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Apr 23, 2018
Topic: FuturismRobocarsThe primary purpose of the city is transportation. Sure, we share infrastructure like sewers and power lines, but the real reason we live in dense cities is so we can have a short travel time to the things in our lives, be they jobs, friends, shopping or anything else.
Sometimes that trip is a walking one, and indeed only the dense city allows walking trips to be short and also interesting. The rest of the trips involve some technology, from the bicycle to the car to the train. All that is about to change.
Transportation has been the driver of the way we live in cities for centuries. The car was the big re-architect of cities in the 20th century, and the tram/train was the factor in the 19th. We don't always like what happened but there is no denying what caused it.
Every aspect of urban transportation is in for big changes in the next couple of decades. Even walking and cycling, to some degree.
The following are the big factors which will affect urban living choices, densities and more. I have written more about most of these topics in other locations, but let's summarize some of the big effects.
E-Commerce and local automated delivery -- affecting retail and value of locations.
Robocars -- changing the meaning of distance and location, and freeing up parking. Also rewriting the meaning of public transit.
Walking -- new thinking on walking (and biking) and how to integrate t
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Apr 20, 2018
Topic: InternetPrivacySolve thisTags: data deposit boxA huge opportunity awaits a young social media company that is poised to take advantage of the fall of Facebook (and Twitter). Is somebody out there ready to carry the ball and make it happen. It probably has to be somebody already with most of this done, or even operating.
The great problem with social networks is the natural monopoly. It doesn't matter how good a tool is if your friends aren't on it. So "there can be only one," at least within each culture. There are different winners in different countries, and LinkedIn seems to have segmented business networking from personal networking enough to get past this.
One answer to the monopoly question would be the creation of a protocol that would allow networks to link together in a meaningful way. Ie. if my "home" is on Facebook and yours is on Google Plus, that it is possible to create a friendship link between the two, without requiring either of us to create a profile on the other site.
This is not that hard to do at a basic level, but of course a basic level might not be very satisfying. Even an advanced level would only suppo
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Apr 09, 2018
Topic: RobocarsThe NHTSA/SAE "levels" of robocars are not just incorrect. I now believe they are contributing to an attitude towards their "level 2" autopilots that plays a small, but real role in the recent Tesla fatalities.
Readers of this blog will know I have been critical of the NHTSA/SAE "levels" taxonomy for robocars since it was announced. My criticisms have mostly involved simply viewing them as incorrect or misleading, and you might have enjoyed my satire of the levels which questions the wisdom of defining the robocar based on the role the human being plays in driving it.
Recent events lead me to go further. I believe a case can be made that this levels are holding the industry back, and have a possible minor role in the traffic fatalities we have seen with Tesla autopilot. As such I urge the levels be renounced by NHTSA and the SAE and replaced by something better.
Some history
It's true that in the early days, when Google was effectively the only company doing work on a full self-driving car for the roads, people were looking for some sort of taxonomy to describe the different types of potential cars. NHTSA's first article laid one out as a series of levels numbered 0 to 4 which gave the appearance of an evolutionary progression.
Problem was, none of those stages existed. Even Google didn't know what it wanted to build, and my most important contribution there probably was being one of those pushing it from the highway car with occasional human
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Apr 06, 2018
Topic: TechnologyTags: bitcoinYou've probably heard the catchword in the bitcoin/crytpocurrency world of "HODL!" Based on somebody's typo, it is an encouragement to hold on to your bitcoins rather than sell them as the price ramps up to crazy levels. If you're a true believer, you will HODL. Don't cave in to the temptation and pressure to sell (SLEL?) but be sure to HODL.
(Previously I wrote about the issues which occur should Bitcoin's price actually stabilize.
I believe that the HODL philosophy is selfish and goes against most of what bitcoin stands for. Let's consider the latter one first.
The goal of bitcoin was to made a digital currency. People want a currency with all of Bitcoin's attributes -- its decentralized trustable blockchain, ability to do smart contracts, privacy of identities in transactions, security, and hopefully quick settlement. Indeed, if you ask a HODLer why bitcoin will be able to justify the high value they are waiting for, they will say that the system has this great value.
