The SxSW Roundup Show

went to south By Southwest Interactive in beautiful Austin, Texas. Yes, I shared a Airbnb house with several other of the guys here at how Stuff Works, So Nolan I both know the joys of sleeping in a large living room together. It was it was being a little bit sarcastic here at the top, but but no, but it was. I mean, it was an amazing, wonderful trip. It was overwhelming most of the time. Now, a lot of our listeners may already understand, but just brief rundown, what is south By Southwest?

South By Southwest? First of all, you have to know that south By Southwest itself is an enormous festival that takes over downtown Austin, Texas for a little bit more than a week, and it has three not just music, No, it's not just music. It has three primary elements. It's gotten music that's that's a big one. It's got film that's a big one. And it has Interactive, which is the youngest of the three elements to join this conference. Uh, and Interactive is really, when you get down to it,

anything vaguely techy. Lots of Internet based companies, but over the years we've seen more and more companies that are tangential to Internet startups join in the fun and create amazing experiences. There are tracts of panels that you can go to to learn more about certain subjects, but there's

also just a ton of other stuff going on. So, for example, you could walk around downtown Austin and never go to a panel ever, but hit all the installations, exhibits and parties that are They are kind of supplemental to the official track program. Yeah, a lot of the

really big tech companies have a presence there. A lot of them are kind of kind of wooing everyone involved, you know, put putting their very best marketing face forward, and and there are so many people who are in the industry who are either on panels or just hanging out having amazing conversations about about digital culture and and just what it's like like, like what this new world

that's Internet based is like around us. Yeah, there's a lot of networking going on its south by Southwest, and I mean that literally people are are networking together and create sometimes creating brand new projects just through their conversations they're having there. So it's, uh, it's it's a party atmosphere, but there's also a lot of talk, real serious talk

around innovation and being more effective. And uh, I got to go to three panels while I was there, so I want to to kind of talk about those panels because they tie in directly to themes we've discussed here

on Forward Thinking quite a few times. Now. Please keep in mind the three panels I saw, they were all part of the same track of programming, which was the Intelligent Future track kind of kind of our sweet spot, ah yeah, which is just one of what maybe like a dozen tracks that were going on just an interactive and there were hundreds of panels available just in Intelligent may maybe maybe another dozen, we'll we'll say in dozens of panels available intelligent futures of the course of the

five days of Interactive And that's an addition to hundreds and hundreds of more panels going on throughout that week and throughout the film segmented throughout the music segments. So also there are unofficial events as well, like there are discussions that didn't require a badge for you to go and check out. So in other words, what what I'm doing is, I'm giving you all the caveats to suggest this is not the only thing that was talked about

south By Southwest. This was the stuff I was personally able to go see. But that being said, the stuff I saw it was pretty amazing. So I wanted to start with the first panel I saw. This was Saturday morning in the morning, as I recall, looking forward to rush hour. No, I don't think they have a nine thirty on Saturdays. They do, I've witnessed it personally. I think downtown Austin was as surprised as you are by this information. Yeah, actually was a pretty full panel too.

That was the other thing that surprised me because I had always heard that because of the party atmosphere of south By Southwest the morning panels were not very well attended, but that was not the case in this one. It's called looking forward to Rush Hour, not the movie Future of Transit, So UH. The panel I saw featured Dan Dorley and Chip Walters, both of whom work for Altuit Design, which is a company that does UH industrial and product design, and they are both designers, and so they kind of

split the panel into two major UH subjects. Um Dan Dorley took the microphone first and talked about the future of car is and UH. One of the things they really focused on, no big surprise, happened to be autonomous cars. This is something we've obviously talked about several times here at Forward Thinking, but at south By Southwest autonomous cars are pretty much we're pretty much talked about as an

inevitable future. Not will autonomous cars become a thing, but it was more like when are they going to be the thing? I think that's been our consensus as well. I agree, I agree. Yeah, it's just one of those where you go there and everyone's talking about like it's already here, almost like we're to be fair, it looks like we're right on the cusp, right, it's just gonna take a little bit more work for us to see the first really truly autonomous vehicles available for some form

of commercial purpose. It may not be for a personal vehicle, but we'll get more to that a little bit. So. He also talked about how autonomous cars have the potential to drastically change car design and more in the future. For one, obviously there's not necessarily a need for human controls, so this hasn't completely shaken out yet. Right. There's some designs for autonomous vehicles that include things like your traditional steering wheel and other controls, some of which might fold

away when you go into autonomous mode. But there are other companies like Google that advocate for a complete lack of human controls uh basically because it improves safety. The idea being that if you're driving down the street and you've got a friend seeing in the passenger's seat, you don't want your friend reaching over suddenly grabbing the steering wheel and giving it a strong jerk to the right right. Well,

you same thing. You don't want to have an autonomous system in control of the car and then have a human try and rest control from that, especially if if brain power wise, your friend is for example, a small child or extremely inapriated like that's probably how the technology and Google's cars would see us humans samely inebriated children. Yes, yeah,

