Los Angeles: Rotting Trash Piles Attracting Rats and Raising Concerns of a New Epidemic
May 21st, 2019Must see video.
Via: NBC Los Angeles:
Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year’s record number of flea-borne typhus cases.
U.S. Postal Service Testing Self-Driving Trucks for Hauling Mail Between Hubs
May 21st, 2019In yesterday’s post, I mentioned how intercity freight is the low hanging fruit of the self driving world.
Here we go…
Via: Reuters:
The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday started a two-week test transporting mail across three Southwestern states using self-driving trucks, a step forward in the effort to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology for hauling freight.
San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might improve delivery times and costs. A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat.
…
Price said self-driving trucks have advantages over passenger cars, including the relative ease of operating on interstates compared with city centers, which reduces mapping requirements and safety challenges involving pedestrians and bicyclists.
Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars
May 20th, 2019A friend of mine is an AI researcher. I know that “AI researcher” is a nebulous term, but let it suffice to say that he is highly qualified in this area.
Back in April, I asked him what he thought about Tesla’s big self driving dog and pony show.
In short, I asked him: Is this going to work?
No.
He’s confident that it’s not going to work under the current paradigm:
Based on my understanding of the technology, I agree with this guy:
“It’s all hype,” said Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. “The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t have it and neither does anybody else.”
“Unfortunately, it may be necessary for several people to die before regulators step in,” Shladover said.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-tesla-self-driving-technology-20190422-story.html
How about just self driving for freight?
My friend thinks the lack of autonomous systems being used for freight indicates that we are far away from a general purpose self driving capability:
But I wonder, why they don’t start by rolling out remote-controlled trucks? That seems like a step on the way toward autonomous vehicles. But for some reason, they never try do this. And, yet, the public is told self-driving cars are just a few years away.
My guess is that, if it happens, it will happen in the freight market first. Freight is a walk in the park compared to the robotaxi concept that Musk is talking about.
With freight, you can train the machine on a specific route and annotate, by hand, the areas that it’s not able to navigate properly. The machine wouldn’t be able to self drive without this training and annotation process.
That is far less sexy than what Musk is claiming is right around the corner, but I could see route specific AI systems being good enough to begin firing some truck drivers in the not too distant future.
As for the robotaxis zipping from one burbclave to another, I’m with my buddy on that one: Not happening anytime soon.
Via: Design News:
The popular notion of the go-anywhere, go-anytime, sleep-in-the-back autonomous car crumbled a bit in the last few weeks, as automakers admitted that the development of full self-driving technology is more difficult than expected.
Questions about the technology’s future reached full public view in April, when Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Hackett acknowledged what had already become painfully obvious to much of the engineering community. “We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” Hackett was quoted as saying by numerous news outlets. “Its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.”
The admission came as a shocker to many in the public and in the media, essentially because it flew in the face of a growing belief that shiny new autonomous vehicles would soon be landing in dealerships.
Still, Hackett wasn’t the first to make such an concession. The auto industry had been scattering clues to that effect for months before the Ford statement. In November, 2018, for example, John Krafcik, CEO of Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo, had been even more blunt than Hackett. “It’s really, really hard,” Krafcik said during a live-streamed tech conference. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re actually in there and trying to do things.”
Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. “Autonomy will always have some constraints,” he added.
The comments by Krafcik and Hackett reinforced what many industry analysts had been saying for more than two years. “I agree with John Krafcik’s comment,” noted Sam Abuelsamid principal analyst for Navigant Research, which publishes an extensive annual assessment on the state of automated vehicles. “There’s no guarantee that we will ever have automated vehicles in the foreseeable future that are capable of operating everywhere, all the time.”
Chicago and Detroit Have Bought Real-Time Facial Recognition Systems
May 19th, 2019Via: Wired:
Civil liberties activists trying to inspire alarm about the authoritarian potential of facial recognition technology often point to China, where some police departments use systems that can spot suspects who show their faces in public. A report from Georgetown researchers on Thursday suggests Americans should also focus their concern closer to home.
The report says agencies in Chicago and Detroit have bought real-time facial recognition systems. Chicago claims it has not used its system; Detroit says it is not using its system currently. But no federal or state law would prevent use of the technology.