Of course, to be a currency, it does have to have a sustainable value. The design of bitcoin requires that value to compensate the miners,
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Apr 05, 2018
Topic: Free SpeechInternetMediaYou, by definition, read blog posts. But the era of lots of individual personal web sites seems to be on the wane. It used to be everybody had a "home page" and many had one that updated frequently (a blog) but I, and many other bloggers, have noticed a change of late. It can be seen in the "referer" summaries you get from your web server that show who is making popular links to your site.
The change is that they aren't doing that so much. Now, the vast majority of outside readers to this site come from places like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Google searches. One might explain this as a fault of my own, but others are reporting the same thing. Dedicated readers through RSS or sites like bloglines are still there but RSS subscription is on the decline too.
RSS subscription (a rather kludgey replacement for the mailing list) is not hard to understand. To RSS subscribe to somebody is to look at everything they produce. In our world of information overload, there are really only so many feeds you have time to look at all of. This blog does 4-5 longish articles per week when I'm not on the road, others can be 20 short items a day, but no matter how much you might like it, there's a limit.
The replacement for "serial" publishing (like RSS, mailing list and newsgroups) has become "sampled" reading. Twitter and Facebook are examples of that. You dip your toe in a stream, e
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Apr 03, 2018
Topic: Free SpeechGovernanceInternetNew DemocracyI have many things to discuss on the problem of "fake news" (which is to say, deliberately constructed false reports aimed to be spread to deceive) and the way it spreads through social media. This hot topic, seen as one of the largest threats to democracy to ever arise -- especially when combined with automated microtargeting of political propaganda -- is causing people to clamour for solutions.
Some of the solutions proposed are problematic on their own. Appointing social network sites to be arbiters of what is real and fake. Censorship executed by web sites or the government or both. Rules similar to the "false news" law in Canada that was ruled unconstitutional after it convicted a holocaust denier. (See: R v Zundel)
Anonymous shaming
Here I propose an alternative in the form of semi-anonymous shaming. If we can create consequences for the spreading of fake news, social consequences, we may be able to reduce it. Of course, if your friend online posts some fake news, you may be inclined (as I often am) to call them out on it. This is not typical activity. Most people are afraid of damaging a friendship in this fashion.
Perhaps
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Apr 02, 2018
Topic: AnnouncementsBoring administrative announcement: In a move long overdue for me, access to this blog and my other large sites will now be exclusively through "https" (ie. encrypted web.)
I set up this, of course, using the great tool Let's Encrypt which was created with support from the EFF. This project and the tools around it take a big step towards making the internet encrypted by default. Let me know if you experience any problems. But then I guess you aren't reading this if you are. Oh well!
For decades, it was painful and expensive to get the certificates needed to secure connections to a site. You typically had to pay a small set of companies, usually every year. Now a trusted certificate can be created automatically and for free.
While you could in the past use self-signed certificates, a serious error was made in browser design, causing the browser to complain far more loudly about the use of a self-signed certificate than about connecting completely insecurely. Because of this, few people used it.
It's also been a lot of work to configure web servers and e-mail tools to use TLS, and in fact today it's still too hard, but tools like certbot have automated a fair bit of that process.
In the very earliest days, encryption was considered legally a munition that needed a licence to export. So most web tools were built without it, or using a useless insecure form of it. In the end, it made people decide it was just too much work. The EFF and others fought to ge
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Apr 02, 2018
Topic: RobocarsThe Uber car and Tesla's autopilot, both in the news for fatalities are really two very different things. This table outlines the difference. Also, see below for some new details on why the Tesla crashed and more.
Uber ATG Test
Tesla Autopilot
A prototype full robocar capable (eventually) of unmanned operations on city streets.
A driver assist system for highways and expressways
Designed for taxi service
Designed for privately owned and driven cars
A full suite of high end roobcar sensors including LIDAR
Production automotive sensors: Primarily cameras and radar.
1 pedestran fatality, other accidents unknown
Fatalities in Florida, China, California, other serious crashes without injury
Approximately 3 million miles of testing
Late 2016: 300M miles, 1.3B miles data gathering.
A prototype in testing which needs a human safety driver monitoring it
A production product overseen by the customer
Designed to handle everything it might encounter on the road
Designed to handle only certain situations. Users are expressly warned it doesn't handle major things like cross traffic, stop signs and traffic lights.
