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Automotive User Interface Conference (Stanford) · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
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  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
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  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
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  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
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  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
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  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
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  and old cars, driving, Motorbikes, motor racing and motoring travel.
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  Good day.
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  Good morning.
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  Good afternoon.
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  It is John Summers, the motoring historian.
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  Today's episode is about a conference that I went to a couple of weeks ago,
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  a week ago now called Automobility User Interfaces 2024 or something like that.
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  Of course, I, I go to this stuff because I, I feel like as a historian, being a
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  historian isn't just about looking at, you know, the war of 1812, it's also
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  about looking at what's happening at the moment and trying to do that thing that
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  historians do, which is look closely at what's happening at the moment and
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  try and use that to perhaps try and foretell the future But at least give some
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  impression of what might be, what it might be sensible to do in future based upon
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  what we've what's happened in the past.
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  In other words, you know, if you know winter's coming and you're not going to
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  be able to grow any crops at that time, you best not eat it all in the summer.
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  It's just.
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  That kind of, you know, knowing what happened has happened other years helps
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  you make good decisions in, in future.
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  We seem to have forgotten that in our society at the moment with
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  our not valuing, um, or paying storytellers properly or historians
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  properly or, or anything like that.
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  We only pay people who report on the contemporary, the walls falling over, the
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  walls fallen down, it's fallen on people.
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  It's terrible.
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  Nobody's Bothering to think about, well, who, who built the wall and what can we
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  do to build the wall better next time?
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  No, no, that's all for another day.
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  We like the shock and horror of people crushed under the wall.
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  Don't we?
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  So the 2024 user interface, automobility user interface
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  conference, um, took place at Stanford.
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  I don't usually have occasion to go to campus at this time of year, um, because,
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  uh, my class falls in, in the spring.
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  So it was nice to have some time on, on campus again.
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  It's nice to be in, in, in that kind of, of, of environment.
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  I guess I'm, I, You know, I'm involved because, uh, as usual in with, with
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  these things, you know, you know, somebody, and, and in this case, um,
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  a number of my former students were at the conference and one of them was in
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  fact, one of the, one of the organizers.
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  So, um, my role, you're probably thinking, what the devil do you know
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  about automobile user interfaces?
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  Um, you know, the, the, the answer is, um, the, I wasn't, you know.
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  Give in some meaningful paper.
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  Well, I don't know what I gave was meaningful.
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  I wasn't giving a paper of my research.
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  Um, you know, as I do at the, uh, you know, as you as one
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  normally does at a conference.
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  And this is very flattering.
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  I was asked to do the closing keynote and it wasn't just me.
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  I was asked to do it with, uh, Barbara Karadian.
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  I guess Dr.
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  Barbara Karanian, although it seems strange to think of Barbara as a
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  doctor, but no, I've, I've co taught, uh, the class now for 13 years and, and
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  always, uh, always alongside Barbara.
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  And in fairness, you know, let's call a spade a spade.
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  I'm officially a teaching assistant and, and I ride alongside Barbara
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  who, who's, uh, you know, visiting.
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  Professor, I guess, uh, what she does gives my cast stuff a lot
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  of academic credibility and what.
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  I do gives her storytelling stuff or to mobility or, you know, automobile
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  credibility, if you like it, it's as, it's as simple as, uh, as Michael Shank
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  said to me years ago, the, the, when we were talking about Pebble Beach was
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  that, you know, he felt like he was in an art gallery where there weren't any,
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  you know, badges and he needed me, you know, where there weren't any, you know,
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  information bits at the side and he needed me to tell him what we were looking at.
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  And more than that, he meant not just, uh, this is a Pizarro, um, more, he
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  needed me to position Pizarro alongside the other, you know, artists of that type
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  and why this piece was, was interesting.
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  So, you know, this Maserati Ghibli is worth 200 grand.
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  Look, because it's the best.
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  Got the big motor and it's a convertible, whereas that one's only
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  worth 150 because it's the hard top and it's in a less desirable color.
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  And, you know, it was wrecked in 1974.
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  They probably all were, weren't they?
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  Let's call a spade a spade, by the way, with these people who are paying
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  out of the ass for old supercars that supposedly have, you know,
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  completely blemish free histories.
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  They're all bloody wrecked.
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  In period, weren't they?
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  Because they were always owned, supercars, hypercars, they were
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  always owned by people like Floyd Mayweather, or, or that half wit that
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  drove the Veyron into Galveston Bay.
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  If you've not seen the video, it's, it's, it's worth it.
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  They were always owned by those kind of Justin Bieber flamboyant idiotic people.
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  Diddy.
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  How did I get onto Diddy from talking about automobile interfaces?
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  My God.
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  So I was asked to do the keynote.
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  So that's flattering, right?
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  Barbara and I asked to do the keynote.
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  Clearly, if we've been asked to do it together.
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  Yeah.
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  Thanks, Arthur.
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  Thanks.
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  Bloody dog always barks when I'm talking.
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  As Mark Gami said in the pod when we were talking together, he's probably thinking
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  to himself, you're yapping, why can't I?
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  I guess he's right, isn't he?
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  Yeah, he does think he's right.
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  I've tried to wait him out with these things, but you know what?
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  It never bloody works.
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  So I was asked to do the keynote, clearly asked to do the keynote with Barbara, uh,
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  clearly at that point, what the organizers are looking for is for you to do something
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  which they're familiar with, which in the case of one of the organizers,
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  he'd been in the class, so it seemed reasonable to both Barbara and I that
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  we do something that was along the lines of, of, of what we do in the class, but.
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  You know, you have 10 weeks and, and, you know, 10 weeks of, of, of
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  two hours where you can get to know the class and it's in a small space.
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  So trying to replicate what we might do in a classroom setting, um, if you want
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  to Google up the course, by the way, it's ME236, Tales to Design Cars By.
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  And, uh, as I said, Barbara, my colleague, Professor Barbara Karanian.
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  You know, and the ancient history on that, whilst we come to mention it, is
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  that the, you know, the great and the good of Pebble Beach, folk like Miles
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  Collier, Fred Simeone, um, they, they realized that, Uh, Jay Leno, you know,
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  they realized some years ago that the issue with shifting generations and
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  old cars was, was bigger than, you know, the values on, you know, not so
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  interesting 30s cars was going down then.
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  And of course now it's.
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  50s and 60s cars, right?
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  They recognized that it was it was bigger than that.
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  It was bigger than once upon a time.
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  There were many people in the Los Angeles area who could rebuild a Barani
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  wire wheel for a Ferrari, but those People were all old and we're all dying.
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  And that was, you know, an issue for somebody like Jay Leno.
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  That was, that was where it was, was, was felt first, but, but people like
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  Myles Collier over in, in Naples, in, in Florida, there at the Rebs
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  Institute, he realized that the issue was deeper than that, that there was
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  a generational thing going on that fundamentally young people didn't care
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  about cars, this was about 10 years ago.
