Category Archives: Technology

Realism about self-driving cars

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As readers of my Observer column know, I regard the Google self-driving car project as very significant for a number of reasons. One is that it signals a need to re-examine our assumptions about what machines can and cannot do. (I had hitherto assumed that driving was a task that only a human could do with reasonable safely.) The other is that the technology could have a devastating (and as yet undiscussed) impact on employment. (Millions of people earn their living from driving; and in many cultures it’s a route to first employment for immigrants — c.f. New York taxi-drivers.) This Business Insider piece is useful not because it undermines that logic, but because it puts the astonishing success of the technology into perspective by highlighting the circumstances in which self-driving cars can run into difficulties.

The first challenge is driving in snow.

When snow is on the road, the cars often have a tough time “seeing” the lane markers and other cues that they use to stay correctly positioned on the road. It will be interesting to see how the Google team sorts that one out. [Yes, but human drivers have the same problems, as I know from my own experience driving on East Anglian roads in a blizzard.]

A second challenge, apparently, is when the car encounters a change in a road that is not yet reflected in its onboard “map.” In those situations, the car can presumably get lost, just the way a human can. [In this case a human copes better — I know because I have an outdated SatNav map which sometimes has me driving through open fields on new motorway sections.]

A third challenge is driving through construction zones, accident zones, or other situations in which a human is directing traffic with hand signals. The cars are excellent at observing stop signs, traffic lights, speed limits, the behavior of other cars, and other common cues that human drivers use to figure out how fast to go and where and when to turn. But when a human is directing traffic with hand signals–and especially when these hand signals conflict with a traffic light or stop sign–the cars get confused.

(Imagine pulling up to an intersection in which a police officer is temporarily directing traffic and overriding a traffic light. What should the car pay attention to? How should the car be “taught” to give the police officer’s hand signals more weight than the traffic light? How should the car interpret the hand signals, which are often different from person to person? And what if the cop is just pointing at you and yelling, which happens frequently in intersections in New York?)

According to an engineer (not a Googler) who was involved in the conversation I had about this latter challenge, none of these problems are insurmountable. But they’re certainly interesting. One of the other interesting points made in the article is that insurance premiums might one day be higher for human-driven vehicles, because they will be, statistically, less ‘safe’.

The vision behind Google Glass

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This morning’s Observer column.

What endears the Google Glass project to me is that it’s the latest instalment in a long and honourable tradition in computer science. It goes all the way back to one of the great luminaries of the business, Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse and was a pioneer in networked computing and the design of graphical user interfaces. (In December 1968, in San Francisco, he gave a live demonstration of what networked computing could do that had a profound influence on the people who built the internet and much of the technology we use today.)

What motivated Engelbart from the outset was a passionate belief that computers had the power to augment, rather than replace, human capabilities. Machines, he believed, should do what machines do best, thereby freeing up humans to do what they do best. And this idea of “augmentation” has inspired a good deal of research in the decades since Engelbart embarked on his mission to change the world.

Gove’s decision

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This morning’s Observer column.

Michael Gove is possibly the most unpopular minister in the government, but on Wednesday he made a courageous and enlightened decision. On that day, the Department for Education announced that computer science will be included in the science options for the Ebacc (English baccalaureate), which is one of Mr Gove’s keystone reforms of the school curriculum. Given the amount of hostility there is to these reforms, this development attracted little attention, but in the long run it could turn out to be a really big deal.

Why? Because it signals a determination to undo an educational disaster that’s been running for decades in British schools – the ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum. This was based on the idea that most of what the young needed to be taught about computing was how to use software. In practice, this turned out to be learning how to use Microsoft Office. For both the schoolchildren who had to endure this, and the teachers who had to instruct them, this was a demoralising and dysfunctional experience. Kids would come home from school complaining (as my children did): “Dad, you’ll never guess what we had to do today – PowerPoint!” The result was that ICT became the educational world’s equivalent of a toxic brand.

HMV and the perils of shipping atoms to ship bits

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Long ago in his book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte drew attention of the absurdity of “shipping atoms to ship bits” – for example using plastic discs as the medium for conveying bitstreams from recording studios to consumers’ audio systems. Now I know that hindsight is the only exact science, but given that music went digital with the advent of the Compact Disc in 1982, and the Internet (which in this context is essentially a global machine for getting bitstreams inexpensively from one place to another) was switched on in January 1983, from that moment onwards businesses that were based on shipping those atoms were destined for a rocky future.

That future took some time to materialise, of course. The Net wasn’t an immediate threat in 1983 because in the 1980s the only people who had access to the network were researchers in pretty exotic labs. But even there one could see harbingers of things to come; for example, in the 1980s some of those researchers were digitising music and sharing it across the network, just as they shared other types of file. But then the pace quickened: the advent of the Web in 1991 — and particularly of the first graphical browser in 1993 — began to turn the Internet into a mainstream phenomenon; MP3 compression technology crunched music files to a tenth of their original size, thereby making them much easier to transfer; Shawn Fanning wrote software (Napster) that made it easy for ordinary folks to share music files and — Bingo! — the die was cast. (For a fuller version of the story see From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg.)

