It’s not just self-driving or any of the other “DDIY (don’t do it yourself) tech that isn’t ready for primetime.
It’s humans.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system was one of the probable causes of a fatal 2018 crash into a concrete barrier. In addition, the safety board said the driver was playing a mobile game while using Autopilot before the crash, and investigators also determined he was overly confident in Autopilot’s capabilities.
“Overly confident,” huh. Well, duh.
Who ever heard of a human who wasn’t, at the least, confident that the tech they spent their money, especially expensive tech, wouldn’t do what they expected.
“In this crash we saw an over-reliance on technology, we saw distraction, we saw a lack of policy prohibiting cell phone use while driving, and we saw infrastructure failures, which, when combined, led to this tragic loss,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said at the end of the hearing on Tuesday. “We urge Tesla to continue to work on improving their Autopilot technology and for NHTSA to fulfill its oversight responsibility to ensure that corrective action is taken where necessary. It’s time to stop enabling drivers in any partially automated vehicle to pretend that they have driverless cars.”
Even driverless cars tell drivers to stay alert, as do “Autopilot.”
Of course, doctors have been telling people to eat more veggies for decades and you know how well that’s worked.
Say the word “auto” to anyone and they will hear “you don’t have to do anything, X does it for you.”
Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
In August 2016 I wrote Self-driving Tech Not Ready for Primetime and a month later Tesla was hacked. But, as you’ll find out tomorrow, hacking isn’t the only problem — humans are actually way higher on the problem scale. While it’s not easy, hacking dangers can be minimized, but fixing humans is impossible.
I’ve been writing (ranting?) about the security dangers of IoT and the connected world in general.
Security seems to be an afterthought— mostly after a public debacle, as Chrysler showed when Jeep was hacked.
GM took nearly five years to fully protect its vehicles from the hacking technique, which the researchers privately disclosed to the auto giant and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the spring of 2010.
“With several months of in-depth research on Tesla Cars, we have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities and successfully implemented remote control on Tesla Model S in both Parking and Driving Mode.”
They hacked the firmware and could activate the brakes, unlock the doors and hide the rear view mirrors.
Tesla is the darling of the Silicon Valley tech set and Elon Musk is one of the Valley gods, but it still got hacked. And the excuse of being new to connected tech just doesn’t fly.
And if connected car security is full of holes, imagine the hacking opportunities with self-driving cars.
The possibilities are endless. I can easily see hackers, or bored kids, taking over a couple of cars to play chicken on the freeway at rush hour.
Nice girls don’t say, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not nice, so — I told you so.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
This Oldie doesn’t need commentary. It was valid when I wrote it in 2006, it’s even more valid in today’s world of social media and will still be valid at all times in the future.
A recent article in Wired focused on the industry claim, amplified by the media, that driverless cars will be a boon to seniors — not that any of them were asked.
Not only are the claims that these systems might help older people overblown, they’re also made, for the most part, without including those older people in studies of the effects of the technology.
What a joke. If you claimed to design a better surfboard, but had never surfed, people would be more than skeptical.
This is a common cycle in technology, more broadly. Over and over again, designers claim their products will be great for an aging population without actually including that population in the conversation. “I think there’s been a lot of new technologies being marketed toward older adults but that haven’t necessarily been designed for them, with their capabilities in mind,” Wendy Rogers, a professor at the University of Illinois, told me for an episode of my podcast Flash Forward. (…)
In many cases, such products were designed by younger people with little sense of what seniors actually need. “So, the buttons are small, the voice quality is not easy to hear, the number of steps required to set it up to get it to do what you want to do is complicated,” Rogers told me. “There are a lot of apps out there, things that are supposed to support pain management, for example, and they’re just not designed well for older adults.”
One of the best examples of bad design is found in most alarms, such as smoke alarms and carbon monoxide monitors. They all have one thing in common, the sound they emit is usually high-pitched, which is pretty useless, since high frequencies are the first to go; not just in old people, but in middle age and younger.
A friend in the geriatric field told me that nursing homes and assisted living facilities often have trainees smear a light coating of Vaseline on their glasses. Functioning all day (or longer) gives them a much better understanding of what many seniors deal with all the time.
You would think companies would be more interested in the reactions of their target market, but when that market is seniors, companies see no need to ask, since they know best — especially true when technology is involved.
There seems to be an assumption, conscious or not, that as joints stiffen brains do, too. And I’m sorry to say it is much worse in younger males.