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  So with.
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  People like McKeel Haggerty, um, they came to Stanford and, and we're like, can
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  you try and do like a humanities inspired thing, um, that links science link,
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  you know, cross disciplinary, a truly transdisciplinary thing, um, that will
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  put the car front and center of academia.
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  Awesome idea.
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  Awesome idea.
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  Um, I got involved in the program with Michael Shanks, who's an Englishman.
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  He grew up in an English nuclear submarine town.
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  So did I.
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  He's about 10 years older than me.
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  But other than that, he went to Cambridge and was very successful academically.
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  Me, rather less so.
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  But other than that, we have quite a lot in common.
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  We have very similar kind of approaches.
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  I think he was always, he certainly sat down and met with me, uh, the first time.
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  The very first time because he was intrigued with the idea of me
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  making money, walking around the forum, telling stories about Rome.
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  It just completely plays into his, he's an archaeologist, Greece, Greek
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  stuff, but Roman stuff as well.
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  But, but really just a passion for stories.
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  And it was that passion for stories that led him to introduce me to Barbara,
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  which is why Barbara and I, Uh, got involved in doing the class together
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  when, you know, there was a REVS program at Stanford and when Miles and all these
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  other wealthy guys from the car community made a big endowment to the university.
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  You're probably wondering what happened with that, by the way.
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  Actually, you're probably wondering why I'm not talking
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  about the UI conference yet.
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  But let me, let me finish this Titus Grone like digression here.
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  Uh, first of all, what happened was that there were three really
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  key professors involved in it.
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  The guy that I worked with, Michael Shanks, who was an archaeologist.
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  So for him, it was contemporary archaeology, and he became very
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  passionate and interested in cars as archaeological objects, which fascinated.
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  The car guys and and fascinated me and and all together.
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  Awesome.
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  And Michael, I can't thank you enough for the insight that you've that you've
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  brought to me over the years on the right hand and really on the edge of campus,
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  an organization called veiled Volkswagen.
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  The Volkswagen, oh, bloody hell, I can't remember the acronym now.
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  Um, the Volkswagen automotive innovation laboratory, um, on the edge of, of
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  campus there, um, this was, you know, the time, this is 2012, 2013, this is when
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  autonomous research into autonomous cars, when it's clear that this is a data crunch
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  and you just need to do a lot of miles.
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  But, but really there was, this was.
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  You know, a decade before Waymo, more than before it was baked for market.
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  And of course, Stanford was involved in in that research through through Vale.
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  So we had now DTT or they had now DTT and they would use it to lap Thunder Hill and
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  take all of this, take all of this data.
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  And it was really very exciting to be involved with because it
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  was clear at that time that that this was going to be the future.
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  The guy that ran that was a guy called Chris Gerdes and he was,
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  uh, really all hard science, right?
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  And then plugging this together, the guy with the relationships with the
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  car companies and the guy with a feel for humanities and a feel for the hard
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  science was, was this guy Cliff Nass.
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  And, and, uh, really he was, uh, the original, like mad eccentric,
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  just mega brain academic.
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  That's how you'd, you'd, you'd thought of him.
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  And, and, and, uh, you know, I was thinking the last time I saw him,
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  he was driving his Volvo 740 and I was involved in some kind of.
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  film shoot with a Jaguar XK 120 and he came along and interrupted the
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  film shoot and the producer sort of shooed him in his Volvo out of frame.
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  And that was the last time I saw him.
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  He had a heart attack in his mid fifties and it was Yeah, it was, I've
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  known a couple of people go like that and it's shocking when it happens.
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  It makes you realize that all of life is like a motorcycle ride and you never
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  know when you can can go, frankly.
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  But look, I don't want to dwell on that macabre note.
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  But yeah, Cliff, we lost Cliff.
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  And, uh, that meant that The money may be towards what Chris was doing
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  with the research with Shelley, the autonomous Audi TT out, uh, you know,
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  and various other sort of hard science things, which frankly, you know, the revs
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  guys, probably, you know, miles Collier went to MIT, you know, he probably.
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  Could have had MIT do that kind of research.
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  But anyway, so I think that's why programs at REV sort of dried up
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  because, uh, and I've tried to give you some insight there into the politics
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  of, of, uh, of, of Stanford there.
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  Um, but, uh, but yeah, I said to Michael, as it was all happening, you know, this
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  feels like it's like medieval baronies in like, you know, France, like,
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  Medieval France or England, where, you know, if you are aligned with the wrong
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  people, you just don't go anywhere.
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  Whereas if you're aligned with the right people, you know, you
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  ascend to, uh, to new heights.
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  And yeah, that's, that's, you know, that's completely,
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  that's completely how it works.
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  When you make an endowment to a university, you can't say like,
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  I want this to do this kind of project, not that kind of project.
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  You're making the, the endowment and that's just how it works.
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  Uh, how it works.
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  So anyway, so there was revs at Stanford for a little bit.
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  Our class survived the, uh, uh, you know, because our class is an arts based class.
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  It's a storytelling class that sits in the mechanical engineering school.
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  So, so look, and, and it's been successful in terms of people
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  have continued to, to come to it.
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  And look, that's worth talking about now, although this is a digression.
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  Why do people continue to, to come to the class?
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  Well, Because automobile design is so bloody exciting at the moment, isn't it?
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  I, I don't mean that, um, that, you know, as a car guy, you might, you
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  know, it might not be excited about car design, but, but personal mobility is
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  in a period of revolutionary change.
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  That's more exciting than it has been at any time since the 1920s, right.
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  When, you know, everybody could afford a car and lots of people could drive
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  and there were proper car mechanics and there was proper gas distribution.
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  You know, the.
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  The design, this, this pivot to electrification and autonomy and
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  the different ownership models.
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  This, even though they're not coming as quickly as it looked to us 10 years
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  ago, it looked like they were going to be here by now in the mid 2020s.
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  But, you know, we aren't there yet, but as usual, you know, in
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  the short term, we underestimate the impact of technological change.
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  And in the long term, in the short term, we overestimate it.
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  And in the long term, we underestimate it.
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  So, in other words, we, uh.
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  At the moment we're in, uh, we're feeling like, oh, is autonomy ever going to come?
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  And, and, uh, by 2050, we're all going to be in flying cars.
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  Like, you know, my neighbor who works for Joby Aviation.
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  That's a total digression.
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  I'll put the link in.
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  Really interesting in what they're doing.
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  Is flying cars.
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  Cause of course you can't really do flying cars where we drive, because then
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  everyone has to have their own PPL, right?
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  Since bloody people can't even drive properly.
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  You can't expect everybody to have a PPL.
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  Well, if the cars can fly themselves, when autonomy comes, they can fly, right?
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  Why not?
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  Right.
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  Why not?
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  I mean, I'm just hoping, right.
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  That when everyone's in the flying helicopters, the roads are going to
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  be empty and I'm going to be able to drive them in my cars and sports bikes.
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  That's what I'm hoping.
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  I'm going to listen to this back and be like, where was I going with that?
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  I was going somewhere with that, wasn't I?
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  So it's flattering to be asked to do this, this keynote speech.
• 17:47
  Um, and I guess the irony of it is it's probably more people are going to listen
• 17:52
  to this pod than we're in that audience.
• 17:55
  But because that's like a face to face experience where, you know,
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  you've like put on nice clothes for it and it's not taking place in your
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  basement when you're looking at some of your crappy jigsaws, you know,
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  That has a completely different, um, vibe to it.
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  And, and, uh, you know, you, I guess you forget what that in person vibe
• 18:18
  is, is like, and that's what's special about, um, about attending a conference.
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  So what our class is about is about when a student.
• 18:32
  Gets to Stanford, they've already put themselves in the top sort of 1,
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  2%, because that's how many people, you know, that's how few people get
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  in based upon, you know, based upon the number of applications, right?
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  So, it's natural for them as they move towards graduate, it's natural for
• 18:55
  them as they move towards graduation and looking for a job to think to
• 18:59
  themselves, what am I going to do to really make myself stand out?
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  Because they've stood out up to now, so it's natural for them to look for
• 19:07
  like a sterling moss, like, uh, unfair advantage, you know, um, or unfair
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  advantage, but just something that's going to, and if you, if you, if you're
• 19:16
  going to come from a, a hard science, um, Kind of background, like, and a lot of
• 19:23
  our students, some are product design, but we have aero, astro, mechanical
• 19:27
  engineering, you know, hard mechanical engineering, um, you know, people who have
• 19:35
  majored in maths and science since 17.
• 19:42
  And they're now in their mid 20s when they're having this thought that I
• 19:46
  might need to think about how to.
• 19:50
  Present myself in a job interview or how to conduct myself when I'm,
• 19:55
  you know, invited to do some kind of like a hackathony kind of project.
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  I need to decide how I'm gonna, you know, handle myself in that situation.
• 20:04
  So I might get a job out of it rather than, you know what I mean?
• 20:08
  And, and, um, You know, if you think about, um, I always feel like this
• 20:13
  with car mechanics, you know, the reason that car mechanics choose to be
• 20:16
  car mechanics because they like cars and they like working with machines.
• 20:20
  So the whole element of dealing with people, like explaining to them why
• 20:26
  yes, You've only just got a leak on the thermostat, but I need to buy a, I want
• 20:33
  to buy a new thermostat and I want to buy a new water pump and I'm going to charge
• 20:38
  you for all this new coolant as well.
• 20:41
  You know, people don't understand why that needs to be.
• 20:44
  It feels like they're being ripped off.
• 20:45
  That's not the case.
• 20:47
  You, you, you just, you know, people don't understand the,
• 20:52
  uh, understand the situation properly and it's hard to explain.
• 20:56
  Yeah, so what I'm saying is that the students are looking for some
• 21:00
  kind of a way to communicate about themselves in a really clear way.
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  So the fact that Barbara and I have this class where it's about storytelling
• 21:13
  and the storytelling is themed around cars, that is a useful vehicle.
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  Pun intended for, for people to be able to, to, to think about, um, you
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  know, both cars of the past and cars of the future and, and also their own
• 21:29
  involvement with cars and, and how that can relate to if they're, you know, design
• 21:34
  people, how that might relate to, to product design, how that might relate to
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  presenting their own ideas to, to people.
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  peers or, you know, any employers or anybody else.
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  So look, right, that's sort of what we've developed over the last decade.
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  We thought that we would Condense, you know, try and condense some of what
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  we did, what we do in the class into the, the hour long keynote that we
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  had now alone of what I do with, with Barbara, it feels like a double act.
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  Right.
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  And I, I have said to people, you know, if, if, if we are a double act, who's
• 22:11
  the, you know, who's the straight man.
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  And who's the, you know, who's the, because both, because.
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  interplay between us on stage, neither of us really knows what, quite
• 22:23
  what the other one's going to say.
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  We've, we know each other really well, but we don't quite know, you know,
• 22:29
  I never say the same thing twice.
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  And Barbara's whole teaching style is.
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  You know, I feel like she's the opposite of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
• 22:40
  He always says that a lawyer, when he asks a question to a witness on the
• 22:44
  stand, he should always know what the answer's going to be before the witness
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  says it, because, you know, he's using the witness to build his case and,
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  and, and build a, build an argument.
• 22:55
  Well, well, I, I naturally operate in an environment where I quite
• 22:59
  like to know, I quite like to not be sure what's around the curve.
• 23:04
  comfortable with ambiguity to use Barbara's, uh, Barbara's parlance.
• 23:09
  But, but she seems to, to unconsciously thrive on putting people
• 23:16
  herself included on, on the spot.
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  She doesn't mind, um, you know, if somebody's not listening or looking
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  at their phone or something like that in the classroom setting,
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  she'll challenge them full on, you know, around not concentrating.
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  It's, it's really, uh, Refreshing, frankly, in, in a modern classroom setting
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  that that, that you, that she demands that level of focus and she demands it,
• 23:42
  you know, from herself as, as, as well in that, you know, uh, she, so, so yeah.
• 23:49
  So we did a little, um, we did like a, a microcosm of our class.
• 23:53
  It seemed to go over, um, extremely well.
• 23:56
  Um, you know, in that the organizer was, was flattering and, and other people were.
• 24:03
  Well, complimentary about what we did.
• 24:05
  And, and so that's pleasing, right?
• 24:08
  Isn't it that that's something that whenever you do something that's a
• 24:11
  little bit experimental, you're never sure whether it's going to work.
• 24:14
  And when it works in one setting, you're never sure whether it's
• 24:17
  going to work in another setting.
• 24:18
  When you're working with somebody where you're not sure what they're going to
• 24:22
  do, where you're looking for audience participation, which we did right from
• 24:26
  the start, you know, at first a show of hands, but later come up and, and.
• 24:31
  you know, share your stories on the microphone.
• 24:35
  Well, that's a lot.
• 24:37
  If you've not engaged with people, then nobody's going to come up and
• 24:40
  then your whole thing is kind of, you know, it's going to fall flat, right?
• 24:44
  It's obvious that you've not engaged if nobody wants to participate.
• 24:49
  Whereas even if you've only engaged with 30 percent of the audience
• 24:53
  and there's another, 70 percent of us sitting there being like,
• 24:56
  what the fuck is this all about?
• 24:59
  If some of the, if the 30 percent are enthusiastic and are sharing,
• 25:04
  which they absolutely did sharing their own experiences, similar to
• 25:08
  the things that, you know, us up on, up as up on stage did yeah.
• 25:14
  So pleasing.
• 25:15
  The long and short of it, I've, I've taken 25 minutes to say that, but, you know, I
• 25:21
  don't know, maybe, maybe this won't feel like 25 minutes when you're listening
• 25:25
  back because I'll have edited it down.
• 25:28
  So let's actually get to the nitty gritty.
• 25:30
  Well, I too, but so let's talk about what I'm going to how
• 25:32
  I'm going to structure this.
• 25:33
  I've got like a little intro piece now, which is already run much
• 25:36
  longer than than I intended it to.
• 25:39
  Um, I've got and then I made notes on some individual sessions and
• 25:45
  that's worth talking about because it will break out the individual.
• 25:49
  You know, ideas.
• 25:50
  So I think, let me frame this whole thing first.
• 25:55
  And, uh, by saying that when I think of a user, an automobile user
• 26:01
  interface, what I'm thinking about are the gauges, the steering wheel,
• 26:07
  the shift lever, and the pedals.
• 26:10
  Almost every element of the conference was about how autonomous vehicles are going
• 26:20
  to communicate with us or with passers by.
• 26:25
  In other words, it was less about, you know, whether or not you have, like,
• 26:31
  nice leather or not, or vegan leather.
• 26:34
  Uh, as As somebody, well, talk about this guy in a minute, this
• 26:39
  guy from Bentley that I spent some, some time talking with, um.
• 26:44
  You know, less about what the traditional automobile user interface and far
• 26:51
  more about how people are going to interface with mobility devices.
• 27:01
  in when they're autonomous or when they're scooters on a sidewalk or when, you know,
• 27:07
  there's lots of people on the bus versus one person riding on the autonomous bus.
• 27:12
  It's, it's, it's, there were lots of.
• 27:14
  So, so yeah, so as usual with these things at Stanford, you go thinking it might
• 27:19
  be about one thing and then find it's sort of about that thing, but it's also
• 27:25
  that thing thought about in a much more.
• 27:28
  In a much more deeply, in a much more deep way.
• 27:30
  I've had that, um, it's why I love being involved in the,
• 27:34
  with the university, right?
• 27:35
  Because you have that kind of, of deeper insight.
• 27:38
  But look, let me actually.
• 27:39
  Get stuck in, right?
• 27:41
  Um, so the Bentley guy who Barbara, so who Barbara and I sat down with
• 27:45
  just at a table when we were working together to complete what we were
• 27:50
  going to present on, and he just happened to be across the table.
• 27:53
  Barbara struck up conversation with him because she strikes a
• 27:56
  conversation with everybody like that.
• 27:58
  Um, in that first conversation, um, he said to me, look, he
• 28:02
  said, I don't like screens.
• 28:04
  I feel like screens shouldn't be the focal point.
• 28:08
  Of interior design, and I was like, I mean, I was like friends forever
• 28:14
  with him at that point, because it's clear that he's thinking deeply about
• 28:19
  this whole conundrum of how do you make Bentley modern without throwing
• 28:24
  the baby out with the bathwater?
• 28:26
  Because, of course, the awesome thing about a Bentley is the old fashioned
• 28:30
  wood and leather and clock and, you know, old fashioned gentleman's.
• 28:37
  Drawing room experience of Bentley, so it's what do you keep?
• 28:43
  What do you throw out?
• 28:44
  So that was a really interesting conversation.
• 28:48
  And you know, if you take nothing away from this presentation, other
• 28:51
  than the fact that, um, most.
• 28:54
  Automobile design now begins with the screen as the focal point,
• 29:01
  and it pulls out from there.
• 29:03
  And he said to me, I don't get it.
• 29:05
  Interior design, we don't start with a television and design
• 29:09
  a living room around that.
• 29:11
  Why are we doing that with cars?
• 29:13
  But I think this is because we're in a first generation
• 29:18
  of these kind of vehicles.
• 29:19
  And at the moment, we're still like fully screen focused.
• 29:24
  Um, because, you know, we're in this place where 40 percent of people
• 29:29
  use some stuff, but not very much.
• 29:32
  30 percent of people buy the car because of the tech and care about
• 29:36
  the tech and connectivity and rah.
• 29:38
  And 30 percent of people are like me and just don't give a shit.
• 29:41
  Transcribed I mean, I realized I'd driven that Tundra 1100 miles
• 29:46
  before I even tried to work out if my phone could connect to it.
• 29:49
  My phone connected to it and that's all I've done.
• 29:51
  I've not used the navigation, not done any of the touch screen on it.
• 29:55
  My phone can connect.
• 29:56
  I can listen to my JTEC EDM.
• 30:00
  I'll add a link.
• 30:01
  Love JTEC.
• 30:02
  Um, That's what I listen to.
• 30:04
  I listen to that through the Tundra stereo works perfectly.
• 30:08
  It's all I need, you know, for me, 2016 is too high tech and I'm not alone.
• 30:14
  Apparently I represent about 30 percent of new car buyers,
• 30:18
  let alone overall car buyers.
• 30:21
  So, um, I think we will pull back from this screen focus, but this
• 30:25
  Bentley guy, and he's a young and this Bentley guy was the first person
• 30:30
  who I'd ever, Engage with who was like, you know, I don't like screens.
• 30:35
  And I thought it was brave sitting at a conference like this one
• 30:39
  to be like that straight away.
• 30:40
  So, uh, that was, was really cool.
• 30:43
  One of the other headlines is around Waymo's now, just in the last.
• 30:50
  couple of months.
• 30:52
  The Waymo self driving Jaguar I PACES, um, have moved from being something
• 31:00
  which, you know, you had to sign up for the program and be like an approved
• 31:03
  user and probably provide them with lots of feedback about how the car drove.
• 31:08
  Um, that phase is now done and anybody Waymo.
• 31:13
  Amusingly, my wife managed to break it the first time she used it because she
• 31:19
  put The three Germans who were visiting us in the back and she rode in the front
• 31:24
  with Ollie on our lap and the car drove a block and then a human voice came
• 31:29
  over the tannoy being like, you know, Dutch, there's three people in the car.
• 31:34
  There's too many people in the car.
• 31:36
  One of you asked to, you know, get the fuck out.
• 31:38
  DSA didn't say that, but that was, you know, basically what it was, uh, what
• 31:42
  it was driving at quite literally.
• 31:45
  Um, and just a word on these Waymos, one of the famous tropes 10 years
• 31:50
  ago was an autonomous car that sat at the intersection of University in
• 31:55
  Cooper, just outside the university in downtown Palo Alto, and it sat at
• 32:00
  one intersection for two hours because it was waiting for its turn to go.
• 32:05
  But of course, in the real world, nobody waits for their fair turn.
• 32:09
  Everyone just walks or, you know, turns around.
