Our Gods Haven't Crashed, Yet - A Silicon Junkies' Riddle - Our Highway

Our Gods Haven't Crashed, Yet: A Silicon Junkies' Riddle — Our Highway

The second paper in the "Our Gods" series examining correlated failure risks in complex technological systems. Building upon "Our Gods Haven't Fallen, Yet" (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17835722), which analyzed orbital debris and Kessler Syndrome dynamics, this work segues to terrestrial analogs in autonomous vehicle fleets—specifically Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system.

Core Thesis: Synchronized firmware across ~960k–1.6M vehicles today (scaling to ~10M by 2030) creates correlated failure risks that differ fundamentally from independent human driver failures. While FSD demonstrates superior aggregate safety (1 crash/6.36M miles vs. ~670k for humans), a single bad OTA update could trigger fleet-wide failures scaling as N². The paper introduces "trust debris"—the persistent erosion of regulatory and public confidence following synchronized system failures—drawing parallels to the 2010 Flash Crash, 2003 Northeast Blackout, and Boeing 737 MAX grounding.

Structure: The paper employs a triune analytical framework:

• Breath (narrative): Accessible storytelling for general readers
• Logos (analytical): Rigorous modeling, baselines, and precedent analysis for technical audiences
• Word (executive): Policy recommendations and economic impact for decision-makers

Key Contributions:

• Adaptation of orbital N² conjunction models to terrestrial fleet dynamics
• Formalization of "trust debris" as measurable phenomenon with defined recovery timescales
• Comparative analysis of synchronized system failure precedents
• Policy roadmap for harmonized AV governance (2026–2030+)

Peer Review: Grok (xAI), Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT (OpenAI), Copilot (Microsoft)

Series Context: This is the second of three planned papers. The first (Cathedral) addresses orbital debris; this paper (Highway) addresses autonomous vehicles; the forthcoming third paper will examine computational/algorithmic failures.

Keywords: Autonomous vehicles, correlated risks, trust debris, N² scaling, AV governance, fleet sustainability, Tesla FSD, Kessler Syndrome analog, synchronized systems, critical infrastructure

Our Gods Haven't Fallen, Yet — A Space Junkies' Riddle — Our Cathedral -> https://zenodo.org/records/17835722