Still in an early state, needing intervention every 13 miles on city streets
In production and needing intervention rarely on highways but if you tried to drive it on city streets
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Mar 30, 2018
Topic: RobocarsLast week, buried in the news of the Uber fatality, a Tesla model X had a fatality, plowing into the ramp divider on the flyover carpool exit from Highway 101 to Highway 85 in the heart of Silicon Valley. Literally just a few hundred feet from Microsoft and Google buildings, close to many other SV companies, and just a few miles from Tesla HQ. I take this ramp frequently, as does almost everybody else in the valley. The driver was an Apple programmer, on his way to work.
(Update: Possibly to an Apple facility in Sunnyvale, and thus not using the ramp but driving next to it.)
With autopilot on, it was just revealed today.
This was only revealed now because the concrete divider was missing its "crumple barrier" and the Tesla was almost complete destroyed, and had a battery fire. They were lucky to get the data.
While they took place in the same week, this is pretty different from the Uber incident. First of all, Tesla's autopilot technology is a very different animal from the full robocar technology tested by Uber, Waymo and others. It's a driver assist technology that requires that the (consumer) driver stay alert all the time. It is, really, a glorified cruise control with lanekeeping ability. There are all sorts of things it doesn't handle, and that Tesla warns customers it doesn't handle. The Uber was a prototype full robocar, designed to handle the situation it failed on, though still a prototype and needing a safety driver.
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Mar 30, 2018
Topic: RobocarsHow does a robocar see and avoid hitting a pedestrian? There are a lot of different ways. Some are very common, some are used only by certain teams. To understand what the Uber car was supposed to do, it can help to look at them. I write this without specific knowledge of what techniques Uber uses.
In particular, I want to examine what could go wrong at any of these points, and what is not likely to go wrong.
The usual pipeline looks something like this:
Localization (no indication of failure)
Sensing (With LIDAR, radar, cameras, etc.)
Sensor fusion (also takes place later in the chain)
Classification (preliminary)
Link to objects previously known, determine velocity
Model future paths of all obstacles. Improve classification
Detect possible incursions
Plan a path forward
Execute plan
Send commands to car controls
Localization
Ideally, the car wants to know where it is on its map. This is a continuous process, and involves the sensing system. However, in this case the vehicle drove properly in its lane so there is no sign of failure here.
Sensing
I could write a lot about sensing here. All the sensors have different attributes. All of them should have detected the pedestrian fairly early, though radar has some limitations.
LIDAR is extremely reliable. The LIDAR would have sensed her, starting at least 90m out.
Radar has challenges on object
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Mar 29, 2018
Topic: RobocarsLost in all my coverage of the Uber event is a much more positive story from San Francisco, where Police issued a ticket to the safety driver of a Cruise test vehicle for getting too close to a pedestrian.
We don't have all the details on this, but based on Cruise's statements -- that the ticket was issued in error and they were never closer than 10.8 feet to the pedestrian and they correctly yielded right-of-way -- it is speculated this incident involved a Cruise car going through a crosswalk which was also in use by a pedestrian.
The law requires cars to yield the right of way to pedestrians in crosswalks, and Cruise claims it does this and did this. It is not clearly defined what the right of way is of a pedestrian. In some places, the pedestrian effectively "owns" the whole crosswalk in front of them. In other places, their ROW only includes half the road or a smaller buffer zone. We have all been there -- you want to turn right on a green, and there are pedestrians in the crosswalk. Often, you will turn through the crosswalk when the pedestrians are coming from the other side and you'll be long gone by the time they get to the lane you are turning through. Or you wait for pedestrians to pass and you turn, with caution, as soon as they have walked through the lane you want.
This is a good thing, and in busy cities, is important for the flow of traffic. The extreme situation -- nobody can turn if a pedestrian is anywhere in or approaching the crossw
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Mar 29, 2018
Topic: RobocarsUber has reached an undisclosed settlement in the fatal incident with the victim's husband and daughter. This matches my prediction of Uber's likely best course of action, since it will shut down much of the public discussion and avoid dragging all sorts of details out into the open in a lengthy trial. The settlement comes with an agreement for silence, as you might expect.