And younger males are the guys who get funded first.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I read a couple of articles last week highlighting two mind-blowing new products. Tomorrow you’ll learn about one that addresses wildfire prevention in a totally new way. The other (Wednesday) is a way to recycle roads, instead of repaving them, using plastic bottles.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
It’s interesting that so many of the entrepreneurs whose ideas could actually change the world are either still in school (not college) or at the other end of the spectrum. It also seems that most of the 20s/30s/40s crowd are primarily interested in changing their financial status and burnishing their brand. Oops! Seems like I’m getting cynical in my golden years.
I frequently see comments on blogs and social sites along the lines of “I know I could be an entrepreneur if I just had a good idea” or “I want to be an entrepreneur and change the world.”
Sadly, it seems that most are looking for ideas to make them the next Groupon or Foursquare and while that might make them rich, it will hardly change the world.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it won’t change much or get you into the history books.
You change the world by tackling real-world problems, often with hard science.
But you don’t need to be a scientist; self-taught Gary Cola invented the world’s lightest, strongest steel that takes less than ten seconds to make.
In fact, you don’t have to be an adult. Take a look at the winners of the first Google Science Fair and you will be blown away; none are 18 yet and none of their ideas involved the Internet.
Here’s an idea; if you want to change the world look for problems with global impact. Blake Mycoskie is changing the world with shoes and glasses, while Anthony Capone, CEO of Nimbus Water Systems, is changing it with inexpensive, solar-powered, portable water purification systems.
Then there are toilets.
Yes, toilets.
That handy gadget that we take for granted (unless it isn’t working) and that many parts of the world only dream about.
“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet.” –Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global development program
And the Gates Foundation is putting its money where its mouth is.
Look around; think about changing the world by reinventing or innovating something that addresses a basic need.
You may not end up as rich as Mark Cuban, but I guarantee that it’s the sexiest, most exciting, rewarding, feel-good thing you’ll ever do.
Whether you’re talking invention or innovation, it’s important to remember that it’s often the simplicity of a solution, as opposed to complexity, that makes it truly elegant. Along with simplicity, practicality is important, as seen in the MYCOmmunity Toilet, and focusing on plain old common sense can create a viable business by addressing American bias against ugly produce.
Here are a few that actually have world-changing potential.
Following up on yesterday’s idea to re-freeze the Artic is best described as ‘back to the future’.
A California-based company called SkyCool Systems is in the early stages of manufacturing a coolingsystem that’s more energy efficient than anything humans have used for a century.It’s doing it using radiative cooling, a concept that was used in the Middle East and India hundreds of years ago.
Inventions like this are potential game-changers as the world stares down a growing climate crisis, spurred by emissions pumped into the atmosphere by human activity. Globally, about 12% of non-carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to refrigeration and air conditioners, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
There is a lot of the talk about “food disruption,” mostly focused on new ways to grow food, plant-based protein, etc. But ending food waste would go a long way to feeding the world’s population.
Europe is way ahead of us when it come to reducing food waste.
Nearly 2 million tonnes of food is wasted by the food industry every year in the U.K. alone. Of that waste, 250,000 tonnes is still edible, equating to roughly 650 million meals. When you consider the 8.4 million people in the U.K. struggling to afford to eat, there’s obviously a problem.
And that’s where the Danish-born Too Good To Go app comes in. The app, which is available in 11 countries in Europe, is simple: it connects users to stores, such as supermarkets, restaurants and bakeries, that have unsold, surplus food.
R3’s software assesses criminal records, as well as credit histories, employment experience and information self-reported by individuals, and produces a numeric indicator for each individual predicting future trends. Scores run from 300 to 850, to mimic the standard framework for conventional credit histories. The higher the number, the less risky the person.
Gina Périer and Alexander Egebjerg have designed an industrial-standard female toilet for festivals and outdoor events that allows people to pee sitting down quickly and safely.
Named Lapee, the pink plastic structure has three urinals arranged in a spiral, with curving back rests that provide privacy while allowing the user to remain aware of their surroundings.
All of these, even Lapee, have the potential to create major change in our world.
Ask any entrepreneur about their idea and at some point most will claim it will “change the world” in some way — such as making it easier to hook up.
But some truly want to change the world֫ — or at least help save it.
And not all are young, nor are they techies.
One of the most impressive I’ve heard about recently is Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an Indonesian designer, and his two colleagues, Denny Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa.
Kotahatuhaha’s team set out to create a prototype for the “re-iceberg-isation” of parts of the Arctic by freezing seawater into hexagonal blocks of ice that nest together to form new ice floes.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,