Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Will autonomous vehicles increase congestion?

Yes, autonomous vehicles will increase vehicle miles traveled by about 6% according to at least one set of serious researchers. They say this might not sound like much, but it will be enough to exceed capacity and cause massive traffic jams. Now, I’m sure these are serious transportation researchers who have thought about all the things I mention below, but I’ll mention them anyway:

  • Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t need to maintain the same “safe following distance” human drivers are supposed to maintain, which is based on slow human reaction times. So the autonomous vehicles should be able to travel closer together (from front to back) than human drivers at a given speed, and do this safely.
  • They also should be able to travel closer together from side to side. Our standard 12-foot travel lanes allow a lot of space for human drivers to weave wildly and unpredictably from side to side, which of course we do. Keep your arms, legs, heads, and pets inside the vehicle at all times, please!
  • Most vehicles are parked most of the time, so that much more space is required for vehicle storage than for moving vehicles. Not only this, but enormous amounts of empty space are required between parked vehicles for human drivers to maneuver the vehicles in and out of storage. Computers drivers will need much less space for maneuvering and will be infinitely patient.

So put all this together and I think that even if VMT increases, the amount of physical space required for vehicles could be massively reduced. This could be a big win for people, cities, and the environment. If VMT increases because people are able to get around more easily and cheaply, including the elderly, disabled, and parents pushing strollers, in all kinds of weather, this is a win for quality of life. I don’t see artificially restricting mobility as a win for people. I shouldn’t even have to say that reducing death and injury caused by vehicles by a factor of 10 or more is a moral and quality of life win.

Now, I am worried about urban and suburban sprawl getting even worse as it gets easier to get around. I am worried about air pollution and climate change. Add in augmented and virtual reality, and we might also come to care less and less over time what our cities look like to unaugmented eyes. I love compact, walking, cycling, and public transportation oriented urban form. One of the downsides of this form in the past has been a lack of green open space, but massively reduce the amount of space required for parking, and it will open up a lot of space in cities that we will then have choices of what to do with. So it really comes down to policy choices, and different places are going to make different choices, but I don’t see the technology itself as the root problem.

Are we forgetting about robots? (or Brute’, where are you when we need you?)

In fast-moving current events as I write on March 15, 2026, the illegal, unauthorized by any legislative body international or domestic, unprovoked US sneak attack on Iran continues to rage. I’ll leave further commentary to others except to say that, in totally unrelated news here on this Ides of March, remember it was SENATORS who had the guts to stab Caesar and try to save the Republic (which didn’t work all that well in the end.)]

Here are a couple headlines we could classify as “things China is doing well”.

China’s Clean Energy Push Has Made It Less Vulnerable to Energy Shocks, Including the Iran War [Is this not obvious? The US could be focusing on ramping up proven technology like electrification of all buildings and transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and battery technology while also funding “moon shot” R&D in areas like materials science and nuclear fusion. We could also be using fission energy and, I hate to say it, domestic fossil fuel production as a bridge to get us over the hump while we scale up in these other areas. If the whole world were doing this we wouldn’t be so dependent on boats moving liquefied dinosaur turds through one little war-torn (by choice of the fools claiming to lead the US government) inlet.]

How China’s AI-Powered Robots Could Reshape the Global Order [Now that disembodied AI has became mainstream, the next somewhat obvious step is to get the AI brains into robots.]

how did nuclear weapons proliferate to Israel?

I always had a vague notion that “Israel got nuclear weapons from France”. That is sort of true but not the whole story, according to this article by Kevin Kirk in Naked Capitalism. Now, I have to state for the record that Mr. Kirk sounds knowledgeable and confident to me, but he does not give a lot of references or cite many sources of his information. I will note a few cases where he does. Here is the story he tells:

  • France wanted access to scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and later moved to Israel. These scientists were given access to French nuclear sites and data in return for their help in building the French nuclear program.
  • In 1956 France built a heavy water reactor for Israel at Dimona. They also supplied the uranium-separation technology needed to fuel the reactor. A heavy water reactor can be used for civilian power generation, but can also turn uranium into plutonium.
  • A heavy water reactor also needs a substance called…heavy water. In the mid-1960s, the French government got cold feet about supplying more nuclear materials to Israel. The UK took over and supplied the heavy water, uranium and plutonium. Argentina, South Africa, and Belgium ALSO supplied some nuclear material to Israel. In South Africa’s case, it was part of a civilian power agreement that included weapons inspections, however the weapons inspections part of the agreement was never fully implemented. In the Belgian case, Israeli operatives essentially hijacked the material in a Dr. Evil-style act of high seas piracy. The US is far from blameless – nuclear material was stolen from a classified site near Pittsburgh, FBI/CIA investigations pointed to Israel, and the administration chose to cover this up. Most of this is backed up by declassified documents.
  • At some point (no year given in the article), Israel conducted an atmospheric nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa.
  • Under Eisenhower, the US looked the other way or even actively covered up all this activity. However, JFK openly tried to impose weapons inspections on Israel. Mr. Kirk never uses words like “Israel killed JFK”, but he implies it. I can certainly see a point of view where losing a nuclear deterrent could be seen as an existential threat, and therefore worth killing to prevent. I would just note that several parties had motive, means, and opportunity to kill JFK. Under the Johnson administration, weapons inspections took place, but always on a schedule announced well in advance, and with negotiated agreement as to areas of the site weapons inspectors would not try to access. Later US administrations have maintained a doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” where they just don’t comment on Israel’s nuclear program. Much of this is based on recently declassified documents.
  • Israel today is believed to have 100+ nuclear warheads (different numbers from different sources; but this is still A LOT for a small country – the US and Russia have a few thousand each, while China has about 600 and the UK and France have 200-300 each). Israel has the “nuclear triad” consisting of nuclear bombers, German-supplied nuclear submarines, and long-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting pretty much anywhere in the world supplied by…the French.

The idea of “atoms for peace” (originally promoted by Eisenhower), in which countries would be given civilian nuclear energy technology in exchange for agreeing to a strict weapons inspection regime, is appealing to me. But you can see where it breaks down when geopolitical intrigue applies. It’s probably better to get renewable energy ramped up around the world (particularly water-scarce yet sunny countries) and keep pressing towards peaceful fusion technology. And keep pressing towards nuclear arms control before something happens that all of us humans are going to regret as long as our species is around.

Some facts and figures on how birds die

This article on a site called ZME Science has some facts and figures on how many birds are killed (in the U.S., I think) by wind turbines compared to other causes.

  • wind turbines: 140,000-680,000 birds per year; 0.3 – 0.4 birds per GW-hr of power production
  • power lines: 12-64 million birds per year [Daddy, how can the birds sit on the power lines without being electrocuted? Well, I guess the answer is that the ones you see on the power lines are the ones that didn’t get electrocuted.]
  • vehicle collisions: 89 million – 340 million birds per year
  • glass buildings: 1 billion birds per year [well, the article says “up to almost”. Rounding is fine with me, but they are oddly precise on some numbers and willing to round on others.]
  • cats: 1.3 billion – 4 billion birds per year [I happen to like cats just fine, but if you consider yourself a friend of animals in general it is really kind of immoral and hypocritical to have an unsupervised outdoor cat.]
  • fossil fuels: 5.2 birds per GW-hr of power produced “through habitat destruction, mercury poisoning, and acid rain” [presumably, the study referenced here followed some pretty different methods than the ones that looked at birds running into stuff and getting disemboweled by cat claws. But still, you can say this is an order of magnitude more than the wind turbines per unit of energy supplied, controlling for the fact that fossil fuels are supplying more energy in an absolute sense.]

There are some things you can do to make the wind turbines less bad for birds. But really, it’s the cats and the cars and just the general wanton destruction/displacement of nature by our civilization. Now I’ve depressed myself, as I often do.

teacher vs. chatbot?

This article is about an English teacher trying to figure out how to cope with AI in and out of the classroom. The main ideas seem to be just in-class writing assignments and discussions. This is high school (I think), and one thing that might surprise an older reader is the idea that the teacher spends a significant amount of time reading out loud to students, and also giving them time to read themselves in class. I am not surprised because I see the teachers of my own children in middle school doing this.

I’ve thought about trying my hand at teaching, at some point. I may or may not ever do that, but if so I will have to think about how to use AI in an engineering classroom. I don’t have all the answers of course, but this is a bold new frontier so neither does anyone else. Here is my first attempt at a brainstorming list:

  • In-class writing assignments,
  • Paper and pencil tests (or portions of a test – maybe if there is a 2-3 hour chunk of time to take a test, you have the first hour to do the paper and pencil part, hand that in, and get the second part where you are allowed to at least use a spreadsheet program. Or if the class period is only an hour, you could give a test over two days)
  • Journaling – I’ve always thought that reading and writing needs to be a part of what students do, even in STEM fields. In my own classes, teachers have tended to spend almost all the time focused on doing math problems. The problems are critical and I plan to come back to them. But I learn by reading and writing first and foremost, and there are others like me. So my idea is to have short reading assignments and ask students to summarize key points in a few bullets or sentences to show that they did the reading. Then, crucially, I would ask them to relate the reading to a relevant outside reference – kudos for a peer reviewed article, but could also be a relevant news or magazine article, or even a Wikipedia page. Now, obviously students are going to use AI for this, and that is okay. There would have to be classroom discussion related to it, and points given for being able to discuss what they wrote intelligently.
  • Okay, now to those problems, homework assignments, and/or take-home exams. These have always been the beating heart of engineering education. This is the struggle and the hard work of relating theory to problem solving, resulting in deep understanding. This is also where students benefit from individualized feedback from teachers and collaboration with peers. They are going to interact with AI here, and I see no real alternative other than classifying AI as not cheating. In fact, this is where you may want to actually encourage them to experiment and openly share what effective techniques they found that they think enhanced their learning. You have to give some points for the homework, otherwise all but the most-disciplined students will not make the significant effort needed for learning. But most of the points should probably be given for doing supervised in-class assignments that are similar to the homework.
  • There’s another problem here though – distance learning has become pretty common, particularly in graduate school. And that throws a monkey wrench into the whole in-person thing. It is potentially unfair if some students are in-person and some are virtual – are you going to surveil students on-camera the whole time and try to ascertain if they are cheating? This is a tough one and I don’t have all the answers.
  • Then there is the traditional “term paper” or “research paper”. This is a traditional cornerstone, but students are just going to use AI for it. Asking them to present their results and asking them personalized questions is part of the answer here, but that doesn’t really help them with feedback on their writing. The in-class writing assignments have to be part of the answer here. But again, in terms of out-of-class-writing, I think you have to classify the use of AI as not cheating and actually encourage them to experiment and share what they thought was effective.

Well, that was just some stream-of-consciousness drivel, wasn’t it? For me, writing and thinking are inseparable. I had some thoughts on this topic in the back of my mind, but now that I have tried to articulate them (without the use of AI), they are more fully formed than they were before I did that. If I were going to think about this more right now, I might ask AI to help me find some more articles and blogs on the subject.

What can we do about garage bioweapons?

Ever since I read Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, probably some time in the early 2000s, I’ve been concerned about the idea that biotechnology will eventually be available to amateurs. And a few amateurs will be psychopaths or suicide terrorists willing to take down civilization along with themselves. My only real idea for preventing this has been heavy duty government surveillance, somehow tempered by political institutions that keep the government itself from being evil. And of course, we don’t think we want this surveillance, and I don’t really want it, but I haven’t seen clear alternatives.

