During the great all-analog and all-human version of Mattel Football that was played yesterday for a mixed crowd of people and cardboard cutouts of people, several automakers paid a lot of money to make small and tasteless movies who hoped to trigger a chain of events that would end with the purchase of a car. Cadillac’s entry went to his next Lyriq electric SUV, and introduced the son of one of the members of modern culture most famous artificial humans with cutlery for hands. It also contributed to the potentially dangerous misinformation surrounding current level 2 driver assistance systems.
If you haven’t had a chance to watch the Cadillac ad, here it is. I think I can just charge GM for showing it here? I’ll look at this:
Now, even before we get to the automotive issues here, if you’re remotely familiar with Tim Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissor Hands, you’ll notice that there are many things here that don’t make sense.
The main character there, the one who looks a lot like the holder (chuckles) Edward from the original film, is actually E d g a r Scissorhands, which implies being the son of the original Edward, the invented man with blade hands who received advice on hair and makeup from Bob Smith of healing.
The mother is similarly implied as Winona Ryder’s strangely blonde character from the original, Kim, which is where things get messy, since at the end of the original film, Kim helped to pretend Edward’s death and apparently went on to live a life nearby, but without any real contact with him.
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Look, it’s all here at the end of the film:
So, someone here is lying. Now, if we say, okay, what the hell, it’s just a commercial, so let’s say that Kim and Edward did being together and having a child, this also raises all kinds of issues.
Remember that Edward was built by an inventor as a kind of android, an inventor who made some extremely bad decisions as to what kind of temporary mechanical hands would be most useful until a human-like pair was completed:
Those complicated, dangerous, multi-bladed hands proved to be a terrible choice, but the inventor was clearly highly skilled: Edward was not just a high-functioning entity with almost human emotions and cognitive skills. but if this Cadillac commercial is accredited, did it also have a fully functioning human reproductive system? With the sperm that somehow carried the DNA information into mechanical scissor hands?
And if that is true, I certainly hope that Kim Scissorhands did a cesarean section. In fact, based on the child’s anatomy, perhaps that was the only possible outcome, possibly initiated by the child? have all kinds of issues of concern here.
But then again, it’s just a commercial. Well. We see in the ad that Edgar, although clearly skilled with his scissor hands, has a lot of problems operating a lot of basic human tools and equipment: pulling ropes on buses, catching soccer balls, pressing buttons, fences, etc.
Now, we see him driving the Lyriq nervously. He seems to have some kind of human hand under all those blades, although when it comes to a task where we would choose a finger, pressing a button, he selects a large blade to do the job:
At this point, the SuperCruise System takes control and because it uses a camera to track the driver’s eyes to confirm that proper attention is being paid to the road, which is different from systems like Tesla’s autopilot, which uses a torque sensor on the steering wheel to confirm that the hand is attached to the wheel.
Now, the message being sent here is very clear and is the part that I have a problem with: GM is saying this, hey, even if you have huge aggregations of knives for your hands that make normal steering almost impossible, it’s okay because SuperCruise means you you don’t even need to touch the wheel!
The problem here is that, like all Tier 2 driver assistance systems, even if you don’t need to touch the car’s steering wheel or controls while it’s running, it can still stop working and require the driver to take control without notice, and if that happened to Edgar there at highway speeds, I suppose, at best, it would end up with some noise and noise and, at worst, with hot-blooded geysers pouring out of everyone in the front seat and probably some LCDs scratched and torn alacantara.
Also, you saw the door handles on Lyriq? No way is Edgar going to open this up. And if he tries, the painting is boneless.
This commercial just feeds the myth, the same myth that Tesla has been fueling with terms like “Automatic pilot“AND”Complete self-driving”That Level 2 driver assistance systems are autonomous and autonomous systems. They are not.
As we said before, Level 2 systems are inherently flawed not for technological reasons, but for reasons of the human brain: people are just not good at these types of “surveillance tasks” and anything that requires people to take control without notice or warning, has profound problems.
This commercial is cute enough and would be ideal for a level 3 or higher system that has some kind of failover / elegant transfer system in place, but it doesn’t.
Cadillac hasn’t solved that problem yet, and neither has Tesla. Although Cadillac’s observer camera system can be more difficult to deceive than Tesla’s, if you have huge scissors in your hands, you will still potentially have so many problems controlling a car, although thanks to SuperCruise, you can find out for yourself problems at much higher speeds and much further from where it started, so that’s something.
With knives or not, commercials like these are leading the public that doesn’t like cars to believe that autonomy is more advanced than it is, and this is a recipe for problems.
Also, do Scissorhands men have skin under the leather? Or is it This one the skin?