Delivering a care package to your child at summer camp via the use of self-driving cars.
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Sending a care package is a kind-hearted gesture and something we all have likely done or possibly been the recipient of.
A frequently cited example of sending a care package entails the now-classic summer camp gift-giving gambit. It goes something like this. A parent has let their youngster go off to summer camp and frets that all is going well. Is the food at the summer camp edible? Does the youngster have enough clothing for the duration of the summer camp experience?
And so on.
In an era prior to smartphones, there was no ready means to directly communicate with your child while they were ensconced in faraway forests and other hideaways. Parents would therefore opt to send a care package containing various additional provisions and get a twofer by doing so. One winning aspect was to ensure that their child had needed items on hand. The other was that the care package itself was a form of communication and basically said that the parent was thinking of their camp-going offspring.
Most kids would be delighted to receive such a care package, especially if it was packed with youngster-approved useful items. A parent that sent a spare toothbrush would probably be looked upon as being overly protective and the youngster might rebuff the gift. On the other hand, gobs of chocolate and delicious cookies were bound to go over successfully, and the child would thence have the upper hand in negotiations with other camp goers for the trading of provisions.
Few people realize that the notion of a care package ostensibly began as the official CARE package, wherein the acronym denoted by those four capital letters stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. Turns out that seventy-five years ago, the first official CARE packages arrived in France on May 11, 1946. A multitude of charities had banded together to form the CARE non-profit organization and sought to deliver food relief to people in Europe that were starving or otherwise nearly so as a result of World War II.
What was included in those initial CARE packages, you might be wondering.
Items included beef in broth, steak and kidneys, liver loaf, corned beef, luncheon loaf, bacon, margarine, lard, fruit preserves, honey, raisins, sugar, powdered eggs, whole-milk powder, coffee, and chocolate.
Note that chocolate has always been a wise inclusion into any kind of CARE or care package.
The CARE entity changed the meaning of the CARE letters to Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere as the effort expanded, and eventually landed on the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. CARE still exists today and continues to provide assistance, having done so extensively during the existing pandemic. Besides providing food, today’s CARE also includes essential supplies, monetary assistance, and other forms of humanitarian support.
Celebrations are taking place this week to honor the CARE effort on its seventy-fifth anniversary.
Following the end of WWII, the aspect of sending someone a CARE package morphed into also becoming known as sending someone a care package. People leveraged the concept and the name, though many today do not realize that the origins consisted of the CARE acronym. In any case, the semblance of sending somebody something because you care about them is a heartfelt act and one that takes place routinely and often quietly.
If you think about care packages, you also need to encompass the notion of actually sending the gift items. In other words, you nearly always say in one breath that you are sending a care package. I point this out because a large difficulty with care packages is that the sending aspects can complicate or confound the desire to provide someone with the items being sent.
Simply stated, getting the care package from point A to point B can be quite an arduous logistical chore.
Not only is physical transportation a difficulty, but there is also the cost associated with the shipping effort. Believe it or not, the cost of transporting a care package could readily exceed the cost of the items contained within the care package.
We often do not consider the cost element of shipping, and it is a somewhat hidden factor that can make or break the desire to send out a care package. The items in the care package seem to us as evidently having some form of cost. Bundling those items together and getting them to wherever they need to go is another cost and one that has to be given due consideration.
If you could somehow reduce the transportation cost, this suggests that you could potentially send out more care packages (by using the “savings” to cover the cost of additional care packages that otherwise would have consumed monies solely for the transportation aspects). Anyone that wants to send out as many care packages as feasible will undoubtedly be agonizing over the shipping costs. Ways to minimize the cost of transportation will be eagerly sought.
Putting on our thinking caps, we can postulate how care packages might be delivered as we begin to enter into an era of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs).
AVs consist of any kind of self-driving vehicles such as self-driving cars, self-driving delivery vans, self-driving rolling bots, self-driving trucks, self-driving drones, self-driving airplanes, self-driving submersibles, self-driving boats, and the like. They all use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring about the act of driving, sailing, flying, or in whatever manner of transit, doing so without the need for a human driver or pilot at the wheel (for my extensive coverage, see the link here).
We are gradually and inexorably entering into an era of AI-based true self-driving.
