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.
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.
Another road trip has meant fewer posts -- this trip included being in Paris on the night of Nov 13 but fortunately taking a train out a couple of hours before the shooting began, and I am now in South Africa on the way to Budapest -- but a few recent items merit some comment.
I'm pleased to announce today the unveiling of a new self-driving vehicle company with which I am involved, not building self-driving cars, but instead small delivery robots which are going to change the face of retailing and last-mile delivery and logistics.
In the buzz over the Tesla autopilot update, a lot of commentary has appeared comparing this Autopilot with Google's car effort and other efforts and what I would call a "real" robocar -- one that can operate unmanned or with a passenger paying no attention to the road. We've seen claims that "Tesla has beaten Google to the punch" and other similar errors. While the Tesla release is a worthwhile step forward, the two should not be confused as all that similar.
Last night, one day early, I attended Stanford's unveiling of their newest research vehicle for self-driving. In order to do experiments with drifting (where you let the rear wheels skid freely) they heavily modified an old Delorean.
They managed to get Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters to host the event so there was a good crowd. He asked "Why a Delorean?" and instead of saying the obvious line:
"The way I see it, if you're going to build a self-driving drifting car, why not do it with some style?"
Some bigger news today, though anticipated for a few months, is Tesla's release of a highway cruise update for Model S cars from the last year.
During a very busy September of travel, I let a number of important stories fall through the cracks. The volume of mainstream press articles on Robocars is immense. Most are rehashes of things you have already seen here, but if you want the fastest breaking news, there are now some sources that focus on that. Here I will report the important news with analysis.
Last week, I commented on the VW scandal and asked the question we have all wondered, "what the hell were they thinking?" Elements of an answer are starting to arise, and they are very believable and teach us interesting lessons, if true. That's because things like this are rarely fully to blame on a small group of very evil people, but are more often the result of a broad situation that pushed ordinary (but unethical) people well over the ethical line. This we must understand because frankly, it can happen to almost anybody.
The ingredients, in this model are:
There's no question that VW has a culture like that. Many successful companies do, some even attribute their excellence to it. Here's a quote from the 90s from VW's leader at the time, talking about his desire for a hot new car line, and what would happen if his team told him that they could not delivery it:
"Then I will tell them they are all fired and I will bring in a new team," Piech, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, founder of both Porsche and Volkswagen, declared forcefully. "And if they tell me they can't do it, I will fire them, too."
Now we add a few more interesting ingredients, special to this case:
The team is asked to develop an engine that can deliver power and fuel economy for the US and other markets, and do it while meeting the emissions standards. The team (or its leader) says "yes," instead of saying, "That's really, really hard."
They get to work, and as has happened many times in many companies, they keep saying they are on track. Plans are made. Tons of new car models will depend on this engine. Massive marketing and production plans are made. Billions are bet.
Not too many months before ship date, it is reported, the team working on the engine -- it is not yet known precisely who -- finally comes to a realization. They can't deliver. They certainly can't deliver on time, possibly they can actually never deliver for the price budget they have been given.
Now we see the situation in which ordinary people might be pushed over the line. If they don't deliver, the company has few choices. They might be able to put in a much more expensive engine, with all the cost such a switch would entail, and price their cars much more than they hoped, delivering them late. They could cancel all the many car models which were depending on this engine, costing billions. They could release a wimpy car that won't sell very well. In either of these cases, they are all fired, and their careers in the industry are probably over.
Or they can cheat and hope they won't get caught. They can be the heroes who delivered the magic engine, and get bonuses and rewards. 95% they don't get caught, and even if they are caught, it's worse, but not in their minds a lot worse than what they are facing. So they pretend they built the magic engine, and program it to fake that on the tests.
This proposal on the upcoming federal election talks about some interesting gaming of the voting system.
In Canada, there are 3 (and sometimes more) strong parties. This is true in much of the world; in fact the two-party USA is somewhat unusual. However, with "plurality" style elections, where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat even though they might have well under a majority, you can get a serious difference between the popular vote and the composition of the house. Americans see the same in their Electoral college and in gerrymandered districts.