So today’s news that the High Street music store HMV is going into Administration has been a long time coming, but really it’s been on the cards for a long time. There are reports that the music/movie industry will try to rescue it. If true, then that merely confirms how poorly managed those industries are.

The baroque Net

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Dumb network, smart applications” was the mantra that they [the designers of the Internet] used to express the philosophy that all of the ingenuity should be left to those people developing applications at the edges of the network.

These turned out to be very good ideas. They enabled the “organic” growth of the network to happen. And they triggered an explosion of creativity as smart people thought up clever applications that the network could be used for. Some of these applications (for example the web) were beneficial; some (viruses, worms, and malware generally) were destructive. And many (file-sharing) were somewhere in between. The consequence was that, over time, a network that was originally seamless and uncluttered came to be overlaid with a grotesque accumulation of add-ons and patches, to the point where it begins to resemble a baroque excrescence rather than a classical design.

This is beginning to concern some people whose job it is to worry about these things…

The ipad Mini: horses for courses

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I’m trying out the small iPad, following a rave endorsement by Jason Calcanis, who claimed that it had left his big iPad for dead. That’s not quite the way I see it: my big iPad is doing just fine. But the Mini would have left my Nexus 7 for dead if it hasn’t been dead already. (It went blank a few days ago after running out of juice, and all attempts to resuscitate it have failed. So it’s going back whence it came.)

Even if the Nexus had stayed alive, however, it was doomed in my eyes, mainly because of the shape. For while it did fit easily in a jacket pocket, I found the aspect ratio hopeless for reading web pages. Some things worked brilliantly on it — Gmail, for example (hardly surprising since it is after all a Google device). And I liked the way Evernote is integrated into the Android environment. But the virtual keyboard was — for me at any rate — almost unusable. And I found that the touchscreen was erratic: there were times when it took umpteen taps to get it to do anything. The battery life was also inadequate compared to the ten hours that the iPad consistently delivers.

The iPad Mini seems, therefore, an improvement. Its most noticeable feature is the weight — it feels much lighter than its big brother. And, objectively speaking, it is: 308g compared to 662g. This matters when using it as an eReader — and I read Kindle books on iPads much more frequently than I read them on the Kindle itself. The big iPad is just too heavy to use as an eReader in bed. For many people (Nick Bilton, for example), it seems that the weight difference is the critical factor.

Some reviewers have complained that the Mini’s screen is significantly inferior to the Retina display of the big iPad. Well, it is certainly inferior in the sense that it’s a pre-Retina technology, but actually for most of my purposes (with one big exception — see below) the display is fine. And strangely, I find the smaller screen keyboard easier to use than the bigger one. Can’t explain why, but my typing on the Mini screen is much more accurate.

My other requirement — for a device that can fit into a pocket — is mostly satisfied by the Mini. At any rate, it slips fairly easily into most of my suit jackets. This is often useful because although it’s only a Wi-Fi model I use my phone as a modem and therefore don’t need to carry the bag that my big iPad necessitates.

In comparing the two iPads and reading the online arguments about which is better I’m struck by the thought that the answer will be different for each individual. It depends on what you use these devices for. In my case, I use the big iPad a lot for writing, and with the Logitech keyboard cover it’s very good for that. And I also use it for intermediate processing of photographs before uploading them to Flickr or sending them out, and for that purpose the Retina display is simply wonderful.

But really the physical properties of the device are only part of the story. For example, one reason why I found the Nexus unsatisfactory (in addition to my problems with the virtual keyboard and the touchscreen) was simply that I couldn’t reproduce on it the software ecosystem that I have built up round my Apple devices. I need that ecosystem for the work that I do, and it works just fine on the Mini. Sad but true: I’m pretty dependent on the services provided in my (luxuriously-padded and skeuomorphic) Apple cell.

So, what it comes down to is the old adage: horses for courses.

Farwell then, netbooks: it was nice knowing you

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Nice piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian on the rise and fall of something that was once the New New Thing. Conclusion:

Netbooks had a short but interesting life – going from the one-time saviour of the PC industry, to just another mispriced attempt to push some low-powered Intel chips and garner more money for Microsoft.

But the squeeze on pricing, plus the fact that Windows licences aren’t free, meant that they got pushed into a tiny niche: worse specifications than slightly pricier laptops, no margin for the manufacturers, and worse battery life and portability than the burgeoning number of tablets with custom apps.

The questions that do remain is what’s going to happen to the various government contracts in countries such as Greece and Malaysia to equip schools with netbooks – or whether those contracts have finished, or been discontinued.

What, too, about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project? Essentially, it’s trying to get netbook-like devices to classrooms in developing countries. There hasn’t been much news of huge wins this year, though, going by its end-of-year blogpost. Perhaps it will function independently of the death of consumer netbooks.

So farewell, netbooks. It was nice knowing you, but ultimately, you were just another PC.

One of the most marked differences between the technology and old-media industries is the speed with which product categories come and go. The Netbook is a classic case-study of this.

One big question: Google still seems to be pushing its Chromebook.