Robot Servant

Tyler Cowen's got a good column up arguing in favor of seeing driverless cars on the road. Taking a wider view, he says that regulations and the way our society works will hinder adoption of this technology in the interests of "safety", even if widespread adoption of driverless cars means many lives spared.

In a related blog post, he adds:

1. I couldn’t fit it in the column, but it is an interesting question why there is no popular movement to encourage driverless cars. Commuting costs are very high and borne by many people. (Here is Annie Lowery on just how bad commutes can be.) You can get people to hate plastic bags, or worry about a birth certificate, but they won’t send a “pro-driverless car” postcard to their representatives. The political movement has many potential beneficiaries but few natural constituencies. (Why? Does it fail to connect to an us vs. them struggle?) This is an underrated source of bias in political outcomes.

Well, bear in mind that 99% of the populace has no idea this technology exists yet. I didn't realize it myself until just three months or so ago, when stories about recent technological advances began appearing online. And if you're still unfamiliar with this technology, this short (4-minute) presentation by Sebastian Thrun at TED is a decent introduction:

Make people aware of these cars first. Then start worrying about why people don't seem to care.

2. In the longer run a lot of driverless cars would be very small. Imagine your little mini-car zipping out and bringing you back some Sichuan braised fish, piping hot.

Excellent. At that point they cross the line in people's consciousness from "driverless car" to "robot servant". I would like to request that by the time I am in my 40s they be widely available and the price of a high-end mp3 player today. Cowen's got a good point that the line between "driverless car" and "robot servant" is entirely arbitrary and invented by humans.

This is where we're at

From the AP: Cloak of invisibility takes a step forward.

Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies.

Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said.

The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold later beneath, the researchers reported in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

From Nature: Scientists supersize quantum mechanics.

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.

Okay, people of Earth. You are officially no longer allowed to complain that it's the year 2010 and there are no jetpacks or flying cars. You're looking for cool future tech in the wrong place.

The Future of IT

Charles Stross has some smart comments up on the near future of computing. Nominally it's all about the future of gaming, but really it's all about computer technology in general between now and, say, 2030.

For the past few years I've been trying to write science fiction about the near future, and in particular about the future of information technology. I've got a degree in computer science from 1990, which makes me a bit like an aerospace engineer from the class of '37, but I'm not going to let that stop me.

Previously, when I thought of Stross' nonfictional speculation about the future, I thought of his essay on precisely why space colonization will probably never be affordable and feasible for large numbers of people. It depressed me, as I'm sure it depressed lots of people who grew up on good old-fashioned space-oriented science fiction. Especially since the bastard is probably right about everything.

But his essay on the future of IT makes me all excited and optimistic about human progress again.