Of course, that means the public does not get to see them, at least for now. It will see some of them in the NTSB accident report. If there is a criminal trial over the death, some details will come out, but far fewer than would in a civil trial. If Uber is simply cited for infraction of the vehicle code, it would not want that to go to trial and would just pay the penalties.
Another option lies open. The governments issuing permits for Uber to do its testing may require it to be more forthcoming if they wish new permits. Last week, Uber's permit to test in California expired and it declined to renew. It is unsure who will let them test in the future.
The settlement offer was presumably generous, so that the family would quickly accept it. As noted this is compounded by the fact that society and court cases don't attach large values to the lives of the homeless in contrast with others. While there should have been law firms willing to work pro bono (or certainly on contingency) because of th
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Mar 27, 2018
Topic: RobocarsYesterday we saw the state of Arizona kick Uber's robocar program out of the state. Arizona worked hard to provide very light regulation and attracted many teams to the state, but now it has understandable fear of political bite-back. Here I discuss what the government might do about this and what standards the courts, public or government might demand.
Waymo / Jaguar
Waymo's big announcement today was a partnership with Jaguar to base their next vehicle on Jaguar's expensive electric car. They are going to buy a lot of cars. I think it's a surprising choice. While the luxury of such vehicles is nice, and electric makes sense, I somehow suspect that for a taxi people prefer vehicles like the minivan they now use, with high seats, easy entry and automatic doors. Less green, though.
Making right turn
Some folks who have been investigating the video (I hate to watch it myself) have suggested that the car shows signs of starting a turn, and that the right turn indicators might be on. This provides some context which might provide an explanation, though not an excuse, for the system failure. In other words that very sloppy code, planning to exit the lane it's in, erroneously decided it need not treat a pedestrian in its soon-to-be-former lane as to be avoided. We're still at the point of speculation, and still waiting for Uber to release the real logs of what transpired in their spirit of full cooperation.
What should the government do?
Some have reacted t
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Mar 26, 2018
Topic: RobocarsThe governor of Arizona has told Uber to "get an Uber" and stop testing in the state. With no instructions on how to come back.
Unlike the early positive statements from Tempe police, this letter is harsh and to the point. It's even more bad news for Uber, and the bad news is not over. Uber has not released any log data that makes them look better, the longer they take to do that, the more it seems that the data don't tell a good story for them.
In other news, both MobilEye and Velodyne have issued releases that their systems would have seen the pedestrian. Waymo has said the same, and I believe that all of them are correct. Waymo has a big press event scheduled for tomorrow in New York, rumoured to announce some new shuttle operations there. I wonder how much consideration they gave to delaying it, because in spite of their superior performance, a lot of the questions they will get at the press conference won't be about their new project.
There are more signs that Uber's self-driving project may receive the "death penalty," or at the very least a very long and major setback. A long and major setback in a field where Uber thought "second place is first loser" to quote Anthony Levandowski.
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Mar 26, 2018
Topic: RobocarsIn the wake of the Uber fatality, I'm seeing lots of questions. Let's consider the issues of crosswalks and interventions by safety drivers.
The importance of the crosswalk
Crosswalks actually are important to robocars in spite of the fact that they still should stop for a pedestrian outside of a crosswalk.
At a crosswalk (marked or implicit) pedestrians have the right of way. They can, and do, just step out into the crosswalk and have a legal right to expect traffic will stop. Of course, if you are rational, you still watch the traffic and make sure it's really stopping before you go too far.
There are actually quite a few different "classes" of road space that exist, and pedestrians act very differently at them, and cars act differently because of that:
Crosswalks with a crossing guard
Crosswalks at traffic lights with walk/don't walk signs or traffic lights. Like Shibuya
General marked crosswalks without signals or lights (at intersections or mid-block)
Unmarked but official crosswalks that the law says implicitly exist at all intersections
Non-crosswalks in places where it is still legal to cross, usually yielding right-of-way to the cars
Non-crosswalks where it is illegal for the pedestrian to cross ("jaywalking")
Non-crosswalks explicitly signed "do not cross here." Which may be known to be places of regular crossing
Roads with a physical barrier (fence or wall) block
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Mar 25, 2018
Topic: RobocarsToday I'm going to examine how you attain safety in a robocar, and outline a contradiction in the things that went wrong for Uber and their victim. Each thing that went wrong is both important and worthy of discussion, but at the same time unimportant. For almost every thing that went wrong Is something that we want to prevent going wrong, but it's also something that we must expect will go wrong sometimes, and to plan for it.
In particular, I want to consider how things operate in spite of the fact that people will jaywalk, illegal or not, car systems will suffer failures and safety drivers will sometimes not be looking.
What's new
First, an update on developments.
Uber has said it is cooperating fully, but we certainly haven't heard anything more from them, or from the police. But we should. That's because:
Police have indicated that the accident has been referred for criminal investigation, and the NTSB is also present.
The family (only a stepdaughter is identified) have retained counsel, and are demanding charges and considering legal action.
A new story in the New York Times is more damning for Uber. There we learn:
Uber's performance has been substandard in Arizona. They are needing an intervention after 13 miles of driving on average. Other top companies like Waymo go many thousands of miles.
Uber just recently switched to havin
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Mar 21, 2018
Topic: RobocarsUpdate: Analysis of why most of what went wrong is both terrible but also expected.
The Tempe police released the poor quality video from the Uber. What looks like a dash-cam video along with a video of the safety driver. Both videos show things that suggest serious problems from Uber, absent further explanation.
You can watch the video here if you have not seen it. It's disturbing, though the actual impact is removed. It will make you angry. It made me angry.
Above I have included a brightened frame from 3 seconds into the video. It is the first frame in which the white running shoes of the victim are visible in the dashcam video. They only appear then because she is previously in darkness, crossing at a poorly lit spot, and the headlamps finally illuminate her. Impact occurs at about 4.4 seconds (if the time on the video is right.)
She is crossing, we now see, at exactly this spot where two storm drains are found in the curb. It is opposite the paved path in the median which is marked by the signs telling pedestrians not to cross at this location. She is walking at a moderate pace.
The road is empty of other cars. Here are the big issues:
On this empty road, the LIDAR is very capable of detecting her. If it was operating, there i
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Mar 20, 2018
Topic: RobocarsUpdate: More information in following posts, particularly impressions of serious possible errors by Uber.
As expected, yesterday's fatal accident with an Uber robocar has created a great deal of buzz and controversy. There have been many updates since I wrote yesterday's post, and I have updated the article with most of them. My biggest question, however, revolves around the police statement that the victim was crossing from the west (left side) but the debris is in the right lane, at about the place where the right turn lane is expanding away from it. I asked the police spokesman to confirm that she was going west to east and it was confirmed.
As we also saw, the right grille of the Uber vehicle is dented. The Uber was going 40mph on a 45mph road (original reports said a 35mph road.)
The big question is, it seems that the victim had to cross three and a half lanes to the point where she was hit. Two left turn lanes, the left lane of Mill St. and finally half of the right lane to where she was hit by the right side of the Volvo. As a reminder, here is the location on StreetView.
This is quite puzzling. Uber's Velodyne LIDAR should have seen her very clearly, and observed her for almost 5 seconds if she was walking, about 2.5 seconds if she was running. A bit l
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Mar 19, 2018
Topic: RobocarsUpdate: Did the woman cross 3.5 lanes of road before being hit?
It's just been reported that one of Uber's test self-driving cars struck a woman in Tempe, Arizona during the night. She died in the hospital. There are not a lot of facts at present, so any of these things might be contradicted later.
Police say 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was crossing the road (not using the crosswalk.) She was walking her bicycle and came out from the median, which is signed that pedestrians should not cross there, and should go to the main crosswalk at the light. According to the police reports, she was in the dark and could not be seen by the safety driver until he hit her. (The LIDAR should have seen her a little bit before but the car did not react, which is odd.)
What should happen very soon is that Uber will know just what happened. The vehicle was in autonomous mode. They'll have a full 3-D recreation of the incident and are almost surely working to understand why their vehicle did not stop in time. There was a safety driver in the vehicle who is supposed to use human senses and judgment to intervene and hit the brakes if they see the car not properly reacting to a cyclist, pedestrian or any other risk on the road. The driver says she did not see her.
Below is the location of the crash on
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Mar 16, 2018
Topic: TechnologyTags: bitcoinI've been doing some analysis of the "HODL" movement (which attempts to use social pressure to convince people to hold on to Bitcoin and other holdings, rather than taking the normal profit-taking steps after such a large appreciation.) I believe that HODL goes against what a cryptocurrency is supposed to be about, since to be valuable it has to be useful, and to be useful, people need to be using it, not holding it. I will explore this in another article next week.
