I'm back from CES, and there was certainly a lot of press over two pre-robocar announcements there:

Toyota

The first was the Toyota/Lexus booth, which was dominated by a research car reminiscent of the sensor-stacked vehicles of the DARPA grand challenges. It featured a Velodyne on top (like almost all the high capability vehicles today) and a very large array of radars, including six looking to the sides. Toyota was quite understated about the vehicle, saying they had low interest in full self-driving, but were doing this in order to research better driver assist and safety systems.

The Lexus booth also featured a car that used ultrasonic sensors to help you when backing out of a blind parking space. These sensors let you know if there is somebody coming down the lane of the parking lot.

Audi

Audi did two demos for the press which I went to see. Audi also emphasized that this is long-term concept stuff, and meant as research work to enhance their "driver in the loop systems." They are branding these projects "Piloted Parking" and "Piloted Driving" to suggest the idea of an autopilot with a human overseer. However, the parking system is unmanned, and was demonstrated in the lot of the Mandarin Oriental. The demo area was closed off to pedestrians, however.

The parking demo was quite similar to the Junior 3 demo I saw 3 years ago, and no surprise, because Junior 3 was built at the lab which is a collaboration between Stanford and VW/Audi. Junior 3 had a small laser sensor built into it. Instead, the Piloted Parking car had only ultransonic sensors and cameras, and relied on a laser mounted in the parking lot. In this appraoch, the car has a wifi link which it uses to download a parking lot map, as well as commands from its owner, and it also gets data from the laser. Audi produced a mobile app which could command the car to move, on its own, into the lot to find a space, and then back to pick up the owner. The car also had a slick internal display with pop-up screen.

The question of where to put the laser is an interesting one. In this approach, you only park in lots that are pre-approved and prepared for self-parking. Scanning lasers are currently expensive, and if parking is your only application, then there are a lot more cars then there are parking lots and it might make sense to put the expensive sensor in the lots. However, if the cars want to have the laser anyway for driving it's better to have the sensor in the car. In addition, it's more likely that car buyers will early adopt than parking lot owners.

In the photo you see the Audi highway demo car sporting the Nevada Autonomous Vehicle testing licence #007. Audi announced they just got this licence, the first car maker to do so. This car offers "Piloted Driving" -- the driver must stay alert, while a lane-keeping system steers the car between the lane markers and an automatic cruise control maintains distance from other cars. This is similar to systems announced by Mercedes, Cadillac, VW, Volvo and others. Audi already has announced such a system for traffic jams -- the demo car also handled faster traffic.

Audi also announced their use of a new smaller LIDAR sensor. The Velodyne found on the Toyota car and Google cars is a large, roof-mounted device. However, they did not show a car using this sensor.

Audi also had a simulator in their booth showing a future car that can drive in traffic jams, and lets you take a video phone call while it is driving. If you take control of the car, it cuts off the video, but keeps the audio.

Robocars and road charging

Happy 2013: Here are some articles I bookmarked last year that you may find of interest this year.

An NBC video about the AutonoMOUS team in Berlin which is one of the more advanced academic teams, featuring on-street driving, lane-changes and more.

It's been a while since I've done a major new article on long-term consequences of Robocars. For some time I've been puzzling over just how our urban spaces will change because of robocars. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and many things could go both ways. I have been calling for urban planners to start researching the consequences of robocars and modifying their own plans based on this.

(Of late I have been writing a few articles for some other online sites.

While there had been many rumous that Mercedes would introduce limited self-driving in the 2013 S-class, that was not to be, however, it seems plans for the 2014 S-class are much more firm. This car will feature "steering assist" which uses stereo cameras and radar to follow lanes and follow cars, along with standard ACC functions. Reportedly it will operate at very high speeds.

I'm on the board of the Foresight Institute, which at over 25 years old has been promoting nanotech since long before people knew the word. This January, we will be holding our technical conference on nanotechnology and related fields. Foresight's focus is on the potential for molecular manufacturing -- doing things at the atomic level -- and not simply on fine structure materials.

In the wake of the election, the big nerd story is the perfect stats-based prediction that Nate Silver of the 538 blog made on the results in every single state. I was following the blog and like all, am impressed with his work. The perfection gives the wrong impression, however. Silver would be the first to point out he predicted Florida as very close with a slight lean for Obama, and while that is what happened, that's really just luck. His actual prediction was that it was too close to call. But people won't see that, they see the perfection. I hope he realizes he should try to downplay this. For his own sake, if he doesn't, he has nowhere to go but down in 2014 and 2016.

But the second reason is stronger. People will put even more faith in polls. Perhaps even not faith, but reasoned belief, because polls are indeed getting more accurate. Good polls that are taken far in advance are probably accurate about what the electorate thinks then, but the electorate itself is not that accurate far in advance. So the public and politicians should always be wary about what the polls say before the election.

Silver's triumph means they may not be. And as the metaphorical Heisenberg predicts, the observations will change the results of the election.

There are a few ways this can happen. First, people change their votes based on polls. They are less likely to vote if they think the election is decided, or they sometimes file protest votes when they feel their vote won't change things. Vice versa, a close poll is one way to increase turnout, and both sides push their voters to make the difference. People are going to think the election is settled because 538 has said what people are feeling.

The second big change has already been happening. Politicians change their platforms due to the polls. Danny Hillis observed some years ago that the popular vote is almost always a near tie for a reason. In a two party system, each side regularly runs polls. If the polls show them losing, they move their position in order to get to 51%. They don't want to move to 52% as that's more change than they really want, but they don't want to move to less than 50% or they lose the whole game. Both sides do this, and to some extent the one with better polling and strategy wins the election. We get two candidates, each with a carefully chosen position designed to (according to their own team) just beat the opposition, and the actual result is closer to a random draw driven by chaotic factors.

Well, not quite. As Silver shows, the electoral college stops that from happening. The electoral college means different voters have different value to the candidates, and it makes the system pretty complex. Instead of aiming for a total of voters, you have to worry that position A might help you in Ohio but hurt you in Florida, and the electoral votes happen in big chunks which makes the effect of swing states more chaotic. Thus poll analysis can tell you who will win but not so readily how to tweak things to make the winner be you. The college makes small differences in overall support lead to huge differences in the college.

In Danny's theory, the two candidates do not have to be the same, they just have to be the same distance from a hypothetical center. (Of course to 3rd parties the two candidates do tend to look nearly identical but to the members of the two main parties they look very different.)

Show me the money?

Many have noted that this election may have cost $6B but produced a very status quo result. Huge money was spent, but opposed forces also spent their money, and the arms race just led to a similar balance of power. Except a lot of rich donors spent a lot of their money, got valuable access to politicians for it, and some TV stations in Ohio and a few other states made a killing. The fear that corporate money would massively swing the process does not appear to have gained much evidence, but it's clear that influence was bought.

I'm working on a solution to this, however. More to come later on that.

Ballot Propositions

While there have been some fairly good ballot propositions (such as last night's wins for Marijuana and marriage equality) I am starting to doubt the value of the system itself. As much as you might like the propositions you like, if half of the propositions are negative in value, the system should be scrapped. Indeed, if only about 40% are negative, it should still be scrapped because of the huge cost of the system itself.

Last month, I invited Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, two of the most respected writers of hard SF, to come and give a talk at Google about their new book "Bowl of Heaven." Here's a Youtube video of my session. They did a review of the history of SF about "big dumb objects" -- stories like Niven's Ringworld, where a huge construct is a central part of the story.

The robocar news continues to increase in pace.

Three big automaker announcements -- and not about V2V even though the ITS World Congress is going on this week.

Nissan is showing a modified Leaf able to do "valet" park in a controlled parking lot. The leaf downloads a map of the lot, and then, according to Nissan engineers, is able to determine its position in the lot with 4 cameras, then hunt for a spot and go into it. We've seen valet park demonstrations before, but calculating position entirely with cameras is somewhat new, mainly because of the issues with how lighting conditions vary. In an indoor parking garage it's a different story, and camera based localization under the constant lighting should be quite doable.