• 32:11
  Drives when they can, and the car was completely confused by that
• 32:16
  because it was so rule following.
• 32:18
  Well, one of the astonishing things about these way modes, and I've only
• 32:23
  had a couple of rides in them, is that they actually drive like, you know, they
• 32:28
  actually, as Dana said, you know, they go, they actually drive, they actually go,
• 32:33
  which, which means that, you know, at the stop sign, it complies with the law and it
• 32:37
  stops, but it doesn't stop and lean back.
• 32:43
  And then go, it pauses the break and then it goes and and and just
• 32:48
  like, you know, just like I do.
• 32:51
  Um, I don't quite roll it, but nor do I, you know, so there's that assertiveness
• 32:57
  that they have, which has to be tuned for each urban environment, right?
• 33:02
  That assertiveness that they have is is really interesting anyway.
• 33:05
  So the fact that the So the whole business of being able to ride a Waymo and what was
• 33:11
  a Waymo like and, and all of that, that was like the weather in terms of a topic
• 33:17
  of conversation for conference delegates.
• 33:20
  And, and, and it should be said that this is about 200 people who, who've
• 33:24
  come from all over the world, um, So the last one of these conferences,
• 33:30
  like last year, it was in Brisbane.
• 33:31
  It was in Stanford like three or four years ago, but there was
• 33:34
  another one like somewhere like Dubai or something like that.
• 33:37
  Like they really, it's really a Ingolstadt, not Dubai, Ingolstadt,
• 33:42
  because I, and this is another feature of the community that there's a lot of of
• 33:48
  Asian women, it would seem, involved in the, in the, in these research projects.
• 33:53
  Um, so, you know, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Chinese Americans.
• 33:58
  Um, but there's also an awful lot of Germans, and the Germans Or speak that
• 34:07
  he perfect English to the extent I said to one of them, dude, when the conference
• 34:11
  was in Ingolstadt, did you speak German?
• 34:13
  And he goes, no, it was all in English.
• 34:16
  Really?
• 34:17
  And he's like, well, all the research papers are in English.
• 34:20
  So, you know, so it's weird.
• 34:22
  It's literally like if you're in that space, you speak German with your friends.
• 34:28
  But, you know, when you're all of the work that you do, it's like
• 34:32
  reading magic, all of the work that you do is in English, all of it.
• 34:37
  And you're doing research papers in English.
• 34:40
  It's really, yeah.
• 34:41
  So, so that was, you know, and that, of course, that's really a great way
• 34:46
  to position the conferences is, um, You know, at Dana's place, they have this,
• 34:55
  you know, thing, the imposter syndrome where, you know, because everyone's
• 35:01
  so clever and accomplished, you feel like you're not accomplished enough.
• 35:05
  And, and, you know, the negative element of this is, is, you know, You
• 35:09
  know, Michael Shanks, my colleague, his, the high school that his kids,
• 35:14
  um, went to, um, they have, you know, uh, an issue with suicides.
• 35:20
  And it's as when I said to him, but Michael, why he was like, well, you
• 35:24
  know, it's cause no one's, you know, they've not made a million by the
• 35:27
  time they're 17 kind of thing, because there's, there's this massive peer
• 35:31
  group pressure to, uh, to succeed.
• 35:35
  I guess what I'm saying is, you know, everyone at Stanford's
• 35:38
  clever, everyone you meet is clever, and that is fun to be around.
• 35:44
  It puts you under pressure, but it is also really stimulating to be around.
• 35:49
  It's why I have carried on doing the class, frankly, and certainly when you
• 35:54
  come to a conference like this, when you come to a conference like this,
• 35:58
  you know, I want to be around the conference to mingle with the people and
• 36:01
  understand it before and You know, the people that had invited me, uh, invite
• 36:05
  us to speak, they were keen the, that we come to sort of the banquet, you
• 36:09
  know, dinner evening and all of that.
• 36:12
  Cause I said, you know, he's a better opportunity to, to mingle than
• 36:15
  necessarily in the, in the sessions there.
• 36:19
  So I, I mentioned that I had some former students involved.
• 36:23
  I'd say there's about half a dozen people.
• 36:25
  Some of whom I, I recognize some, most of whom I spoke to.
• 36:29
  Um, What are they doing now?
• 36:32
  Um, two are academics, um, in the field.
• 36:38
  Three are with car companies.
• 36:42
  So, uh, Ford, BMW, Zooks.
• 36:47
  Yeah.
• 36:47
  Uh, I mean, I just, I'm looking at my next note here and, and, and as
• 36:50
  usual, I've done things out of order.
• 36:52
  My next note was German speaking, perfect English, intimidating intellect.
• 36:57
  And yeah, that's, uh, that that's completely, uh, that's
• 37:00
  completely what it was.
• 37:02
  It's all right.
• 37:02
  What did I learn?
• 37:04
  I'm going to go through the talks that I, uh, that I, I did, uh, sort of, of one
• 37:09
  by one, but there's, um, there's sort of, there were a number of different events.
• 37:14
  And just from a storytelling perspective, it's worth, you know, thinking
• 37:18
  about what, what worked well, if you like, and what didn't work so well.
• 37:23
  So.
• 37:24
  Um, three days, um, in the day's papers, um, and then one of the evenings, a
• 37:31
  sort of mingling session where people had prepared posters, the posters
• 37:37
  outline the idea that they had.
• 37:39
  So it wasn't a full paper.
• 37:40
  It maybe wasn't fully researched.
• 37:42
  Um, but it was, was, you know, the idea laid out on the paper and then on the
• 37:47
  poster there, so you the poster and then the dude that did the research or
• 37:51
  had the idea or whatever, he's there.
• 37:53
  So you can ask any clarifying questions and, and engage with, with them.
• 37:58
  Um, super simple idea, but what an.
• 38:01
  Absolutely awesome way to, to communicate.
• 38:05
  It was one of those things where I was like, I can't believe I'd never been to
• 38:08
  an event where these, this kind of poster workshop, selling the idea thing before.
• 38:13
  I just thought that was absolutely, um, absolutely brilliant.
• 38:17
  'cause you could engage with the things that you wanted to, you can engage the
• 38:20
  extent that that, that you wanted to.
• 38:23
  It was, was really a fun thing.
• 38:26
  So that was, was, was one of the evenings.
• 38:29
  Um, another one of the sessions I, I sat in, and this was, was really compelling
• 38:33
  as, as well, um, it was short videos.
• 38:37
  And so they'd stacked like eight of these five minute videos.
• 38:41
  Or six, eight videos, eight videos, and how long they were in anyway, they
• 38:45
  stack them back to back, but in order to make sure that you were properly
• 38:50
  engaged and and really thinking about them, they asked you to rank your
• 38:57
  top three of the eight and then at the banquet, they announced a winner.
• 39:03
  I'll talk about the individual ideas in a minute.
