Can "Free Countries" emerge from "Free Cities"?

Something to watch: the Free Cities Initiative (via Reason).

Elon Musk: fully autonomous cars "in approximately 3 years"

I hope he's right (TechCrunch):

Musk is now saying that Tesla cars should have “full autonomy” in “approximately three years.”

As for when regulators are ready to sanction self-driving technologies, they “probably will not allow for full autonomy for one to three years after that,” said Musk. “It depends on the market. Some will be more forward-leaning than others.”

Quibbling over the vernacular: "post capitalism"

In general, I like the article but to call the increased efficiency of markets as being "post capitalist" seems as a bit silly and sensationalist but the basic premise is this:

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.

It's worth noting that the term "capitalism" itself was coined and created as a pejorative by self described "socialists" (econlib)

Automated cars need new laws

It's been exciting watching the rapid development and acceptance of the idea of automated cars. Instapundit points to how laws can/should change in a world with automated cars.

"The end of doom"

Interview of Ron Bailey, the science correspondent at Reason with a number of interesting/hopeful predictions (via reason.tv):

Stem cell dental implants and using lasers to burn away mental illness

Scientists are commercializing a way to use stem cell dental implants to grow new teeth directly in your mouth (PopSci via Instapundit) while others are proposing to use lasers to burn away some mental illnesses (Wired) - as others have pointed out with the latter, what could possibly go wrong?

More on how Obamacare may be inadvertently driving a consumer-driven healthcare revolution

"The law is driving people into high-deductible plans" (WSJ):

The widespread adoption of high-deductible plans does, however, face two major challenges.

First, advocates of consumer-directed health care suggest that much of the money saved in premiums—high deductible plans can be thousands of dollars less expensive than comprehensive plans—be put into health-savings accounts to help pay for routine care. Over time, that savings can grow into a large nest egg.

But without that backstop, Americans will face the worst of both worlds: no coverage for everyday care and no dedicated financial resources to offset new expenses. Hence, critics cry that high-deductible plans leave patients “underinsured”—and that they will avoid or delay needed care as a result. The evidence is mixed. But it seems to be a problem particularly among those who enroll in high-deductible plans on the ObamaCare exchanges; few appear to be establishing health-savings accounts. One problem is that the exchanges make it very difficult to identify HSA-eligible plans.

Second, consumer-directed health care works because it encourages competition. Unfortunately, competition in medicine seems to be falling as hospitals and insurers merge, potentially leading to higher and more opaque prices.

I think even the WSJ is underestimating the potential for concierge care.

Daimler introduces the world's first self driving semi-truck

Demand isn't slowing down for logistics, but the ability to recruit drivers is. Makes sense and it's already legal in Nevada (wired):

The truck in question is the Freightliner Inspiration, a teched-up version of the Daimler 18-wheeler sold around the world. And according to Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, it will make long-haul road transportation safer, cheaper, and better for the planet.

The Freightliner Inspiration offers a rather limited version of autonomy: It will take control only on the highway, maintaining a safe distance from other vehicles and staying in its lane. It won’t pass slower vehicles on its own. If the truck encounters a situation it can’t confidently handle, like heavy snow that covers lane lines, it will alert the human that it’s time for him to take over, via beeps and icons in the dashboard. If the driver doesn’t respond within about five seconds, the truck will slow down gradually, then stop.

In hardware terms, the truck isn’t much different from the latest trucks and passenger cars Daimler is putting on the road. A stereoscopic camera reads lane lines. Short and long range radar scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because they’re not needed. There’s no vehicle-to-vehicle communication, no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of those developed for use in Mercedes-Benz’s autonomous vehicles.

As Moore's Law turns 50, the revolution is only beginning...

WSJ via Instapundit:

Moore’s Law is creative destruction on steroids. It regularly fosters the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunities made possible by the latest jump in chip performance. It can be blamed for much of the 90% mortality rate of electronics startups.