I haven't bothered quickly reporting on the robocar story every other media outlet covered, the signing by Jerry Brown of California's law to enable robocars. For those with the keenest interest, the video of the signing ceremony has a short talk by Sergey Brin on some of his visions for the car where he declares that the tech will be available for ordinary people within 5 years.

A follow-up thought about yesterday's shuttle fly-by and panorama. I was musing, might this be perhaps the most photographed single thing in human history to date?

Today marked the last trip through the air for the space shuttle, as the Endeavour was carried to LA to be installed in a museum. The trip included fly-overs of the Golden Gate bridge and many other landmarks in SF and LA, and also a low pass over Nasa Ames at Moffett Field, where I work at Singularity University. A special ceremony was done on the tarmac, and I went to get a panoramic photo.

Tomorrow (Wed Sep 19) I will give a robocars talk at Dorkbot SF in San Francisco. Dorkbot is a regular gathering of "People doing strange things with electricity" and there will be two other sessions.

A round-up of just some of the recent robocar news:

For years I have posed the following question at parties and salons:

By the 25th century, who will be the household names of the 20th century?

My top contender, Armstrong, has died today. I pick him because the best known name of the 15th century is probably Columbus, also known as the first explorer to a major location -- even though he probably wasn't the actual first.

MythTV

I'm watching the Olympics, and my primary tool as always is MythTV. Once you do this, it seems hard to imagine watching them almost any other way. Certainly not real time with the commercials, and not even with other DVR systems. MythTV offers a really wide variety of fast forward speeds and programmable seeks. This includes the ability to watch at up to 2x speed with the audio still present (pitch adjusted to be natural) and a smooth 3x speed which is actually pretty good for watching a lot of sports. In addition you can quickly access 5x, 10x, 30x, 60x, 120x and 180x for moving along, as well as jumps back and forth by some fixed amount you set (like 2 minutes or 10 minutes) and random access to any minute. Finally it offers a forward skip (which I set to 20 seconds) and a backwards skip (I set it to 8 seconds.)

MythTV even lets you customize these numbers so you use different nubmers for the Olympics compared to other recordings. For example the jumps are normally +/- 10 minutes and plus 30 seconds for commercial skip, but Myth has automatic commercial skip.

A nice mode allows you to go to smooth 3x speed with closed captions, though it does not feature the very nice ability I've seen elsewhere of turning on CC when the sound is off (by mute or FF) and turning it off when sound returns. I would like a single button to put me into 3xFF + CC and take me out of it.

Anyway, this is all very complex but well worth learning because once you learn it you can consume your sports much, much faster than in other ways, and that means you can see more of the sports that interest you, and less of the sports, commercials and heart-warming stories of triumph over adversity that you don't. With more than 24 hours a day of coverage it is essential you have tools to help you do this.

I have a number of improvements I would like to see in MythTV like a smooth 5x or 10x FF (pre-computed in advance) and the above macro for CC/FF swap. In addition, since the captions tend to lag by 2-3 seconds it would be cool to have a time-sync for the CC. Of course the network, doing such a long tape delay, should do that for you, putting the CC into the text accurately and at the moment the words are said. You could write software to do that even with human typed captions, since the speech-recognition software can easily figure out what words match once it has both the audio and the words. Nice product idea for somebody.

Watching on the web

This time, various networks have put up extensive web offerings, and indeed on NBC this is the only way to watch many events live, or at all. Web offerings are good, though not quite at the quality of over-the-air HDTV, and quality matters here. But the web offerings have some failings

A month ago I hosted Vernor Vinge for a Bay Area trip. This included my interview with Vinge at Google on his career and also a special talk that evening at Singularity University. In the 1980s, Vinge coined the term "the singularity" even though Ray Kurzweil has become the more public face of the concept of late.

Any speaker or lecturer is familiar with a modern phenomenon. A large fraction of your audience is using their tablet, phone or laptop doing email or surfing the web rather than paying attention to you. Some of them are taking notes, but it's a minority. And it seems we're not going to stop this, even speakers do it when attending the talks of others.