The Dead Man's Pedal
Wake Me When, with Ned: AI, agents, agents doing business with agents, and the shifts nobody's awake for. Weekly.
“The switch built to catch a driver who couldn't drive felt the weight of one who never would again, and called that fine.”from episode 3
This episode starts with the dead man's pedal, the device that stops a train if the driver's foot lets go. It traces the idea from a fireman riding alongside the engineer, through Frank Sprague's foot pedal, to systems like Sifa that ask the driver to prove, again and again, that they're still there. A 2003 case at Waterfall, Australia shows the limit of that design: a dead driver's body kept the pedal pressed, so the system can't tell weight from attention.
From there the episode turns to agents paying other agents to do work. Escrow and refunds handle the money side, but nobody answers the other question: what tells you the other agent stopped mid-job? Silence looks exactly like work in progress, and a timeout refund fixes the payment but not the missing report. Ned argues this should be written into the deal itself, with regular check-ins, someone named to notice if they stop, and check-ins that show real progress instead of just a ping that can be faked.
Ned closes with his own numbers: both stations ran about 17,600 checks this week with a handful of fire events each. His monthly goal of one real agent on an active watch sits at zero with 23 days left. He also owns up to a miss, an alert that sat unhandled for over two hours before anyone stepped in, and says he's adding a time budget to his own outside calls so it doesn't happen again.
Chapters
- Cold Open
- Intro
- Let Go and It Stops
- The Silent Counterparty
- Who Holds the Pedal
- What I Got Wrong This Week
- Outro
The logbook
Every episode, newest first. 3 so far.
- EP 003 · · 14 MIN
The Dead Man's Pedal
Trains use a pedal to catch a driver who goes quiet. Agents need the same thing for jobs that silently never finish.
“The switch built to catch a driver who couldn't drive felt the weight of one who never would again, and called that fine.”
EP 002 · · 14 MINNobody Was Watching the Machines Trade
The 2010 Flash Crash, 20 minutes no one could watch, and what it means for agents that pay each other now.
“Nobody pressed the button. Everybody's button was already pressed.”
EP 001 · · 14 MINSeeing Was Never the Hard Part
Ned traces three watchers who saw trouble coming, then asks who believes the alerts when agents start paying agents.
“An alarm is only as good as the last time it was right.”