According to contracts obtained by the Georgetown researchers, the two cities purchased software from a South Carolina company, DataWorks Plus, that equips police with the ability to identify faces from surveillance footage in real time. A description on the company’s website says the technology, called FaceWatch Plus, “provides continuous screening and monitoring of live video streams.” DataWorks confirmed the existence of the systems, but did not elaborate further.
Daily Mail Claims U.S. Has Combat Ready EMP Cruise Missiles
May 17th, 2019Flashback 2012: CHAMP – Lights Out
Via: Daily Mail:
The U.S. Air Force has deployed at least 20 missiles that could zap the military electronics of North Korea or Iran with high-power microwaves, rendering their military capabilities virtually useless without causing any fatalities, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively.
Known as the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), the missiles were built by Boeing’s Phantom Works for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and tested successfully in 2012. They have not been operation until now.
The microwave weapons are fitted into an air-launched cruise missile and delivered from B-52 bombers. With a range of 700 miles, they can fly into enemy airspace at low altitude and emit sharp pulses of high power microwave (HPM) energy that fry computer chips, disabling any electronic devices targeted by the missiles with causing any collateral damage.
Mary Lou Robinson, the chief of the High Power Microwave Division of the Air Force Research Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base, has confirmed to DailyMail.com that the missiles are now operational and ready to take out any target.
The missile is equipped with an electromagnetic pulse cannon. This uses a super-powerful microwave oven to generate a concentrated beam of energy. The energy causes voltage surges in electronic equipment, rendering them useless before surge protectors have the chance to react
The project has been advancing secretly ever since the Air Force successfully tested a missile equipped with HPM in 2012.
In the test, the CHAMP missile flew over a two-story building on the Utah Test and Firing Range.
The building in the west Utah desert was crammed with computers and security and surveillance systems. The microwaves took down the compound’s entire spectrum of electronic systems, including video cameras set up to film the test, without damaging anything else.
‘We hit every target we wanted to,’ Boeing’s CHAMP Program Manager Keith Colman said in a company press release. ‘Today we made science fiction into science fact.’
Robots Take the Wheel as Autonomous Farm Machines Hit Fields
May 16th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Robots are taking over farms faster than anyone saw coming.
The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland. And it’s all happening well before many analysts had predicted thanks to small startups in Canada and Australia.
Half of Americans Are Just One Paycheck Away from Financial Disaster
May 16th, 2019Via: MarketWatch:
Missing more than one paycheck is a one-way ticket to financial hardship for nearly half of the country’s workforce.
A new study from NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent social research institution, found that 51% of working adults in the United States would need to access savings to cover necessities if they missed more than one paycheck.
Certain communities were more prone to economic hardship in the event of missing a paycheck. Roughly two-thirds of households earning less than $30,000 annually and Hispanic households would be unable to cover basic living expenses after missing more than one paycheck, the researchers found.
RealTalk: This Speech Synthesis Model Our Engineers Built Recreates a Human Voice Perfectly
May 16th, 2019Via: Medium:
Today we’re excited to announce that our Machine Learning Engineers Hashiam Kadhim, Joe Palermo and Rayhane Mama have produced the most realistic AI simulation of a voice we’ve heard to date.
It’s the voice of someone you’ve probably heard of before?—?Joe Rogan. (For those who haven’t: Joe Rogan is the creator and host one of the world’s most popular podcasts, which to date has nearly 1300 episodes and counting.)
Obviously, something like this has to be heard to be believed. So without further ado, check it out for yourself:
Driverless Electric Truck Starts Deliveries on Swedish Public Road
May 16th, 2019Via: Reuters:
Resembling the helmet of a Star Wars stormtrooper, a driverless electric truck began daily freight deliveries on a public road in Sweden on Wednesday, in what developer Einride and logistics customer DB Schenker described as a world first.
Robert Falck, the CEO of Swedish start-up Einride, said the company was in partnership talks with major suppliers to help scale production and deliver orders, and the firm did not rule out future tie-ups with large truckmakers.
“This public road permit is a major milestone … and it is a step to commercializing autonomous technology on roads,” the former Volvo executive told Reuters.
The Haunting Last Words of Isaac Kappy: “Now, I Am One of Them”
May 16th, 2019“I am not suicidal.”
Via: Vigilant Citizen:
Isaac Kappy – the actor who accused several Hollywood figures of child abuse – died after throwing himself off a bridge. A few days prior to this fateful day, Kappy posted a haunting video about him “crossing the line” and becoming “one of them”. What actually happened to Isaac Kappy?
