Category: General

Future with driverless cars 3: Private cars

 

This is part three of a series on changes that driverless cars may bring. I expose some of the ideas I have, mostly quite practical things. We moved project troglodyte to it’s own website, so the more patent centric recap of the Google driverless car patents can be found from there.

Below I assume that the problem has been solved completely. Driverless cars can access any part of the road network, function even when there are people darting around and can handle any weather including lots of snow and very slippery conditions. Accident levels are same or lower than currently and people are not scared to use autonomous cars.

See also: Rental vs. taxi, Mass transportation, Pirvate cars, Cargo, Parking and driving empty, Zoning Traffic volume and Externalities

While there is a clear reduction on operating cost for taxis and public transportation, private cars will only get an initial premium to purchasing price. Economic benefits will be less direct, but as mentioned in another post renting the car out when it is not needed is clearly a possibility. It is difficult to tell if  this will drive taxi and rental car operators out of business or make more people start using public transportation and rent when traveling outside the coverage area of scheduled public transportation. The optimum solution will likely depend on how population is distributed in a certain area.

Not needing to drive the car is a benefit for many, but not all. According to wikipedia depending on the severity of motion 33 to 66 % of people are susceptible to motion sickness. This limits the number of people who can read or work during a car trip and thus also limits the benefit from a driverless car. Some people also enjoy driving a vehicle and wouldn’t want to give it up.

Not everybody can drive though and these individuals have most to gain from this development, in addition to public transportation they can have the option of owning a personal car. Beside some adults either unable or unwilling to drive, children and elderly are a large group that cannot or should not drive. As an example children under the age of 15 and elderly over the age of 75 make up about 25 % of the population in Finland*.

Adults under the influence of alcohol, medication or recreational substances is a group that will greatly benefit from automated cars for their transportation. There might be adverse health effects as being able to drive might be a sufficient reason to stop drinking after the weekend and this reason will be less powerful when there is no need to worry about driving.

Private cars are needed a couple of times during the day to go to work, get back home etc. These are also times when there is maximum need for transportation, so scaling the taxi fleet to meet that demand is likely not economical, even when the cost of the driver is removed from the equation. Many of the taxis would be idle for the rest of the time and not producing. Although this is probably the situation now for many taxis and certainly is for private cars.

Even if the rush hour peak in transportation need would be flattened this might not produce efficient use of the available cars in a case where private cars would be rented when not used by their owners. If housing and places of employment are at separate areas it takes some time for the vehicles to travel back to pick up the next passenger. Thus it looks like densely built areas with mixing of commercial and residential districts may benefit from a change to driverless vehicles. That however requires that the peak is wide enough to allow a vehicle to transport several consecutive passengers during one rush hour.

While vehicle size for public transportation is driven partly by the cost of the driver there is no such link for private cars. People usually want a car large enough that they can pack the whole family, including the dog and a canoe in to it. One reason for large vehicle size is safety, a large car with big mass experiences statistically smaller accelerations in accidents and can be safer than a smaller one. A big car likely also feels safer even if it might have inferior technology and actually be less safe. If automated cars live up to their promise and accident rates become lower there is the possibility that consumers may accept smaller cars.

Energy efficiency and operating cost are currently factors that drive private car size towards smaller vehicles. When the car can also drive by itself it is possible that the yearly distance travelled by the car will increase, this would also put emphasis on the  operating cost and make smaller cars more desirable.

It is also possible that a super mini, i.e. just one person, class emerges to enable sending the car on an errand by itself. The car could for example collect food from several places and bring it back home. But to be viable a car this small would likely also require some more traditional use to be economical.

Parking is a problem in many areas. It is infact an important reason for the use of public transportation. Here driverless cars will have a considerable effect. Currently parking space needs to be within a walkable distance from the place where the driver is heading. With driverless cars it is possible to drive to the closest point accessible with the car and the car can then find a parking space on its own.

While this will eliminate driving around to find a parking space, it can increase traffic close to points of interest and increase the overall distance driven as the cars may travel fairly far when optimizing between price of driving and the price of the parking space. This may lead to situations where for a short visit the vehicle is left to drive around so that it is almost immediately available for the owner. This in turn creates a need to put a price for the use of the road network, otherwise it might be cheaper to use a holding pattern than to park.

