Self-Driving Cars Approach? Doubt It.

Posted on by David Wright

Geekdom is a-flutter over Google’s self-driving car project.

Google announced a new phase of its self-driving car project Tuesday. The test vehicles, of which there are “about a dozen on the road at any given time,” have so far logged 300,000 miles of road testing without a single accident under computer control. In the next phase of testing, team members will start commuting to work solo, with the robot at the wheel.

Google also showed off a new vehicle type added to the program, the Lexus RX450h SUV. Now that the self-driving car software is comfortable in a variety of traffic conditions, the next phase will test snowy roads, temporary construction signals and other unusual terrain.

More here. Via MR under a very optimistic headline. An optimism I don’t share, unfortunately, but not because of the technology.

What I’m worried about is whether our society is genuinely capable of putting the most lethal weapon on earth in the hands of AI.

Remember that the auto liability insurance market is the largest in the world by an order of magnitude. This is so because everyone who can drive has the power to maim and destroy a lot of property and life around him/her. Auto insurance works because agents have control over their actions and are responsible for those consequences. Each person pays premium.

Who pays when Google’s driver hits a schoolbus full of children and sends it rolling down a cliff? What if Google’s driving algorithm isn’t at fault but a court pins the blame anyway? Remember Google’s car need never cause an accident for people to scream “Skynet!” and pull the plug.

Like with Kickstarter, Google’s car will only truly be tested when someone gets effed over. You tell me how long Kicktarter will last when someone commits genuine fraud and everyone’s confdience evaporates. Caveat Emptor? Yeah right.

It is our liability system (which mostly reflects an underlying extreme risk aversion) that will probably kill these technologies.

Exam Day

Posted on by David Wright

Today I write an exam. It was originally scheduled for last Friday but my wife went into labor a few days before and I had to move it (using my laptop in the delivery room three hours before my son was born. Wife, incandescent with rage from pain: “WTF are you doing on your computer?!”).

Anyway, the exam isn’t until 5pm so I’ve got some time for a little sharpening up. And of course I turn to Barker:

If you can’t get in a full night’s sleep, you can still improve the ability of your brain to synthesize new information by taking a nap. In a study funded by NASA, David Dinges, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a team of researchers found that letting astronauts sleep for as little as fifteen minutes markedly improved their cognitive performance.

The challenges that the brain had grappled with during the daytime replayed in the mind as the subject went to sleep… (S)ubjects who spent more time dreaming about the game demonstrated a greater improvement in their skills the next time they played than those whose brains hadn’t relived its experiences during sleep.

Ugh, I slept horribly last night because I strained an abdominal muscle playing soccer yesterday. I’m actually convinced it’s a studying injury triggered by the running around. Ok, nap today, got it.

Here’s some more interesting stuff:

Dement— one of the premier researchers in the history of sleep science who you may remember from an earlier chapter— received a commission from a company that had recently built a prototype of a high-tech mattress. Inside of it, warm air flowed through billions of tiny, ceramic beads. The end result was the feeling of a cushion built out of heated mud.“Everyone in our lab agreed that it was the most comfortable bed they had ever lain on,” Dement later noted. The company that hired him asked Dement to determine how well people slept on its product, which was expected to retail for several-thousand dollars, compared with a conventional mattress. To make the final result more dramatic, Dement decided to include a third option in his study: sleeping on a concrete floor with no padding. Volunteers gamely spent a night on each of the three, and Dement’s team later evaluated the results. “We were absolutely flabbergasted,” he wrote. There were no significant differences in the quality of a volunteer’s sleep or the total number of hours spent sleeping on the three surfaces.

A bit surprising, actually. I’ve slept on all manner of mattresses and agree that they probably don’t matter up to a point (I actually think that a concrete floor is better than a lot of soft mattresses out there). But wouldn’t the psychological effect alone of sleeping on a concrete floor make people uncomfortable? Questionable science!

Examining the NYT

Posted on by David Wright

Was turned onto a documentary about the NYT by Ebert:

The paper remains, as it has long been, the most essential source of news in this nation. “Page One: Inside the New York Times” sets out to examine its stature in these hard times for print journalism, but ends up with more of the hand-wringing that dominates all such discussions.

Indeed. Sadly for Ebert, he stumbles into a bit of hang-wringing of his own with a “kids these days!” kind of comment:

I suspect that at the bottom of the crisis in print media is a crisis in American education, and that many of today’s college graduates cannot read and write as well as grade-school graduates did a few decades ago.

That Ebert review was from last year and this post has been sitting in my drafts folder since then. I’ve finally seen the movie!

The documentary is about the NYT Media section, which is tasked with reporting on New Media / Old Media stories. Obviously this is happening at one of the great Old Media establishments so there’s an interesting kind of circularity about the whole thing.

