Results for “driverless car” 101 found
In tech, we fear what we can’t control
That is the topic of my new Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Like drones, driverless cars possess some features of an especially potent scare story. They are a new and exciting technology, and so stories about them get a lot of clicks. We don’t actually know how safe they are, and that uncertainty will spook people above and beyond whatever is the particular level of risk. Most of all, driverless cars by definition involve humans not feeling in direct control. It resembles how a lot of people feel in greater danger when flying than driving a car, even though flying is usually safer. Driverless cars raise a lot of questions about driver control: Should you be allowed to sleep in the backseat? Or must you stay by the wheel? That focuses our minds and feelings on the issue of control all the more.
And:
The recent brouhaha over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (read here and here) reflects some similar issues. Could most Americans clearly and correctly articulate exactly what went wrong in this episode? Probably not, but people do know that when it comes to social networks, their personal data and algorithms, they don’t exactly feel in control. The murkiness of the events and legal obligations is in fact part of the problem.
When I see a new story or criticism about the tech world, I no longer ask whether the tech companies poll as being popular (they do). I instead wonder whether voters feel in control in a world with North Korean nuclear weapons, an erratic American president and algorithms everywhere. They don’t. Haven’t you wondered why articles about robots putting us all out of work are so popular during a time of full employment?
We are about to enter a new meta-narrative for American society, which I call “re-establishing the feeling of control.” Unfortunately, when you pursue the feeling rather than the actual control, you often end up with neither.
Do read the whole thing.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Sam Harris interviews Robin Hanson.
2. I still find the Cambridge Analytica story confusing. This article is useful, but it heightens my confusion too. Who exactly did what wrong? And I don’t think I agree with the framing of this Michael Dougherty piece, but it does pose some useful questions. Here is the Bershidsky take.
3. “Ask a child to draw a scientist, and she’s more likely than ever to draw a woman.”
4. Megan is skeptical about the greater safety of driverless cars.
Friday assorted links
2. Are driverless cars overrated?
3. What is it like to run someone over with a train?
4. The micro-sociology of planning mass killings.
5. “Ms. Brewer, 33, and her understudy, Edward Barbanell, 40, are thought to be the only known performers with Down syndrome to play the lead in an Off Broadway or Broadway theater production.” NYT link here.
Monday assorted links
Monday assorted links
1. How to make America great again.
2. “We want to give the impression of every aspect of dinosaur life.”
3. “Habitual sub eater may move lunch spot because of Tonawanda resident’s gripe.”
4. Church of England fund is top world performer (FT).
5. Pittsburgh is no longer so thrilled with Uber driverless cars (NYT).
6. The forthcoming sand shortage? (New Yorker).
When Labor is Cheap
Labor is cheap in India which leads to some differences from the United States.
The first couple of times I took a taxi to a restaurant I was surprised when the driver asked if I wanted him to wait. A waiting taxi would be an unthinkable expense for me in the United States but in India the drivers are happy to wait for $1.50 an hour. It still feels odd.
The cars, the physical capital, in India and the United States are similar so the low cost of transportation illustrates just how much of the cost of a taxi is the cost of the driver and just how much driverless cars are going to lower the cost of travel.
Everything can be delivered.
Every mall, hotel, apartment and upscale store has security. It’s all security theatre–India is less dangerous than the United States–but when security theatre can be bought for $1-$2 an hour, why not?
Offices are sometimes open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not that anyone is in the office, just that with 24 hour security there is no reason to lock up, so the office physically stays open.
Every store has an abundance of staff. This one is puzzling since it results in worse service. Even in a tiny store, for example, it’s common to have one person tabulate the bill and then hand it to another person to ring you up. My guess is that this is an anti-theft procedure for the owner as it then requires two to collude to rip the owner off.
At offices, cleaning staff are on permanent hire so they come not once or twice a week but once or twice an hour. The excessive (?) cleanliness of the private spaces makes the contrast between private cleanliness and public squalor all the more striking.
Friday assorted links
1. The great (media) unbundling. And should Disney buy Netflix?
2. Japan’s hi-tech toilets to get standardized symbols.
3. Drive driverless cars for a living (those new service sector jobs).
4. Some Trump budget proposals, including eliminating the NEA and NEH. And detailed (but still incomplete) analysis of the proposed tax reform, from Treasury.
5. More on the new French Polynesian floating city, including the tourist angle.
6. Robert Shiller says stock prices will fall, at least he is taking a stand.
Thursday assorted links
1. The Paris Review archives are now on-line.
2. Should Facebook enter China? And China vows to dig more coal (NYT). And first but not last Chinese Hugo award. And were China’s “missing girls” simply unregistered?
3. The punishment culture that is Canada.
4. Hacking your home by ultrasound. And can you make any car a driverless car with a hack?
Solve for the equilibrium are British people really like this?
The first self-driving cars to be operated by ordinary British drivers will be left deliberately unmarked so that other drivers will not be tempted to “take them on”, a senior car industry executive has revealed.
One of the biggest fears of an ambitious project to lease the first autonomous vehicles to everyday motorists is that other road users might slam on their brakes or drive erratically in order to force the driverless cars into submission, he said.
This is why the first 100 self-driving 4×4 vehicles to be leased to motorists as part of a pilot scheme on busy main roads into London will look no different than other Volvos of the same model, said Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars. The scheme will start in 2018.
Americans wouldn’t talk this way:
One driver interviewed for the survey said: “I’ll be overtaking all the time because they’ll be sticking to the rules.”