• 39:05
  I just thought that was a great way.
• 39:07
  The two, right?
• 39:08
  The duality of the short format video, which you watch in a cinematic kind of
• 39:15
  setting because they put it up on the big screen and you're sitting there voting.
• 39:19
  And you know that in three quarters of an hour, this is going to be done.
• 39:22
  So you're not going to be there.
• 39:23
  Like, you know, there's not 20 videos to watch.
• 39:26
  There's eight.
• 39:27
  So yes, it demands a level of common concentration, but, you know,
• 39:30
  we're all in the conference and the conference was pretty expensive.
• 39:33
  So, you know, they, they, again, they, They were, you know, we were talking about
• 39:38
  participation earlier and, and, you know, they were right to expect that level of
• 39:43
  participation and, and, you know, the bulk of the conference is the traditional
• 39:49
  conference way of, of papers where people present their academic research and,
• 39:55
  and, and, you know, that is, is Thanks.
• 39:59
  fundamentally pretty dry.
• 40:00
  I mean, that was the language that I heard used a couple of times.
• 40:05
  And of course, what people mean by that is fucking boring.
• 40:08
  And I thought a lot about this as a storyteller, because it shouldn't be
• 40:13
  boring because the ideas are interesting.
• 40:18
  So often, the way in which the presenters, and it's not the presenters fault,
• 40:24
  the presenters have to present in a certain way, they have to say, this
• 40:28
  is the research that we were doing.
• 40:30
  This is how we set about doing it.
• 40:33
  This is what happened.
• 40:35
  And this is what, what we learned and this is what we think should
• 40:38
  happen, you know, going forward.
• 40:40
  So with, with that format, and I guess that's why I like the video
• 40:46
  format, because you were like, it was like, these people would have like
• 40:51
  20 minutes or however long on stage.
• 40:53
  Right.
• 40:54
  And within.
• 40:56
  You know, whereas the videos, they were like three, four
• 40:58
  minutes long and all right.
• 41:00
  You could say, well, the ideas in the video were less well
• 41:02
  developed, but I just feel like the short format was very compelling.
• 41:08
  But for all that, after people finished speaking, there were lots of
• 41:13
  people coming up to the microphones that was set up and having, having
• 41:16
  questions that they wanted to ask.
• 41:18
  And quite often, not everybody got all their questions asked.
• 41:22
  And one of the things that they did also was they had a sort of.
• 41:26
  You know, leather couches up on the stage and, and, uh, uh, often they'd sort of do
• 41:31
  three or four that was similar together.
• 41:34
  And then afterwards they'd have somebody who knew the space very
• 41:38
  well, be a sort of chairperson.
• 41:40
  And that person would run a panel discussion then, um, and people
• 41:47
  would ask questions of the panel rather than of individuals.
• 41:50
  So.
• 41:51
  I feel like the dryness is, is a feature, not a bug, right?
• 41:57
  That there has to be this level of, of, if this is a conference, which
• 42:02
  is on the very cutting edge of this kind of, of research, this is where
• 42:07
  automobile designers come to get ideas.
• 42:09
  This is where PhD students kick around the idea of, is this a real project?
• 42:15
  Am I solving a real need?
• 42:16
  Is the methodology that I'm doing?
• 42:19
  Is that meaningful?
• 42:20
  Is somebody else working on the same thing?
• 42:23
  Can I network with them and try and do this?
• 42:25
  You know, there's, there's really an, an awful lot going
• 42:28
  on here in this really quite.
• 42:30
  You know, and I felt like most other people, I wouldn't say everybody knew
• 42:35
  everybody else, but most people had been to the conference, um, before,
• 42:39
  you know, a surprising number of people had like being to the Brisbane one
• 42:43
  and the Ingolstadt one, which, uh, you know, shows how unusual what it is.
• 42:52
  That you're doing and this is, um, and this is why, you know, there was
• 42:57
  a really interesting blend of ideas, which were fully baked ideas, which
• 43:03
  weren't baked or people working on similar ideas, which made you feel like.
• 43:10
  Oh, this is the zeitgeist of what's happening at the moment.
• 43:14
  So, so two of those zeitgeist areas that I thought I felt like I
• 43:20
  encountered with one is how do you tell people that The autonomous car
• 43:26
  needs you to take over and drive.
• 43:29
  It's having an emergency.
• 43:31
  It needs you to take over and drive.
• 43:34
  Now apparently the industry standard is three to five seconds.
• 43:39
  So it has three to five seconds to say, motherfucker, you need to drive.
• 43:44
  Or, you know, shake the seat, or maybe have a dog barking, or,
• 43:50
  you know, warm you up gently.
• 43:53
  It needs to find some way to make you take over, because if it does what
• 43:58
  I just did, quite often people sit up, engage, and then crash the car.
• 44:04
  This is what one German PhD student did.
• 44:07
  Told me I was like, I mean, you could, when she said it, it seems
• 44:12
  so obvious, you know, she was like, but the people when they take
• 44:15
  over, then they make bad decisions.
• 44:17
  They do not look in the mirror.
• 44:18
  They swerve, they crash.
• 44:20
  And I'm like, yeah, and I could see that she's distraught, right?
• 44:24
  Because, you know, the machine, it was doing a better job.
• 44:26
  You know, it had already, it had already decided that you couldn't swerve.
• 44:30
  That was why it needed you to take over.
• 44:32
  You know, you could see the, the, the, uh, you know, I realized how in that
• 44:37
  moment, how passionate she was about solving this thing anyway, she had a
• 44:41
  system of lights, which, which, you know, graduated system of, of lights.
• 44:46
  And a number of people were working on light based things.
• 44:52
  So, uh, the BMW one was.
• 44:56
  Absolutely fascinating.
• 44:58
  This was like dynamic lighting where there, where, you know, you can,
• 45:03
  um, not just change the interior lighting of the car, but also change
• 45:11
  the way the light reflects on things like the leather on the inside.
• 45:14
  So the color of that seems to be different.
• 45:16
  You can also do things like push buttons.
• 45:21
  So, you know, answer the phone call.
• 45:25
  Listen to the voicemail message, you know, set the navigation going, um,
• 45:32
  that you can do that from a light button, which you can, yes, put onto
• 45:39
  a surface on the car, but you can also do it onto the back of your hand.
• 45:45
  I'm actually going to sit down with the guy that because that was one of
• 45:49
  my students, the guy that organized the conference, that was his project, one
• 45:53
  of the projects that he'd worked on.
• 45:55
  And that was, that was one of the most fascinating things that I encountered
• 46:01
  because that seemed ready for market.
• 46:04
  That seemed ready to go to market.
• 46:05
  A lot of the other stuff I'm going to be talking about, it's not ready for market.
• 46:10
  It doesn't make it less interesting.
• 46:11
  It doesn't make it less valid.
