A few self-driving taxis in San Francisco just demonstrated the real problem with autonomy.
They were too rational.
For a brief moment, several robotaxis aligned at an intersection and created a perfectly polite deadlock.
No aggression.
No improvisation.
No human-style “you go, I’ll go.”
Just algorithms waiting for clarity.
And that is exactly why this moment matters.
What interests me is that this was not a failure of sensing.
The vehicles could see.
The problem was social judgment.
Because cities are not just physical systems.
They are negotiation systems.
They run on:
→ tiny signals
→ hesitation
→ assertiveness
→ eye contact
→ imperfect timing
That is where autonomy gets much harder than people think.
We are not only teaching machines how to detect objects and follow lanes.
We are asking them to operate inside messy human environments where the right move is not always the most logical one.
To me, that is the deeper lesson.
The next frontier in self-driving is not just better perception.
It is better judgment under uncertainty.
And that is a much more difficult problem.
What do you think matters more for autonomous vehicles now: seeing the road better, or learning how to navigate human ambiguity?
#AI #AutonomousVehicles #SelfDrivingCars #FutureOfMobility #Innovation #Technology #SmartCities #MachineLearning #FutureOfWork
They did. George W Bush bombed Fallujah with white phosphorus and depleted uranium in 2004. Fallujah now has the highest rate of birth defects in the world. Higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the U.S. dropped atom bombs on them.
This is wild.
143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history.
Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots.
Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget.
Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard.
The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.
I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock
my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive
when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost
what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise
I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily
the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…
China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally
so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine
the gap is ARCHITECTURAL
it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks
it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…
and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now
BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee
I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one
Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name
it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster
Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.
The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.
Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.
This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.
They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.
Estoy maravillado con un paper de hace 6 años que estudia el bias negativo de los tempos a los que TODOS los directores del mundo interpretan las obras de Beethoven vs los que anotaba el mismo Beethoven en las partituras
Parece que el loko interpretó mal como usar los metronomos de la epoca (objetos hermosos si los hay), y usaba como indicador la parte de abajo de la masa por la forma de flechita que tenia
Puede parecer gracioso o extraño, pero no lo es tanto pensando en que era alta tecnologia para su epoca (de hecho hasta la octava sinfonia las compuso sin metronomo porque no existian)
Cuestion que en el paper modelan fallos fisicos de metronomos para lograr el bias y llegan a esa conclusion que termina de cerrar por una anotacion en el manuscrito de la novena sinfonia donde Beethoven escribe acerca de la confusion de usar uno u otro valor
O sea que pasaron 200 años con los mejores directores de orquesta e interpretes del mundo, rompiendose la cabeza de por que mierda Beethoven queria que se lo interprete a ritmos tan altos versus lo que todos, absolutamente todos, sentian que la musica pedia y que debia interpretarse mas lento.. y era simplemente porq el loko interpreto mal la forma de usar el metronomo
The math on this image is insane.
New Horizons transmitted at 2,000 bits per second from 3 billion miles away. Slower than a 1990s dial-up modem. It took 16 months to download all the flyby data.
The spacecraft had to hit a target box 100km wide, arriving within 150 seconds of schedule, after 9 years of flight. Miss it and the preloaded observation commands point at empty space.
Ten days before arrival, the spacecraft crashed and went into safe mode. Engineers had 72 hours to restore everything.
The probe is now 5 billion miles out, still whispering data back to Earth. We got 50 gigabits of Pluto photos using technology slower than your phone’s bluetooth.
Because OSIRIS-REx samples were collected and analyzed free of earthly contamination, these findings give strong evidence that crucial ingredients for life’s chemistry were readily available on asteroids throughout the solar system.
Por persona, sólo en bares y restaurantes, contando todos los espectadores: 267€
Los datos estos de impacto siempre suenan a estar hechos por el método MCM (mis c*j*nes morenos)
🚨 NEW: The NFL game generated €150 MILLION in Madrid City.
42,000 out of the 78,610 fans who came to the Bernabéu were tourists. €21M was generated in bars and restaurants.
The NFL Madrid game at Bernabéu is considered a HUGE success. @diarioas 💰
“This isn’t China,” they say.
But the cranes are.
The automation system is.
Even the dream of “reviving American manufacturing”,
was made in China.
Fun fact:
During Obama’s speech on rebuilding U.S. industry,
the ZPMC logo of the Chinese-made cranes behind him
was awkwardly covered by an American flag.
The wind blew.
The logo reappeared.
History has a sense of humor.
El Pentágono ha convocado a cientos de generales y almirantes, desplegados por todo el planeta, para decirles que ya está bien de soldados y mandos gordos, melenudos y barbudos. Que se acabó
Tourism means becoming a nation of unskilled landlords and servants. It is not a path to prosperity, but a cope for its absence.
It will worsen, not fix, the problems of Southern Europe and, as they get poorer, other developed countries too. My new article in @palladiummag: