Tag: autonomous vehicles

Ransomware and innovation – links of the week

A Friday afternoon outbreak of ransomware dominated the week’s links along with the ethics of driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

Last week finished with a big bang as the Wannacry ransomware attack spread around the world with a curious twist which led one New York Times columnist to suggest software companies need to take more responsibility on security.

In the meantime the world goes on companies still struggling with the definition of innovation and Facebook crushing anyone who dares to try out-innovating them.

On a lighter note, Cary Grant spend much of his Hollywood years on LSD but it all turned out well and VentureBeat asks do humans have a role in a world run by Artificial Intelligence?

The future of humans

Is there a future for humans in a world run by artificial intelligence controlled robots? Venture Beat staged a panel in New Orleans that looks at where we fit into the automated world.

Ultimately the panel concluded, it’s up to us to make some serious choices. Something we shouldn’t leave to engineers.

The ethics of driverless cars

Autonomous vehicles should give priority to occupant over passers by in the case of an emergency suggests a Mercedes Benz engineer.

Christoph von Hugo, Mercedes’s manager of driver assistance systems, probably hasn’t helped the development of autonomous vehicles with his comments but the ethics of driverless vehicles is a discussion we should be having.

Defining innovation

Innovation is very simple, it’s about trying new ideas says Pete Williams, Deloitte Australia’s chief edge officer.

“You need ideas, they need to be new, new for you. If everyone in the world is doing something and you haven’t done it and you do it for the first time, you’re innovating. You’ve got to try stuff. Not just have new ideas, you’ve got to try stuff. Innovation is something you do,” he said.

Rethinking public transport

British transport app Citymapper is to launch its own ‘popup’ bus service in London with the promise of a modern and user friendly operation. An interesting twist for a software service.

“There will be a large screen that shows riders where they are in real time, and what’s coming up on the route — similar to how its smartphone app works. And they also have USB charging ports.”

Snapchat feels the market chill

One the darling unicorns of the tech industry, Snap, reported its first results as a listed company and the results were not good as Facebook’s shameless copying of the service’s features takes its toll.

Sadly Facebook seems to be following the Amazon playbook of crushing upcoming competitors that refuse to be bought out. This is a part of a broader problem with modern American capitalism.

What is Wannacry

Security researcher par excellence, Troy Hunt, gives a full run down on the Wannacry ransomware and how to combat it.

Towards the end of his article he has a list of eight actions computer users – from major organisations to households can do to protect their systems. Depressingly these are exactly what the computer tech support industry has been telling people to do for the past twenty years.

Wannacry’s accidental hero

An anonymous British IT security researcher realised the malware has a ‘kill switch’ – so he activated it. He does have an important message for computer users though.

“This is not over. The attackers will realise how we stopped it, they’ll change the code and then they’ll start again. Enable windows update, update and then reboot.”

An age of insecure machines

One of things that might bring down an AI controlled world is insecure machines as Wannacry shows. In the New York Times technology commentator Zeynep Tufekci suggests we can’t stop the wave of attacks taking advantage of systems running out of date software and vendors need to take responsibility.

“It is time to consider whether the current regulatory setup, which allows all software vendors to externalize the costs of all defects and problems to their customers with zero liability, needs re-examination.”

100 trips in tinseltown

Cary Grant got through his Hollywood years by microdosing on LSD claims a new documentary. When he retired from the movies he quit the speed and lived happily every after.

Interestingly, microdosing is one of the strategies used by today’s Silicon Valley workers to get by in their stressful and demanding roles. Some things never change.

Earworm of the week

Human bullies and autonomous vehicles

Will humans bully robots as they appear on our roads in our communities?

What happens when drivers encounter autonomous vehicles on the highways?

Conventional wisdom is the roads will be carnage as logically thinking robots literally collide with irresponsible humans.

The Chief Executive of Mercedes-Benz America has a different take, it may be that humans quickly learn to bully safety conscious and law abiding autonomous vehicles on the road.

Speaking at a motoring conference in Las Vegas, Dietmar Exler suggested the immediate future will see aggressive drivers taking advantage of driverless vehicles programmed to avoid collisions and risky situations.

This raises an interesting question – will autonomous vehicles actually make the roads less safe in the earlier days despite being safer themselves?

How humans interact with new technologies is never a certain thing, and the idea that people will bully robots is a delicious, and plausible idea. It does raise though some interesting possibilities as robots become common in our lives.

Attack of the killer drones

In the age of drones it’s going to take more than fences to keep out today’s technologically savvy trespassers.

We’ve heard much about the benefits of fun about drones – remote control aircraft – but what about the security and safety issues of the device. At the Black Hat Security conference today Jeff Melrose of the Yokogawa industrial controls company described the risks posed when bad people use these devices.

With typical consumer drones having a range of up to five kilometers the idea of an attacker needing to be physically close to their target no longers applies. A drone, as Melrose points out, can  can tailgate workers easier than people and even navigate within offices.

Fences are no barrier as Melrose showed with a camera equipped drone being able to fly up to valve within a gas field and then read its meter. The drone doesn’t even need to have to make it back, it could be landed on a roof where it quietly record its surroundings for weeks.

Put more than a camera on a drone, say a wireless packet sniffer or a jamming device and the possibilities for mischief are endless. Melrose illustrated this by starting his presentation with a video of The Killer Drone, a flying chainsaw developed by a pair of Finnish farmers.

Scarier still, was Melrose demonstration of the ‘target tracking’ technology included on the latest consumer drones by chasing one of his research assistants across a lawn. Despite the assistant’s best efforts to escape, the aircraft was able to follow her.

Despite the scary aspects of drone spying, vandalism and harassment the devices aren’t invulnerable. The two Finnish farmers had their drone brought down by a balloon and all the risks – from chainsaws to signal jammers – that drones present they themselves are vulnerable to.

Melrose’s demonstration shows how the physical security world is changing a drones become commonplace. Fences, padlocks and ‘keep out’ signs are not enough to keep today’s generation of technologically savvy trespassers.

Jeff Melrose’s presentation was a thought provoking view of how the threat landscape is changing and that risks evolve with technology.

Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Nuix

The dangers of hands free driving

The first death in a driverless car will raise questions about their safety and regulation

Last May 7 45-year-old Joshua Brown was killed when his car hit a truck just outside Willston, Florida. His Tesla was operating in ‘autopilot mode’ and he was the first death in a driverless car accident.

Now the investigation and the speculation into the Mr Brown’s unfortunate demise begin. It’s worth watching to see how the accident will change public perception and government regulation of autonomous vehicles.

What’s notable is Tesla are careful not to recommend leaving the car to its own devices, as The Verge reports.

Tesla reiterates that customers are required to agree that the system is in a “public beta phase” before they can use it, and that the system was designed with the expectation that drivers keep their hands on the wheel and that the driver is required to “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” Safety-critical vehicle features rolled out in public betas are new territory for regulators, and rules haven’t been set.

Another aspect that should concern users and regulators is Tesla’s software industry attitude towards liability and safety in dismissing the car’s flaws as being an unfortunate consequence of imperfect beta software. That may cut it in the world of Microsoft Windows 3.11 but it doesn’t cut it when lives are at stake in the motor industry.

Introducing Singapore’s driverless pod

Singapore starts to roll out driverless ‘autonomous pods’ for its public transport system

A while back we speculated on what the autonomous vehicle would look like, given that having a dashboard, steering wheel and even forward facing seats were no longer necessary if a car no longer has a driver.

It seems almost certain that the future driverless cars will take a very different form the vehicles we travel in today.

Now the Singaporean mass transit agency has unveiled its trial autonomous ‘pod’ that’s designed to carry 32 passengers.

How the pod integrates with other transport modes and interacts with general road users will be interesting to watch, but illustrates why thinking about the future of public transit has to look beyond apps.

The big question is how will these technologies change the economics of public transit and the behaviour of users. It seems we’re about to find out.

Making seniors mobile

Robotics and automation promise to improve mobility and extend our working lives

One of the understated benefits of automation and robotics is it allows the elderly and disabled more mobility.

Facing an aging population, the Japanese are unsurpringly ahead of the rest of the world in understanding this and, as the Wall Street Journal reports, researchers are investigating how driverless cars can help the elderly get around.