• 46:13
  It just means the dynamic lighting shit you could see on like a BMW within the
• 46:20
  next couple of, uh, next couple of years.
• 46:23
  Just as an aside, I did talk about current BMW design, did say to him,
• 46:28
  you know, what about the buck teeth?
• 46:30
  He showed me a meme.
• 46:31
  I'll add the meme in here.
• 46:34
  It is quite amusing.
• 46:36
  He then showed me, um, this Neue Klasse concept, and I'm going to put an image
• 46:44
  of, you know, linked to that as well.
• 46:46
  I'll leave you to do that.
• 46:48
  To see what you, you think of that.
• 46:49
  I mean, I fundamentally agreed with the point that he'd made that, you
• 46:54
  know, we developed some products for some markets and we do deliver
• 46:56
  other products for other markets.
• 46:58
  And, you know, we believe that a product like the Neue Klasse
• 47:02
  might appeal to somebody like you.
• 47:03
  And it, it.
• 47:04
  Oh, yes, it did.
• 47:06
  It did.
• 47:07
  So, look, all of these YouTubers say, without further ado, don't they?
• 47:12
  And, uh, look, there's been lots of ado, without further ado.
• 47:17
  It's a filler phrase, isn't it?
• 47:19
  It's a filler phrase.
• 47:20
  But we like filler phrases.
• 47:22
  It's easier to understand the information if we use the filler phrases.
• 47:26
  You can hear me rustling my pages now, can't I?
• 47:30
  So after talking for 50 minutes, now I'm about to actually talk about
• 47:36
  what I witnessed at the conference.
• 47:38
  Monday.
• 47:39
  I missed the whole day.
• 47:41
  I was deciding what I was going to write.
• 47:43
  It was the school tramp camping trip the day before, like, it was You know,
• 47:47
  I went to campus, but I just worked with Barbara to confirm what we were
• 47:51
  going to, what we were going to do.
• 47:52
  And we understood how we were going to present.
• 47:55
  Tuesday morning, I missed two.
• 47:59
  And Wednesday was the day that I was going to do the keynote in the morning.
• 48:02
  So I was definitely around, you know, going to be around on the Wednesday.
• 48:06
  So on the Tuesday afternoon, I went to a panel on sustainability.
• 48:11
  There's actually a school of sustainability at Stanford.
• 48:15
  I wrote a session on a study on ecological driving advice
• 48:22
  and whether or not it works.
• 48:24
  How instructions influence the efficiency of eco driving solutions.
• 48:33
  It was talking about, I put in quotes here, cognitive distractions.
• 48:38
  So they measured eye movements and basically how if when you were like, you
• 48:44
  know, Turning off Enya and turning on Slayer, how at that moment, you weren't
• 48:54
  focused on the car being like, I'm sorry, Dave, I need you to take second gear now.
• 49:01
  I'm sorry, Dave, I need you to take second gear now, you know, like,
• 49:05
  you know, so in other words, people pay attention to eco driving if
• 49:10
  they're not doing something else.
• 49:13
  This was a team of academics from from Berkeley, which I
• 49:17
  thought was somehow typical.
• 49:19
  It's like such a, uh, it's just coming from such a place of not
• 49:25
  understanding motoring as it has been, and just, it's not even car hating.
• 49:30
  It's I feel it's like it's, it's, it's like Paving a parking lot over
• 49:36
  wildflowers and not even perceiving that you're killing all the wildflowers.
• 49:41
  That's how it made me feel about it.
• 49:44
  It really was pretty, uh, was pretty shocking.
• 49:49
  The conclusion of the research was that drivers need to be in what
• 49:54
  was called in the right status, i.
• 49:57
  e.
• 49:57
  concentrating, to be able to accept ecological driving advice.
• 50:02
  I wonder, I'm not sure what status I need to be in to accept
• 50:06
  ecological driving advice.
• 50:09
  Rarely have I, you know, I just feel like this was like, this is like when
• 50:14
  you see an interesting car passing you on the freeway at a high rate of speed
• 50:19
  on the other side, you know, it just, it was there for a moment, it just passed.
• 50:23
  For a moment we were communicating on the side and now we've just passed.
• 50:27
  I really was, was not.
• 50:30
  There was another presentation in that sustainability session, which I missed,
• 50:34
  which was about, um, getting ev chargers installed in homes, and there was
• 50:40
  another one about incorporating shared autonomous cars and, and buses properly
• 50:48
  for, for taxi and and delivery services.
• 51:09
  One of the questions was, what are you excited for in the future?
• 51:14
  The answers were that the one individual, I can't remember
• 51:19
  her name, blonde French lady.
• 51:21
  Um, she was talking about, and I can't remember which city it was
• 51:25
  she was talking about, but she was talking about a business model
• 51:29
  where the city was paying Uber.
• 51:34
  To do the last mile of the bus route.
• 51:39
  In other words, people who live right out in the sticks, instead of them riding
• 51:44
  the bus, they call an uber and then the uber is paid for by, you know, the uber
• 51:52
  fare is no more than the bus fare because it's like part of public transport.
• 51:58
  And I just thought that that was.
• 52:02
  As one of those little wrinkles that you don't think about, and then when
• 52:05
  you see it, you're like, wow, there's a whole, the future efficiencies that we
• 52:12
  can accomplish are enormous effect, of course, is, is compounded by autonomy,
• 52:19
  and it's compounded by the fact that we can increasingly have, you know, the,
• 52:24
  the door dasher can be the uber driver.
• 52:29
  As, as well, if, if that makes sense, it can be delivering people
• 52:33
  and goods when we can join the, the algorithms up, uh, up properly.
• 52:40
  The Berkeley lady, when asked about the future, talked about
• 52:45
  zero pedestrian fatalities.
• 52:49
  She talked about how pedestrian fatalities had gone up recently and,
• 52:53
  and, you know, I guess I'm like, ah, you're the one to blame for all of
• 52:58
  these stupid driving, impeding, you know, more space for pedestrians, you
• 53:05
  know, so in San Francisco, they put all these Polar ads up around curbs.
• 53:10
  So where, where people used to like, you know, stand off the curb.
• 53:14
  And if you were using all the roads, you might hit them right now, instead of like
• 53:21
  turf in paper, instead of encouraging people to stand on the bloody pavement,
• 53:25
  no, now they've put these bollards round.
• 53:28
  So people are fine standing in the road and now you have to turn.
• 53:31
  square off the corner in the car, which if you're in a big vehicle is hard to do.
• 53:37
  It's literally, they've made it harder to drive so that even if
• 53:43
  you're drunk and fall off the pavement, you can't get run over.
• 53:47
  Just for me, I feel like it's a back to front way of thinking about it.
• 53:51
  Pedestrians have to be, uh, responsible for them, uh, for themselves.
• 53:57
  One of the others, a woman that lived in London, who was on the panel as well.