Here are some suggestions by others. I am not sure if I am convinced, but these are ideas worth thinking about. First, Amodei from Anthropic in his recent TLDR essay The Adolescense of Technology (where he tries to pull a Bill Joy and doesn’t quite pull it off, in my view.) You have to keep in mind that although he seems to be motivated by ethical views, heavy government surveillance is not in the interest of private companies, so his suggestions tend toward self-regulation by industry. Anyway, his suggestions are:

  • “AI companies can put guardrails on their models to prevent them from helping to produce bioweapons.”
  • “transparency requirements,27 which help society measure, monitor, and collectively defend against risks without disrupting economic activity in a heavy-handed way” – this would be government regulation, but it would constrain all competitors equally
  • “try to develop defenses against biological attacks themselves. This could include monitoring and tracking for early detection, investments in air purification R&D (such as far-UVC disinfection), rapid vaccine development that can respond and adapt to an attack, better personal protective equipment (PPE),28 and treatments or vaccinations for some of the most likely biological agents.” – One imagines scientists using AI extensively to develop these defenses, or possibly “AI scientists” developing them with some human mediation.

Now, here is an article from Big Think called How to deter biothreats in the age of gene synthesis. What they come up with is to screen all orders of biological materials (like DNA) from the companies that make and sell them to researchers. Screen the orders, screen the customers themselves, and screen for particularly dangerous DNA sequences.

This has to be done internationally, which adds to the difficulty. Even if it is done effectively by most countries most of the time, you will have enterprising countries and criminal organizations out there setting up a black market, just like you do with drugs and nuclear materials. Because it will be profitable to do so. The more effective the clamp down, the higher the risk and potential profit becomes (which is why the war on drugs has not and probably cannot be won, other than by massive and intrusive surveillance of individuals which most people in most countries agree they don’t want. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts and for people caught up in all the violence fueled by the black market created by their prohibition. But they aren’t going to spread like fires through uninvolved and unprepared populations and cause the extinction of our species. Which is why I wonder if accepting some level of intrusive surveillance on individuals is the least evil option as the technology gets more accessible and more dangerous all the time.

Nonetheless, it is probably good to take an “all of the above” approach. If I were feeling optimistic I might say perhaps the existential nature of the threat will prompt some international cooperation and formation of some more functional institutions for cooperation than we have seen over the past decade or so. But maybe it will take some sort of near miss or partially contained disaster for this to happen. (Covid-19 was not bad enough, apparently.)

Let’s close with a few quotes from Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, which anyone who has not read must drop what they are doing and read now:

The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them…

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Joy’s proposed solutions included “relinquishment” of certain technologies we all agree are too dangerous (as we have, to some extent up until now, with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons at the nation-state level) and strong protections for whistleblowers in the scientific and technical communities.

what is engineering anyway?

Engineering is both a professional practice and an academic field (but really, an overlapping set of sub-categories within both of these). And none of these categories agree on what it even is. This article suggests it is something like “implementing things that work by following previously successful models”. And I think that is close to how many practicing engineers and the public, and even some academics such as the one quoted here, think of it. To be fair, the person quoted is talking about how historical engineering methods often predated the scientific theories that could explain why they worked.

The article actually suggests that engineering is somewhat disconnected from science. I happen to think this is wrong in the modern context, or at best a small part of what the relationship between modern science and modern engineering is or should be. The definition I prefer is something like “applying science to understand systems, how their component parts determine their behavior, and how they interact with conditions at their boundaries in time and space.”

Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty

I like the idea of applying decision theory to real-world problems. The ideal concept is that decision makers and stakeholders have a body of highly relevant objective information available to them at the time they are also applying judgment and values (and politics) to make those decisions. There is a huge academic endeavor, but the hard part in my work experience is pulling together relevant information in a timely manner. Today’s schedule and budget expectations just don’t allow complex analyses in many cases, so we default to relatively simplistic approaches to complex problems. Maybe AI can help apply these methods more quickly, alongside more traditional methods like benefit-cost analysis. I like the focus on robust decisions in this paper, and I like the collection of practical tools including some R packages.

