Fisker has another braking issue on its hands, prompting US safety regulators to open a fourth probe on the automakerâs electric Ocean SUV.
Technology
Fiskerâs brakes canât catch a break
NHTSA is probing Fiskerâs electric Ocean SUV for alleged inadvertent automatic emergency braking (AEB) activations. The EV was previously probed for allegedly lost braking power.
This time, the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into customer claims that the Ocean would unexpectedly activate its automatic emergency braking (AEB) without any forward obstruction. Reuters reports three of the claims involved someone getting injured.
This is the second probe opened for the 2023 Ocean that has to do with the vehicleâs braking system. The first, which was announced last January, was based on complaints that the vehicle would lose braking power. Now the regulatorâs Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is opening a preliminary evaluation based on eight customer complaints that allege inadvertent AEB activations.
The issues echo Teslaâs struggles with phantom braking, although those appeared related to the companyâs advanced driver-assistant features like Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.
Another investigation opened last month alleges failures on the Oceanâs latch and handle systems that stop users from opening doors inside and outside. And in February, four complaints were filed about the Ocean not shifting into park or the intended gear, resulting in unintended vehicle movement or rollaway.
Fiskerâs image has suffered from mounting safety and reliability issues. The company is also struggling to keep afloat financially, forcing it to slash prices by almost 40 percent in an attempt to stay afloat.
Meanwhile, Fisker hasnât paid its engineering and carpeting partners, and its contract manufacturer Magna International recently stated it will no longer build any more Ocean SUVs.
If youâre into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.
Thereâs been a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien life, thanks in large part to a 2019 story published in the New York Times about reports of UFOs â also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) â off the East Coast a decade ago. Since then, the whole topic of UFOs feels considerably less fringe than it once did.
We still donât have anything like evidence of actual aliens, but it is, at least, a live question in a way it wasnât before. Iâm still inclined to believe that there are far more plausible explanations for UAPs that donât involve extraterrestrial creatures. The possibility, however, that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions.
How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding of our place in it? And what if aliens are real but so unlike anything we can imagine that we canât even begin to understand the implications?
Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the author of two books on this topic. Her first book, American Cosmic, was focused on the religious dimensions of UFO mythology. The new one is called Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, and it dives into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien life.
I recently invited Pasulka to The Gray Area to talk about her research, the stories sheâs heard from people who claim to have experienced UFOs, and how her views have evolved in surprising directions. As always, thereâs much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Illing
When you write in this book that UFO events are a âspiritual realityâ for people, what does that mean?
Diana Pasulka
UFO events are transformative realities for the people who experience them. Theyâre not necessarily good â religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good. I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs and sometimes with what they called âbeings associated with UFOsâ and it sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.
I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record. There were no planes, there were no rockets back then. People were seeing things in the sky and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could be souls from purgatory or they could be houses of saints and things like that. I think weâre dealing with something here that isnât necessarily a new religion so much as a new form of spirituality.
Sean Illing
So when people tell you that theyâve encountered aliens or theyâve been visited by angels, you really believe them?
Diana Pasulka
I believe that they believe it, but that doesnât commit me to the belief that it happened. Iâll give you an example. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician in the early 20th century from India, and he was a genius. And he believed these math calculations were whispered in his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region. I think she was a version of Lakshmi. So thatâs a story that takes hold and gets repeated.
Now, am I committed to the belief that Lakshmi gave Ramanujan that? No, Iâm not. But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse, and I can leave aside the question of the objective existence of these entities.
Sean Illing
Whatâs the most âholy shitâ thing youâve seen or heard after 14 years of researching this?
Diana Pasulka
I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face. And then he started to see this person in crowds. He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldnât tell anybody because he noticed that other people didnât see them.
And he also had burns. His eyes started to hurt. I asked a scientist about that and said, âWhatâs this effect?â And he said, âIt was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.â So that was pretty weird!
Sean Illing
I just donât know what to do with some of these stories and characters you profile in the book. The vividness of the accounts, the consistencies, the depth â it is puzzling, to say the least. Itâs hard to believe thereâs nothing to see here.
Diana Pasulka
Well, I agree with you. I mean, I started out as a complete nonbeliever. But when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford, and there were so many of them, I was absolutely shocked. And that shock lasted for a couple of years.
Iâve been studying this now for about 14 years, so thatâs a long time. I actually believe these people. Itâs definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as what people are talking about today. We can only say that these people are having these experiences. Most of them will not come out and say that because of their jobs. Thereâs still a stigma and I donât blame these people for not coming out publicly. Iâm just not going to disbelieve them because Iâve met thousands of people who are credible witnesses, and the patterns are so similar.
Sean Illing
The skeptic in me says the will to believe is so strong in the human mind and we can sincerely convince ourselves of almost anything. I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things theyâre telling you to be true.
But as you were saying, that doesnât mean theyâre true or it doesnât mean that theyâre reliably true. So to take one random example, thereâs that guy you talked to who moved his family out of Los Angeles to live in some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so. That just sounds like the hallucinations of a confused person.
Diana Pasulka
I mean, what did the pilgrims do? Or what did people who had visions and thought that they needed to leave Egypt or go someplace because a god told them to? Or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this? This is how I see that type of thing. I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years. Itâs a fundamental religious impulse. Thatâs how I see it.