that's exactly how how they would see us. And and for good re in I mean, you're talking about the system that has planned out what it's going to do, and if you introduce what appears to be random noise into that, you have just put what was at least in theory a safe system, uh into and and turned it into one that's not safe. So that was one of the points you made. Also said that if you don't have human controls, it means you can completely redesign

the interior of cars. And we haven't really talked about this on forward Thinking, but when you think about it, that's true. You could have an interior of a car not look anything like cars do right now. We've seen some artist depictions of this where all the seats are facing inward, where it's more like almost like a conference room, like there's a table in the center and your back is to the windshield. There there's still some practical considerations

to think of around, like like motion sickness. I would not personally be excited about riding backwards in a car, well, you know what you always said, in the back of the car, and then you don't even have to you know, you're still facing for it or there. I've seen some designs where it's a swivel version where the front Yeah. No, I totally get it because I I also if I'm sitting backward for too long in any kind of moving vehicle, I feel a little a little green around the gills.

But you can also create more displays for things like entertainment. You can have a lot of other options. You can have workstations if you want to do work while you're in the car. Also could make you really motion sick if you're not used to that sort of thing. But interesting alternatives to what we have often thought of as the traditional, uh interior of of a car also pointed out.

Doorally pointed out that autonomous cars are safer than human drivers, and once there are enough autonomous cars on the road, you can really change what is standard car design. For example, you don't need to build in huge crumple zones if all the cars on the road or the vast majority of them are autonomous, because the likelihood of any kind of crash on that level is so low, which means you're using less material to make your cars. That's less wasteful.

You can be more efficient with the material you're creating. It also means that the cars themselves weigh less. And presuming that these cars are also electric, which I think most people just assume that's the future that's gonna be it electric in one way or another, it means that you can preserve battery life. You know, their battery doesn't have to put out as much electricity to move a lighter car as it would a heavier car. You know,

pretty simple stuff. But his point was that the implications of autonomous cars go well beyond you don't have to drive anymore. Um. He also brought up the idea of a universal chassis, So, in other words, you create a base for your vehicles that is common across all the lines of vehicles you make. You might have to extend it a bit for certain vehicles, like the chassis that you might use for a compact car. Obviously you would have to to a little bit for it to be

like a pickup truck. But you can start with the same basic foundation and this allows you to uh to rapidly build various different vehicle types on demand, possibly because he also brought up the potential for three D printed cars. Yeah and and yeah, right, any anytime that you can streamline the manufacturing process. Here, you're saving time and energy, yes, and that's both of those are non trivial. Right, We've talked about money. But yeah, yeah, yeah, time, energy and money.

It's a it's the it's the trio that's everyone's wanting to, uh really crack. We actually saw this concept championed in person orally. When I say we, I mean a crew from mouse Stuff Works did. I went to c E. S And you might remember I talked about Faraday Futures

f F zero one race car concept. It was a super crazy looking race car, but it was really just an eye catcher for Faraday Future to talk about their approach, which takes this idea of let's start with a basic foundation that is very easily modifiable, and then we can create all sorts of different vehicles using this same chassis, and that reduces production cost dramatically, and ultimately it means that these types of vehicles will be less expensive to

make and therefore, at least in theory, less expensive to purchase. Uh. As well as other implications. So he also talked about you could get to a point where you could design your own vehicle. Yeah, like like on the flip side, you know, instead of being less customized your could you could get something very customized. Right, So you you got like your basic chassis where essentially that that is unchangeable to some degree, But then you can sit there and

decide how your car should look. You can become a car designer using some form of three D manipulation software. Should have should have that grimlin on the front like the truck and maximum overdrive you I mean, I guess you could do that. I was thinking that you could go crazy like Homer Simpson when he had the chance to design his own car, like you need a horn everywhere, that kind of thing. Um. So, but you could actually design your own unique vehicle that nobody else in the

world will have. Uh. And there are even some companies right now that are experimenting with this. Now. Granted, this is super high end, so you've got to have a lot of money to be able to do this sort of thing. Also, you obviously need to have some some skill in design to make this, uh, something that's both gonna be a practical and attractive or if not practical,

at least safe. Right. So, but but it's an interesting notion that we could get to a level of customization where, at least for some businesses, you don't you know, people will ask, well, what kind of cars that? Oh, it's my car. I made it. There is no other like it. That's pretty amazing. Uh. And then the second half of the talk discussed the hyperloop. Right, yeah, this was Chip