A review of tools and resources to support Decision-Making Under Deep Uncertainty

Decision-making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) offers approaches to support robust, adaptive strategies for complex decision-making. However, practical uptake of DMDU remains limited, partly due to fragmented access to resources and a lack of an inventory of available tools. This study introduces a comprehensive catalogue of tools and resources. Through a structured survey and expert elicitation, we identify 28 resources and 16 tools that support DMDU research and practice and classify them using an established DMDU taxonomy. Our analysis reveals a focus on introductory guidance regarding theory and methods of DMDU application, with some bias toward water-related applications. Technical, method-specific resources on how to implement existing frameworks remain limited. Our results identify tools supporting all core DMDU components, though they highlight persistent scalability challenges. The resulting online catalogue provides a foundation for expanding the use of DMDU in practice and is intended as a living, community-driven platform.

Waymo coming to Philadelphia

Waymo test-cars are being spotted pretty frequently now in Philadelphia. I have been paying attention, and at first they had a human driver with hands on the wheel. Recently, they have had a human sitting in the passenger seat with no hands on the wheel. Recognizing that this technology has been out for awhile on the U.S. west coast and abroad, especially in China, the lag time and the public amazement here (expressed in positive and negative ways) is partly a metric of how far behind our city and state are.

Just the other day, I watched a Waymo pull over quickly and come to a complete stop as a fire truck overtook and passed it from the back. This is mostly great – you can imagine if all or even the majority of vehicles did this, fire trucks could get where they need to go a lot faster. This is NOT what human drivers do in Philadelphia currently – people either choose to ignore traffic laws or they may actually not be aware that there are traffic laws, and there are virtually no consequences. So I can imagine human drivers being startled and possibly causing a few crashes when a Waymo does the right thing, rationally and efficiently. And I see a metaphor here – automation/AI will overtake some industries quickly that are mostly unaffected by human institutions and quirky, irrational, inefficient, suboptimal human behavior. But it will have a harder time penetrating other industries and institutions, and this might be a good thing if the technology and institutions take some time to adapt to each other, at a speed that buffers some of the potential disruption. And then there is government, which might be like a brick wall. Just look at DOGE – I think a charitable interpretation of DOGE is that it was an attempt to automate and streamline the federal government using AI. AI probably identified a million ways the government is irrational and inefficient, and it was able to fix none of them in a short period of time, and in fact caused massive disruption and human suffering by trying to fix them, consequences we continue to live with.

The article had a couple interesting statistics:

  • ‘ Waymo recently published a journal article analyzing 127 million miles of trips taken by fully autonomous robotaxis, comparing those results to human benchmarks. “The Waymo Driver,” says Teicher, referring to the name of their driverless-car system, “achieved a tenfold reduction in serious injury or worse crashes, and a twelvefold reduction in injury crashes with pedestrians.” ‘
  • “Between 2014 and 2017, the value of a taxi medallion — the source of family-sustaining wealth for many taxi drivers — plummeted, from a high of more than $500,000 to $10,000. Uber and Lyft eventually grew the total amount of jobs for drivers, but shaped them in the mold of the gig economy.” [major pain for a small group of workers, eventual expansion of jobs but arguably lower quality]
  • In a city like San Francisco, where Waymo has eclipsed 10 percent of the ride-hailing market share, the average fare remains 12 percent higher than Uber and 17 percent higher than Lyft. [okay, so there will be competition between Waymo and ride sharing, and eventually Waymo and other robo-taxi companies.]

good bye ISS

NASA plans to deorbit the International Space Station “around 2030” and crash it into the ocean. According to Longreads (linking to a Wired article):

The [Deorbit Vehicle] will then move the ISS into the lower atmosphere. Most of it will burn, but some of it will fall into the sea. 

It sounds somewhat spectacular, and possibly risky. I’ll give NASA the benefit of the doubt and assume they know what they’re doing until/unless they show us that they don’t (case studies: FEMA after Hurricane Katrina and CDC during Covid-19). There is no ISS2 in the works – instead, individual countries and private companies seem to be talking about their own space stations and moon bases. Maybe this is partly because technology has improved and costs have come down, so cooperation is no longer necessary just to share the cost. But to me, it is also sad because it represents the end of the post-Cold War era of relative optimism and international cooperation in space.