But because the usual graphic presentation of the law is tamed by the format into a nice shallow line, we don’t get to see the awesome power of the raw curve—which, like all exponential lines stays shallow seemingly for a long time, then suddenly curves almost straight upward in a vertiginous climb. It is the curve of a rocket’s acceleration, of a pandemic, of the cells born from a fertilized egg.

The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.

Crowd-sharing, crowdfunding, bitcoin, micro-venture funding, cloud computing, Big Data—all have been early attempts, of varying success, to cope with the next phase of Moore’s Law. Expect many more to come. Meanwhile, as always, this new pace will become the metronome of the larger culture.

Moore’s Law has always induced de-massification: giant mainframe computers become smartwatches, giant vertically-integrated organizations are defeated by what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds has dubbed an “Army of Davids.”

Rigid command-and-control structures in every walk of life, from corporations to governments to education, become vulnerable to competition by adaptive and short-lived alliances and confederacies. Now that process is going to attack every corner of society.

Tech to watch: DNA nanobots to cure cancer

This is amazing (nextbigfuture):

In a brief talk, Bachelet said DNA nanobots will soon be tried in a critically ill leukemia patient. The patient, who has been given roughly six months to live, will receive an injection of DNA nanobots designed to interact with and destroy leukemia cells—while causing virtually zero collateral damage in healthy tissue.

According to Bachelet, his team have successfully tested their method in cell cultures and animals and written two papers on the subject, one in Science and one in Nature.

Estonia's e-residency: the end of the nation state?

Estonia's new e-residency (Australian broadcasting corporation):

For 50 euro - about $70 - you can apply for the digital ID card with a couple of PIN codes that will make you an e-resident of the country.

With a population of just 1.3 million people, they're looking at allowing up to 10 million 'e-Estonians'. An experiment to watch. Compare and contrast (Reuters).

Rethinking charity: a reading list

A thoughtful list that doesn't centre around 'spending other people's money' from from TED.

Self driving cars and the future of logistics

It's difficult to see the downside, especially if the technology is showing that it's better than human drivers (MITTechReview) - even if driving through the downtown of any major metropolitan city, it doesn't seem like a high bar to reach. But it's fascinating to follow the iterations the Google team has been making in testing its prototypes:

The idea was that the human drives onto the freeway, engages the system, [and] it takes them on the bulk of the trip—the boring part—and then they reëngage,” said Nathaniel Fairfield, a technical lead on the project, speaking at the Embedded Vision Summit in Santa Clara, California, on Thursday.

That approach had to be scrapped after tests showed that human drivers weren’t trustworthy enough to be co-pilots to Google’s software. When people began riding in one of the vehicles, they paid close attention to what the car was doing and to activity on the road around them, which meant the hand-off between person and machine was smooth. But that interest faded to indifference over weeks and months as people became too trusting of the car’s abilities. “Humans are lazy,” says Fairfield. “People go from plausible suspicion to way overconfidence.”

And so Google’s new vehicle design takes a leaf out of NASA’s design book to cope with such eventualities. “It doesn’t have a fallback to human—it has redundant systems,” said Fairfield. “It has two steering motors, and we have various ways we can bring it to a stop.”

While Wired calls it sneaky, incremental technology improvements are already making their way into mass produced cars. The developing technology also seems to seeping into other industries where we may see more immediate gains with technologies that are allowing trucks to drive in platoons reducing wind drag and increasing fuel efficiency as much as 10% for the rear truck (MITTechReview). Exciting developments to watch...

Handwringing over the private funding of science

Interesting discussion over at ASI:

For the basic problem here is that scientific research, or at least the results from it, is a public good. It's non-rivalrous and non-excludeable meaning that it's very difficult indeed to make a profit from it. Thus there will be too little private investment in this sphere. This is the argument in favour of government funding of science, that scientific results are a public good. But if we can gain private finance, despite the public good problem, then we've solved that public good problem, haven't we? And therefore private funding, to the extent that it happens, is indeed entirely and actually a substitute for government funding.