HODL is based on a faith that the price of a bitcoin will continue to rise and perhaps never fall. But to be useful it needs to stabilize, or at the least get to a period of fairly modest and predictable appreciation. You can't do smart contracts for more than a few days when the currency is highly volatile.
So what if Bitcoin did stabilize in price? What would it mean? I'm not sure it works.
If the price were stable, the mining capability would also have to stabilize at a level where mining is close to a break even proposition. If it's seriously profitable, then more people will bring up more mining gear until it's just modestly profitable. In addition, as people bring up newer generations of mining gear that are more profitable, the older gear becomes money-losing, and rational miners would shu
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Jan 24, 2018
Back in December a GM Cruise car had an accident with a lane-splitting motorcyclist in San Francisco.
I didn't report on it because the police report blamed the motorcyclist, but the accident is possibly more complex, and the motorist has filed a lawsuit against GM..
That's not too surprising. As the first lawsuit against a self-driving car company, it assures fame for the lawyers, and involves a super deep pocketed defendant keen to come out of it looking good. One could be motivated to sue even if clearly in the wrong.
The accident is a somewhat complex one, which means there is some dispute over whether the biker was in the wrong. He was "lane splitting" -- an action illegal most places but not in California. The Cruise vehicle moved to change lanes to the left. The biker then moved to pass on the right at 17mph, faster than the car going 12mph. The car decides it can't complete the lane change and aborts it. GM says it is "re-centering itself" and the biker glanced the side of it.
It's not clear from this description just what happened. Did the Cruise get all the way into the left lane and then come back to the right lane, getting in the way of the biker? Was the biker on the right side of the right lane, happy to see the car leaving to the right, then surprised when it came back? We don't know from the text description, but the vehicle's LIDAR and camera logs will have recorded everything in great detail.
That makes this part of the question boring. While GM has not published the data, they know exactly what happened, and in court all sides will know. There will be zero doubt on who v
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Jan 22, 2018
Topic: HealthTechnologyI've been mulling a bit over the philosophy of law, and one concept I have been exploring is that a key to understanding a major class of immoral acts is to look at attempts to exploit flaws in human cognition and physiology. There's been a reasonable amount of scientific study of the "bugs" in the way humans think by economists, game theorists and psychologists, and while some of the bugs are debatable, some are fairly undisputed. This might help build moral codes.
There are a lot of consequences of this which need more study -- for example it might argue that a large fraction of modern marketing should perhaps be illegal rather than rewarded -- but for now I would like to focus on one of our most obvious bugs, namely addiction. Both psychological addictions, like to gambling, and physical ones, like nicotine.
This led to a potentially interesting idea -- the use of new digital currencies (such as cryptocurrencies) to regulate the purchase of addictive things.
For some people, gambling is addictive and life-destroying. For others, it is entertainment. Most places take a "nanny state" approach and forbid gambling, but of late this has changed with governments running lotteries almost everywhere and legal gambling in many places.
Gamblin' Money
One idea might look like this: All gambling would be required to be done only with a new digital currency. All wagers and winnings would
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Jan 19, 2018
Topic: RobocarsEarlier this week I talked about many of the LIDAR offerings of recent times. Today I want to look at two "up and coming" sensor technologies: Advanced radar and thermal cameras.
I will begin by pointing readers to a very well done summary of car sensor technologies at EE Times which covers almost all the sensor areas. For those tracking the field it is a worthwhile resource.
Advanced radar
Robocars have used radar from the earliest days. It's not that expensive, and has many superhuman capabilities -- it sees through fog and all other forms of weather, it has very long range, and it tells you how fast every target is moving.
What's not to love is the resolution, which is very poor. Radars if they are very good today will tell you where a target is within several degrees of azimuth (horizontal) and are even worse in the altitude. Radar is also noisy, and full of "multipath" returns that bounced off something else in the environment. (That's actually a big feature when a signal from a car you can't see bounces off the road surface.)
