By David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Updated May 9, 2018 HMI. Drive.ai There’s been a string of stories in the past year or so about fatalities involving self-driving cars. The latest, from March, was about a pedestrian run down in Arizona by a self-driving Uber vehicle, which apparently saw her but deemed her a “false positive” (shudder). Of course, as fans of the technology will rush to tell you, none of the vehicles …
Solar learning/experience curve is more like 28% and nope, cobalt’s not a problem for EV development. What Elon Musk is trying to transform.
From Jenny Chase, to Zach Shahan on Clean Technica, Feb 2018 Jenny just sent this update: “We have pegged the typical factory-gate module price at the end of 2017 at about 33 cents per W, meaning a price around 37 cents per W in most markets. About 98GW was installed in 2017. Over the past two years we have revised …
Losing work, sooner than you think, followed by some latest thinking on universal basic income (UBI)
Excerpt from an article in Mother Jones magazine, October 2017 Until we figure out how to fairly distribute the fruits of robot labor, it will be an era of mass joblessness and mass poverty. Working-class job losses played a big role in the 2016 election, and if we don’t want a long succession of demagogues blustering their way into office …
Highlights from The Great Convergence: radical change will happen when cost of moving people falls as much as the cost of moving ideas in recent years
Understanding the First Unbundling’s Stylized Facts Chapter 2 identified five top-line facts that marked globalization’s first unbundling: The North industrialized while the South deindustrialized Trade boomed Growth took off worldwide but sooner and faster in the North than in the South The Great Divergence happened Urbanization accelerated, especially in the North. Falling trade costs produced industrialization in the North and …
Data analytics and AI progress in China, plans to dominate the market by 2030
Bloomberg, 14 Aug 2017 Xu Li’s software scans more faces than maybe any on earth. He has the Chinese police to thank. Xu runs SenseTime Group Ltd., which makes artificial intelligence software that recognizes objects and faces, and counts China’s biggest smartphone brands as customers. In July, SenseTime raised $410 million, a sum it said was the largest single round for …
Wait! What jobs will be safe from robots?
An excerpt from The Guardian, June 2017 Ford, the futurist, classifies resilient jobs in three areas. The first is jobs that involve “genuine creativity, such as being an artist, being a scientist, developing a new business strategy”. Ford notes: “For now, humans are still best at creativity but there’s a caveat there. I can’t guarantee you that in 20 years …
Smart City projects need long term vision and to serve the people personally
By Dan Swinhoe, IDG Connect, 19 June 2017 Depending on which expert, analyst, or guidebook you read, there are more than 100 different definition of what constitutes a “Smart City” is and what it should do. Is it about local government services all being available online? Is it about implementing sensors for things such as lighting, parking, and pollution across …
AI: Replacing managers with automated decision-making saves time and eliminates emotional volatility says world’s largest hedge fund
Bridgewater Associates has a team of engineers working on a project to automate decision-making to save time and eliminate human emotional volatility. See article in The Guardian, below. This has an interesting connection to the weather and also air pollution. The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and medical researchers had already previous reported that air pollution from fossil fuel …