What Google’s driving at

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Hmmm… Google is getting into the automobile business.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. The work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History.

Safety has been our first priority in this project. Our cars are never unmanned. We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software.

Glocer and the (layered) Orwellian future

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One of the chapters in my upcoming book has the title “Huxley vs. Orwell”, symbolising the fact that the visions of these two writers serve as bookends for scenarios about our online futures. So it’s interesting to see this rant by Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters setting out the Orwellian case.

Ultimately, I believe that the answer lies in creating a “super net” or overlay internet among trusted and authenticated institutions, akin to the role mil.net served for the US Department of Defense. We are slowly evolving from an unpoliced network of anonymous nodes to a multi-layered network of authenticated institutions and individuals. Just as individuals must be approved to receive a security clearance from their government, so can their machines be identified and approved. What emerges, need not be an Orwellian nightmare of government control. Rather, I can imagine a layered internet in which the nuclear arsenal is controlled by the highest and most secure level, the power grid, air traffic control and ATM networks are secured by a sufficiently robust next layer, but an open cyber frontier — a wild west — remains for individuals to roam free of government control and authentication, but also open to attack and abuse.

Interesting that the CEO of a major journalistic organisation (Thomson Reuters) believes that “what emerges need not be an Orwellian nightmare of government control”. Want to to bet? Since 9/11 I don’t think we’ve seen any government — authoritarian or ‘democratic’ — voluntarily turn its back on any opportunity for tighter control.

Andrew Marr attacks ‘inadequate, pimpled and single’ bloggers – Telegraph

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Extraordinary outburst by Andrew Marr at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

“Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism.”

Responding to a question from his audience at Cheltenham Town Hall he added: “Most of the blogging is too angry and too abusive. It is vituperative.”

Oh dear, oh dear. And there I was thinking that Marr was an interesting and thoughtful chap. Apart from the absurdity of someone as plug-ugly as Marr complaining about the physical appearance of others, I’m reminded of the sneering of Dan Rather’s Crossfire producer at the “guys in pyjamas” who dared to question the accuracy of Rather’s journalism.

Remember what happened to Rather? I wonder if Marr does? It’s a sobering story of what happens to mainstream journalists who become complacent and lazy. Until today, I had thought that Marr was better than that.

LATER: Krishnan Guru Murthy has some sensible comments on this. I also wondered if Marr has actually read any serious blogs. One charitable explanation of his strange outburst is that he’s confusing bloggers with the anonymous commenters who are the scourge of the Guardian and other sites which allow anonymous commenting.

Today I heard a recording of his remarks at Cheltenham. He sounded, in a way, like a guy playing a gullible (and adulatory) audience for cheap laughs. His first stab at “bloggers” raised a titter, so he pushed ahead, at each point waiting for the next laugh.

Cheering for Bob Woodward

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Bob Woodward (aka the stenographer to power) says he doesn’t do Twitter. Dave Winer gives him a cheer. Here’s why:

I cheered for Woodward the way an addict cheers for someone who was smart enough never to smoke the first cigarette, or take the first hit of coke or smack. I am stuck in Twitter, like the frog in the boiling water. I notice it’s getting uncomfortable as they pull back features that were central to my adopting it in the first place. The ability to hack my own stuff in there. The level playing field where I could be as influential as the greatest media celebrity. The level playing field relative to Yahoo and Google and all the other Giants of the Valley. These are all lost, they were things I came to depend on, and now that they’re gone, like my friend Jay — I’m not happy. And as with Jay, it’s my fault for believing, for no good reason, that things would more or less stay as they were.

The only way to get what we want is to make the stuff work the way we want it to work. We can’t wait for Silicon Valley to do that for us, because they will never do it. It's not in their nature.

So mazel tov to Woodward…

Dave’s right. What enthusiasts for free services seem to forget is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the end, the providers of these services are doing it to serve their own purposes. And those sure as hell aren’t your purposes or mine. Why is why Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in the Cloud” lecture was so interesting.