1.8 million people in the United States drive heavy trucks for a living and are at risk of losing their jobs when trucks become autonomous. That number is from the BLS category heavy and tractor-trailer trucking with 1.8 million employees. A separate category Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers has 1.3 million workers. The heavy duty truckers are more at risk than the local delivery drivers because it is easier to automate long haul driving on interstates than to automate driving on more complex (cross traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, etc) local roads. Plus, delivery drivers have to run up to houses and businesses to make most deliveries. Building robots to do that work will take longer. Railroad operation is easier...

The incentive to automate will be enormous for $15 per hour minimum wage. Of America’s nearly 16 million retail workers, the biggest group — 4.6 million — are salespeople. Their average wage is $10.47 an hour. After that, the country has another 3.4 million cashiers, and their average wage is $9.28 an hour. Only a quarter of salespeople earn more than $14 — and only 10 percent earn more than $19. The figures are worse for cashiers. But in the race to automate there will be a clear winner: Amazon. Why: Amazon can automate more easily than can physical stores. It is analogous to why long haul trucking can be automated before taxis: Just as highways are simpler places than...

2021 for taxi-style usage in selected areas. This is level 4 automation: no human driver will be needed to take over. But the car won't be able to go everywhere. Likely that means the cars will be restricted to very well mapped areas without challenging conditions. Ford says the higher cost of the computer and sensing equipment restricts its use to fleets which rack up very high mileage per vehicle per year. The car will be a more expensive piece of capital equipment that requires very high usage rates to pay the cost of capital. I find the 2021 launch date to be a little surprising since Ford seems late to the party. On the other companies seem think they...

Uber also made a deal with Volvo to cooperate on self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are an existential threat to Uber if Uber doesn't develop them first. Suppose Ford makes self-driving cars viable a few years before does and rolls them out in many cities. Uber gets wiped out by Ford's ability to charge less for a ride. Uber's big competitive advantage from a large set of recruited drivers could vanish as fast as sufficiently safe autonomous vehicles can get manufactured. Sufficiently safe: that's the challenge. But autonomous vehicle makers who limit themselves to some urban markets can lower the bar for their initial roll-out by just excluding any streets and corners that are too tricky to handle. They'll lose some...

By 2060 Phoenix Arizona will have 132 days a year over 100F. Dallas will 55 and Pecos Texas 101 days. My view about problems: We should solve them. If the Earth really does heat up substantially then we should pull the CO2 back out of the atmosphere while also releasing cooling gases. If its practical we should also raise the albedo (surface reflectivity) of the planet. Right now cities should change their zoning laws and roads policies to make buildings, roads, and other surfaces more reflective. No more dark buildings. Use light colors of concrete, white shingles, and other surfaces that reflect more light. That would be beneficial even if the Earth was not heating up. Hot cities are unpleasant...

The Miami Beach danger zone for mosquitoes carrying Zika virus is expanding. This isn't just about microcephaly in developing fetuses. Since Zika attacks neural progenitor cells it might cause lasting damage in adults too. A case of acute sensory polyneuropathy in an adult caused symptoms that lasted for months. It is suspected that Zika causes inflammation of sensory nerves and possibly an auto-immune response. So Zika is bad. What should we do about it? Wipe out the mosquitoes that carry it. Totally drive them to extinction. These mosquitoes are invasive in the Western Hemisphere. If a mosquito causes major health problems for the human species we should just wipe it out. Wiping out a mosquito species could be done with...

I've previously argued that going to Mars and trying to live there is a dumb idea for the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding assorted recent comments by Elon Musk this is still true. The best treatment of Musk's proposal for a big trip to Mars comes from The Martian science fiction author Andy Weir in his comments to Ars Technica. I think Weir went too easy the obviously ridiculous low cost estimates made by Musk and didn't address many of the problems with a Mars colony. But he makes excellent points. Read the article if you are interested. I like Weir's point that solar panels weigh too much to cart all the way to Mars. Better to take a nuclear reactor. I've...

In a nutshell: editing offspring DNA at the embryo stage will eventually offer so many advantages that lots of people will cave in on some advantage. Don't want to make your kid smarter? Make him or her better looking? Don't want that? How about a throwing arm competitive in major league baseball? Opposed to that? How about avoiding passing along your terrible allergies, need for braces, terrible eyesight, tendency to get depressed or perhaps anxiety attacks or eating disorders? Lots of ways to be persuaded to step over the line once the tech becomes safe. If asked whether one would genetically engineer one's offspring today many people would answer "No" to the hypothetical question. But today choosing genes for your...

Elon Musk thinks a universal basic income is inevitable. Musk doesn't see plausible alternatives. I hope not. So here's the optimistic scenario: On the one hand, manual and low skilled work will mostly get automated out of existence. So one could imagine why demand for people at lower skill levels and lower levels of cognitive ability could just evaporate. On the other hand, automation will cut costs and boost the wealth of those still employed. Even if the pay of manual laborers is low the goods a manual laborer will need to survive should become very cheap. So any upper class people who can find a use for them might pay them enough to survive. But I see a stronger...