Walters who took this concept and ran with it. So he was talking about how when Ellen Musk or Elon Musk, I usually say Ellen, but I've heard both, was talking about hyper loop. His idea was that he wanted to make the the designs that he and his engineers had come up with available for other companies to play with to turn this idea into a potential reality, and out to it. Design was one of the companies that actually

took on that challenge. So first, Walter's explained the differences between their approach to creating a capsule for the hyper loop and the one that was outlined in the initial documents that Musk released, and so uh. In Musk's version, the ideas that a capsule would travel at a top speed of more than seven hundred miles per hour one

thousand seven kilometers per hour. But Walter said that when their engineers started working on this and started crunching the numbers, they decided that it was probably better to design a top speed of between three or fo three to four kilometers prower as the top speed. Not that the seven hundred would have been impossible, but this would be more achievable from an engineering standpoint. It's more practical for a

couple of different reasons. One about you know, the amount of energy you would need to uh push something up to that that top speed. Another would be how long you would want the acceleration to last, because obviously, if you have a short period of acceleration, you create a huge amount of force that the people writing the capsule

will feel. So you want to decrease that amount, and you want the acceleration be nice and gentle, so that it's not something that everyone's concentrating on, like they're suddenly pressed back in their seat and can't move forward at all. Um And he also pointed out that this caused some other issues because if you're moving at a quote unquote slower speed, then your trip is going to take longer, right, Like a trip from San Francisco to l A will

take longer. The original hyper loop design has that trip lasting about half an hour. Well, if you're going half that speed, you're talking about at least an hour to get from point A to point B, which is still incredible, but it you know, you might need to go the

bathroom in an hour. You might be all right for half an hour, you might even be all right for an hour, but for longer travel times you have to start thinking, all right, well, now we've got to build in something that wasn't in the initial approach, which is lavatories, and that's just one of those practical considerations you have to make. Um So I thought that was really interesting that he talked about that. Uh. He also mentioned that the design they created had retractable wheels, so a normal

operation you actually have air bearings. It's like an air sled almost inside you know, the hyperloop In case you've forgotten, it's an enclosed like tunnel like track that's elevated above the ground, but it's it's a vacuum tube or near vacuum. It's actually very low air pressure, so not a true vacuum that a capsule or several capsules actually can move through. And each capsule uses compressed air to rise up above the surface of the enclosed track and fly on down

at at high speeds. And you're able to go at those high speeds because you have very low friction, very low air resistance, and that helps. But you not you might need wheels if the air system breaks down. Yeah, it's it's the most practical. If you know, some something happens, you don't want to have to wait for like helicopters to come get everybody off the trade or something like that. Yeah, you're inside a solid capsule, inside a tunnel that is

elevated above the ground. You might start feeling a wee bit anxious if it stops moving and you have no idea when it will start again. So they have these retractable wheels in their design that would deploy if the if the air sled was to stop working, and then

they could just wheel to the next exit point. And I think he said, and I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure he said that in their design they made it a requirement that there should be an exit point every ten miles along the track, so it would drive all using its wheels to the next extraction point essentially, and you would exit the chamber or the you would exit the capsule into the the track, uh and then climb out from there. UH. So that was

also interesting. He also talked about the fact that there would be multiple classes of capsule layouts, so sort of like how you have different classes of seats in an airplane, you would have different classes of seats in a hyperloop. UM. He first explained that Musks design allowed for two different sizes of capsules, one that would be smaller and one that would be larger, and they chose to go with

a larger one for two reasons. One, the smaller one created a real feeling of claustrophobia when you think about how small it was, um. And to the larger one would allow for you to have a car stored in one of the capsules. So the idea being that if you were trying to go from San Francisco de l A, but you needed to have your car once you got l A, it could transport the car as well. UM and so uh. They showed off some of the or he showed off some of the artists renderings of what

these different capsule interiors would look like. So the top of the line had the fewest number of seats, so each person was given the most space possible. And this is one where you might, Lauren, you might have to have claim a specific chair because because the four seats, they would all the two two pairs of seats would face in towards each other. And you could have like a fold away tray er table that you could lay out to act as a workstation. But again it's almost

like a conference table. Now. The difference here, of course, is that you can't you can't see the outside. There's no window for you to look at, which is which is a huge part of right. So uh it's also something that some people might find create some anxiety, but I'll talk more about their solution to that in just a second. So that was the most roomy of it could be, but I'll get to it. Uh So next was a business class style capsule which had sort of

roomy ish seats. What you could think of it like kind of the the comfort economy seats and some airlines. And then you had your economy class or standard class, which you know, you pack them in like sardines. And uh it looked like the you know again, in the renderings, it looked like the width of the capsule was about the same as a small commercial jet. So maybe one that has like two seats on one side and one seat on the other, something along those lines, or maybe

two and two. But that's about as many as you could pack, just because the limitations on the size the interior size of the capsule UM. And here's how they tried to combat the feeling that you're just in a you know, like like essentially an elevator that you can't get out of for half an hour or an hour.

They in their design they expect that the walls would be very high quality displays and you could display something on the walls that could be uh it could even be in motion, like it could be a video, not just a static picture, so that you have something to look at besides just you know, the people sitting around you.

