AI Is Changing The World

The AI's, They Are A-Changin'. . .

I'm not sure in which direction, though. On the one hand, medical researchers are enlisting AI in the task of finding a vaccine for COVID, on the other hand, medical researchers are enlisting AI in the task of finding a better toxin to kill humans. 

Oh - I don't think AI is going to "... go on-line August 4th, 2023 ... begin to learn at a geometric rate..." and then "...become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th..." like the movie. If we build that AI, it's more likely to bulldoze a wall to deliver us a pair of Amazon slippers than it is to bulldoze the wall to kill us. 

For instance, I always wanted one of these - and now
I have my very own "Gyro Gearloose" little helper,
"DJ  FM  TRAP" and he's very assistingly helpful.

Let me start at the hardware level - we can see what differences just tech can make in balances of power shall we? 

Tech War

Ukraine are successful at repelling the Russians from target after target because they're well versed in using technology. They use social media to drive public perception and reaction, they used the warfare equivalent of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers - inexpensive strike drones (Bayraktar TB-2) that are extremely effective loiter munitions. And they used off the shelf drones for surveillance, target acquisition and targeting. 

Ukraine and Russia are what we'd call state actors. And yes, technology has radically changed the balance between them. Ukraine has been holding Russia back because Russia has relied on what may have seemed to be pretty high tech but is also older, quite expensive and difficult to maintain, and used it using dated procedures. Their gear costs . . . 

Ukraine has opted for the throwaway tech and used it skilfully because they are defending themselves.
(Wisdom from my father: "When a tiger attacks another tiger, he must attack and he has to win. The tiger defending needs only to survive.")

In order to do that they've been aided by other state actors (Turkey, for instance, providing and selling TB2s, other countries providing directly or providing finance for purchasing equipment, munitions, and weapons) who are technically not involved in the war. But they have also had aid from some decidedly not state actors.

If Elon Musk can change the course of the Ukraine-Russia war with his Starlink donation, that means he has more power than Russia because he was able to provide Ukraine with communications that Russia will find very hard to block. 

If a Taiwanese company can supply high value camera drones to Zelesnkiy then they too are helping win a war because their gift directly allows Ukraine defenders to conduct covert and hard to stop aerial surveillance, it allows them to provide targeting information to artillery, and it provides live proof of destroying the target. 

Freelance mercenaries (the very word "freelance" has military origins) flocked into Lviv and other cities to join the Ukraine fighters. These have had to be equipped with weapons and transport, etc. That has to a large part come from yet other non-state and state actors. 

All of these things are making a very large difference to what might have been seen as a very one-sided war. The latter benefactors who are joining the fray aren't State actors, and while Russia can threaten other countries (that join the military of the Ukraine to fight the Russian military) with retaliation, it can't do the same to these other participants. 

Where do you aim a missile to take out the origins of a bunch of mercenaries? What of Musk's properties can you attack? Which people in Taiwan do you send a bunch of soldiers to drag out of their homes and execute? How do you "get" an enemy on foreign soil without declaring war on the countries they reside in and over-committing your armed forces and finances?

Guerilla war and terrorism rely on this shadowiness. Now Great Britan have made donations of equipment and funding to Ukraine. Germany are re-arming themselves, Finland and Norway are mooting joining NATO, China and Afghanistan aren't offering as much assistance as Putin had hoped for, and just where does Putin send troops and aim airstrikes to counter that? 

(BTW the reasons the Chinese aren't as overtly forthcoming is that they have a financial crisis, they have a worldwide image problem, and they need overseas customers. Also, they've managed a lot of their population problems.)

Technology has given an edge to militaries that use it. That's why there have been literally trillions of dollars poured into research and development for military equipment ordnance and materiel. It's resulted in super-effective (but also super-expensive) military tech. Then that super-expensive tech found its way into commercial technology and became super-cheap tech. 

And what we know is that if you make it super cheap and available to anyone, then everyone will mess with it. We're a race born to tinker, we use tools - and that includes once super-expensive, now super-cheap tech. Among other things that's given us computing power unlike anything seen on Earth a mere hundred years ago, when the tag "supercomputer" began to be applied to the biggest computers of the day. They were super for their time but nowadays you probably have a much better computer in your pocket or are reading this article on it. 

But as soon as they existed, those early computers became bigger better tools. . . In the 1970s the Cray-1 came along, followed about five years later by the Cray X-MP in the early1980s. Then sometime in the early 1990s the first massively superparallel computers came along, and today we take them and the massive server farms for granted. 

