Great blog post by about Google Glass by Jason Calcanis.
I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:
Take. Them. Off.
First, you look like an idiot.
Second, you’re killing the party.
Third, are you recording me right now?!?
Great, illuminating post. Worth reading in full.
Needs to be taken with the mandatory dose of salt but still…. If autonomous vehicles do become an everyday reality, then lots of other things will start to change.
While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”
Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.
A test of Google’s self-driving car.
Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.
As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.
So the answer to the question is: a definite maybe (as Sam Goldwyn used to say).
Very judicious New Yorker comment piece about the Snowden revelations by Henrik Hertzberg. I was particularly struck by this passage:
The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen. But that does not mean that no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and a democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity.
On May 23rd, President Obama made clear in a passionate speech his readiness to reconceive the so-called war on terror. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” he said. One aspect of that struggle, “expanded surveillance,” he said, raises “difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.” Given the month’s disclosures, Mr. President, you can say that again.
He’s right. The harm is civic in the first instance.
This morning’s Observer column.
The best is the enemy of the good,” said Voltaire. It’s a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire’s rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best. Which is why working for him was such an exhausting business and also why Apple’s products became so distinctive.
As it happens, Voltaire’s maxim may also be useful in explaining what will happen in the field of autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving cars…
This morning’s Observer column.
Instagram filters represent an interesting contemporary phenomenon – what one might call analogue nostalgia. Digital technology enables anyone to take photographs that are – technically – flawless, in the sense of being sharply focused and properly exposed. Some cameras even have features such as smile detectors so that they won’t shoot until they detect at least a rictus grin. They have elaborate systems for controlling or eliminating the “red eye” effect of direct flash photography. And, of course, if you don’t get a satisfactory picture first time you can keep going until you get something that looks acceptable on the camera’s LCD screen.
All of this would have seemed like attaining Nirvana to earlier generations of (analogue) photographers. And yet the popularity of things such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Pixlr-o-matic and other apps for creatively mangling photographs suggests that the effortless perfection offered by digital technology has come to seem, well, boring. So just as painters abandoned realism once photography arrived, Instagrammers, Hipstamaticians et al now seek ways of creatively degrading their imagery so that it looks different, arty or just plain cool.
Hmmm… Not sure how seriously I take this.
Credit Suisse released a report on Friday about the outlook for the wearable technology market arguing that it’s already a $3-$5 billion market today and claiming that in the next two to three years it could increase to $30-$50 billion.
That means more smartwatches, fitness monitors, shoes, and headsets.
Smartphones are one of the key driving forces behind the expected growth in wearable tech, acting as a hub that keeps all of our devices connected. Over time, wireless devices will become even more popular as hardware improves, and sensors and batteries get better.
With Apple and Google dominating the install base of smartphone operating systems — iOS and Android respectively — they are in two of the best positions to leverage the wearable tech market.
Here are some key stats and info from the report:
There are more than 250 million installed mobile operating systems that can support wearable technology.
An iWatch could generate $10 billion a year in revenue with an EPS of $3.30. There are currently only nine smartwatches available today.
Watches are a $56 billion market.
Regarding retail impact, Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour have best leveraged wearables to enhance the fitness experience and efficacy of their products.
The health and fitness market is about $2-$3 billion.
By 2020, batteries are expected to be 2.2x more powerful.
I smell boosterism here.
This morning’s Observer column.
For a long time, the world looked upon quantum physicists with a kind of bemused affection. Sure, they might be wacky, but boy, were they smart! And western governments stumped up large quantities of dosh to enable them to build the experimental kit they needed for their investigations. A huge underground doughnut was excavated in the suburbs of Geneva, for example, and filled with unconscionable amounts of heavy machinery in the hope that it would enable the quark-hunters to find the Higgs boson, or at any rate its shadowy tracks.
All of this was in furtherance of the purest of pure science – curiosity-driven research. The idea that this stuff might have any practical application seemed, well, preposterous to most of us. But here and there, there were people who thought otherwise (among them, as it happens, Richard Feynman). In particular, these visionaries wondered about the potential of harnessing the strange properties of subatomic particles for computational purposes. After all, if a particle can be in two different states at the same time (in contrast to a humdrum digital bit, which can only be a one or a zero), then maybe we could use that for speeded-up computing. And so on.
LATER: Gary Marcus has a nice sceptical piece about quantum computing in the New Yorker.
This morning’s Observer column.
Although there are already some very sophisticated applications of 3D printing in industry (in aircraft manufacture, for example), most of the stuff produced by 3D printing in the public domain looks pretty naff to the layperson’s eye. The Texas gun, for example, looks naive and unsophisticated when compared to, say, a Walther PPK. One can just imagine James Bond’s incredulous sneer if Q were to offer it to him.
But for those who have followed the work of Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen over the years, the sheer crudity of the printed object is what rings bells because it evokes the possibility of disruptive change…
LATER: It turns out that the Feds are onto it:
On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”
This is interesting — a working handgun produced by a 3D printer. “I’m seeing a world where technology says you can pretty much be able to have whatever you want. It’s not up to the political players anymore,” said Cody Wilson, the head of the Texas-based outfit which made the weapon. Cue Shock! Horror! reactions. For example:
Defense Distributed plans to make the blueprints for the almost entirely plastic firearm (only the firing pin is metal) available online, worrying political players including Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who on Sunday reportedly called the possibility of mass production of untraceable weapons “stomach-churning.” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., last month introduced the Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, which would extend the ban on non-detectable weapons and add language concerning 3D-printed guns. “Security checkpoints, background checks and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print their own plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,” Israel said in a statement, according to the New York Daily News. Wilson has said before that he views Defense Distributed’s project as “vital” and a censorship issue.
So is this an example of technological determinism gone mad? Well, maybe. But Alex Hern’s piece in the Guardian takes a more measured stance.
The Liberator is a more serious prospect. All of the necessary parts can be printed from a 3D printer except for the metal firing pin, which is made from a single nail. (In order to comply with US laws, the gun as produced also has a 175g chunk of steel inside it, so that it doesn’t evade metal detectors). It is a fullblown gun, and recognisably so.
But technologically, it’s still simple. That’s because the principle behind a gun isn’t too tricky: load a bullet into a reinforced tube, and whack the back of it hard. That’s an engineering problem street gangs in the 1950s managed to solve with wood, antenna housings and elastic bands, building “zip guns” to shoot at each other; and it’s also the basis for converted air rifles and cap guns. The difficult stuff – getting it to fire accurately, repeatedly and without jamming or blowing up in your face – is still a long way off for 3D printers. And even the best 3D-printed gun still relies on someone else to make the gunpowder.