And in the examples they had, they had one that looked like you were flying over clouds like you were in a jet um with with no obstruction, like it like the whole thing is just open because you know, there are no windows the whole side of the wall as a screen. There was another one where it made it look like it was a giant aquarium. So it's really cool, but you know, again it was just sort of conceptual. There's they don't have one built. Um, so

I thought that was pretty interesting. And they also said that because of their design, because they're not a jet, you don't have to have the capsule accelerate to top speed right away. You can take a lot of time and have it continuously accelerate at a lower rate, thus creating less of a of a force upon the people inside the capsule. That's obviously important if you're if you're one of those people who's sitting with your back facing the front of the capsule, and if it were to

accelerate quickly, you would be bent forward right. You wouldn't be pressed back in your seat, you would be folded up. So you want to make sure that that accelerative force is not so strong as to create discomfort in the passengers. Yeah, nobody wants to unintentionally head desk. That's not that's not fun. No, Intentional head desks are are comedic. Unintentional ones are tragic. So um. He also mentioned a thing that I never thought about before, so clearly, these these tracks are not

going to be a straight line. You're not gonna have a straight line from San Francisco de l A. There's gonna be some curves. But then you think, well, curves, when you change direction, that's an acceleration, right, because it's a velocity thing, it's got a vector. Uh, So how do you change the direction without having that star trek effective? Everyone being jostled around inside the capsule whenever? It's because you can't even see when it turns coming up right,

because you're inside a solid capsule. And they said, well, the way it works is it banks. Uh The actual capsule will roll up the side of the wall that the curved wall of the tunnel, and because of that, the G force will continuously be pulling you downwards, not pulling you left or right, because it has this banking ability. Same sort of thing that if you had a race track with banked turns, those g forces are pulling you down more than they're they're pulling you off to the side.

So if you've ever been on a road that has like a banked turn, you know it feels a lot different than if you're just going around a flat curve. To the left or right where you're being pulled to one side or the other. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. I never thought of that, that these these capsules are essentially kind of uh, they're not They're not always perpendicular to the ground sometimes. I mean, they're never

going to be parallel to the ground. You're never gonna have a turn that's gonna be that that intense, but they're going to, you know, they allow some sway. And

I thought that was a really clever idea. One other thing that they brought up that I thought was interesting I didn't put it in my notes here is that as they were talking about this future of autonomous cars and um uh and the hyper loop, is that with the autonomous cars, you suddenly have the capability of allowing more people access to mobility, which is great, but that also means it potentially could mean more miles driven by vehicles, So we might actually see a net increase in the

number of miles driven by vehicles on the roads. So we might see more cars on the road in the future because autonomous cars will give more mobility and independence to people who previously had no access to that, like the elderly children, people who have visual impairments, right Exactly. I have a friend who when she has to take her medication, she cannot drive because she is prone to epilepsy. So, but she might be able to do that in an

autonomous vehicle. So that raises more questions about what will traffic be like in the future. And now, if autonomous cars are super smart, it might end up being all right, because they'll make more efficient use of the infrastructure than human drivers would. But we don't know that for sure, right, That's something that we can't say for sure right now. Yeah, and this, this conversation actually leads us into these Well, it was technically the third panel that you went to, right,

but it's a but it's a tied end concept. This second panel that we're going to discuss today robot cars and sharing road rage or smooth sailing. Yeah, so because we're about smooth rage, that sounds like it's a type of music. I love smooth rage at any rate. This would be as Lauren was saying, this was the third panel. I saw that, David, because it ties directly into the

what I just talked about, we said to tackle it next. Uh. This panel focused on the future of autonomous cars in the concept of the shared car UH and The panelists included Frederick Sue of NATO, Shad Laws from Renault and and Nissan. He specifically works for Renault, but he says that in the United States, like that's one of the places where the brand Renault is not known, but their partner brand Nissan, everyone knows. And then Mark Platchen from

bmw UH and Mark Platsch was actually a substitute. Marian wou of ge Ventures was supposed to be on the panel, but she got sick unfortunately just before south By Southwest. So NATO I mentioned with Frederick Sue, you might wonder what that company is. It's a company that may It is an app that coordinates a mobile device, several cameras, and a data infrastructure of driving information to improve fleet management. UH.

It measures driving skill. So if you have like a a company like Uber and you want to UH find out if a driver is actually appropriate for your business, you could install this system and see how well they drive. UM as well as I can turn a regular car into a smart car, so you can think of it as as sort of an aftermarket smart car upgrade, and you would mount a camera essentially it goes right over where you're right behind where your rear view mirror is,

so it doesn't block your view. Uh. And that coordinates with an app running on a mobile device and also the obviously the infrastructure of the app. So he was sort of the moderator Sue was. And according to Sue, the typical American car spends nine six percent of its life part. Uh, we're only driving our cars four of the entire time that they are active, and that, Uh, I think it's pretty easy to say that's inefficient. That's

not an efficient use of the technology. It matters, especially in cities where you gotta find a place to keep the cars, right, Yeah, especially cities where parking is a premium, things like New York City. That would be a big one, right. So uh. They also only use about two percent of all the energy they expand to move a person from point A to point B. The other are that's used for other stuff, either overcoming in efficiencies or moving the vehicle itself, but not you know, it's when you take

the factor of the person out of it. So only two percent of the energy that the vehicle is using is actually doing what you needed to do, which is get a person from one point to another, and that's you know, that's also inefficient. So he was talking also about how electric cars could be UH an advantage to this, you could, uh with with the improvement of things like battery technology and the simplified drive train of electric car,