It might still be the case that every now and then an unseen situation is found which the car can not handle on its own. Remote operation may be used in these cases if the vehicle either does not have controls or the occupants are unqualified to operate it. For control only in rare circumstances basic controls may be enough, similar to game consoles or just an application using a touch screen. This off course requires upgrades in communications infrastructure as the road network currently covers some areas that have bad or no affordable ways to transmit for example video streams.

Acknowledgment:  Thanks to Laston Kirkland for thoughtful evaluation of these ideas.

Future with driverless cars 2: Mass Transportation

This is part two of a series on changes that driverless cars may bring. I expose some of the ideas I have, mostly quite practical things. We moved project troglodyte to it’s own website, so the more patent centric recap of the Google driverless car patents can be found from there.

Below I assume that the problem has been solved completely. Driverless cars can access any part of the road network, function even when there are people darting around and can handle any weather including lots of snow and very slippery conditions. Accident levels are same or lower than currently and people are not scared to use autonomous cars.

See also: Rental vs. taxi, Mass transportation, Pirvate cars, Cargo, Parking and driving empty, Zoning Traffic volume and Externalities

Just like the difference between rental cars and taxis will dissolve, mass transportation will also overlap more with taxis. This is because currently cost of drivers pushes public transportation towards larger vehicles and less frequent service. The larger the vehicle is, the smaller the change in cost structure as personnel costs become less important in trams and trains due to their larger passenger capacity. Smaller busses and more frequent operation will become a practical proposition.

While taxi traffic probably also scales nonlinearly this is certainly true for public transportation. More people travelling leads to more frequent operation, it will be easier to change between lines, journey times will be shorter and prices will be lower. This would seem to indicate that busses would benefit greatly from being able to operate autonomously. The optimum transition point between operating a bus or a tram/light rail would also likely be different. With current arrangements it is difficult to operate busses with very short intervals, as this leads to busses travelling right behind each other with some full and others empty. With smaller busses it would be possible to operate slightly different parallel routes if the geography of the area allows it. In many cases this is not possible and it would still be necessary to use a higher capacity transport mode.

Currently there seems to be a psychological limit for the minimum size of public transport, people don’t want to get into a small vehicle with strangers. There are some fully automated rail systems in operation and in many trains the operator is not able to intervene to assist if there is some trouble, so this doesn’t seem to be a big problem for large vehicles, but it can be a limiting factor for smaller ones.

Passenger density is larger for big vehicles and the possibility of some passengers standing during rush hour gives some flexibility in exchange to some discomfort. A large vehicle can also have large doors enabling fast boarding, this is an important factor for high throughput mass transportation with many stops. For very small vehicles the same road or rail network would still be able to handle less passengers despite the smaller headway enabled by the automation of the vehicles.

Vehicle costs also differ between small and large vehicles, small ones can be mass produced with fairly low cost, while larger ones likely have lower maintenance costs per capacity. Small vehicles can idle when not needed, but large ones need to run half empty during off peak hours. Most likely different solutions will be used in different environments to optimized between the comfort of small, even one person vehicles and the higher capacity of larger ones.

Acknowledgment:  Thanks to Laston Kirkland for thoughtful evaluation of these ideas.

Future with driverless cars 1: Rental vs. taxi

 

This is the first part of a series on changes that driverless cars may bring. I expose some of the ideas I have, mostly quite practical things. There may also be more profound changes on how people see the world but my looking glass is out of focus with such matters.

We moved project troglodyte to it’s own website, so the more patent centric recap of the Google driverless car patents can be found from there.

Below I assume that the problem has been solved completely. Driverless cars can access any part of the road network, function even when there are people darting around and can handle any weather including lots of snow and very slippery conditions. Accident levels are same or lower than currently and people are not scared to use autonomous cars.

