Google: self-driving taxis 2-5 years out

Is widespread commercialization of self-driving cars decades out? No, 2-5 years according to Google!

Google has made no secret of its ambitions to revolutionize transportation with autonomous vehicles. Chief Executive Officer Larry Page is said to be personally fascinated by the challenge of making cities operate more efficiently. The company recently said the driverless car technology in development within its Google X research lab is from two to five years from being ready for widespread use. At the Detroit auto show last month, Chris Urmson, the Google executive in charge of the project, articulated one possible scenario in which autonomous vehicles are patrolling neighborhoods to pick up and drop off passengers. “We’re thinking a lot about how in the long-term, this might become useful in people’s lives, and there are a lot of ways we can imagine this going,” Urmson said in a conference call with reporters on Jan. 14. “One is in the direction of the shared vehicle. The technology would be such that you can call up the vehicle and tell it where to go and then have it take you there…”

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has publicly discussed what he sees as the inevitability of autonomous taxis, saying they could offer cheaper rides and a true alternative to vehicle ownership. “The Uber experience is expensive because it’s not just the car but the other dude in the car,” he said at a technology conference in 2014, referring to the expense of paying human drivers. “When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost [of taking an Uber] gets cheaper than owning a vehicle.”

One group of players you never hear mentioned in these articles…the Detroit car companies. Remember, they would have gone extinct in the 2007-8 financial crisis if the government hadn’t bailed them out. Are they completely missing out on the autonomous vehicle and ride-sharing trends now, instead picturing the millennials and their children living in the exurbs with two cars in every garage? If so, they may be headed for short-term extinction. I’m also waiting to hear more about autonomous trucks and buses – they have to be coming.

“robot scientist”

This article is about a robot that can somehow develop its own experiments to test new drugs.

There is an urgent need to make drug discovery cheaper and faster. This will enable the development of treatments for diseases currently neglected for economic reasons, such as tropical and orphan diseases, and generally increase the supply of new drugs. Here, we report the Robot Scientist ‘Eve’ designed to make drug discovery more economical. A Robot Scientist is a laboratory automation system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to discover scientific knowledge through cycles of experimentation. Eve integrates and automates library-screening, hit-confirmation, and lead generation through cycles of quantitative structure activity relationship learning and testing. Using econometric modelling we demonstrate that the use of AI to select compounds economically outperforms standard drug screening. For further efficiency Eve uses a standardized form of assay to compute Boolean functions of compound properties. These assays can be quickly and cheaply engineered using synthetic biology, enabling more targets to be assayed for a given budget. Eve has repositioned several drugs against specific targets in parasites that cause tropical diseases. One validated discovery is that the anti-cancer compound TNP-470 is a potent inhibitor of dihydrofolate reductase from the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium vivax.

my vacation reading list

Here’s my vacation reading list, just in case anyone is interested:

The Fear Index (about a hedge fund running an automated trading algorithm – way more fun to read than it sounds)

Count Zero (the sequel to William Gibson’s Neuromancer – great dystopian technology and artificial intelligence fiction although similar to Neuromancer, he uses a lot of made-up slang, weird sentence structure, and multiple points of view that keep me from getting really absorbed in the book)

Monster Hunter International (what it sounds like – pure escape fiction, basically an updated Ghostbusters with a Walking Dead-like gun fetish, violent but lighthearted)

MaddAdam (the third and final book in Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake series)

The original I Am Legend (because why not, I seem to be on a monster kick – if I don’t get to this one, I may save it for around Halloween)

the “new Pliocene”

New evidence from fossil cores supports the idea that more greenhouse gases means warmer temperatures in a more or less linear way.

During the Pliocene, the Earth’s temperature was often several degrees higher than in pre-industrial times, while atmospheric CO2 levels were around 350-450 parts per million (ppm), similar to the levels reached in the past few years (400 ppm).

By studying the relationship between CO2 levels and climate change during a warm period in the Earth’s history, the scientists have been able to estimate how the climate will respond to increasing levels of CO2, a parameter known as climate sensitivity.

The findings suggest that climate sensitivity was similar in a warmer world to other times – allaying concerns that warming could produce positive feedbacks that would accelerate warming above that expected from modelling studies.

I wouldn’t call this great news, but it does suggest we will have a chance to adjust to gradual change, rather than being blind-sided by some sudden catastrophic change.

Robert Reich on the sharing economy

Robert Reich is not a big fan of the sharing economy.

The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the “share-the-scraps” economy.

New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.