I am amazed at what gritty realism the Wall Street Journal will publish from Peggy Noonan. Life has been famously cruel to some good people the past few decades. The past few years it seemed the progressive left and the Democratic Party, confident in what they called the coalition of the ascendant, were looking at the old American working class, especially the white working class, and saying: “Here’s your disability check, now go take your opioids and get lost while we transform our country. By the way, we have friends on Wall Street.” From the right and Republicans it was: “Take your piece of the dole, we are importing an entire new people from other countries to take your place,...

Already we've hit the $1000 genome and faster and cheaper DNA sequencing is on the way. DNA sequencing is going through a speed-up and cost-cutting rate that is similar to that which computer processors have been going through for decades. While the doubling rate of computer power has slowed quite a bit the rate of decrease in DNA sequencing costs has kept up the pace and, in fact, the rate of decline in DNA sequencing costs suddenly accelerated at the end of 2007 has been going down pretty sharply ever since. The cost decline seemed to halt during 2014 only to plunge in 2015. So why should you care? Really cheap massive amounts of DNA sequencing of cancerous cells will...

Spiegel has a piece Inside the Desperate Battle against Sports Doping. Lots of athletes get away with it. Pretty unfair for the ones who do not cheat. I've made this argument many times: anti-doping efforts are a losing cause. Doping techniques will become harder to detect. They will also become more powerful. But there is hope of a sort on the horizon: In 10 years time we have orders of magnitude more understanding of how genetic variants cause differences in human performance. This is inevitable due to the plunging costs of DNA sequencing. As a result it will become possible to measure a person's genetic potential to perform in various sports. Test the genetic potential. Then report for each athlete...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finds Tesla's Autopilot cuts crashes by 40%. How cool is that? Autonomous vehicles are going to cause a huge decline in accidents and deaths. Even short of autonomous vehicles, when you get your next car try to get one that supports automatic braking on imminent collision detection. You could get a large fraction of the collision avoidance benefit at a much lower cost today. Check out Insurance Institute for Highway Safety ratings of collision avoidance systems in current cars. Watch a Tesla react to a crash in front of it: Watch a Tesla avoid hitting a reckless driver: A recent analysis finds that autonomous vehicles will allow 2 million disabled people to get...

For large electric power storage projects the cost of batteries has plummeted. 2008, when battery prices were 10 times higher than they are today. This advance is timely as photovoltaic electric power prices have dropped so far that in SoCal PV is causing a growing drop in mid-day demand and therefore a much bigger spike in evening demand. Therefore there's a growing need for a cheaper way to store power generated in mid day and deliver it in the evening. You can see how much solar power output surges each day in California by clicking on some of the Daily Renewables Watch links at the Cal ISO site (the organization that manages California's electric grid). The growing supply of wind...

Check out this qz article: The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates. About 35-40 years ago secretary was the biggest job in most states. Those days are long past. As you can see by advancing the time bar for the USA states map on that page, by 2000 truck driver was the biggest job. So I have a question for Bill Gates: Do you want to tax word processors too? Also, autonomous vehicle technology will surely wipe out most truck driving jobs in the next 20 years. Do you want to tax autonomous truck technology to slow the rate of that transition? Keep in mind that thousands of lives will be saved each year once...

Check out: The FDA Is Cracking Down On Rogue Genetic Engineers. Apparently the US Food and Drug Administration wants to classify genetically altered dogs as drugs. When this is done to humans will they become drugs too? I think Huey Lewis has foreseen this possibility. A substantial part of the population is going to continue to insist on owning highly inbred genetically messed up dog breeds with serious health issues (e.g. bulldogs and pugs). If you do not want to me like them then avoid the unhealthiest dog breeds. But given that these breeds will continue to exist it certainly makes sense to genetically fix the fixable ones (some are, by breed standard, probably not fixable). So genetic engineers who...

Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University find that robots really do decrease human employment. As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national...

Suppose you randomly go 1 million miles somewhere away from our Sun. What will you find when you get there? With extremely high probability: Nothing! Suppose you go 100 light years in a randomly chosen direction. It is exceedingly likely that once you get there you will find nothing. Space. Vacuum. Rarely any atoms. Nothing, really boring nothing. Space is a dull and boring destination. If we don't take something with us to make our visit to a space destination interesting then it will be boring. Suppose we arrive at some place that is not just space. If some location has lots of mass it begins to have a chance of not being boring. But most pieces of mass out...

Keep calm, and stay geeky people!

Limit your exposure!

Survives another day!

It's hard to keep up with the Zoomers!

Make some noise!

The message is Zoom and gloom!

We all have a rope to pull!

Stupidity repeats itself!

Is the new normal a new normal for you?

Is your Significant Other significantly agitated?

Let your finger do the unlocking.

Accept your self-improvement!