But wait, there’s more. In this movie about Dying Media vs Disrupting Media which stars writers writing about the same subject from within the Dying Media, the main plot thread is a story about another newspaper company struggling with the same changing industry. The result of it all is this article by David Carr (Ebert’s favorite character in the film and mine) about the Tribune.

The tribune story is interesting. Sam Zell played the Murdoch card and tried to solve the paper’s problems by going downmarket, joking that he’d add a porn section if he could.

Obviously in hindsight this was the wrong strategy (the porn industry is doing terribly!). But it’s wrong in an interesting way. Zell tried to solve a technology problem with an editorial strategy.

Here’s my take. The news business has heretofore been made up of what we are discovering are three very different businesses:

  1. The distribution of information (and advertising).
  2. Research.
  3. The construction of narrative. Also called great writing.

The Internet clearly upended #1. Nothing much has changed about the others, though.

Yet everyone is worried that #1 is the only thing that anyone cares about, so is the only thing that advertisers will pay for. Without the subsidy of an information distribution cartel, what about all that great research and writing?

All pure information enterprises are being challenged by the Internet. Into this group I’d lump newspapers with academia and television. Are there more economies of scale available with this new technology? You betcha. Economics says that if incumbents are too slow to figure this out new entrants will steal their lunch. Those foreign bureaus everyone likes to point to as justification of the Newspaper’s Divine Right to exist? There’s an algorithm for that.

One thing that struck me about seeing the inside of the NYT is that its core is simply a bunch of (mostly) middle-aged white guys sitting around figuring out what is happening in the world and what it all means. The Internet didn’t change our appetite to pay someone to do that.

The Internet simply changed just about everything else. If they wanted to they could have tried to compete with Google or Wikipedia or whatever 20 years ago. But instead they chose the higher status ‘white guys in a room talking about world events’ as their business, not distribution of information.

Now they complain it’s a smaller business than they thought? Let me go get my violin.

Together Everyone Achieves More

Posted on by David Wright

I love the leadership freak for frequent little little pump-ups. Today’s was good:

Leaders who can’t ask people to do hard things can’t get hard things done. Meaningful contributions require deep commitment and effort. Weak leaders assume others can’t or won’t step up. They rule out before they ask.

Ruling out:

  1. That’s too hard for them. Making it easy prevents people from stepping up. Give people the opportunity to do hard things. I’m not suggesting you intentionally make things hard for others.
  2. They already contribute so much. Translation, they can’t make meaningful contribution in new areas.
  3. They wouldn’t be interested.
  4. They’re too valuable where they are. If anyone says that to you, update your resume’.

I work in a human capital business. In human capital businesses we can’t scale by adding servers and clever code. We scale by adding clever people. And the companies that scale best don’t poach experts, they train them.

To me the key to successfully training people is to put them in the driver’s seat and tell them to lean heavily on the team. The change in leadership might not even mean a change in the functional roles.

Let’s say there’s an accountant, a lawyer and a janitor working on a project. The lawyer reviews the legal documents and normally also reports up to the VP. Today we put the janitor in charge of reporting up. The lawyer still does the docs, the accountant does the figures and the janitor scrubs the toilets. But after cleanup he receives the others’ work, reviews it and takes the heat if the VP doesn’t like the work.

Maybe the janitor didn’t know much about the work before, but I bet you he’ll learn faster than he ever thought he could. If everyone buys into this process, you can create an extraordinary culture.

The idea is that we’re trying to cultivate an alignment of identity with the task, which (to me) is the fundamental quality of leadership. It can’t be taught, it must be experienced.

What Do The Unemployed Do With All That Spare Time?

Posted on by David Wright

“[L]ess than 1% of the foregone market work hours are allocated to job search. However, this represents a fairly large percentage increase given how little time unemployed workers allocate to job search. We show that individuals increase their time investments in their own health care, their own education, and civic activities. Specifically, around 12% of foregone market hours are allocated to these investments.”

We show that the bulk of the foregone market work time during the recent recession is allocated to leisure. …  These categories include, for example, socializing with one’s friends, watching television, reading, and going to the movies. We include sleep, eating, and personal care into our leisure measure given that the marginal investments in these activities may be more akin to leisure than personal maintenance. … [L]eisure activities absorb only about 50% of a given decrease of market work. Additionally, a large fraction of this reallocation is directed towards sleep (more than 20% of foregone work hours).

more here.

The Innovator’s Curse

Posted on by David Wright

Great Cringely piece here.