And of course, they're now the tools that are being used to create the AI and ML (Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning) software we have and which will generate ever better AI/ML. And yes, the AI strides we're now making can be put to a multitude of uses.

So now that we've got that technological angle covered let's get back to AI. . .

AI War

AIs are something that we needn't be afraid of. It's more technology, another tool we can use.

But the people that develop those AIs - them I've got issues with... 

Cyber attacks are at the moment carried out by hackers. Lone wolf hackers generally don't manage large scale hacks. Hacker collectives can be much more successful at larger scales but they go after targets dictated almost by whim and social media, so to speak.

The so-called state actors are a different matter. Countries usually keep a team - a farm if you will - of what we should probably call "their IT people" for political correctness and they are then tasked with hacking other states' critical IT infrastructure and gaining sensitive information. War is where the tech came from, after all, and war is a legit hothouse incubator of technological advances as we saw in the last section.

And so you can bet at least one of those cyberwar groups are looking at AI as a new and powerful tool in the fight. As an ex system and network admin, I can think of a dozen things I could point a machine learning / neural network box at.

I'm sure a hacker in a cyberwar/espionage unit can, too. And they'll have access to good AI software and hardware if they ask for it. 

Lone wolves and collectives would first have to hire or hack a powerful computer system before they could even run such a program. State employed cyberwarfare teams on the other hand can generally just ask for stuff and be given access. 

AIs and technology go hand in hand, you can have technology without AI but AI is dependent on the right strength of tech to run on. And between them, technology and AI software have already changed the face of warfare and commerce and transport logistics and store management and airline bookings and.... You get the idea. 

It hasn't escaped the militaries of the world, the governments of the world. China has a very good handle on 'managing' their entire population by surveillance technology, AI facial recognition technology, and so-called 'social credit'. 

If you're a naughty citizen they can find you in less than seven minutes because of their facial recognition software and the largest smart surveillance camera network in the world. 

If you're not naughty enough to be arrested, you may find that trains won't let you board, and some stores will no longer take your card, you could lose your job - or your lease on your apartment. 

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Meanwhile robotic platforms like Bayraktar, Big Dog and Atlas, and countless other robotic machines are being equipped with smarter and smarter AI, enabling those machines to decide for themselves if a certain person is an ally, a non-combatant, or an opponent. The only thing stopping that happening already are 'morals' and 'war conventions'. We are so screwed... Unless:

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My Great Look Forward

Disclaimer: Includes utopian trippy-dippy-hippie thinking.

Boots-on-the-ground wars are becoming a thing for underdeveloped countries. (Both in terms of resources, and in terms of humanity and intellectual advancement. Russia isn't out of that group yet, obviously.) Developed countries send AI-directed machines, and the next generation won't even need those, because it's becoming pretty obvious that wars achieve nothing that a sufficiently robust balance of trade and economics agreement can't do. 

I'm not sure how long it'll take people to realise that we can pretty much become Earthlings instead of sticking to our ethnoreligiogeopolitical divisions, because let's face it we've proven that none of those have proven useful nor helpful nor harmless. 

(I admit, this is a pretty utopian trippy-dippy-hippie proposition but I believe we're watching an intersection. Common forms of politics have all proven disappointing and in fact their badness goes all the way through to actively harmful and catastrophic. Individual country and personal economics systems also haven't proven to actually ensure any minimal quality of life for everyone, and the uses we've been putting technology to have proven to be a disaster of planetary proportions. I think there's every chance that I'll live to see this change happening.)

Thinking: Technology. AI software. Hypersurveillance 'Social credit'. 

It's already theoretically possible to - like China - be able to locate any specific individual around the globe in a matter of minutes. There are enough ways to home in and then triangulate. Internet activity IP address, bank and loyalty card transactions, phone signal, phone GPS - these form a search chain that gets successively smaller radii of location. 

It's also theoretically possible to give every locatable person a Universal Basic Income in the form of specific tokens: Accommodation tokens, fuel and/or energy tokens, grocery tokens, clothing tokens, entertainment tokens, discretionary spend tokens, etc. The minimum value of those tokens should ensure a liveable life, but not much more. 

Social credits would provide the means to upgrade those tokens. Work would provide the means to upgrade those tokens. The whole system will be able to be managed by software and hardly need administering. The question is - will it be dispensed by governments, by corporations, or an AI? 

Anyway. Just my humble brainfart. Ciao for now. 

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Possible Future Of Electric Vehicles

 

Why Own A Car?

