Eliminating checkout lines via automatic object recognition: IMAGR and Mashgin.
(Technically, these are artificial intelligence systems but probably shouldn’t really count as ‘robots’ since they respond to the physical world but don’t manipulate it)
Tech
Robot of the Week: The Audi Traffic Jam Pilot
On certain roads, it is able to control the vehicle without driver involvement at speeds up to 37 mph. The system, which in addition to the Traffic Jam Pilot also includes the Garage Pilot and the Parking Pilot, uses technology from Nvidia, Mobileye, and Delphi.
The feature package is available (not sure if its optional or standard) with the 2018 model A8.
Disclosure: I’m an NVDA shareholder.
Why Does This Happen?
Skype used to be the premier VOIP app (long before we called such things apps). It always had a crummy user interface but call quality was excellent and users put up with the rough edges. However, since Microsoft bought Skype call quality has declined, seemingly steadily. There are frequent software updates that don’t improve the user experience and sometimes introduce new problems. With its Skype updates on Windows MSFT forces you to opt out a la Java from having your browser configuration hijacked. Calls get dropped more than they used to. Calls that don’t go through are much more frequent. Bandwidth now seems to affect call quality even though it was once possible to use Skype easily over dialup Internet connections.
This morning I tried to make a Skype call on my mobile and found there had been another upgrade, forcing me to waste minutes selecting a new background color and dismissing what’s-new pages and trying to find my contacts list, which is all I ever want to do. I don’t want to invite my contacts to use Skype, I don’t care about inserting GIFs into chats, I don’t care about the Skype community. I care about good, consistent call quality, about having my list of phone numbers propagate automatically to laptop or phone when I update the list, about having a Skype number for incoming calls, and about easy management of occasional conferences and international calls. I used to care about video calling but I gave up since good alternatives appeared. If Skype could restore its past high call quality I could happily put up with the other hassles. If Skype could also improve its UI in a few obvious ways I would be thrilled. It never happens. Why not?
A company with a great product conspicuously fails to improve that product and it starts to lag competing products. Or a big company buys a small company and ruins its main product. MSFT’s management is no doubt part of the problem here but the pattern is familiar. Why is it familiar? You might think the smart people running MSFT would know better. Perhaps they don’t, perhaps this is a more difficult problem than it appears to be. Or perhaps something else is going on.
Discuss.
Summer Rerun: Selling New Concepts can be Challenging
Via Maggie’s Farm, here’s a Bob Newhart skit from 1970. Bob plays the role of an 1890s-style venture capitalist, talking on the phone with inventor Herman Hollerith, who is trying to explain the merits of punched card technology.
Related: Father, Son & Co.
Lynchings and Witch-Trials, Technology-Enhanced
Jonathan Kay: The tyranny of Twitter: How mob censure is changing the intellectual landscape. Excerpt:
A few weeks ago, shortly after I left my magazine gig, I had breakfast with a well-known Toronto man of letters. He told me his week had been rough, in part because it had been discovered that he was still connected on social media with a colleague who’d fallen into disfavour with Stupid Twitter-Land. “You know that we all can see that you are still friends with him,” read one of the emails my friend had received. “So. What are you going to do about that?”
“So I folded,” he told me with a sad, defeated air. “I know I’m supposed to stick to my principles. That’s what we tell ourselves. Free association and all that. It’s part of the romance of our profession. But I can’t afford to actually do that. These people control who gets jobs. I’m broke. So now I just go numb and say whatever they need me to say.”
also
The Writers Union of Canada and the University of British Columbia Fine Arts faculty do not operate gulags. Nevertheless, the idea that a whole career can fall victim to a single social-media message sent in a moment of anger or frustration — or even a bad joke — has produced an atmosphere of real terror that is compromising the art and intellect of Canada’s most creative minds.
I don’t think it’s just Canada, although perhaps it’s worse there than in the US at the moment.
Motivations of the trolls:
A lot of these people are brilliant writers who have spent their lives toiling in obscurity. Whole years may pass during which they will write a book of poetry, or an academic thesis, that perhaps only a few hundred people will ever read. The privilege that I am putting on display here — the right to author a long essay in a national newspaper — isn’t available to most of them. But thanks to the three-way combination of social-media technology, the moral urgency of identity politics, and these intellectuals’ hallowed status as wordsmiths, they now have a chance to gain a wide audience — and even impose their moral judgments on others. It is not hard to see why they would jump at this chance.
I am reminded of Peter Drucker’s report of a conversation he had with an acquaintance who was supporting the Nazi party. This man had come from a working-class background and felt that his career prospects had been very limited, but “Now I have a party membership card with a very low number and I am going to be somebody.”
Clarence Thomas referred to the media coverage surrounding his candidateship for the US Supreme Court as a “high-tech lynching”…the high-tech in this case evidently being television. But the nature of the television medium meant that denunciations had to originate from or at least be directed by a fairly small group of media-company employees. Now, with the rise of social media, we have crowdsourced denunciations and witch-trials, as described in the Jonathan Kay article.
In my post Freedom, the Village, and the Internet, I drew on some passages in the novel Every Man Dies Alone, which is centered on a German couple who become anti-Nazi activists after their son Ottochen is killed in the war (it was inspired by, and is loosely based on, a real-life story.)
Trudel, who was Ottochen’s fiancee, is a sweet and intelligent girl who is strongly anti-Nazi..and unlike Ottochen’s parents, she became an activist prior to being struck by personal tragedy: she is a member of a resistance cell at the factory where she works. But she finds that she cannot stand the unending psychological strain of underground workmade even worse by the rigid and doctrinaire man (apparently a Communist) who is leader of the celland she drops out. Another member of the cell, who has long been in love with her, also finds that he is not built for such work, and drops out also.
After they marry and Trudel becomes pregnant, they decide to leave the politically hysterical environment of Berlin for a small town wherethey believelife will be freer and calmer.
Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in small towns than in the big city. In a small town, everyone was fully exposed, you couldn’t ever disappear in the crowd. Personal circumstances were quickly ascertained, conversations with neighbors were practically unavoidable, and the way such conversations could be twisted was something they had already experienced in their own lives, to their chagrin.