Another said: “They are going to stop. So you’re going to mug them right off. They’re going to stop and you’re just going to nip around.”
Here is more, via Michelle Dawson.
Addendum: Via Anecdotal, here is an Australian perspective:
Well, I am here to tell you: that’s OK. We’ve all had it drummed into us from infancy that humans bullying cars = bad.
But we can’t let our bourgeois notions of propriety in auto-human interactions stop us from letting out our inner Johnny from Karate Kid.
We must, rather, get on with the vital and necessary work of bullying, haranguing and insulting these contraptions every chance we get. Because I cannot stress this enough: these cars must not be allowed to develop self-esteem.
From another corner of the world, I can tell you that Kiwis do not drive as politely as they talk.
Shout it from the rooftops, Protestant Uber freedom edition
Our findings provide empirical evidence that ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease the traffic congestion after entering an urban area.
Here is the paper, by Li, Hong, and Zhang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Kevin also directs our attention to this paper by Arye Hillman & Niklas Potrafke:
Simple correlations show that Protestantism is associated with economic freedom, Islam is not, with Catholicism in between. The Protestant ethic requires economic freedom. Our empirical estimates, which include religiosity, political institutions, and other explanatory variables, confirm that Protestantism is most conducive to economic freedom.
By the way, here is my earlier column on the benefits of Uber, one product of economic freedom. By the way, do not try this driverless car trick at home.
Hail GMU’s visionary, Dan Klein
I will second Bryan Caplan’s post:
Last week, my colleague Dan Klein kicked off the Public Choice Seminar series. During the introduction, I recalled some of his early work. But only after did I realize how visionary he’s been.
In 1999, when internet commerce was still in its infancy, Klein published Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct. Seventeen years later, e-commerce towers before us, resting on a foundation of reputational incentives – everything from old-fashioned repeat business to two-sided smartphone reviews.
In 2003, long before Uber, Airbnb, or serious talk of driverless cars, Klein published The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues. This remarkable work explores how technological change keeps making old markets failures – and the regulations that arguably address them – obsolete. (Here’s the intro, co-authored with Fred Foldvary). Fourteen years later, the relevance of Klein’s thesis is all around us. Transactions costs no longer preclude peakload pricing for roads, decentralized taxis and home rentals, or full-blown caveat emptor for consumer goods. So why not?
I’m not going to say that Klein caused these amazing 21st-century developments. But he did foresee them more clearly than almost anyone. Hail Dan Klein!
Some of Dan’s work, and later work (much of which is covered at MR), you will find here and here. For instance, his later work on academic bias also was well ahead of its time and prefigured subsequent events, so this is actually a running streak.
Friday assorted links
1. The economics of cyberextortion. Piddling returns, maybe the cost is low too.
3. What is it that former CEA economists all agree upon?
4. Department of Why Not?: artillery to fight forest fires. And report reveals staggering scale of iguana problem the culture that is Cayman.
5. Can driverless cars handle Pittsburgh bridges?
Nascent insurance markets in everything
…at least one insurer seems to sense an opportunity where others fear to tread. In what appears to be an unprecedented move, a British insurance company has begun offering a special policy designed for autonomous and partly automated vehicles. In theory, you could use this on your Google driverless car or your Tesla that’s equipped with autopilot.
Unfortunately, it’s only available in Britain. But the policy protects against all of the usual things you would find in your typical car insurance — damage, fire, theft. And it also goes further, covering accidents caused by malfunctions in the car’s driverless systems even if the passenger has failed to use a manual override. It covers any havoc that hackers may wreak on a car’s operating system. It applies to cars even if they haven’t been updated to the latest software. And it even covers mishaps that may occur if your car loses satellite or other crucial connectivity.
From Brian Fund here is the full story.
What would a recovery path for the American middle class look like?
I am not predicting this scenario, but it is useful to think through which paths might restore the growth gains to the American middle class. From my column in The Upshot, here is the section on China:
Much of the competition for American manufacturing has come from China, and recent research has shown that China’s economic impact in the United States has been bigger than many economists initially thought, and in some ways, it has been more painful. China’s manufacturing has held down American middle-class wages, while soaring Chinese demand for commodities has pushed up resource prices. Of course, cheap Chinese imports have made American paychecks go further, but that is no consolation for people who have lost their jobs or suffered lower wages as a consequence.
Better times may be ahead, though. Higher wages in China — and other emerging nations — are now limiting the competitive advantage of those economies. And perhaps more important for Americans, as China reaches technological maturity, it is likely to shower innovations on consumers, creating a net gain for people in the United States.
China is already the major producer of solar panels and electric cars, for example. It is likely to contribute important innovations in consumer drones and driverless cars and in many other fields: The Chinese government is pouring immense resources into biotechnology, including new gene editing techniques. When it comes to mobile apps, messaging and electronic payments, China is arguably ahead of America. Imagine a future in which Chinese innovations benefit Americans just as the United States benefited Europe and vice versa.
This would mean more competition from China, of course, and lost jobs in some fields, but to simply focus on the negatives would be shortsighted. The reality is that innovators do not capture all or even most of the benefits they bring to the world. Once an idea emerges, its benefits begin to expand, and those benefits will surely spread to the United States.
I believe China will become much more innovative even if Chinese growth goes through continuing turmoil; keep in mind the United States was remarkably innovative in the 1930s throughout the Great Depression.
The column also considers skill-based technical change, and how it might turn more toward less skilled workers, and also…religion and Mormons.