The author, who wishes to defeat the incumbent Conservative party, proposes a way for the other two parties (Liberals and New Democrats) to join forces and avoid vote splitting. The Liberals and NDP are competitors, but have much more affinity for one another than they do for the Conservatives. They are both left-of-centre. This collaboration could be done at a national party level or at the grass roots level, though it would be much harder there.
Often in parliaments, you not only get splitting within the race for each seat, you get a house where no party has a majority. For minority governments, one party -- usually the largest -- strikes a deal with another party for a coalition that allows them to govern. Sometimes the coalition involves bitter enemies. They cooperate because the small party gets some concessions, and some of their agenda is passed into law, even though far more of the dominant party's agenda gets passed. Otherwise, the small party knows it will get nothing.
Among the most common questions I have seen in articles in the mainstream press, near the top is, "Who is going to be liable in a crash?" Writers always ask it but never answer it. I have often given the joking answer by changing the question to "Who gets sued?" and saying, "In the USA, that's easy. Everybody will get sued."
Yesterday I attended the "Silicon Valley reinvents the wheel" conference by the Western Automotive Journalists which had a variety of talks and demonstrations of new car technology.
Now that robocars have hit the top of the "Gartner Hype Cycle" for 2015, everybody is really piling on, hoping to see what's good for their industry due to the robocar. And of course, there is a great deal of good, but not for several industries.
Let me break down some potential misconceptions if my predictions are true:
Recently I did a road trip through Portugal. I always enjoy finding something new that they are doing in a country which has not yet spread to the rest of the world.
Along a number of Portuguese roads, you will see a sign marked "velocidade controlada" -- speed control -- and then a modest distance down the road will be a traffic light in the middle of nowhere. There is no cross street. This is an interesting alternative to the speed bump or other "traffic calming" systems.
Most of you would have heard about the giant scandal where it has been revealed that Volkswagen put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests in the USA and possibly other places. It's very bad for VW, but what does it mean for all robocar efforts?
You can read tons about the Volkswagen emissions violations but here's a short summary. All modern cars have computer controlled fuel and combustion systems, and these can be tuned for different levels of performance, fuel economy and emissions. (Of course, ignition in a diesel is not done by an electronic spark.) Cars have to pass emission tests, so most cars have to tune their systems in ways that reduce other things (like engine performance and fuel economy) in order to reduce their pollution. Most cars attempt to detect the style of driving going on, and tune the engine differently for the best results in that situation.
VW went far beyond that. Apparently their system was designed to detect when it was in an emissions test. In these tests, the car is on rollers in a garage, and it follows certain patterns. VW set their diesel cars to look for this, and tune the engine to produce emissions below the permitted numbers. When the car saw it was in more regular driving situations, it switched the tuning to modes that gave it better performance and better mileage but in some cases vastly worse pollution. A commonly reported number is that in some modes 40 times the California limit of Nitrogen Oxides could be emitted, and even over a wide range of driving it was as high as 20 times the California limit (about 5 times the European limit.) NOx are a major smog component and bad for your lungs.
It has not been revealed just who at VW did this, and whether other car companies have done this as well. (All companies do variable tuning, and it's "normal" to have modestly higher emissions in real driving compared to the test, but this was beyond the pale.) The question everybody is asking is "What the hell were they thinking?"
That is indeed the question, because I think the central issue is why VW would do this. After all, having been caught, the cost is going to be immense, possibly even ruining one of the world's great brands. Obviously they did not really believe that they might get caught.
Beyond that, they have seriously reduced the trust that customers and governments will place not just in VW, but in car makers in general, and in their software offerings in particular. VW will lose trust, but this will spread to all German carmakers and possibly all carmakers. This could result in reduced trust in the software in robocars.
The motive is the key thing we want to understand. In the broad sense, it's likely they did it because they felt customers would like it, and that would lead to selling more cars. At a secondary level, it's possible that those involved felt they would gain prestige (and compensation) if they pulled off the wizard's trick of making a diesel car which was clean and also high performance, at a level that turns out to be impossible.
Much press has been made over Jonathan Petit's recent disclosure of an attack on some LIDAR systems used in robocars. I saw Petit's presentation on this in July, but he asked me for confidentiality until they released their paper in October. However, since he has decided to disclose it, there's been a lot of press, with truth and misconceptions.