Until MobilEye did it with cameras, car ADAS systems like adaptive cruise control and forward collision warnings all used radar. The low resolution meant they sometimes could not be sure what lane a car was in, and in the early days strange actions by adaptive cruise controls were common. Radars also have a problem with fixed objects or stalled cars. Their Doppler says they are stopped
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Jan 18, 2018
Autonomous flying personal transportation -- "the flying car" -- is becoming real.
I have written previously about some of the issues such as noise, energy efficiency and
"sky pollution" but it's clear that the engineering problems are being solved.
Solving those other problems is a challenge, but I can be more confident in predicting that in the 2020s, many ambulances, police, fire and military vehicles will be based on multirotor technology. This will be particularly true in more rural areas or areas with limited roads.
The air ambulance seems an obvious win, at least for some cases. A small number of air ambulances in a city will get one to you in under 3 minutes, and likewise be able to get you to the hospital just as fast. So fast, in fact, that it might be a better choice to get you to the hospital in 3 minutes with no paramedic to attend to you than to have it take 12 minutes in a big van with all the gear and team. While you fly above the traffic, the traffic will be happy you aren't disrupting it either.
Down below I will talk more about the technologies, but let's begin by looking at the issues of the flying ambulance.
The flying ambulance
There are a few key issues with the air ambulance right now. Pure electric multirotors, like the volocopter shown in the picture, have a payload of about 400lbs. That's not enough (especially with some patients) to also carry a paramedic and all the gear they might want to treat you on the ground and during the trip, and certainly not a pilot as well.
The pilot can be removed through automation and remote operation/supervision for the landing and takeoff. The people and gear to treat you at your site can arrive in a 2nd vehicle -- in most cases
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Jan 17, 2018
Topic: RobocarsI have created a gallery in Google Photos with some of the more interesting items I saw at CES, with the bulk of them being related to robocars, robotic delivery and transportation.
Click on the CES 2018 Gallery to view it. Make sure to see the captions, which will either appear at the bottom of the screen, or if you clicke the "Info" button ("i" in circle) it will open up a side panel with the caption, and then you can go through the images with arrow keys or the arrow buttons.
In the gallery you will see commentary on 3 different flying car offerings, many LIDARs, 6 delivery robots and the silliest product of CES 2018.
In other news
It's been reported that Pony.ai got a $112M series A which shows the valuation frenzy is continuing. Pony.ai was founded by veterans of Baido (and Google Chauffeur) but what is more surprising is that their plan is not very ambitious, as least for now -- cars for restricted environments such as campuses and small towns. They will go after the Chinese market first.
The U.S. Dept. of Transport will make a 3rd round of robocar regulations this summer. The first round was much too detailed, the 2nd round fixed that but said almost nothing. The 3rd round will probably be a bit closer to the middle, and will also deal with trucks, which were left out of earlier rules.
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Jan 16, 2018
Topic: RobocarsGM revealed photos of what they say is the production form of their self-driving car based on the Chevy Bolt and Cruise software. They say it will be released next year, making it almost surely the first release from a major car company if they make it.
As reported in their press release and other sources their goals are ambitious. While Waymo is the clear leader, it has deployed in Phoenix, because that is probably the easiest big city for driving in the USA. Cruise/GM claims they have been working on the harder problem of a dense city like San Francisco.
What's notable, though, about the Cruise picture is what's not in it, namely much in the way of dashboard or controls. There is a small screen, and a few controls but little else. Likewise the Waymo 3rd generation "Firefly" car had almost no controls at all.
The car has climate controls and window controls and little else. Of course a touchscreen can control a lot of other things, especially when the "driver" does not have to watch the road.
Combine this with the concept Smart-car self-driving interior from Daimler below, and you see a change in the thinking of the car industry towards the thinking of the high-tech industry.
At most car conferences today, a large fraction of what you see is related to putting new things inside the c
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Jan 15, 2018
Topic: RobocarsWhen it comes to robocars, new LIDAR products were the story of CES 2018. Far more companies showed off LIDAR products than can succeed, with a surprising variety of approaches. CES is now the 5th largest car show, with almost the entire north hall devoted to cars. In coming articles I will look at other sensors, software teams and non-car aspects of CES, but let's begin with the LIDARs.