See also: Rental vs. taxi, Mass transportation, Pirvate cars, Cargo, Parking and driving empty, Zoning Traffic volume and Externalities

The distinction between renting a car and taking a taxi will disappear. When a small car is needed it can be called for from any comms unit. It is possible that this will create a pressure to move away from the personal automobile affection as getting a rental car to any location is as easy as asking for a taxi as the rental can come to the renter and not vice versa. But this is not necessarily the case. There will still be a delay in getting the rental. This might not make a big difference for longer journeys taking several hours, but for shorter intra city traveling the difference might be too large.

When the road network extends very close to one or both ends of the trip journey times will be shorter than now for the rental (or a private) car as it can can pull up at the door and find a parking spot by itself after the passengers have left. A taxi is usually rented only for one leg of the journey at a time, but this is largely because of the cost of the driver. If a taxi was much cheaper many might want to get rid of the waiting in line by reserving the car for themselves in the same way a rental car is often rented for a longer period.

While a driverless taxi will be cheaper it  will of course lead to a massive reduction in the need for taxi drivers. There will likely still be some cases where a human might be needed, to help elderly or disabled passengers to get to the car etc. In these cases it might be economical to share one driver between several cars, for example if the customer is visiting a place where help is available at the other end the driver may change to another car on the way to assist someone else. The relative cost of a car with driver will be higher than now which will lead to pressure to reduce their use especially in cases of subsidised trips.

For a car of comparable size a driverless taxi will have a larger passenger capacity by at least one, possibly more as the seating arrangement can be made more freely. Because there is no driver to oversee the passengers, interior of the vehicle may need to be more durable, but on the other hand use of mass production models straight out of the factory is cheaper than using modified vehicles.

In some places offering taxi service is subject to licence. The rationale for this includes driver proficiency, health, reputation etc. It is difficult to see how such licences would be needed in the case of driverless taxis. This is likely to lead to more widespread secondary use of personal cars as taxis. While the owner is working or sleeping the car can drive around the town transporting passengers as needed. This will give a further advantage to those who can arrange their lives so that their traveling is off peak.

Acknowledgment:  Thanks to Laston Kirkland for thoughtful evaluation of these ideas.

Trolling on the human rights

If I were a patent troll, which universal human right would I start abusing next?

Patents and humanitarian activity (and how patents can kill humanitarian activity) have been covered on this blog before (see the SMOS project). I am in a slightly cynical mood, so I will now pretend to be a strategist for a patent troll (a “non-practicing entity”). How could I best abuse the world?

Note: I am NOT talking about the way big companies (like, say, Monsanto) are perhaps strong-arming the patent system. Compared to me, Monsanto are the good guys. They at least have at some point put some money into some R&D, and produce something. All I plan to do is to exploit quirks in the patent system.

I would want my target industries to have three key criteria:

  1. They have little or no experience with IPR, and none with trolls. The best attack is when the target has no idea what hit him.
  2. They produce things which every person needs to have. Ideally, things that are considered human rights. That way, the targets have no real option except to accede to my demands (or else break IP law).
  3. (Optional): Some type of vendor lock-in. This means that the customer is tied to one specific vendor for all his needs. Many people realize that the vendor can then abuse the customer at will. Most people do not realize that a troll can then abuse both the vendor and the customer at will.

An nice target list is provided by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially Articles 25-26.  There are many potential attacks, but here I will focus only on a few novel ideas.

Article 25.

  1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
  2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Food / clean water

This is where I would strike, first and foremost, no hesitation.  Water-purification technologies are the choicest target because they fulfill all key criteria (they are essential, people don’t expect attacks, and there are lock-ins). Some target markets (for example oil-rich desert countries) are rich enough to provide considerable blackmail money.

Methods to create potable drinking water would be my number one focus. It is a high-tech activity, with serious companies doing serious R&D work. An overly broad patent (either created now, or bought from a suitable player, or an fire sale after a bankruptcy) could be a major block.

I would target companies close to a breakthrough, and file/buy a huge number patents around the same area. Here’s a secret: It doesn’t really matter whether or not the patents are truly valid. All one needs to do is to strike at a strategic moment, and announce that one has a hundred patents which company X is infringing. This is a typical troll strategy.

The strategic moment: the instant a major water-cleaning plant has started providing water to a large city (Dubai, Nairobi, Mumbai, Dhaka). Even a brief court injunction on the operation of a key water plant could be problematic to a whole city. The blackmail potential is very high.

(Normally, one would expect a reasonable government to act like India in the medicine case discussed below, and simply ignore the blackmail and the the injunction. However, consider an extremely poor and corrupt country with the leading elite fully tied to foreign interests… it might not do the sane thing).

Water distribution would be even more fruitful, since it is in practice impossible to set up a competing water and sewage network overnight. There is a definite vendor lock-in in that business. However, the technology is so simple that there is little IPR to abuse.

Medical care

Medical care would be a lucrative area for attack, but… filing spurious patents is difficult in this area. The major drug manufacturers are well protected by patent thickets.  There is also an active backlash against medical patents, which means that criterion 1 is no longer satisfied. Everyone is expecting attacks. For example, India is banning branded drugs. Governments and NGOS’s are already on their toes, unlike the water case. I would pass on this.

Communications

I would put communications in this category as well. I am not the only one; the ITU (the telecommunications branch of the United Nations) is waking up to the patent wars in the telecoms industry, and their effect on innovation (see for example here). This war was also addressed in our SMOS project.

The ITU initiative is largely an attack on patent trolls. A cynic might expect that since the big companies have deep pockets to affect the process, and governments have their own telecom industries to protect, the end result will be an even deeper monopoly on development by a few megacompanies, with no benefit for poor countries. Time will show.

In any case, while trolling the telecoms industry is currently all the rage, the competition is getting harsh, there is little chance for a surprise attack, and a serious backlash is likely. I would look elsewhere.

Motherhood and childhood

Childhood diarrhea is one of the worst killers in the world, and could largely be avoided by providing clean water and saline solution. A patent on a particular type of saline solution could provide interesting leverage to an utterly sociopathic troll. However, in practice it is relatively easy for medical professionals to work around the IPR by substituting slightly different components. Thus, while intriguing, the work-arounds make trolling difficult.

Article 26.

  1.  Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
  2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
  3.  Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

(Distance) education

Low-cost distance learning technologies are interesting, especially as they provide a very low-cost alternative in extremely poor countries. The best course of attack would be cases where a given company has achieved an effective lock-in on the overall technology and has created a walled garden.

A walled garden means that one company controls all aspects of the material: the hardware, the software, and the content. Apple is the best-known example of this strategy,  followed perhaps by Microsoft and Google (whose lock-in does not extend fully to hardware though). The walled garden can create many type of problems for customers; for example, there have been cases where critically-needed applications have been pre-emptively deleted from the AppStore if Apple has feared litigation.

These companies have pockets deep enough to fight the trolls, but those same pockets can also bribe the trolls. I would frame the attack behind the scenes, making the problems appear to be the fault of the company, as in the AppStore case above. Since their brand names are absolutely crucial to them, they would be more  likely to pay off (though of course they also have armies of lawyers. The balance is difficult).

A public-service note: attacks like this could be avoided by using open-source solutions, or at least by minimizing vendor lock-in. A sure way to create problems of this type is to accept a walled garden, however attractive it might look in the short run.

Am I serious? Yes and no.

No. If I actually wanted to do this, I wouldn’t write about it. Profit is made by keeping absolutely silent and working in the shadows.

Yes. The basic principles are valid. The exact sample cases I’ve suggested might or might not work. I have outlined some techniques for avoiding attacks of this type (most importantly avoiding walled gardens), but where there is money, there will be trolls.

Rest assured: there are people out there thinking precisely along these lines. Globally, masses of people are now being downsized who have the competence for this, families to feed, and negotiable moral values.  (To be consistently cynical: I am among them. I could  be good at this. We all like to think we’re on the side of the angels, but we’re not).

If someone has good ideas on how to protect the world against them (us?), I would appreciate hearing those ideas.

UN

 

On teaching

Do elite nerds need any education? 