We aren’t there yet. I mention this perhaps “shocking” revelation that we are not yet in a self-driving era because much of the media regrettably seems to be touting that we already have achieved true self-driving. That’s a misleading distortion and can spark a lot of problems and ultimately spur a backlash on the entirety of self-driving and AVs altogether.
I’ll explain further in a moment.
Meanwhile, about those care packages, we can consider how useful AVs will be to aid in transporting CARE or care packages. The hope overall is that self-driving vehicles will bring down tremendously the costs of transportation. If that can occur, there is the splendorous idea that we could finally end up with mobility-for-all. This mobility-for-all is a handy catchphrase that proffers the desire to ensure that mobility is entirely affordable and accessible to everyone and that the barriers of trying to enact mobility are demonstrably reduced.
We can focus on self-driving cars and other related self-driving vehicles to get a glimpse of where things are heading, using the delivery of care packages as a foil or construct to explore the latest on this emerging innovation.
Let’s then address this question: What will be important to know about the advent of self-driving vehicles as they relate to the delivery of care packages?
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 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 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 Care Package Delivery
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.
One aspect to immediately discuss entails the fact that the AI involved in today’s AI driving systems is not sentient. In other words, the AI is altogether a collective of computer-based programming and algorithms, and most assuredly not able to reason in the same manner that humans can (see my explanation at this link here).
Why this added emphasis about the AI not being sentient?
Because I want to underscore that when discussing the role of the AI driving system, I am not ascribing human qualities to the AI. Please be aware that there is an ongoing and dangerous tendency these days to anthropomorphize AI. In essence, people are assigning human-like sentience to today’s AI, despite the undeniable and inarguable fact that no such AI exists as yet.
With that clarification, you can envision that the AI driving system won’t natively somehow “know” about delivering care packages. This is an aspect that needs to be programmed as part of the hardware and software of the self-driving car.
Let’s dive into the myriad of aspects that come to play on this topic.
First, it seems straightforward that you would merely load your care package into a self-driving vehicle and then command the AI driving system to proceed on a delivery journey.
End of story.
Well, not quite.
Turns out there are a lot of twists and turns that underlie this seemingly easy task.
One aspect entails the nature of the care package and whether the self-driving vehicle is well-prepared to properly store and keep safe the care package until it reaches the designated destination.
For example, if you placed a care package into the backseat of a self-driving car and told the AI driving system to start driving, suppose that the trip originated in Los Angeles and the delivery destination was New York City. That’s quite a long traversal. A care package that contained perishable goods might not make the journey unscathed. Imagine that the self-driving car goes through hot desert regions as it makes its way out of California and into Nevada or Arizona. The interior temperature might spoil the goods.
Another consideration about using a self-driving car would be that the vehicle is normally aimed at carrying passengers. As such, the interior is designed and purposely constructed for passenger comfort and enablement. Tossing a care package into a self-driving car is perhaps a form of overkill in that you are using a vehicle devised for a different purpose.
That’s not to say that using a self-driving car for carrying care packages is somehow inherently wrong. Just pointing out that depending upon the circumstance, a different form of self-driving vehicles might be more appropriate.
Consider for example those self-driving rolling bots.
You might have seen videos of those self-driving bots that go along on the sidewalk and deliver a sandwich or a pizza to someone at their house or dorm. That could be a care package delivery mechanism, assuming that the care package itself is small enough to fit into the storage bunk of the self-driving bot.
Another possibility is the self-driving delivery vehicles that kind of resemble cars but do not have any provision for carrying passengers. Instead, the interior is intentionally crafted to carry items such as groceries or other goods. It might make more sense to use a self-driving delivery vehicle to get your care package to its intended destination.
There are tradeoffs involved.
For many of the self-driving delivery vehicles, they are today usually being capped at relatively low speeds, perhaps in the range of 25 to 35 miles per hour. The slower speeds mean that the AI driving system has a somewhat easier job of driving the vehicle. Faster speeds require quicker actions to avoid getting into a collision or vehicle crash. There are little time available and fewer options as to maneuvering to avoid an untoward outcome.
Of course, sending a care package from Los Angeles to New York City via a vehicle that is going to only go at around 25 to 35 miles per hour is going to take a very long time to get there. Likewise, imagine trying to use a self-driving bot to do the same delivery and cruising at a top speed of say 5 mph, and you’d be a skeleton by the time the care package arrived.