The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

His solution is unionization and collective bargaining. I am not against those things – in the short term, how you divide up earnings between owners and workers is a zero-sum question. In the longer term though, you want to grow those earnings at the same time you are dividing them up in some fair way. Unionization might resist the underlying economic and technological forces for a time, but it can’t change them. Remember the “ownership society”? If we aren’t going to give workers real equal bargaining power compared to their corporate employers, a possible alternative is broader ownership of those corporations. We could use inheritance and gift taxes to give every baby an IRA with $10,000 in stock the day they are born, just to throw out a random idea. That would grow, and then later in life, people could choose to either invest that money in education and skills for the jobs that do exist, or they could just choose to work fewer hours than earlier generations did.

mining sewage for gold

Japanese sewer authorities are now profitably mining sewage for gold.

A sewage treatment facility in central Japan has recorded a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world’s best mines. An official in Nagano prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, said the high percentage of gold found at the Suwa facility was probably due to the large number of precision equipment manufacturers in the vicinity that use the yellow metal. The facility recently recorded finding 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash from incinerated sludge.

how to not pay for cable

There are lots of ways to watch TV now without paying for cable. Why include this on a blog about innovation? Well, I’m trying to figure out how Comcast is building a second skyscraper in Philadelphia if consumers really hate paying them for TV so much and there is a ton of disruptive innovation going on that would seemingly threaten their business model. The answer must be that big “cable” companies have a lot more going on besides just charging exorbitant rates for TV. I am a Comcast customer by the way, because they are the best broadband option on my street at the moment, and of course I can’t live without that. They charge a lot for it, but then they throw in basic cable and HBO Go for just a little bit more, so they got me. I’m still actively shopping for other options though so don’t get too complacent, Comcast.

12-fold increase in U.S. solar capacity since 2008

This article is called Nothing Can Stop the US Solar Industry Juggernaut Now. A couple quotes:

The US solar industry has engineered a 1200% increase in utility-scale capacity since 2008, according to a new blog post from the Energy Department. When you factor in the explosive rate of growth in small-scale solar, it’s clear that the current hiccup in the price of oil is not going to stop solar energy from advancing in the US market.

The only question now is how quickly the US solar industry can meet the growth in demand, and for that we turn to a pair of newly announced SunShot programs designed to help the US solar industry churn out — and install — more product than ever before…

If you’re not familiar with the Obama Administration’s 2011 SunShot initiative, that would be a 10-year plan to bring the cost of solar energy down to parity with fossil fuels.

Logically speaking, solar energy just has to be a big part of the sustainability solution. The cynic in me would say if you express an increase from a very small number in percentage terms, it may sound impressive, but it doesn’t mean much. I am a little disappointed if grid parity is really still 10 years out. I really thought we were closer than that. I will believe we are close when I walk out of my house and see it all around me, and/or when my electric bill tells me it is mostly or entirely solar. By the way, my house is in the United States, but I am lucky enough to be on vacation in Southeast Asia at the moment, and I don’t see it here either. What I see here is living standards and health conditions close to what we take for granted in the west (my current mild stomach trouble not withstanding), but it is very clear that relatively cheap, abundant oil, gas, and coal make it possible.

R graph catalog

Here’s a nice catalog of graphs made with R, along with source code for each. Some of the images were broken or missing when I tried it, but hopefully they’ll get that fixed. (By they way, this is my personal experience with interactive “Shiny” apps so far – I love the idea and the look, but there always seems to be something wrong that needs to be fixed, and fixing it takes more time and requires more specialized training than just dealing with plain old code. At first, I thought it might be a productivity enhancer, but instead it’s a drag when your job is not to build cool-looking apps, but to produce useful data analysis results in a reasonable amount of time.)

January 2015 in Review

I’m dropping my “Hope for the Future Index” this year. If anyone out there is particularly attached to it, you can let me know.

Negative trends and predictions:

  • According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily.”
  • Exxon predicts the rate of greenhouse gas emissions will stop growing…by 2030…at a level that will still cause atmospheric concentrations to continue rising. They try to present this as good news, but it is clearly a pathway to collapse if you think about it just a little bit.
  • Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
  • By several measures, 2014 was the hottest year on record.
  • The Doomsday Clock has moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes from midnight due to “climate change and efforts to modernize nuclear weapons stockpiles”.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them. I put this in the positive column because I think the new services are better and this is a good example of creative destruction.
  • Remote controlled, robot-assisted surgery is here.
  • The ongoing tumble in oil prices was of course a big story throughout the month. We won’t really be able to say until we look back years from now whether this was just a short-term fluctuation or the reversal of the decades-long trend toward higher energy prices. My guess is the former.
  • It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.
  • Robots can learn to perform physical tasks by watching videos.
  • Howard T. Odum was a genius who invented a “system language” that, if widely understood and applied, might give humanity the tools to solve its problems. Unfortunately, so far it is not widely understood or applied.
  • There may be a realistic chance for a de-escalation of the Middle East nuclear arms race.