[Finnish version: click here]

Niko Porjo’s posting last week (Finnish only) raised some conflicting feelings. Summary: based on his own experiences when studying physics, Porjo strongly questioned whether lectures are an efficient type of teaching at all.  I found this argument compelling, given that it resonates with my own experiences.

Porjo then suggested, perhaps polemically, that it would be more efficient to get rid of most artificial and formal types of education. Learning by doing is the most efficient way, and theory should flow from the practical work rather than vice versa. I did not agree with this suggestion at all.

I believe Porjo may be right, but only within tight boundaries. It is true that sitting in compulsory classes is slow and inefficient, especially now that much of the information is available on the Net already. If someone wants to listen to good lectures, there are sites like  TEDx or the Khan Academy.

Whatever the field of study, the actual learning happens elsewhere, not in lectures. Physics requires vast amounts of exercises. Some subjects require massive amounts of reading and writing. In practical subjects, only the practical work teaches what the work really is.

I do not break any confidences if I say that Porjo is a gifted physicist and an extreme nerd (in the most positive sense of that term). He studied physics in Turku in the 90’s, and I studied physics in Helsinki in the 90’s. Although we only met at work in the 00’s, our student experiences are similar.

That is why I found Porjo’s skepticism about lectures so familiar, even heartwarming. I never got much out of lectures, even the good ones. I was mostly too fidgety to even sit in them, even the good ones. I did pass, and even got a PhD (though it took me exactly twenty years), but I was no academic star.

This was quite common in the University of Helsinki’s physics department in the 90’s. All the familiar faces sat at the cafeteria, not the lecture rooms. (Actually, the largest number of familiar faces sat at the library doing physics exercises. It is not possible to graduate in physics without undergoing a punishing regime of thousands of calculations. For every hour spent goofing off from lectures, I spent two hours doing exercises).

But — and here is the crux — we are talking about maybe a few dozen people. Not really an elite, but an unusual crowd. We spent our first kegger making physics calculations, even though there was beer on offer (no women though, for some reason). We spent all keggers that way, actually. Those were the days. The Big Bang Theory may be a parody of physicists, but it is a subtle parody.

What do the learning experiences of this crowd teach us about the ways in which education in Finland should be arranged?

Nothing.

The situation Porjo describes applies to a very specific group of Finns: introverted people who are voluntarily studying scientific or technical subjects. In practice, this group would teach itself the basics whether or not there was any formal teaching at all.

Should the world rotate around this group? It is trendy to suggest that a nation succeeds only if its cognitive elite succeeds. Give the top percent all the resources it needs, weed out the weak ones, and let Darwinism do its magic. The fittest will survive and save society.

I beg to disagree. A nation is on average as competent as its average citizens. Finland has no Nobel laureates, but even a mediocre engineer is quite good and well-rounded here. This is almost certainly one reason why the cell phone business rose so quickly in such a small country. A company could recruit almost anyone at random, and be reasonably sure that they were reasonably competent.

This business has now collapsed (see the Finnish-only blog by Timo Tokkonen), but the average competence means that people will learn to do something other than cell phones, although the transition will be painful. If all Finnish engineers were only trained to optimize Symbian code, we would be in trouble. Luckily, the educational system is well-rounded, at all levels.

So who should we focus on: the elite or the average? Porjo’s blog gives an immediate answer. The most gifted and motivated people will dig up their knowledge from under a rock, if they have to. All they need is Net access. After that there is no particular need to pamper them.

Resources should be put into providing a good well-rounded education for the average Finn. (In fact, I feel that a civilized society should give even its weakest members the best feasible education, even when it doesn’t seem to make quantitative economic sense. I have no rational defense for this idea, it is simply an ideology).

Since I know nothing about pedagogy, I don’t quite know what this means. Probably, it means that education must be quite structured, perhaps repetitive, and even include some formal discipline. It definitely cannot mean the type of anarchistic workaholism that got me and my friends through. But I am happy to leave the exact definitions to the professionals.

The key point is that in this debate, the experiences of people like Porjo and me are largely irrelevant. We have our place in the margins of society (an important place even). But in terms of the education debate, almost everyone else is more important.

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