While autonomous vehicles of all sizes promise greater mobility to many people currently restricted in their access, robotics also promises to extend our working lives just as mechanisation has over the past two hundred years.

Thinking through the effects of autonomous vehicles

Driverless cars and autonomous vehicles are going to change the economy and workplace. Where will the jobs come from?

The defining technology of the Twentieth Century was the automobile. While there were many advancements – antibiotics, mains electricity and mass communications to name just three – nothing changed society to the same extent as the motor car.

A hundred years ago it was impossible for a pundit to appreciate how the motor car was about to change communities, the population’s increased mobility saw the suburbanisation of cities, the creation of the consumerist society and the rise of industries such as supermarkets and drive in theatres, none of which were foreseeable fifty years earlier.

Change didn’t happen in isolation, those new industries were the result of a number of changes in technology alongside the motor car, for instance the supermarket couldn’t have happened without refrigerators becoming household items along with radio and television developing new markets through the advertising industry.

Economic drivers

The biggest driving force was economic, once motor cars became affordable for the typical worker – just before World War II in the US and in the mid 1950s in most of rest of the Western world – the cost of travelling fell dramatically.

With the cost of moving around falling, workers had the opportunity to move out of the dirty, grimy inner city to new and clean suburbs where they could commute to their jobs in offices and factories. At the same time it also meant families could travel further to buy their groceries, forcing the end of the cornershop and the milkman.

Autonomous vehicles change those economics again, as Uber founder Travis Kalanick pointed out last year, the most expensive item in a taxi or Uber fare is the driver.

During his interview at the Code Conference Kalanick went on to describe how eliminating the driver changes the economics.

“When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.”

Changing ownership

The assumption in today’s discussions about autonomous vehicles is that car ownership will become and thing of the past, something that fits into Travis Kalanick’s view.

Should that be the case then a whole range of new industries open up. Who owns the cars, who dispatches the cars, who plans for peak and normal usage are just a few questions and opportunities that open for savvy entrepreneurs.

A changing concept of ownership doesn’t come without problems, not least who owns the code controlling the vehicles and the data being generated which in turn raises privacy issues.

Loss of jobs

The obvious other question with driverless vehicles is what happens to all the taxi drivers, couriers and long haul truckers as automobiles no longer require operators.

With truck driving being the dominant occupation in most US states, employing 1.8 million workers according to the Bureau of Labor Studies, this is a serious question. Interestingly the BLS forecasts employment to grow five percent per annum over the rest of the decade.

That scale of  job losses hasn’t been unusual over the last century. The agricultural industry itself has seen a massive fall in employment in that time period with the proportion of Americans working in agriculture falling from half the population to a tenth of that.

Creating new industries

Obviously half the US working population didn’t end up being unemployed, with the many of those displaced by the motor vehicle – either in the agricultural sector or in those fields catering for the pre-motor car market – finding work in other fields.

That the economy adapted to the loss of jobs in what were traditional fields in 1915 gives us a clue to where the jobs and industries of the future are going to come from as the changing nature of the economy means new businesses are created.

As the economics of these industries change, we see the need for workers move further up the value chain. We also see those reduced costs open opportunities for new ideas, just as the supermarket concept took hold in the 1950s as the economics of household shopping changed.

This is where the greatest opportunity lies for today’s entrepreneurs lies, in figuring out how those reduced costs will change the way consumers and society use transportation. In turn that will drive the next wave of employment growth.

When autonomous vehicles and humans collide

The interaction between humans and autonomous vehicles is not turning out well so far

With the rapid advances in driverless cars, it was only a matter of time before the question of what happens when people encounter them would be answered.

It turns out not too well for the autonomous vehicles reports Bloomberg citing a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute that found driverless cars have accident rates double those of normal vehicles.

As it turns out, those accidents are usually minor and are caused by humans colliding with the autonomous vehicles as the law abiding computers catch drivers unawares.

That people aren’t very good at driving cars isn’t a surprise but now we’re seeing what happens when distracted, mistake prone humans encounter cautious and usually correct computers.

We now have to start thinking about what happens when artificial intelligence encounters human frailty.