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I'm asking because I LOVE our car. It's an old gas guzzler but it's ours by golly! I can keep most of my fishing gear in it all the time, we have our bag of shopping bags, a couple of water bottles, and so forth. We sometimes go buy sandwiches and coffees and drive to the beach to watch a sunset, or head down the coast on a trip to VISIT ALL THE OPP SHOPS! in our region. We'd be lost without it.

Except. . . When I do the sums, our car sees use maybe 150 - 200 hours a year in total. Less than 5% of the time, and the rest, it sits on our driveway rusting and depreciating in value. A little while ago I wrote about how much less expensive an EV is to operate, and it's occurred to me that they also retain far more value than a conventional vehicle. And then I realised that the whole 'total cost of ownership' thing is actually a bit of a Furphy.

I reckon I could probably pack my fishing kit into a fishing bag. We could just - use a folding shopping trolley. And we could always keep the meter running during a beachside dinner.

This bag would be a cheap option if I could just ditch the car.

My point is that if there was a guarantee that I could summon a vehicle within five minutes or less and rent it for as long as I needed (including romantic sandwiches on the beach) then the driveway could become a series of raised gardens or a neighbourhood meeting space with a few tables and chairs. 

Profits. And Losses

Profit

And for EV manufacturers, they're missing out on a huge source of income as a car rental company. A car they sell for $100k could earn much larger sums from rental micropayments. Say an EV has a pretty much trouble-free service life of eight years, it costs $35 per day to completely amortise the price they would have gotten, plus charging fees. (Which are negligible if you own a charging park running on renewable energy mostly generated in-house.) 

But let's say the vehicle (now that it's on summon call for the public) does 700km a day, at <5c/km that means maybe another $35 in energy costs. I'm working on each vehicle doing around 12hrs of duty a day in a mixed travel public, i.e. some commuters, some doing shopping, some going for a day trip. A rental fee of $6/hr would cover those costs. 

You can do much better with good scheduling and ensure that most vehicles operate for 18 hours a day or more. Also consider that the EV actually costs the manufacturer a lot less than it does the end customer. A fee of $3.50 per hour would most likely break even over the first four to five years, and a $5/hr rate would recoup close to twice as much as the manufacturer would have earned from directly selling that car. 

Loss

There's location location location, for a start. Where do you house your fleet and their charging park? 

Such a venture would also face the consequences of bad drivers damaging the vehicles, and you could maybe also say vandalism and accidents would be a problem, but would it, really? Yes, share e-bikes and e-scooters were a disastrous and economically and ecologically damaging fiasco but they were very insecure. 

A person didn't need a driver's license for them and in many cases could get hold of them fraudulently, which added to their perceived low worth, low risk, and thus a high probability for mistreatment. These companies were ahead of the curve in one way, but out of touch with people and people's ethics and morals. 

Mitigation

But a car with multiple cameras, sensor systems, an always-on GPS, and a requirement for a hirer to present a valid driver's license and pay a security deposit is another matter. Also, a tighter setting on the autopilot mode can be set to override the driver if they become erratic or dangerous, and in any case, one of the biggest drawcards I can imagine would be that my vehicle is completely autonomous. 

There will be large swathes of apartment and office buildings in the beginning, that will have floor after floor of empty car parks. They'll be looking to monetise the wasted space in any way they can, and keeping them as car parks would be a low capital way they could do that. 

An operator could strike deals with the real estate owners to lease whole floors of parking and install their own charging facilities, and green energy on the roof. The parking floors don't have to be the most convenient to the occupants or the street, because a car can collaborate with the others to negotiate a quick way out when they're needed. 

Incentives

Imagine guaranteeing the apartment owner that there will always be a certain number of vehicles available to occupants at all times. That's just a benefit the owner can then use to make the apartments more appealing to renters. 

We're already on the way to having EVs become the dominant vehicles on the road, and once that's os, autonomous driving will become an order of magnitude safer because autonomous vehicles don't have to cope with the unpredictable actions of a human driver. All that's missing is that people exchange their petrol and diesel vehicles for an autonomous one. 

As to how to get them there, how's this for an incentive? Each vehicle scrapped (not resold) earns the ex-owner a flat credit towards their hire EV use that's valid for the next ten years. Ditch the private and fleet car and you can have a government-backed subsidy to your smart car rentals for ten years. 

Counter-intuitively, that latter works if you accept that in return for just giving your car away to a recycler, you're getting ten years (!!!) worth of transport without another investment into another vehicle, without another cent spent on maintenance or ancillary items like fuel or oil or coolant or even new wiper blades. 

