Brad Templeton is Chairman Emeritus of the EFF, Singularity University founding computing faculty, software architect and internet entrepreneur, robotic car strategist, futurist lecturer, photographer and Burning Man artist.
This is an "ideas" blog rather than a "cool thing I saw today" blog. Many of the items are not topical. If you like what you read, I recommend you also browse back in the archives, starting with the best of blog section. It also has various "topic" and "tag" sections (see menu on right) and some are sub blogs like Robocars, photography and Going Green. Try my home page for more info and contact data.
General Motors has purchased "Cruise," a small self-driving startup in San Francisco. Rumours suggest the price was over one billion dollars. In addition, other rumours have come to me suggesting that at least one other startup has been seeking a new round of funding at that valuation, but did not succeed due to the market downturn.
Michael Bloomberg, a contender for an independent run for US President has announced he will not run though for a reason that just might be completely wrong. As a famous moderate (having been in both the Republican and Democratic parties) he might just have had a very rare shot at being the first independent to win since forever.
Here's why, and what would have to happen:
If nobody has a majority of the electoral college, the house picks the President from the top 3 college winners. The house is Republican, so it seems pretty unlikely it would pick any likely Democratic Party nominee, and the Democrats would know this. Once they did know this, the Democrats would have little choice but to vote for the moderate, since they certainly would not vote for Trump.
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Now all it takes is a fairly small number of Republicans to bolt from Trump. Normally they would not betray their own party's official nominee, but in this case, the party establishment hates Trump, and I think that some of them would take the opportunity to knock him out, and vote for the moderate. If 30 or more join the democrats and vote for the moderate, he or she becomes President.
It would be different for the Vice President, chosen by the senate. Trump probably picks a mainstream republican to mollify the party establishment, and that person wins the senate vote easily.
To be clear, here the independent can win even if all they do is make a small showing, just strong enough to split off some electors from both other candidates. Winning one big state could be enough, for example, if it was won from the candidate who would otherwise have won.
Reports released reveal that one of Google's Gen-2 vehicles (the Lexus) has a fender-bender (with a bus) with some responsibility assigned to the system. This is the first crash of this type -- all other impacts have been reported as fairly clearly the fault of the other driver.
I have a big article forthcoming on the future of public transit. I believe that with the robocar (and van) it moves from being scheduled, route-based mass transit to on-demand, ad-hoc route medium and small vehicle transit. That's in part because of the disturbingly poor economics of current mass transit, especially in the USA. We can do much better.
Last year, I wrote a few posts on the attack on Science Fiction's Hugo awards, concluding in the end that only human defence can counter human attack. A large fraction of the SF community felt that one could design an algorithm to reduce the effect of collusion, which in 2015 dominated the nomination system.
I've written before about my experiences inhabiting a telepresence robot. I did it again this weekend to attend a reunion, with a different robot that's still in prototype form.
The highlight and founding program of Singularity University, where I am chair of computing, is our summer program, now known as the Global Solutions Program. 80 students come from all over the world (only a tiny minority will be from the USA) to learn about the hottest rapidly changing technologies, and then join together with others to kickstart projects that have the potential to use those technologies to solve the world's biggest problems.
In a recent article, Car and Driver magazine compares 4 of the Highway autopilot systems, including those from Tesla, Mercedes, BMW and Infiniti. They test on a variety of roads, and spoilers: The Tesla wins by a good margin in several categories.
I recently read a report of a plan for a new type of intersection being developed in Malaysia, and I felt it had some interesting applications for robocars.
The idea behind the intersection is that you have a traditional intersection, but dig in one or both directions, a special underpass which is both shallow and narrow. One would typically imagine this underpass as being 2 vehicles wide in the center of the road but other options are possible. The underpass might be very shallow, perhaps just 4 to 5 feet high.
I'm doing a lot of flying these days for international speaking and consulting, and I try whenever possible to have 2 or more clients when I fly overseas, since the trips and time-changes can be draining.
In 2010, I proposed the idea of planes with no landing gear which land on robotic platforms. The spring loaded platforms are pulled by cables and so can accelerate and turn with multiple gees, so that almost no matter what the plane does, it can't miss the platform, and it can even hit hard with safety.
I've been electric car shopping, but one thing has stood out as a big concern. Many electric cars are depreciating fast, and it may get even faster. I think part of this is due to the fact that electric cars are a bit more like electronics devices than they are cars. Electric cars will see major innovation in the next few years, as well as a decline in their price/performance of their batteries. This spells doom for their value. It's akin to cell phones -- your 2 year old cell phone still functions perfectly, but you dispose of it for a new one because of the pace of innovation.
While I've been in love for a long time with the idea of mobility-on-demand and the robocar taxi, I continue to have some privacy concerns. The first is simply over the idea that a service company gets a map of all your travels. Of course, your cell phone company, and companies like Google with their Location History (Warning, don't click or you will be freaked out if you didn't know about this) know this already, as does the NSA and probably all the other spy agencies in the world. That doesn't make it much better to add more trackers.
NHTSA, the federal car safety agency has been talking about getting into the robocar game for a while, and now declares it wants more involvement with two important details:
Hot on the heels of my CES Report is the release of the latest article from Chris Urmson on The View from the Front Seat of the Google Car. Chris heads engineering on the project (and until recently led the entire project.)
I'm back from CES 2016 with a raft of news, starting with robocars. Some news was reported before the show but almost everybody had something to say -- even if it was only to have something to say!
I have many more photos with coverage in my CES 2016 Photo Gallery.
Ford's CEO talks like he gets it. Ford did not have too much to show -- they announced they will be moving to Velodyne's new lower cost 32-laser puck-sized LIDAR for their research, and boosting their research fleet to 30 vehicles. They plan for full-auto operation in limited regions fairly soon.
Ford is also making its own efforts into one-way car share (similar to Daimler Car2Go and BMW DriveNow) called GoDrive, which pushes Ford more firmly into the idea of selling rides rather than cars. The car companies are clearly believing this sooner than I expected, and the reason is very clearly the success of Uber. (As I have said, it's a mistake to think of Uber as competition for the taxi companies. Uber is competition for the car companies.)
Ford is also doing an interesting "car swap" product. While details are scant, it seems what the service will do is let you swap your Ford for somebody else's different Ford. For example, if somebody has an F-150 or Transit Van that they know they won't use the cargo features on some day or weekend, you drive over with your ordinary sedan and swap temporarily for their truck -- presumably with a small amount of money flowing to the more popular vehicle. Useful idea.
The big announcement that didn't happen was the much-rumoured alliance between Ford and Google. Ford did not overtly refute it but suggested they had enough partners at present. The alliance would be a good idea, but either the rumours were wrong, or they are waiting for another event (such as the upcoming Detroit Auto Show) to talk about it.
The big disappointment of the event was the silly concept racecar shown by Faraday Future. Oh, sure, it's a cool electric racecar, but it has absolutely nothing to do with everything we've heard about this company, namely that they are building a consumer electric car-on-demand service with autonomous delivery. Everybody wondered if they had booked the space and did not have their real demo ready on time. It stays secret for a while, it seems. Recent hires, such as Jan Becker, the former head of the autonomous lab for Bosch, suggest they are definitely going autonomous.
Google's car drives by having super-detailed maps of all the roads, and that's the correct approach. Google is unlikely to hand out its maps, so both Here/Navteq (now owned by a consortium of auto companies in Germany) and TomTom have efforts to produce similar maps to licence to non-Google robocar teams. They are taking fairly different approaches, which will be the subject of a future article.
One interesting edge is that these companies plan to partner with big automakers and not just give them map data but expect data in return. That means that each company will have a giant fleet of cars constantly scanning the road, and immediately reporting any differences between the map and the territory. With proper scale, they should get reports on changes to the road literally within minutes of them happening. The first car to encounter a change will still need to be able to handle it, possibly by pulling over and/or asking the human passenger to help, but this will be a very rare event.
MobilEye has announced a similar plan, and they are already the camera in a large fraction of advanced cars on the road today. MobilEye has a primary focus on vision, rather than Lidar, but will have lots of sources of data. Tesla has also been uploading data from their cars, though it does not (as far as I know) make as extensive use of detailed maps, though it does rely on general maps.
Lyft announced a $500M investment from GM with $500M more, pushing them to a $5.4B valuation, which is both huge and just a tenth of Uber. This was combined with talk of a push to robocars. (GM will provide a car rental service to Lyft drivers to start, but the speculation is that whatever robocar GM gets involved in will show up at Lyft.)
Yahoo Autos is reporting rumours that Google and Ford will announce a partnership at CES. Google has always said it doesn't want to build the cars, and Ford makes sense as a partner -- big, but with only modest R&D efforts of its own, and frankly a brand that needs a jolt of excitement. That means it will be willing to work with Google as a partner which calls many of the shots, rather than just viewing them as a supplier, which gets to call few of them.
Be careful what you wish for -- yesterday the California DMV released its proposed regulations for the operation of robocars in California. All of this sprang from Google's request to states that they start writing such regulations to ensure that their cars were legal, and California's DMV took much longer than expected to release these regulations, which Google found quite upsetting.
This summer, I started wondering what you might do to build a small farming robot to manage a home garden. I then discovered the interesting Farmbot project, which has been working on this for much longer, and has done much of what I thought might be useful. So I offer kudos to them, but thought it might be worth discussing some of the reasons why this is interesting, and a few new ideas.