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[Image: the internet/Total Recall]
Google’s boring self-driving taxis
“It’s a remarkable feat of usability design: Waymo has made the technology so mundane, it no longer feels like a novelty [...] the transportation revolution starts, not with a gasp, but a yawn”.
That quote is from a review of Waymo One, a self-driving taxi service that Google-owned Waymo is launching in an Arizona city. GM, Tesla and Uber might be dismayed that Waymo now looks quite far ahead in autonomy (Uber and Tesla have both slowed down their self-driving ambitions in recent months). But Uber will be more worried because One is a taxi service, and Google has an investment in Uber’s rival Lyft.
Another interesting review - Waymo as a sometimes-dull, sometimes-unnerving experience, not quite of this world:
“encountering the technology in the field, on actual city streets, doesn’t trigger the exciting pang of future freedom. Instead, it produces a stranger feeling: discomfort that an ethereal intelligence inhabits the human world. [...] Any time the car does something you would do as a driver, you impute [human-like] reasoning. When it doesn’t, it becomes a machine again. We keep half-recognizing our own kind of behavior—and then it slips away. Our brains see other brains everywhere, too, even when we know we’re wrong.”
The view presented to the passenger is an edited representation of what the car “sees”, and is designed to reassure you that, yes, the car is keeping track of that vehicle and that human.
This newsletter has in the past confidently asserted that self-driving’s waaaay off. But it’s here! Or here with constraints: it’s in one city, for a few hundred real passengers and with a Waymo employee sitting in the front just in case. And it sounds like it mostly works fine, if a little cautiously. “Cautiously” seems like a good word for a wheeled computer that needs to keep pedestrians and passenger safe!
Data is the new X
Data is (are?) one of those terms that hovers at the boundary of singular and plural. It’s hard to get a handle on in other ways too - we keep looking for other metaphors for it. Companies usually think of data as an asset - a valuable resource that you collect, generate, increase, sift, extract insight from and use to yield financial value.
So the metaphors are ones of natural resources: an extractable deposit like oil, data mining, data lakes and rivers, mountains and mines, and so on (though the idea of data as a limited resource doesn’t really sit well, because data is obviously unlimited, copyable and infinitely multipliable.) That’s probably how you see data if you’re a credit agency or a Californian social media platform.
Data for the common good – framing the debate points out that analogies have limitations. And instead of trying to explain with metaphors borrowed from the physical world, an excellent piece argues that data must more visible and directly legible. Until that happens though, this is probably a good way to think about it: "Data is not oil. Data is people."
Facebook, again
UK parliament published a lot of Facebook papers and emails. The emails sit at various points on the “just playing devil’s advocate”-to-exploitative spectrum but they confirm what already know, that FB was sometimes a bit… *casual* about being a good guardian of its users’ personal data. Some of the bad stuff Facebook has already fixed, and some of the very competitive stuff is to be expected.
The questions are: 1. can FB regain trust?, 2. does losing trust actually matter?, and 3. are big tech firms becoming anti-competitive because they can exert a monopoly power? Regulation has found the internet hard to keep up with because anti-competition law was conceived in terms of whether a company’s action is unfair to consumers, eg by controlling supply and fixing prices high etc. However, in the current era, big tech generally does the opposite: it controls *demand* (access to users) rather than supply, and has delivered a “consumer surplus” to users in the form of lower prices. Which sounds great, but big tech can steamroller competition.
Broken by the crypto markets
You feel sorry for this guy: he works hard and spends a lot of money to start a crypto mining hosting business which goes well until the crypto markets fall over, and then it becomes uneconomical to mine coins, and then his customers disappear. In this video he’s holding the tears back as he goes round his warehouse, pointing out all of the infrastructure, server racks, power supplies that once cost a lot (all denominated in US dollars!) but is now just a heap of broken images. (Via this, which has some tough love for him.)
The lesson is probably that your business is very high risk if it relies on lots of people continuing to speculate on assets whose fair value can’t yet be determined. Anyway, if you’re thinking of buying the dip now that cryptos are much cheaper, don’t try buy a mining rig from Digital Gold.
Climate change
Some symptoms and effects of climate change. Is climate change killing the river cruise industry? This map is “fun” if you live by the sea. Coffee production will need to seek higher altitudes.
Needed: data portability for gig workers
Power imbalances caused by controlling data (and wider context: UK poverty report):
“Unlike the traditional economy, the gig economy doesn’t rely on CVs or letters of recommendation. You build your reputation on one platform at a time — and your reputation is often the route to higher earnings (A service user is more likely to choose someone with 100 five-star ratings than just one or two). Platforms don’t want people to leave, so they don’t let workers have ownership over their own ratings. Leaving a service means starting over.”
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Events
- Engineering community of practice meetup - Wed 12 Dec 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Line managers drop-in clinic - Thu 13 Dec 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 17 Dec 1pm at Federation House.
- Engineering community of practice meetup - Mon 17 Dec 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Co-op digital christmas party - Mon 17 Dec 3.30pm at Federation House.
- Membership show & tell - Tue 18 Dec 11am at Federation House 6th floor.
- Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 18 Dec 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.
- Food ecommerce show & tell - Tue 18 Dec 3pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Web team show & tell - Wed 19 Dec 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Line managers drop-in clinic - Thu 20 Dec 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 20 Dec 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.
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