There are many security aspects to robocars. By far the greatest concern would be compromise of the control computers by malicious software, and great efforts will be taken to prevent that. Many of those efforts will involve having the cars not talk to any untrusted sources of code or data which might be malicious. The car's sensors, however, must take in information from outside the vehicle, so they are another source of compromise.
There are ways to compromise many of the sensors on a robocar. GPS can be easily spoofed, and there are tools out there to do that now. (Fortunately real robocars will only use GPS as one clue to their location.) Radar is also very easy to spooof -- far easier than LIDAR, agrees Petit -- but their goal was to see if LIDAR is vulnerable.
The attack is a real one, but at the same time it's not, in spite of the press, a particularly frightening one. It may cause a well designed vehicle to believe there are "ghost" objects that don't actually exist, so that it might brake for something that's not there, or even swerve around it. It might also overwhelm the sensor, so that it feels the sensor has failed, and thus the car would go into a failure mode, stopping or pulling off the road. This is not a good thing, of course, and it has some safety consequences, but it's also a fairly unlikely attack. Essentially, there are far easier ways to do these things that don't involve the LIDAR, so it's not too likely anybody would want to mount such an attack.
Indeed, to do these attacks, you need to be physically present, near the target car, and you need a solid object that's already in front of the car, such as the back of a truck that it's following. (It is possible the road surface might work.) This is a higher bar than attacks which might be done remotely (such as computer intrusions) or via radio signals (such as with hypothetical vehicle-to-vehicle radio, should cars decide to use that tech.)
Here's how it works: LIDAR works by sending out a very short pulse of laser light, and then waiting for the light to reflect back. The pulse is a small dot, and the reflection is seen through a lens aimed tightly at the place the pulse was sent. The time it takes for the light to come back tells you how far away the target is, and the brightness tells you how reflective it is, like a black-and-white photo.
To fool a lidar, you must send another pulse that comes from or appears to come from the target spot, and it has to come in at just the right time, before (or on some, after) the real pulse from what's really in front of the LIDAR comes in.
The attack requires knowing the characteristics of the target LIDAR very well. You must know exactly when it is going to send its pulses before it sends them, and thus precisely (to the nanosecond) when a return reflection ("return") would arrive from a hypothetical object in front of the LIDAR. Many LIDARS are quite predictable. They scan a scene with a rotating drum, and you can see the pulses coming out, and know when they will be sent.
Jean-Louis Gassée, while a respected computer entrepreneur, wrote a critical post on robocars recently which matches a very common pattern of critical articles:
The pattern is as follows:
I wrote earlier on the drama that ensued when a group of SF writers led a campaign to warp the nomination process by getting a small but sufficiently large group of supporters to collude on nominating a slate of candidates. The way the process works, with the nomination being a sampling process where a thousand nominators choose from thousands of works, it takes only a 100-200 people working together to completely take over the process, and in some cases, they did -- to much uproar.
In the aftermath, there was much debate about what to do about it. Changes to the rules are in the works, but due to a deliberate ratification process, they mostly can't take effect until the 2017 award.
One popular proposal, called E Pluribus Hugo appeals, at least initially, to the nerdy mathematician in many of us. Game theory tries to design voting systems that resist attack. This is such a proposal, which works to diminish the effect that slate collusion can have, so that a slate of 5 might get fewer than 5 (perhaps just 1 or 2) onto the ballot. It is complex but aimed to make it possible for people to largely nominate the same way as before. My fear is that it modestly increases the reward for "strategic" voting. With strategic voting, you are not colluding, but you deliberately leave choices you like off your ballot to improve the chances of other choices you like more.
After a hard 10 weeks, our Singularity University Graduate class for 2015 will have its closing ceremony this Thursday night. If you are in the Bay Area, consider coming down to join luminaries of the SFBA accelerating technology community at San Jose's California theater and see presentations from the 5 top student teams as well as tables and posters from all 24 of them. With 80 students from 40 countries it's an eclectic and amazing group.
You can get Event info and tickets here.