Sean Illing
A religious impulse, sure, but thatâs separate from the question of truthfulness. And again, I may sound like Iâm contradicting myself, but Iâm just being honest about my own ambivalence. Despite what I just said about the will to believe being strong, I also think the will to hold on to our current worldview is strong because letting go of that means letting go of almost everything we take to be true â and thatâs scary.
So there are forces pushing in both directions here. For me, the only sensible position at this point is agnosticism. Iâm open to the evidence, but thereâs not enough yet.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, I do think that. I also want to push back a little on what you said about the will to believe. It seems like most people donât want to experience these things. That pilot didnât want to experience that. He didnât want to believe it. He was just going about his life, doing fine, and then everything gets turned upside down. He sees this face in the clouds and itâs almost mocking him. Who would want to experience that?
This is also the case with people who claim to have seen angels or souls from purgatory in the 1600s or 1700s. They werenât actually looking for that.
I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory, and it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent and she was terrified. And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept to her story and finally Mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough she saw the same thing. And so, they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent prayed for weeks to get rid of it, and it finally disappeared.
Sean Illing
To get back to this broader question about the possibility of alien life, Iâm not even going to ask if this discovery would be the most significant event in human history, because it obviously would be. But I do wonder what you think the most significant implication of that discovery would be for us as a species?
Diana Pasulka
For a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in the world believe in nonhuman intelligence because most people are religious. And so within various different religions, you have different forms of nonhuman intelligences that display themselves in different ways to people. Itâs mostly people in the post-Enlightenment West who are disbelievers in that narrative. So it would absolutely be the most shocking event for us, and the implication would be something like a post-secular society.
Sean Illing
Iâm not sure weâre nearly as secular as we think, but thatâs another conversation. I guess Iâd say this: What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity. The claim to being a special animal with some unique significance fell apart. It turns out weâre part of the same historical process as everything else.
But the discovery of alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible to deny, that would be the final step in the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin. It would, in a terminal way, upend our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful thing in some ways. But if the price of that discovery ends up being aliens showing up and destroying us, itâs totally not worth it.
Diana Pasulka
Yeah, that would be bad!
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Technology
Apple doesnât understand why you use technology
Appleâs marketing campaign for its new iPad suggests that the company is confused about what makes technology exciting. Thatâs new.
I wonder if Apple CEO Tim Cook was surprised by the visceral revulsion many people felt after viewing the newest commercial for Appleâs iPad. In it, a plethora of creative tools are flattened by an industrial press. Watching a piano, which if maintained can last for something like 50 years, squished to advertise a gadget, designed to be obsolete in less than 10, is infuriating. The backlash was immediate.
The message many of us received was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, everything thatâs a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny glass and metal slab.Â
Astoundingly, this is meant to sell a product. âBuy the thing thatâs destroying everything you love,â says Apple. This is quite a change from the famous â1984â ad, where Apple styled itself as smashing boring conformity. Sure, the new ad is tone-deaf â after all, Apple rose to prominence by aligning itself with creative types. But it also takes an embarrassingly narrow view of technology. Imagine being such a rube that you believe that the only good technology is new technology.
The iPad doesnât replace those experiences
That view of technology is fundamentally disrespectful. We are surrounded by stuff thatâs meant to endure. Technology, in a much broader sense, is innately hopeful. Itâs a bright golden thread between our past and our future.
Language is the most basic technology, the one that lets us build everything else. Writing down our thoughts meant we could begin to access lifetimes of experience. The Pythagorean theorem was so significant when it was first discovered that a cult formed around it; I learned it in sixth grade because it was foundational for a lot of things we created later. These foundations â language, math â made possible a chain of events that allowed Apple to exist.
Thereâs still a place for the technology Apple crushes in its ad. A TV screen is larger and more enjoyable to use than an iPad if you donât need to be on the move; thatâs why most people still own one. A record player allows the secondary joy of trading physical objects, and get-togethers at record stores. The arcade video game exists in places where you gather with other people.Â
The iPad doesnât replace those experiences. At its best, it complements them. I have never met a professional carpenter who uses only a multi-tool to get their job done. But if youâre trying to travel light, that Swiss Army knife is probably better than an entire toolkit.
This ad does highlight a particular Silicon Valley attitude: It scorns the past as outdated
This ad does highlight a particular Silicon Valley attitude: It scorns the past as outdated rather than respecting it as clever. In some sense, these companies have to: theyâve got products to sell. If Apple were to build something as durable as a piano, it would sell a lot fewer computers. In fact, the company has a history of kneecapping its own products in order to sell more of them: it deliberately slowed its older iPhones, for instance. It also has a history of making repairing and maintaining its products difficult.
In this ad, technology is disposable. I flinched when that piano got crushed. But apparently, no one inside the company did â and a lot of people had to sign off on this ad. The emotional valence of crushing is unmistakable; simply reversing the ad, as Reza Sixo Safai did, so that all the creative tools spring from the iPad immediately improves it. After all, the iPad can also be a creative tool, and isnât that what the commercial was meant to suggest?Â
Apple has a habit of suggesting its older devices are obsolete by releasing new versions that change their shells and styling without altering what they do in any meaningful way. The point of this ad is not about the iPadâs creative uses â itâs that itâs skinny. Thatâs the big selling point: the skinniest ever. Apple was so focused on its exciting new marketing feature that it lost sight of whatâs really important: the tools that make the things we love.Â
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