Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: transportation

A few lines in a seemingly routine RAND Corp. report on the future of technology and law enforcement last week raised a provocative question: Should police have the power to take control of a self-driving car?

Human drivers are required to pull over when a police officer gestures for them to do so. It’s reasonable to expect that self-driving cars would do the same. To look at it another way: Self-driving cars are programmed to stop at red lights and stop signs. Surely they should also be programmed to stop when a police officer flags them down. It is, after all, the law.

It’s clear, then, that police officers should have some power over the movements of self-driving cars. What’s less clear is where to draw the line. If a police officer can command a self-driving car to pull over for his own safety and that of others on the road, can he do the same if he suspects the passenger of a crime? And what if the passenger doesn’t want the car to stop—can she override the command, or does the police officer have ultimate control? – Slate, Aug. 24, 2015

Our view of civil rights has to evolve as technology changes our lives. More often than not, the changes are for the worse. Fifty years ago, could the police enter your home without a warrant and review your family photos for criminal evidence? No, and they still can’t today – though, of course, we know they do. However, they can order Facebook to give them access to photos you shared only with your selected friends.

Read more

A small, Santa Fe, New Mexico-based company called Knowm claims it will soon begin commercializing a state-of-the-art technique for building computing chips that learn. Other companies, including HP HPQ and IBM IBM, have already invested in developing these so-called brain-based chips, but Knowm says it has just achieved a major technological breakthrough that it should be able to push into production hopefully within a few years.

The basis for Knowm’s work is a piece of hardware called a memristor, which functions (warning: oversimplification coming) by mimicking synapses in the brain. Rather than committing certain information to a software program and traditional computing memory, memristors are able to “learn” by strengthening the electrical charge between two resistors (the “ristor” part of memristor) much like synapses strengthen connections between commonly used neurons in the brain.

Done correctly—and this is the result that HP and IBM are after—memristors can make computer chips much smarter, but also very energy efficient. That could mean data centers that don’t use as much energy as small towns, as well as more viable robotics, driverless cars, and other autonomous devices. Alex Nugent, Knowm’s founder and CEO, says memristors—especially the ones his company is working on—offer “a massive leap in efficiency” over traditional CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware now used to power artificial intelligence workloads.

Read more

Castrol Edge & Video Games technologies: Racing a Real Car in Virtual Reality.

Castrol EDGE has premiered its latest Titanium Trial driving challenge, featuring Formula Drift professional Matt Powers driving his Roush Stage 3 Mustang whilst wearing a state-of-the-art Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headset: blind to the real world around him, but fully-immersed in a rapidly changing 3D virtual world.

In a world first, Castrol EDGE fused video games technology and a real world driving experience, using a modified car and virtual reality technology, so a computergenerated world responded to the driver’s and car’s movements in real time.

The video game-like experience featured a mind-blowing landscape of falling boulders, crumbling track, tunnels, sheer cliff drops and even a cameo virtual appearance from another racing icon — with the landscape’s shifts reacting to Matt Powers’ every driving move.

The challenge was part of Castrol EDGE’s Titanium Trials, a series of high-powered challenges that bring man and machine together to push the boundaries of performance enabled by the strength of Castrol EDGE boosted with fluid Titanium technology – Castrol’s most technologically advanced and strongest oil.

After taking on the VIRTUAL DRIFT Trial, Matt Powers said: “Virtual Drift was exhilarating and challenging like nothing I’ve ever done before. It’s been awesome not only being involved and testing this next generation of gaming technology but the possibilities this opens up for motor sport in general are mind blowing. I had to rely on my instincts and the car to perform, with the strength of Castrol EDGE in the engine to give me the reassurance that the car would reach its maximum performance.”

Read more

V2V communication is a viable way to mitigate accidents amongst autonomous vehicles.

Engineers have known for some time that if cars could only “talk” to each other, they could avoid a lot of accidents.

Vehicles could be driven more safely with information about another car, obstacle or pedestrian around a blind curve, for example.

But the hurdles to implementing these systems are numerous: they require a and the allocation of to enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.

Read more