To the extent that science is getting private funding this is indeed the perfect argument in favour of cutting public funding. And given the increased efficiency coming from not having to worry about race and gender perhaps cutting by more than is donated.

NYT's article "Billionaires with big ideas are privatizing American science" that started the discussion. But more from the Cato Institute advocating the "End of government science funding" (1997), the Scientific American asking "Are we entering a Golden era of private science funding?" and an article at Berkeley - "Who pays for science?".

Redfin: Not all industries can be revolutionized with just an app

Doing research for something else, I came across this profile of Redfin blending technology with people working through the challenges of scaling both while realigning incentives in a broken industry (WSJ):

If you're touring a neighborhood and see a house for sale, you can order up a Redfin agent to drive over to show you the property quickly. In the company's most-established markets, Seattle, for instance, the agent can be at your service within an hour. (It takes longer in Redfin's newer markets, like Dallas). This works thanks to a blend of technology and management. Just as the Uber online ride service maps its drivers, Redfin keeps track of its agents' calendars and real-time locations. Unlike a traditional real-estate brokerage—in which agents essentially are contractors of a brand, not employees—Redfin's agents are salaried workers. The company can tell them where to go and what to do.

Redfin helps soothe other home-buying frustrations as well. Redfin compiles detailed histories on competing brokerages' pricing strategies, strengthening Redfin agents' negotiating prowess. Redfin also conducts most of the home-buying process online, reducing paperwork. And if you're selling your house, Redfin can test offer prices on the Web, helping you to home in on the optimal price.

The biggest opportunity is price. Mr. Kelman says the incentives of traditional real-estate agents are misaligned with those of customers. If you're selling your house, your agent, who gets paid on commission, will prefer that you take a lowball offer over no offer. If you're buying, your agent will want you to bid higher than you might otherwise want—or need—to pay. Economists call this the Principal-Agent Problem, and it has proved stubbornly intractable in real estate.

Mr. Kelman says Redfin has a solution. About half a typical Redfin agent's pay comes through salary. The rest comes through commissions. But crucially, commissions are linked to detailed reviews that Redfin customers complete after sales. The reviews are posted online and affect each agent's future business. Your agent always has an incentive to please you. If pushing a client to close a deal will produce a bad review, the agent would rather not close.

"The automation doesn’t replace us. It makes us better."

From Wired: What UPS Drivers Can Tell Us About the Automated Future of Work:

Many of us are a lot like UPS drivers in our daily lives: The only difference is we spend our days shepherding virtual bits between destinations rather than driving physical boxes around. But we still face many of the same prioritization and optimization challenges.

Yet one of the biggest misconceptions about software-enabled decision making is the idea that it’s far removed from us. Many people think of data as something technical that only accountants, warehouses, data scientists, or the latest slew of tech technology-as-a-coach startups need to worry about. We don’t recognize the strategic connection between information collection and decision making, or see how data can help increase our own performance.

This skepticism was in evidence during UPS’s first roll out of ORION. In hindsight, Levis admits that he bears some of the blame for that. “We’d go in the morning and say, here’s your planned number of miles,” he recalled. Telling a driver with years of experience that an algorithm knew how to plan a route better than he did struck them as more than a little dismissive.

Levis’s team decided to change approaches and tackle the drivers’ resistance head-on by issuing a challenge: “beat the computer” by combining ORION’s suggestions with their own. One driver who used ORION’s suggestions ended up subtracting 30 miles from his daily route.

Half price gasoline?

This could be huge... (TechnologyReview via Instapundit):

At a pilot plant in Menlo Park, California, a technician pours white pellets into a steel tube and then taps it with a wrench to make sure they settle together. He closes the tube, and oxygen and methane—the main ingredient of natural gas—flow in. Seconds later, water and ethylene, the world’s largest commodity chemical, flow out. Another simple step converts the ethylene into gasoline.

