| Driverless cars may be safer |
| 09/03/23 Tech |
"I would qualify this only slightly by noting that some locations are more difficult than others and while San Francisco is quite difficult terrain, Phoenix, Arizona was chosen because of flat terrain and sunny weather. Still, the bottom line is absolutely correct. Driverless cars are safer and more capable than many people think and we should always measure their defects relative to realistic alternatives and not to some idealized notion of perfection."
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| AI is killing the old web |
| 06/27/23 Tech |
"By contrast, the information produced by AI language models and chatbots is often incorrect. The tricky thing is that when it's wrong, it's wrong in ways that are difficult to spot."
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| AI is a waste of time |
| 04/30/23 Tech |
"AI will waste a billion hours before it saves a billion hours. Before it kills us all, it will kill a lot of time."
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| Why the chip shortage drags on |
| 11/14/21 Tech |
"Analysts say the companies that make these chips may be reluctant to invest in new factories because the chips carry thin profit margins and the industry is notoriously cyclical, with spikes in demand followed by sharp declines. They fear a future glut of chips that would drive prices lower."
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| The robot behind the restaurant |
| 10/07/21 Tech |
"'With three metres squared, we can serve 1.2k meals an hour,' says Richard. 'A traditional McDonald's restaurant is 125m2, and usually they can serve 550 meals an hour.'"
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| Algorithms are what we read |
| 06/06/21 Media Tech |
"I stopped writing a regular column on art and culture for the Globe and Mail, my job for almost twenty years. Nobody noticed. I did not receive a single reader's letter. I had a polite message from my section editor. He was sorry things didn't work out and hoped we could stay in touch. The note contained no sense of symbolic occasion. I knew what I did was no longer important, either to the national culture or to the newspaper's bottom line."
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| Years away from self-driving cars |
| 10/03/20 Tech |
"Flash forward to today, and precious little has changed about our daily driving. You probably hear a lot less about self-driving cars than you did a few years ago, and the prospect of safely dozing off behind the wheel on long drives remains a distant fantasy"
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| How innovation works |
| 05/22/20 Tech |
"Ridley's new book, How Innovation Works, chronicles the history of innovation and argues that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than as an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan." [video]
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| How innovation works |
| 03/28/20 Tech |
"In this interview, Yaron Brook sits down with Matt Ridley to discuss innovation and the bottom up process which 'flourishes in freedom'." [video]
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| Mispriced innovation |
| 07/31/19 Markets Tech |
"quantitative measures of innovation have the potential to identify mispriced growth opportunities in the market; supporting the notion that innovation is tied to future economic value."
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| The rise of the robots |
| 05/14/16 Tech |
"Companies need fewer and fewer employees to generate each dollar of profit. This trend is likely to continue."
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| The garage self-driving car |
| 01/31/16 Tech |
"In the coming weeks, Hotz intends to start driving for Uber so he can rack up a lot of training miles for the car. He aims to have a world-class autonomous vehicle in five months"
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| The myth of basic science |
| 10/25/15 Science Tech |
"The perpetual-innovation machine that feeds economic growth and generates prosperity is not the result of deliberate policy at all, except in a negative sense. Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention; they can only make sure that they don't hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change."
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| Ad-Blocking |
| 09/20/15 Media Tech |
"The sands they are a-shifting. We have spam blockers, a whole industry trying to weed out bad e-mail, but we can.t get rid of bad ads? Come on."
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| Humans are underrated |
| 07/30/15 Tech |
"We humans have good reason to be uneasy. Strange things are happening in the economy. Ever fewer men of prime working age - the group that historically has been the most thoroughly employed - are working, and while several factors are feeding the trend, most economists believe that advancing technology is one of them. In factories and offices, on construction sites and behind counters, technology keeps doing more jobs better than people."
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| Self-driving cars and insurance |
| 07/18/15 Tech |
"Self-driving cars have a near perfect driving record. So far, when self-driving cars do get into accidents, it's because humans were responsible. Since Google began to release details about self-driving car accidents, reports from the Wall Street Journal, the RAND Corporation, and KPMG have all predicted a dramatic shrinking in the auto insurance industry."
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| Refracking is the new fracking |
| 07/12/15 Markets Tech |
"But in an industry that is desperately trying to cut expenses after oil fell below $60 a barrel from over $100 a year ago, the technique's low cost has great appeal. Because the first step in the fracking process is already done -- the drilling of the wellbore -- the outlay is just a fraction of the $8 million or so it costs to tap a new well."
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| Ancient Roman concrete |
| 06/16/13 Tech |
"After 2,000 years, a long-lost secret behind the creation of one of the world's most durable man-made creations ever - Roman concrete - has finally been discovered by an international team of scientists, and it may have a significant impact on how we build cities of the future."
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| Why did baby catalogs arrive at our house? |
| 04/20/13 Tech |
"Marketing Genetics is a data company based in Nebraska. They gather up data that companies share with each other about purchasing behavior and sell it to other companies that are looking for certain types of customers. They've got a database of 100 million people and more than a billion transactions (most of those from the last couple of years). As they show in a sample report on their site, Marketing Genetics takes a company's data and creates a statistical profile of their best customers. Then they look for similar people within their own databases, so those companies can send these people catalogs or other direct mail. They call this Data Navigation Analysis (DNA)."
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| No hands |
| 09/08/12 Tech |
"It may sound like science fiction, but much of the technology needed to turn ordinary vehicles into self-driving ones already exists. Indeed, almost all carmakers are developing sensors, control systems and other equipment that turns cars, in effect, into autonomous robots. Prototypes are on the roads today."
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