you improve the efficiency of the overall system. UH. There's still arguments to be made about how the electricity has produced and all of that, but that that was not what he was focusing on. UH. He introduced the concept of ACES, which stands for autonomous, connected, electric and Sharing, and he had these set up in a in a slide in four corners, and then he showed related concepts between each of the elements to explain how these all

fit together in the car of the future. So all of those elements are important for cars of the future, but a lot of the projected models incorporate all four into one approach. So in other words, you don't necessarily have to have a future with autonomous cars, or electric cars, or shared cars or connected cars, but most of the projected models have all four of those playing at least

some role. UH. And he said that the autonomous car era will be akin to another industrial revolution with massive disruption across multiple industries beyond personal transportation, including shipping, so like the trucking and stry um and the airline industry.

Because if you're able to get a cheap ride in an autonomous car to take you to your destination and it's less expensive than an airplane ticket and you're not as concerned about getting there in the least amount of time, that could be incredibly disruptive of incredibly um uh hard for the airline industry to handle. It may become a very different business uh in five to ten years or

forty if we want to go with our usual number. So, according to laws, the safety benchmark for manually driven cars is less than one fatality for every one million kilometers traveled. And he says most nations meet this or exceed this already today. And he was making this point to say, uh, you know, talking about making the argument that au Thomas

cars need are are safer than manually driven cars. His point was manually manually driven cars are already really safe because when you take this benchmark and you look at the world, almost all the nations already meet it. Uh So in the US it's one point eight fatalities per one hundred million vehicle miles traveled. Because it's the United

States and we use miles not kilometers. So remember that a mile is one point six kilometers, So actually, even though it's one point eight fatalities, it's actually less than one fatality per hundred million kilometers driven. But not all states are equal. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Wyoming leads the state states in fatalities per hundred million miles driven at one point five nine, and Massachusetts is on the low end at point five seven or one

hundred million miles traveled. So I appreciate Laws this point that manually driven cars are already remarkably safe. However, that being said, it's very easy to kind of think of that in a statistics point of view. But when you start looking at hard numbers and you realize that in el s people died in the United States due to car accidents, that to me is more powerful than less than one per million kilometers dravel. Well, it means we

do a lot of car driving. Yeah, yeah, We've got a lot of cars on the road and we were driving a lot. So in my mind, the safety argument is still a very relevant one. Laws was kind of saying, well, until autonomous cars proved that they are safer than manually driven cars, which are already really safe, it's a non issue. I think that based upon early results, it's hard to

argue autonomous cars are less safe. There at least as safe from what we've seen so far, keeping in mind is still very early days, and maybe there will be a case. I hope there's not, but maybe there'll be a case that shows that they are not as safe and we still have a ways to go. Pletschin actually introduced what he called the three ps that are necessary for a fleet based them to work, which are proximity, prevalence,

and price. So you want proximity in the sense that you want to you want cars on demand to be close to you, right. You don't want to have to wait twenty five minutes for the car to get to you to pick you up unless you've scheduled it for that amount of time. If you call a car, you want to be there pretty quickly. Uh. The prevalence is that you need to have enough cars in the area

to meet demand. So if if there's a car that's two minutes away, that's awesome, But if it just so happens that's one of three cars in the city and you just lucked out. That's not gonna do you good in in the long run, right And then price, obviously, you need it to be competitive and affordable. Right now, according to Platchin, the average price per mile for services like Uber and Lift is about, you know, excusing surge pricing,

is about a dollar a mile. But he thinks that using autonomous technology you can start to and with the economy of scale, you can get that down to be fifty cents per mile or maybe even as as little as twenty five cents per mile, which suddenly makes it a much more accessible means of transportation for a larger

amount of the population. As for the shared nature of cars, uh Law said, there are a lot of different models out there, and not all of them follow that fleet of service cars that we've talked about, right, So we've talked about how autumas cars might mean that we don't own one of these as a personal vehicle. Rather we

all rely on shared services. So one alternative he mentioned, and he said there were multiples, but this was the only example he gave, was imagined that you have sort of a communal car where you and other households have all joined up together and essentially invested in a single vehicle, so you own like one sixth of a car. That sounds like a horrible idea. I also think that because how can you ever guarantee that the car will be available when you need it unless everyone's schedule is slightly

offset with each other never changes. Yeah, I can't imagine that. That just sounds awful. I mean, it's it makes a lot more sense to me to do the widespread shared car network issue. Yeah, I agree, you call a car. Yeah. Now, Plash and mentioned there are some This was actually in response to an audience question about, well, what about privacy, what about the fact that people use their cars like there's a lot of clutter in in a lot in

some people's cars. Not everyone keeps their car pristine. A lot of people have stuff that they rely upon stored in their cars so it's easy to access and they don't have to carry it everywhere. And he said, yeah, that's a problem because obviously in the shared economy approach you can't do that. It's like going in a taxi cab. You don't want to leave anything behind because you will never see it. Again, but that means you can't rely on having stuff close at hand, just stored away in

