We are now a few days from the Uber fatal crash story, which is good for making sense of it instead of speculating. The video has been released and the investigations are ongoing. If you watch the video of the events leading up to the crash, or read through any of what people are saying, there's a lot happening there in a short period of time. My first impression of it was wow, I'm glad I wasn't driving. It would take some really quick reflexes to avoid that crash. The analysis so far paints a bigger picture. There is plenty of blame being spread around, whether it's primarily the victim or the safety driver or the software or the hardware. What I'm seeing in this event is starting to look like a perfect storm of failure.
I once had a boss who was a pilot. When JFK jr's plane went down, she told me something that I still remember about the events as she interpreted them. There were multiple mistakes made on that flight. Usually, as a pilot, you can make one mistake and live to tell about it. Two or three at the same time spells disaster. That same confluence of events seems to be the case here. The interesting part for me, however, is that there is some software work that needs to be done. In many ways, that is a lot of what makes the autonomous vehicle development process very promising. Since the vehicles are well instrumented, we can learn a lot about what went wrong. If the processes are sound, it should be fixed and not happen again. Plus, it's definitely promising technology when you consider that the system SHOULD be able to see in the dark and have no problems reacting well before a human could have.
Off on a different topic, I'm sure lots of people have seen the crypto ad bans across Google, Facebook, and now Twitter. I'm no cryptocurrency expert, and there are lots of them nowadays if you haven't noticed. There are a couple of things that I do find interesting about this, however. One thing that keeps jumping out at me when I read about crypto is how focused journalists and other commentators seem to be about the currency markets. While it's to some extent unavoidable, since it's so interesting and fills so many people with dreams of being an instant millionaire as if they bought the lucky lotto ticket, I think it's easy to miss the point. Blockchain technologies are liberating, and they are a direct threat to gatekeepers and people with more traditional power. Decentralization is a wonderful thing, and in many ways is going back to the roots of what the internet is (or was supposed to be) about. Enabling people to create and publish, and to freely communicate, is a game changing idea. It's not without its risks, but it is truly amazing what people can accomplish when they get together and try to do something useful. Yaaay us :)
And for the last little bit of something that caught my eye today, Kim Dotcom has won himself a court case. If you don't know who Dotcom is, it should be easy enough to find out. I won't bore you with the details, but he has been a pretty controversial figure. One of the things that he is in trouble for is standing up for some of those concepts I just blabbererd about regarding freedom. He has made some pretty powerful enemies, and I'm sure it has not been an easy ride. Still, it does seem that the latest chapter probably got him to smile a little.
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