Our cart costs us around $100/mth for fuel, and that's because we spend most of our driving life going to the shops or medical appointments. More rarely, we go for a small outing. When you add the cost of all the ancillary items we get maybe another $25/mth, add in servicing about $30/mth. The car costs us $22,000-something over a ten year period. 

Oh wait I forgot the on-road costs like registration - that's close to $10,000 in ten years but let's say $7,000 so now the car's cost us $29,000 in ten years or $2,900 a year. And I'm not even figuring in the fact that the average change-over for cars is around 4 - 5 years, and that you never get a free changeover - the least I've ever managed is $5,000 for a newer second-hand car.  

Say you change cars twice in that ten years, you'll have lost another $10,000 on average. (I'm referring to trade-ins not private sales, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the worst car trader in the world.) The sum's up to almost four thousand a year you just - lose - on owning a car. $4,000...

Another not immediately obvious incentive is that the car you give to the recycler comes back as a lot of raw materials, and as recycling starts becoming one of the most important industries in the world over the next 2 - 4 years that means new raw materials won't need to be dug out of the ground, and more people be employed recycling.

Analysis

So I'm going to say that driving a car that I own costs me around $330 a month, or $77 a week. Remember we're both retired so we don't commute to work - that would be reflected in the above analysis as whatever further fuel, wear and tear, higher maintenance costs, and lower trade-in value of your car, so we're a very low-use case.

We probably go into town for shopping twice a week, once for groceries and staples, once for a trip to the clothing store or hardware store or garden centre or a department store or something else. And each trip takes under 25 minutes of driving in total. So an hour's rental of an EV should be enough, but to be on the safe side I'll say two. If the rental ends up being $20/hr we'd still have saved $37 a week, almost $2,000 a year. 

For anyone that commutes to work (which I gather is a much smaller percentage of workers these days) the savings shrink a tiny bit but I think on the whole they'd still end up with money in their pocket - and best of all, lower carbon emissions, by a significant margin. 

Further Than Hire or Rental

Even if a person sprang for a EV in their driveway that they exclusively used, the savings would still mean that they make significant savings over the life of the vehicle - which itself would be almost a decade longer. 

Now suppose you kept your car clear of personal belongings (which would make the car you own as characterless as the car you could have rented instead) then several organisations either already exist or are being brought into existence to rent your car out and earn money while you're at work or asleep. But to me that does make the car just another rental and I'd be stuck with a larger insurance premium, less of the security that owning a car is supposed to bring, and I'd never know, when an emergency occurs and I need the car right now and - it's unavailable and an hour away. . . 

Plus, one car per household or person is a lot of vehicles, one car per ten - forty people means a lot fewer total cars needed. 

Some Nuts And Bolts

Any decent logistics scheduling program these days can predict peaks and valleys in usage, and an AI could make this even more laser-focused on getting people used with the fewest cars on the road at any time. Such software could move cars in and out of charging parks to "taxi ranks" near the highest traffic spots to ensure that no-one waits more than a guaranteed few minutes for a ride, and shuffle cars between charging parks and ranges as needed. 

The rentals could be structured as subscriptions, memberships, and casual leases. A subscription could buy you exactly the mileage / time you need per year but at a reduced rate, saving even more. A membership by the year could allow you to randomly hire a car, again at a better rate. And casual leases could be more like taxi rides. Existing taxi drivers could even be employed to drive the casuals and be almost indistinguishable from current taxis except for the lower rates and faster response times.

It just needs US to make companies aware of what we want, and make our governments aware of what we want. 

For a last argument in favour of such a share scheme, look at what's happening in Australia right now: Petrol and diesel prices are sky high due to the Ukraine-Russia situation. So high that people are literally taking out loans to fill the tank and buy groceries, and the government have halved their fuel tariff - and admitted what a huge chunk it'll take out of their coffers.

The exact percentage this creates is somewhat muddied because the Australian government charges GST on top of the total fuel price after the excise (tariff) is applied, meaning they're in effect "double dipping" on their excise, which is why the Treasurer is bitching so loudly about it. 

But consider that it's estimated that the government takes between 40% and 60% of every fuel dollar, and then figure out how much you're actually paying at the pump - supporting a 'significant part' of the national income... 

Also - you'll probably notice that whenever there's a rise in oil prices, the fuel companies manage to raise prices instantly, and when this excise is relaxed, it'll take a week or two for the prices to drop, if they even do.

The energy companies may not be our friends but they're getting cheaper and more sustainable by the week, whereas fuel companies will just continue to gouge us for more and more per litre to keep up with their bottomless thirst for our money...  There IS a better way.

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