your mobile storage unit, which is your car. So you could argue that even though your car is parked it's time, if it's also acting as a storage unit, then it has a little more added utility, right, and you lose that in the shared version. He said, there's not really a get solution for that, although if you get the price down low enough, he says, you could have your stuff in another car and just call it on demand

and it comes and brings it to you. And I thought, so you want to double or triple the number of cars out there. That seems like that would be a lot of money and a lot of of expended energy for a what I would argue a trivial benefit. But it was an interesting thing to hear about. So in both of the the autonomous car panels I saw, there were people who were saying, listen, I don't think that personal ownership is going to go away. I don't think that we're going to get to a point where the

government will outlaw manually driven, personally owned vehicles. But one guy said it may turn into something like horse ownership that few people actually own a car. There will be somewhere, there will be use cases where a car is necessary, Like in I would argue again in rural areas, it makes more sense to have a manually driven, personally owned

vehicle than a car sharing service. Um. And also if you want to do things like off roading, if you want to do recreational driving, obviously you would need to have your own manually driven car, or or own seven own a fleet of them and allow people to rent them, or just or just hobbyists, which I suppose is a word that's more often applied to car enthusiasts than to horse enthusiasts. But you know, there are plenty of people out there who just like horses a whole bunch and

want to have one. And you know, for like Scott Benjamin not with the horses, with the car thing, like I'm sure would you would have to. You would have to pry his car away from his cold dead hands. Yeah. I think I'm going to talk to Scott later this week and I'm going to drop some bombs on him to find out how he reacts. Well, I'll be nice to Scott to him. One thing that occurs to me is that there are some people for whom they really need the car to be a mobile storage unit, for example,

for the work they do. Like if you are a plumber, or if you are you know, anybody who has a set of tools or materials in your truck that you use at various places that you go, that's seems like you pretty much need to have your own vehicle. Yeah, unless you have unless you have some sort of of plumbing business that's large enough to have its own fleet of dedicated vehicles that are outfitted with the right tools. But that ends up meaning that you would you couldn't

have independent contractors anymore. And I can't imagine that that's going to be a case, at least not until we get the plumber robots, which they don't. You know, they'll have all the tools just stored away and then they just hover over to your place and and they hoover out the pipes, or maybe in the future, instead of calling a plumber, people just call a car and then

use the bathroom in the car. There was also talk about the fact that there there would need to be systems to maintain the exactly and that would just do a scan and anything that pops up on the scan and say time to go back to HQ. Oh never mind. I didn't need to go anywhere. I was trying to trans transition, however, to by making the plumber robot thing to the last panel I saw, right, yeah, yeah, which is not about transit. No, it's about robots. It wasn't plumbers,

it was not about plumbers. It's not about the future. It's called The panel was called one Robot Doesn't Fit All uh. And this one featured four people, UH, product designer nure Kim Uh, the executive director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford University UH, Wendy Jew and then former Google X User Experience researcher Leila Takayama. And finally the c IO of Fellow Robotics Fafadu, Rena Tonga. And this was a fascinating panel. I will let me go ahead

and say this right off the top. I couldn't hear Rena Tonga very well. He he was. He's a soft spoken guy, and my hearing is bad. But it was a great panel. All the women were phenomenal, enthusiastic and incredibly knowledgeable, and every question that was asked was a good one, and every answer was really great. I wish I could have shot video of it, but you can't at off myself West, So this is as close as

you're gonna get if you weren't actually there. So the panel mostly focused on how big a challenge it is to design robots. Um and Takeyama pointed out that it's much easier to design a single purpose robot, something that is meant to do one thing and one thing only, and you can you can design everything about that robot to dedicate it toward that task. That is much easier than building a general purpose robot. This is something we've

talked about on the show before. Yeah, and tuky I'm actually went ahead and said, like, the more stuff you're robot does, the crappier it performs. That was essentially the way she said it too, which was awesome. Uh and her her example because each panelist was asked to name what their favorite robot was, and her favorite robot was Mo from Wally and Mo was the little tiny just as Mo and it tries to scrub. It's a cleaner robot.

It just scrubs dirt off of things. And there are times in the film when when Mo is critical to the mission. Yes, and she loves Mo. She says, Mo knows what its purposes and that is what Moe does. That is all MO does, and Mode does it with efficiency, and that's why I love this character. So that was

really very endearing. They actually showed a clip from the film, but Takiyama and you both talked about how as a human it can be really difficult to tell what a robot is doing, particularly if the robot is in a mapping mode where it's it's examining its environment, but it's not directly acting on anything at the moment, you might just think it's being idle. Right, there's no necessarily there's

not necessarily an outward indication that anything is going on. Besides, it's just sitting there all right, unlike a human person, who you know, if they're trying, if you humans trying to figure out where to go next. They might be looking around. They might be checking a map. They might be just standing with their head tilted in a in a perpetually confused manner. They may be looking around in a little bit of you know, a panic, hoping that they can find help. There's at least some sort of