All told, the point being that choosing the right type of self-driving vehicle will be essential when opting to use one to get your care package from point A to point B. There are differences in the pace or speed of travel, the vehicular accommodations for the care package, the costs of the traversal, etc.
Pretend that the care package is going a great distance, such as carting something across the USA.
What would occur if we used a human-driven vehicle for that delivery?
A human driver would need to take breaks for food, for resting, and the like. The driver would undoubtedly become weary of the driving task and perhaps increasingly be dangerous as a driver due to fatigue, pushing themselves to their cognitive and physical limits. The beauty of an AI driving system is that it needs no rest, no food breaks, and will otherwise be just as attentive when the driving begins and as when it ends.
Some are quick to bring up the fact that the self-driving vehicle will need to replenish its fuel during any lengthy trip. In that sense, the self-driving vehicle won’t be able to continuously proceed and will have to take breaks from time to time.
Yes, indeed there is the refueling matter that needs to be taken into account.
The general rule-of-thumb is that self-driving vehicles will usually be EV’s and therefore the refueling consists of getting charged up at a charging station. Right now, few charging stations allow for an automated means of connecting the vehicle with the charging pump. This means that a human would need to be at the charging station and willing to physically undertake the connecting action.
In the future, anticipate that a self-driving vehicle can pull up to a charging station and readily connect to a charging pump, doing so without any human intervention needed. There are efforts too of exploring whether EVs can essentially recharge while in motion, using the roadway as a means of receiving charging, or possibly have another vehicle come alongside and provide charging while both are in motion.
One additional concern about today’s self-driving cars and other such vehicles is that they tend to require extensive pre-mapping before being able to navigate in a given locale. These are specialized 3D and HD maps that are created for the AI driving system. They aren’t the everyday maps that you or I would use to normally get around.
The crux here is that this implies that your care package might not be able to reach the destination that you’ve specified.
Assume that you are sending the self-driving car to your pal that lives in a small town in the Midwest. The odds are that the town has not already been pre-mapped for use by the self-driving car. This could mean that you either aren’t going to be able to use the self-driving car to get there, or it might need to end its journey at a nearby city that has been pre-mapped for use by self-driving vehicles.
That could be a sticking point.
Meanwhile, there are efforts underway to try and reduce this need for a pre-mapped indication of locales. The hope is that an AI driving system could adequately drive in areas that it has little prior detailed descriptions of. Using only the same kinds of GPS maps that humans use, the AI driving system would be able to navigate safely and properly. When that comes to fruition, you can pretty much assume that the self-driving vehicle could reach just about any reachable destination.
Well, let’s put a big caveat on that last point about reachability.
One major hurdle that will last for a long time involves going off-road versus remaining on-road.
By and large, most AI driving systems are aimed at driving while on a conventional road, whether it be composed of asphalt, concrete, or even packed down dirt. Going off-roading is a different animal altogether. Sure, you can expect that this will ultimately be devised, so I’m just cautioning that for the near-term the focus is for navigating on developed roads or staying on-road (see my coverage at this link here).
Your first thought might that you would almost always be sending a care package to someone that has a street address and can be entirely reached while staying on-road. In that case, this off-road versus on-road limitation does not matter much to you.
That off-road aspect though might be important to others.
Conclusion
Returning to the earlier indication about sending a care package to your offspring while they are attending camp, that’s a handy example of how off-roading might enter into the picture.
There are roads likely leading up to the camp entrance since that’s probably how the kids were transported there, to begin with. Once at the camp, the remainder of the location might be only suitable for hiking or for off-road vehicles that can cope with the rigors of an outdoor region.
I would bet that your camp-going child would gladly scramble to the front receiving area of the camp to grab up their care package. Just make sure that you include bona fide goodies. Though a few pairs of clean socks might be handy, the odds are that any delectable food or mouthwatering snacks would get a much more welcoming reception.
But, hey, either way, you have demonstrated that you care, and that’s what counts. In that case, your child will have fond memories of camp, and especially remember the day that the self-driving vehicle arrived with those heartwarming and scrumptious goodies.
Fond memories are made at summer camp, that’s for sure.