Velodyne
When it comes to robocar LIDAR, the pioneer was certainly Velodyne, who largely owned the market for close to a decade. Their $75,000 64-laser spinning drum has been the core product for many years, while most newer cars feature their 16 and 32 laser "puck" shaped unit. The price was recently cut in half on the pucks, and they showed off the new $100K 128 laser unit as well as a new more rectangular unit called the Veloray that uses a vibrating mirror to steer the beam for a forward view rather than a 360 view.
The Velodyne 64-laser unit has become such an icon that its physical properties have become a point of contention. The price has always been too much for any consumer car (and this is also true of the $100K unit of course) but teams doing development have wisely realized that they want to do R&D with the most high-end unit available, expecting those capabilities to be moderately priced when it's time to go into production. The Velodyne is also large, heavy, and because it spins, quite distinctive. Many car companies, and LIDAR companies have decried these attributes in their efforts to be different from Waymo (which uses their own in-house LI
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Jan 03, 2018
Topic: MediaOne of the most useful consumer electronic devices of the past two decades is the DVR, pioneered by TiVo. Many people imagined a hard-disk based video recorder before that, but they showed the way.
Since then, bandwidth has reached the level where streaming is practical, and I have "cut the cord" on cable/satellite -- more about that in some other posts. A variant of streaming is called "cloud DVR" -- in effect, you request a "recording" of a program you wish to watch that is stored in the cloud and streamed to you. In a few cases, there is actually a server making a recording for you, but usually it's just saving a pointer to a pre-stored stream.
Either way, there is a problem. Streaming isn't nearly as pleasant for some types of content compared to playing a local copy. The difference is most clear in content that you will fast forward and rewind in, which includes programs with commercials and sports -- particularly things like the upcoming Olympics which are usually watched on delay.
There are a few other disadvantages, such as the way streaming fails, buffers or downgrades quality when there are issues with your internet connection.
More and more people have very high speed (20 megabit) connections and storage is very cheap, so it doesn't have to be this way. Unfortunately, use #1, skipping commercials, is not popular with the broadcasters who use them. I am happy to pay extra for comm
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Jan 02, 2018
Topic: RobocarsHere are the biggest Robocar stories of 2017
Waymo starts pilot with no safety driver behind the wheel
By far, the biggest milestone of 2017 was the announcement by Waymo of their Phoenix Pilot which will feature cars with no safety driver behind the wheel, and the hints at making this pilot open to the public.
The huge deal is that Waymo's lawyers and top executives signed off on the risk of running cars with no safety driver to take over in emergencies. There is still an employee in the back who can do an emergency shutdown but they can't grab the traditional controls. A common mistake in coverage of robocars is to not understand that it's "easy" to make a car that can do a demo, but vastly harder to make one that has this level of reliability. That Waymo is declaring this level puts them very, very far ahead of other teams.
Many new LIDAR and other sensor companies enter the market
The key sensor for the first several years of robocars will almost surely be LIDAR. At some point in the future, vision may get good enough but that date is quite uncertain. Cost is not a big issue for the first few years, safety is. So almost everybody is gearing up to use LIDAR, and many big companies and startups have announced new LIDAR sensors and lower prices.
News includes Quanergy (I am an advisor) going into production on a $250 8-line solid state unit, several other similar unit
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Dec 20, 2017
Topic: Air TravelSolve thisSo many of the world's great sites are made much worse by the presence of "touts" (also known as hawkers, souvenir sellers etc.) particularly the ones who are pushy, constantly talking to you to advertise their wares, or even getting in your way. They can range from those who just fill the site with cheap souvenirs to those that constantly try to start a conversation with you about something else as a way of catching you off guard.
I don't think that many nations and great sites understand just how much the touts detract from the quality of these places. Sure, the great site is still the great site, but it's a much less pleasant experience after 143 people have all tried to sell you a selfie stick, as though you are finally going to buy from the 144th. But clearly some people do our the touts would not be there.
This is most strong in areas of lower income, where labour is cheap and tourists are comparatively super-wealthy. Even getting a tiny fraction of the rich tourists to buy high-margin junk (or even non-junk) makes almost any amount of disturbance worth doing to the impoverished sellers.
Governments could just try to ban or regulate the touts, and some places do, but in some places they clearly don't want to; selling like this is a vital source of tourist income for the poor in some cases. In some public spaces it is hard to legally ban the touts, and in many places the well behaved touts are an asset
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