visual indication that something's going on. Uh, so uh, Takiyama actually told a really funny story about that. Well, first, first I should mention that, um, that Jews point was that there's also an issue where there's a trust barrier. If you don't know what the robot is doing, it's hard for you to trust the robot, right you If you suspect the robot might be doing something on the sly, then it's gonna make you feel nervous. And she brought

up the example of Amazon Echo. This actually ended up being an interesting discussion because, uh, fava dude didn't think of Echo as being a robot, but Jews said, no, it totally is a robot. It's doing work on behalf of humans. It's doing it in the background. Sure, there's not a physical body moving around, but it is an artificially intelligent construct that's doing work on behalf of humans. And uh, it doesn't necessarily fit the traditional definition of robot,

but still doing what a robot does. Sure, it's still it's a robot. Yeah, it's at least it's at least Lauren just hits some air quote. Yes, it's at least the back end of of a robe addic system. It just lacks the physical body to move around. Doesn't need it for what it does. They just need to give it a single wheel. Yeah. Well. One of the things that she pointed out is that it's impossible to tell when an Amazon Echo is really listening in because because

you can, you can use voice commands to activate it. Right, you say alexa, and it wakes up. And by the way, if you have an Amazon Echo and I just woke it up, I'm sorry anyway. Because it's listening, you don't know if it's spying, if it's recording, if it's transmitting. That makes people nervous. It creates a trust issue. She says, there needs to be some sort of system built in to make people feel better, like they know what's happening. Alexa,

order ten thou drinking straws man, Yes, okay so. Taka Yama also demonstrated how this barrier barrier could create real

engineering issues. She used a concrete example from her own past and told a story about how she used to work in an office building where engineers were working on robots uh and and testing them out all the time, which meant there are robots just cluttering up the hallway and there's a particular hallway that her office was off of that often was used for robot testing, and she said, I got to the point where I hated the things because I had to try and find a way to

get around them while doing my day to day stuff. And she talked about how in some cases the robots might be standing in front of a door, and what the robots are actually doing is mapping out the door. They're looking at the door's dimensions. They're identifying what is the handle, what is the mechanism for the handle, how do you operate it? Does the door open inward or

does it open outward? These are things that we humans can figure out very quickly by looking at a door, right and if we if we don't figure it out properly, if we pull when it's a push door, we figure that out and then change our behavior and move on. Robots, that's not necessarily the case, uh, And it could take hours for a robot to do all the mapping before

it's able to take an action. And she talked about tim where she passed between the robot and a door in order to get around it, and immediately engineers were running around the corner screaming at her, like what did you do we you just ruined two hours of work because I don't know. The robots just sitting there, it's not doing anything. How am I supposed to know it's doing something when it's just sitting there. All For me,

it's just an obstacle that's in my way. And so that's what kind of got her thinking about creating robots that have some form of expression. And the benefit is not to the robot necessarily, at least not directly, but more to humans for human robot interactions. Yeah, I've read about these concepts before. One of them is is it the Baxter robot that does this where it has eyes?

And it's not so much like you say, it's not for the robot, because the robot can see anyway with its cameras, but it has eyes that are displayed on the screen so that the person can tell what the robot is looking at. Yes, and that's that's exactly what Takeyama and you were both arguing for. They're saying, this is absolutely critical to build meaningful human robot interactions that are effective and not distracting or destructive. And so she said, well,

you know, she created a paper. She worked with a guy from Pixar to create a series of animations to kind of get people's reactions to various scenarios in which a robot might react or not react. And she said, what if you had a robot that's standing there looking at a door. It's mapping things out, just as the situation was in her real past, but it occasionally reaches up and sort of makes a scratching motion at its head like it's thinking. She said, well, that's an indication

that it's actually doing something. It's not just sitting idle, it's not just trying to charge itself or something, and that that would give an indication to the human Oh, I should skirt around the other side, because this robot is actually trying to do something. I don't know what it is, but it's clear it's it's occupied with something. Um And she also talked about creating a series of animations indicate a robot's reaction to either succeeding at a

task or failing at it. And again, it's not for the robots benefit, it's for the people around the robot. And she gave a very simple example again of opening a door. So imagine that you have a robot and it uh it tries to open a door, but for some reason is incapable of doing so. Maybe it's grip is at the wrong point on the handle and it slips right off. She said. If you have a robot that does it but doesn't react to the failure, then people just think of it as a dumb robot. Yeah. Yeah,

you don't know that the robot knows that it fails exactly. Yeah, you just think that the robot just went through. It's almost like if someone were remote controlling it and they just missed a little bit, and they're like, oh, well, all right, it's just a dumb thing. It doesn't have any intelligence of its own, so you need to give

it sadness. Yes, yes, And so the Pixar animator did this thing, and it kind of looked a little not exactly like Wally, but you know, kind of similar in that it had an articulated head and had arms and uh, kind of a blocky body. In the anime, it's very simple animation where the robot reaches forward that the hand slips off the handle, and then the robot SAgs a little bit like it's shoulder like what well, the block essentially SAgs down a bit as if it's disappointed in

