AI would be alerted whenever an electronic connection and order was placed.
Could there be as much excitement and enthusiasm sprinkled toward a conventional ice cream truck as there might be for a state-of-the-art self-driving ice cream truck?
Perhaps so, encompassing a newly formed set of traditions that those of us mired in the prior ones cannot readily discern.
Conclusion
Not all facets of self-driving ice cream trucks are necessarily rosy.
If you frighten or become startled easily, please prepare yourself for what I’m about to mention.
One aspect of self-driving cars and all such vehicles that I’ve repeatedly pointed out is that they will have a roving eye (see my discussion at this link here).
With the abundance of sensors including video cameras, radar, LIDAR, ultrasonic, thermal imaging, and the like, the self-driving driving vehicles will be able to collect massive amounts of data about our daily lives. Imagine that as every self-driving car and self-driving truck perchance goes down your street, it is capturing a video recording of everything that is taking place.
This bodes for some handy benefits but also proffers scary privacy intrusions. In the use case of a self-driving ice cream truck, it would presumably be able to record all the comings and goings of the young children that come up to the vehicle to get their ice cream. You can then add into the equation the aspects of facial recognition. Consider how this might be adversely used, and you will get chills down your spine.
A counterargument is that the AI can do a better and more consistent job of acting friendly towards the children and the parents that make use of the ice cream dispensing capabilities. Perhaps the AI detects that little Joey or little Samantha are approaching the self-driving ice cream truck and immediately establishes their preferred snow cone or drumstick for them. No need for the kids to place an order since the AI already realizes what they usually want. The AI also calls out to them, by name, providing an ultra-personalized ice cream dispensing experience.
Here’s an additional oddball twist.
Envision that the AI is so well devised that it can carry on a seemingly intelligible conversation with the children that approach the vehicle. Those kids might then tend to anthropomorphize the AI. In short, they will believe that the AI is as astute as a human, embodying human-like intelligence. This could be dangerous for those kids. Plus, it makes one wonder what those children will be like when they grow-up having been led into believing that AI is essentially sentient (it is not, and we are a long way from having such AI).
In any case, set aside that worrisome talk.
As the days and nights of winter come upon us, and the cold weather takes hold, please continue to keep friendly and warm thoughts about the coming summer and the annual revival of the ice cream truck.
Just don’t be surprised if the next time you see an ice cream truck it isn’t already outfitted as a self-driving vehicle and the AI is ringing the bell to welcome you all to a treasure trove of ice cream delights.
But please do keep your eye on that sneaky AI, despite those delicious snow cones and delectable popsicles.