If I were Apple, knowing that Samsung is the only other game in town (just as Sony was in the iPod days), I would use every method possible to slow them down.  Lawsuits show a sign of desperation frankly, and that is likely to be the case here.  Consumer electronics is characterized by commoditization and Apple had better get used to that fact…

The weapons available to Apple are, as they were for Sony in the Walkman days, difficult stuff like continuous innovation, building a brand and maintaining it (that is what I think this lawsuit is really about by the way), distribution, getting a lock on the supply chain, getting a lock on content, and very occasionally using the International Trade Commission and lawsuits.

Apple needs to do all of this and not just rely on innovation because, unfortunately, as Samsung and previously Microsoft have shown them, they can’t win on innovation alone.

…Samsung doesn’t have to do anything different. Samsung is the Borg.

It is easier to go on litigious autopilot than invent the next iphone or ipad. Bill Gates says the only way to make money in technology is to be the de facto standard. That means the optimal strategy is to push yourself to the max to build a monopoly, hire a pile of lawyers and ride it out.

The problem, incredibly, is that Apple’s competitive position isn’t as strong as Microsoft’s was in the early 90s. Without a motivated visionary at the helm, game changing innovation is very unlikely. Same happened at Microsoft, same happens at every tech company.

Innovation is an extraordinary thing best left to the small and hungry. Big companies are simply relatively much better at being a Borg.

How to Play in Someone Else’s Band

Posted on by David Wright

the principle rule to remember: your number one job above all else is to make the leader sound good, look good and feel good. {read that again. we will come back to it over and over. we will refer to this as the rule.}

ask yourself, “okay..self….who is The Dude here?” most likely, it is not you. {depending on the size of the band, the odds are one in four, or five.}
who is the dude? who is the person that comes up with the ideas, signs the checks, negotiates the deals, writes the music, does the interviews, provides the credit for all the travel arrangements, keeps the books, collects the receipts, pays the taxes, mails the checks out, has likely spent years starving and building his scene before you ever got there, and as well takes the heat if things go in the crapper? that’s probably the dude. identify him or her and make sure they are happy. if they are happy, things stand a chance of going great. if they are pissed off or depressed, you are screwed. {you may be operating under a band name, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a dude. and just because the dude is mellow and easy going, or a zillionaire, that doesn’t mean the rule isn’t in place.}
if you want to participate in making some art, get along with other musicians, get other jobs, make some bread, travel with some like minded souls, learn something, contribute in the lifting up of the battered human spirit, and otherwise maximize your opportunity, figure out who the dude {or dudette} is, and apply the rule. it’s pretty simple.

More here. Outstanding piece.

Sales Is For Everyone

Posted on by David Wright

Consider this joke:

“Martinis are like women’s breasts, one is not enough and three are too many.”

Let’s assume you found this joke funny. Now I’ll give you a task: you must tell this joke to three people: your best friend, your grandmother and a 6-year-old child.

I bet you your reaction to this task is surprise. Maybe your grandmother would think the joke hilarious or maybe incredibly rude. Maybe your friend is a woman who has had a mastectomy and would be really uncomfortable, etc, etc.

In most circumstances you’d choose who to deliver this joke to. But if you HAD to deliver it to all, you’d probably deliver it differently to each (“I know this joke isn’t funny, but just bear with me, this blog told me to do it”). If you understand those two points, you understand sales.

The key skill of a salesperson is identifying exactly how to deliver a message to an audience. And even the best salesperson in the world may not tell that joke to your grandmother as well as you could. That’s because he/she wouldn’t know her as well as you.

The greatest asset a salesperson has is *knowing the market*. Not the gift of the gab, not high intellect and not anything else. If you understand the people you are delivering your message to you can sell.

And understanding people is the most fundamental quality of human intelligence.

Disruption Defined

Posted on by David Wright

In order to overcome the massive inertia associated with a dominant platform technology, two conditions must exist. First, there must be new, overwhelmingly important functionality that the old platform cannot support in a reasonable way. Second, the new platform must be able to coexist and interoperate with the old.

That’s Ben Horowitz.

Violence in America

Posted on by David Wright

I saw this interesting chart suggesting violence in the US is on the decline (original image here):

This is via Krugman who doesn’t hesitate to grind his political ax a bit:

And that’s one reason I find all these laments about declining values among non-elite Americans hard to take seriously. If things like single parenthood were as bad as they say, how can social pathologies have declined so much?

Ugh, I say, politics and sociology. What a mess!

So I thought I’d like to tickle a bias of mine with the graph, too. Notice that the trend is the same in all OECD countries? They’re dwarfed by the scale of the US data. Oh, the statistical tricks we can play!

For a quick and dirty analysis, let’s just see what the demographics of the era have looked like (source):

You’ll see that society is aging pretty remarkably since the 70s. Common to almost all OECD countries.

Angry youngsters killing each other!