- Robust and Transparent Governance is Key to Building Trust in Driverless Cars (Robohub) — I was just talking through this with my cousin. Who makes decisions and how accountable are they for them?
- We Robot Conference Roundup — videos of talks on How to Engage the Public on the Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons and other subjects. (You had my attention at “lethal autonomous weapons.”)
- The Reality of AR/VR Business Models (TechCrunch) — list of potential revenue streams and superficial analysis of what they might look like in practice: hardware, e-commerce, advertising, mobile data/voice, in-app purchases, subscriptions, enterprise/b2b, and premium apps.
- Notes on Google’s SRE Book — said book published by O’Reilly, I’m chuffed to say. SRE = Site Reliability Engineer = the DevOps magicians who make uptime at scale possible.
"driverless cars" entries
Four short links: 12 April 2016
Driverless Car Governance, Robots Conference, AR/VR Business Models, and Google SRE Book
Four short links: 13 May 2015
Makey Makey Go, Driverless Accidents, HTTP/2 Guidelines, and Choking The Mac
- Makey Makey Go (Kickstarter) — $19 portable Makey Makey hardware kit. (via Makezine)
- US Driverless Car Accidents (NYTimes) — Delphi sent AP an accident report showing its car was hit, but Google has not made public any records, so both enthusiasts and critics of the emerging technology have only the company’s word on what happened. The California Department of Motor Vehicles said it could not release details from accident reports. This lack of transparency troubles critics who want the public to be able to monitor the rollout of a technology that its own developers acknowledge remains imperfect.
- Architecting Websites for the HTTP/2 Era — HTTP/2 introduces multiplexing, which allows one TCP/IP connection to request and receive multiple resources, intertwined. Requests won’t be blocking anymore, so there is no need for multiple TCP connections on multiple domain names. In fact, opening multiple connections would hurt performance in HTTP/2. This is going to be exciting.
- tripmode — software to control the downloads your Mac software wants to make, even when you’re tethered or on a pay-per-meg hotspot.
Four short links: 23 October 2013
The Rational Pregnancy, Arts Innovation, Driverless Cars, and Frolicking Robots
- Expecting Better — an economist runs the numbers on the actual consequences of various lifestyle choices during pregnancy. (via sciblogs)
- Business as Usual in the Innovation Industry — the only thing worse than business plan contests for startups is innovation wankfests for small arts groups. [T]he vast majority of small and mid-sized arts organizations are not broken so much as they are in a constant state of precarity that could largely be addressed by reliable funding streams to support general operations and less onerous grant application processes that would allow them to focus more on delivering services and less on raising money. Hear! (via Courtney Johnston)
- Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think (MIT Technology Review) — nice roundup of potential benefits. experiments involving modified road vehicles conducted by Volvo and others in 2011 suggest that having vehicles travel in high-speed automated “platoons,” thereby reducing aerodynamic drag, could lower fuel consumption by 20 percent. And an engineering study published last year concluded that automation could theoretically allow nearly four times as many cars to travel on a given stretch of highway.
- Portraits of Robots at Work and Play (The Atlantic) — photo-essay that is full of boggle. (via BoingBoing)
The end of integrated systems
The programmable world will increasingly rely on machine-learning techniques that can interact with human interfaces
I always travel with a pair of binoculars and, to the puzzlement of my fellow airline passengers, spend part of every flight gazing through them at whatever happens to be below us: Midwestern towns, Pennsylvania strip mines, rural railroads that stretch across the Nevada desert. Over the last 175 years or so, industrialized America has been molded into a collection of human patterns–not just organic New England villages in haphazard layouts, but also the Colorado farm settlements surveyed in strict grids. A close look at the rectangular shapes below reveals minor variations, though. Every jog that a street takes is a testament to some compromise between mankind and our environment that results in a deviation from mathematical perfection. The world, and our interaction with it, can’t conform strictly to top-down ideals.
We’re about to enter a new era in which computers will interact aggressively with our physical environment. Part of the challenge in building the programmable world will be finding ways to make it interact gracefully with the world as it exists today. In what you might call the virtual Internet, human information has been squeezed into the formulations of computer scientists: rigid relational databases, glyphs drawn from UTF-8, information addressed through the Domain Name System. To participate in it, we converse in the language and structures of computers. The physical Internet will need to understand much more flexibly the vagaries of human behavior and the conventions of the built environment.
Read more…
Four short links: 9 July 2013
Driverless Intersections, Quantum Information, Low-Energy Wireless Networking, and Scammy Game Tactics
- Autonomous Intersection Management Project — a scalable, safe, and efficient multiagent framework for managing autonomous vehicles at intersections. (via How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities)
- Quantum Information (New Scientist) — a gentle romp through the possible and the actual for those who are new to the subject.
- Ambient Backscatter (PDF) — a new communication primitive where devices communicate by backscattering ambient RF signals. Our design avoids the expensive process of generating radio waves; backscatter communication is orders of magnitude more power-efficient than traditional radio communication. (via Hacker News)
- Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks (Gamasutra) — amazingly evil ways that free games lure you into paying. At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress. To the brain this is not just a loss of time. If I spend an hour writing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much more painful to me than the loss of an hour. The same type of achievement loss is in effect here. Note that in this model the player could be defeated multiple times in the boss battle and in getting to the boss battle, thus spending several dollars per dungeon.
The driverless-car liability question gets ahead of itself
Who will pay damages when a driverless car gets into an accident?
Megan McArdle has taken on the question of how liability might work in the bold new world of driverless cars. Here’s her framing scenario:
Imagine a not-implausible situation: you are driving down a brisk road at 30 mph with a car heading towards you in the other lane at approximately the same speed. A large ball rolls out into the street, too close for you to brake. You, the human, knows that the ball is likely to be followed, in seconds, by a small child; you slam on the brakes (perhaps giving yourself whiplash) or swerve, at considerable risk of hitting the other car.
What should a self-driving car do? More to the point, if you hit the kid, or the other car, who gets sued?
The lawyer could go after you, with your piddling $250,000 liability policy and approximately 83 cents worth of equity in your home. Or he could go after the automaker, which has billions in cash, and the ultimate responsibility for whatever decision the car made. What do you think is going to happen?
The implication is that the problem of concentrated liability might make automakers reluctant to take the risk of introducing driverless cars.
I think McArdle is taking a bit too much of a leap here. Automakers are accustomed to having the deepest pockets within view of any accident scene. Liability questions raised by this new kind of intelligence will have to be worked out — maybe by forcing drivers to take on the liability for their cars’ performance via their insurance companies, and insurance companies in turn certifying types of technology that they’ll insure. By the time driverless cars become a reality they’ll probably be substantially safer than human drivers, so the insurance companies might be willing to accept the tradeoff and everyone will benefit. Read more…