The white pellets are a catalyst developed by the Silicon Valley startup Siluria, which has raised $63.5 million in venture capital. If the catalysts work as well in a large, commercial scale plant as they do in tests, Siluria says, the company could produce gasoline from natural gas at about half the cost of making it from crude oil—at least at today’s cheap natural-gas prices.

Mojave Desert: the next Silicon Valley?

It's a whole new world, and magic carpets have nothing to do with it (WashingtonPost via Instapundit)

If there’s one thing that New Space has going for it, it’s that Old Space is in trouble. Old Space and New Space turn out to be symbiotic. New Space companies need NASA contracts, and NASA needs New Space companies to pick up the agency’s slack.

The true believers imagine that, someday soon, robotic vehicles will mine asteroids for precious metals, including gold and platinum. Moon dirt will be transformed into rocket fuel for missions to Mars. Closer to home, FedEx will send a package from New York to Tokyo, via space, in half an hour.

More: on SpaceX's coming commercial geostationary launch (USAToday)

Theranos: Creating technologies towards instant diagnosis

A pretty exciting startup coming out of the valley that has the potential to dramatically change how healthcare is done... created by a woman who would seem to make most people feel unaccomplished (WSJ):

Ms. Holmes, a 29-year-old chemical and electrical engineer and entrepreneur, dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate after founding a life sciences company called Theranos in 2003. Her inventions, which she is discussing in detail here for the first time, could upend the industry of laboratory testing and might change the way we detect and treat disease.

[...] A Theranos technician first increases blood flow to your hand by applying a wrap similar to one of those skiing pocket warmers, then uses a fingerstick to draw a few droplets of blood from the capillaries at the end of your hand. The blood wicks into a tube in a cartridge that Ms. Holmes calls a "nanotainer," which holds microliters of a sample, or about the amount of a raindrop. The nanotainer is then run through the analyzers in a Theranos laboratory. Results are usually sent back to a physician, but a full blood work-up—metabolic and immune markers, cell count, etc.—was in my inbox by the time I walked out the door.

[...] Theranos is committing to a half-off discount on Medicare fees. "So a test that costs $100 now, we'll do $50 or less. The quote-unquote payer community I don't think has ever seen someone walk in and say we want to bill you at less than you're willing to reimburse," she says. If this strategy succeeds in squeezing down prices—say, lowering testing as a share of total health costs to 1.5% from 2.3% now—it could save Medicare $61 billion over 10 years and Medicaid $96.1 billion, according to what Theranos calls a conservative estimate.

More here (HN).

More on the future of jobs and technology

ASI asks: "Do technological advances destroy jobs without creating new ones?":

Perhaps the line which most annoys me is "the belief that technology doesn't destroy jobs, but merely creates new and better ones, is, like so much else about bourgeois economics, a baseless assumption."

Does Mueller really believe that claim? Unemployment is 7.8%. Employment is touching 30m, its highest level ever. Since the 1750s there has been a tide of vastly transformative technological improvement and yet somehow a much larger population is employed. At the same time, this larger workforce is working much fewer hours and enjoys much greater abundance. Surely these widely available facts are enough to suggest that the assumption technology creates—as well as destroys—jobs is more than just a "baseless assumption"?

By no means is it certain that the trends of the past, which have seen mobile phones, more hygienic toilets and tasty soft drinks spread to even the poorest areas of the world, will continue. But certainly some evidence (e.g. the graph above) seems to suggest that technologies are spreading throughout society—and benefiting the general populace, not just the wealthy—faster than ever before. This is great, and implies that we can hope for greater abundance and leisure without smashing new technologies. If it turns out that not all benefit, then what we need is something like Krugman's universal basic income, not drastic societal upheaval.

More: The BBC asks, is the solution for more jobs lower wages? And that's also why most economists dispute the need or effectiveness of the minimum wage...