itself slightly deflates. Yeah, And the people that she talked to, after they viewed the various animations they were supposed to rank how intelligent they thought each robot was. The interesting thing was they thought the robots that failed but indicated they understood that they failed. In other words, they made this expression were more intelligent than robots that succeeded but

showed no no response at all. So there are also were success ones, and my favorite was a success one where the robot opens up a door and then immediately like like they had a little column that represented a person. So the robot opens up a door and immediately turns its head to the person and looks down, looks up and and and perks up as if to say, look what I did. And everyone in the audience went, uh. These are very simplistic representations too. They weren't like like

realistic or true to life or anything. So I thought this was fascinating, This idea of designing robots for human robot interaction, again taking human psychology into account, because often from the roboticist side, they're looking at a functionality approach, right, they need to find a way to make a robot be able to do the thing it's designed to do. But if that robot is designed to interact within a human environment, part of what it has to do is

interact with humans. It's usually the trickiest part. Yeah, I believe there is a human Robot Interactions lab here in Atlanta, Georgia Tech in there. Yeah, you've spoken to people there. Yeah, it's it's really interesting. I mean, there's and there's so many different ways of creating this. There were some great questions at that panel. One guy asked, because he worked in a company, either it makes industrial robots or they

use industrial robots. I can't remember precisely, but he said, what do you think about what are ways that we can design industrial robots so that they create a a a warning that people can pick up on and not just dismiss. And they were saying, yeah, it's really tricky because if you create an expression that becomes uh that

the people associate with being human. There's also the danger of dismissing something like you might dismiss a person who you don't think is really an authority figure telling you, hey, don't do that, and you're like, well, they don't even know what they're talking about, and they said, this is actually a really hard problem to solve because you want to create the safest possible response. But you right now

people don't agree on what that actually is. I would say that what you should do is, when you're designing dangerous industrial robots, you should design them to look scary. You should specifically design them, like hire people to design them so they look like angry monster and maybe have

like like circular saws on the shoulder they're just constantly rotating. Well, no, not necessarily make them more dangerous than they already are, but to make them look like a scary creature show Reach for the Stars man, come on, maybe like like edgeless circular saws, so they're not actually more dangerous, they just look and have them just roar and breathe fire every now and then. I think if you make it

make a really obnoxious sound. Actually, instead of making them scary, just make them annoying, like like like a field of urkle bots, like putting together. Everybody want to hug r B. That's actually I'm thinking of what's the what's the little robot in the Borderland's game. I'm thinking of that what clap trap. Make it like clap trap, where you know, after you're around it for thirty seconds, you're like, I would rather be anywhere else but here. Um. It was

a really cool conversation. I'm glad I got a chance to go to that panel, and in fact, I have to thank Lauren for that, because I originally had a different panel on my schedule and she said, well, why don't we just switch it out for this other one? And it was totally the right call. It was a much better well, I don't know it was a much better panel because because he didn't see the other one, but it was a very formative and entertaining panel, So huge props to all of the people and south By

Southwest who who did these panels. Is really interesting stuff and um, and it was great to kind of get that that view of the future. I think in all cases it was more optimistic than otherwise, which again kind of speaks to me. So I'm really glad that we had the opportunity to go there and that I had the opportunity to sit down on some of these panels. Yeah, it was a really exciting conference overall. I definitely recommend if if people are interested as well, probably many of

you are. And uh in hearing industry experts talk about these kind of things, and you know, there's a lot of marketing involved too, I think, But but it's it's really it's really lovely getting to actually talk to these people. It is and uh, of course there are tons of other things that are awesome about the surrounding event, like the tacos, which I will talk about at lant How many how many tacos did you eat while you were there? Did you have account a total taco? Only had five?

I think I think guy might be like the like the loss the loss leader in taco consuming. Actually wait, wait, I'm sorry, I had nine. I forgot I've got about the two airport tacos. I actually had three, like immediately upon landing. I'm not sure. I'm not sure why that they are addictive. Well at any rate, uh, I do recommend checking out south By Southwest if you get the opportunity.

It's a pretty it's pretty expensive to get a badge, but there are a lot of things against surrounding the conference if you're if you're not able to afford the direct conference, there are a lot of opportunities to talk to super smart people in all different fields of music, film interactivity, and there's a there's a lot of areas that you can get into with a guest pass, which is basically just like an online registration process you do, you don't have to go through, you don't have to

pay any money for it, right, So definitely check it out. And hey, check out some of the videos that are coming out on now dot house to works dot com. Yeah, and also our YouTube channel. You can you can find them with Google. I'm sure we've got quite a few, right. We've got something about Thomas Car's future of transit. You did one about that, right, and I get I did uh one about robots um and some other stuff too. Yeah, well,

we've got a ton of amazing video. Our crew worked their butts off to get all around Austin and shoot those and edit those in a timely manner. So check that out. Also, if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes, send us a message. Our email address is f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. Or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter we are f W Thinking. Just search fw Thinking

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