• 54:02
  Her answer was that she was interested to see what she called friendly
• 54:11
  and easier to use interior design.
• 54:15
  By friendly she meant more intuitive UI.
• 54:20
  You know, in other words, I don't know what she, well, that's what she said.
• 54:24
  And she also said that nothing.
• 54:27
  was more important than safety and security.
• 54:31
  I wrote that down.
• 54:32
  Nothing is more important than safety and security.
• 54:38
  What happened to the freedom of the open road?
• 54:40
  There's no freedom of the open road when nothing is more
• 54:44
  important than safety and security.
• 54:48
  I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that.
• 54:51
  I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that.
• 55:19
  The other thing that, uh, Miss, uh, nothing is more important than safety
• 55:24
  and security said was, uh, that the driver is relieved from the heavy
• 55:30
  burden of being told about eco driving.
• 55:34
  And so their research was that you only needed, you didn't want to like overburden
• 55:39
  the guy with too much information.
• 55:41
  You had to like wait for the right time to tell him about eco driving.
• 55:46
  And I'm just like, I just wrote down, like it's the opposite of the
• 55:50
  old Jack Brabham story, isn't it?
• 55:52
  You know, they said to Jack Brabham once, Jack, Jack, how are you?
• 55:56
  How are you so fast?
• 55:57
  What advice do you have?
• 55:58
  And he said, well, lean close and let me tell you.
• 56:02
  More throttle.
• 56:05
  Less brake.
• 56:07
  Well, this is the opposite, isn't it?
• 56:08
  Eco driving is simply.
• 56:11
  Less throttle and less brake, isn't it?
• 56:15
  It's the same thing.
• 56:16
  It's less throttle with most EVs with the regen braking.
• 56:20
  It's one pedal driving.
• 56:22
  So you just have to learn how to coast up to this.
• 56:25
  You can't learn that.
• 56:27
  My God.
• 56:28
  Like, how drunk are you?
• 56:29
  Like, how uncoordinated are you if you can't do that?
• 56:33
  It is one pedal driving, yet the driver needs to be relieved from the heavy burden
• 56:42
  of being told how to drive ecologically.
• 56:45
  I mean, it's just so Sustainability is more than EVs, it's changing
• 56:54
  in city infrastructure to as comparatively obvious, isn't it?
• 56:59
  But, but when you, when you say it in that way, but it makes you
• 57:05
  realize how infantile the approach of, you know, replace everything
• 57:11
  with an EV and we'll be fine.
• 57:13
  It makes you realize how infantile that approach is.
• 57:16
  It makes you, you realize how urban personal mobility is.
• 57:23
  As much about infrastructure, more, far more about infrastructure than
• 57:28
  it is about whether we ride in a bus or in an electric Volkswagen or in
• 57:34
  a, you know, gas powered Mercury.
• 57:37
  I think it was the French lady who said, uh, instead of so many lanes, cities
• 57:42
  need to take lanes away from cars.
• 57:45
  And I was like, Oh, yes, that's exactly what's been happening in San
• 57:48
  Francisco, that cities, that the city has taken the lane away from the car.
• 57:53
  So on the school run at the moment, it used to be this two lane sweeper where
• 57:58
  you could weave in and out of the slow people and usually get through the next
• 58:02
  green line, whereas now they've done it where it's one lane for cars, one lane
• 58:06
  for the cyclists, and now you can't weave.
• 58:09
  So it means you always get caught with the light, so it means that even if
• 58:12
  I'm in like a zen mood and I'm like, I won't ride, drive in the cycling lane
• 58:16
  today, you know, even if I'm in and said, because I've never driven in the
• 58:20
  cycling lane, even if you think I won't do that by the time the light goes out.
• 58:25
  But you then get caught by the light and you sit at the traffic light
• 58:28
  waiting for the two or three people in front to, you know, finish chewing
• 58:32
  at their third Xanax of the day or something or feeding their kid in
• 58:36
  the backseat or something like that.
• 58:37
  I mean, I don't know what people do at traffic lights not to go.
• 58:41
  Because, you know, in theory, it's possible for you to just
• 58:44
  drive around them every time, because there's nobody in this.
• 58:47
  The light turns green and you can just drive all the way around them.
• 58:50
  It's like, you know, it's like a Fernando Alonso start where you're
• 58:54
  on the third row, but you're third into the first corner because you've
• 58:58
  got driven through the middle.
• 58:59
  I feel like I do that.
• 59:01
  I feel like it would be possible just in theory to do that all
• 59:05
  the time to be honest, right?
• 59:07
  I said this to to the boy.
• 59:09
  It's it's like when they did the pedestrian when they Uh, turned
• 59:14
  the right hand lane of the M4 from Heathrow into London when they
• 59:19
  turned that into a taxi only lane.
• 59:23
  At first I was like, you know, as I said in the pod the other day, like,
• 59:28
  what the fuck have they done to me pub?
• 59:30
  You know, this was mine.
• 59:32
  I was used to it.
• 59:32
  It was familiar.
• 59:34
  If you don't get that reference, the Mac lads.
• 59:37
  I'll put the link in.
• 59:38
  It's not safe for work, highly offensive, but it reflects how
• 59:43
  people feel about change coming to the things that they love.
• 59:47
  And because I love motoring, when the change came to the outside lane of the M4,
• 59:51
  a section of road, which I historically used to see Good, a good deal of speed
• 59:57
  along a piece of road that I loved because you came along, you got over Heathrow
• 1:00:01
  and then you got onto the Westway.
• 1:00:02
  And, and, you know, I remember coming into London with, with my dad, you know, in
• 1:00:07
  the eighties and used to be able to get onto the Westway, uh, Autobahn speeds.
• 1:00:12
  I'm not saying that we necessarily ever did that, but you used to
• 1:00:15
  be able to do that, you know, onto the Chiswick fly over there.
• 1:00:19
  Um, but then, you know, they turn the whole section from Heathrow
• 1:00:22
  to like this 50 mile limit.
• 1:00:24
  Well, then I realized, right, I could ride it on my motorcycle.
• 1:00:28
  I was allowed, you were allowed in the taxi lane.
• 1:00:30
  Well, then it became like my own private overtaking lane.
• 1:00:33
  Well, in a sense, that's what's happened with these, you know, so
• 1:00:36
  at the moment, so, you know, in theory, one can just completely bend
• 1:00:41
  the rules and take advantage of it.
• 1:00:43
  I'm not saying I.
• 1:00:44
  would ever dream of doing that, but you know, you can.
• 1:00:47
  So, but I mean, yeah, it's the, the roads are becoming, they are by design becoming
• 1:00:57
  less free and it is driven by the theory of these academics instead of so many lane
• 1:01:03
  cities need to take away lanes from cars.
• 1:01:06
  The other thing that I've written down, and this was a guy from Toyota
• 1:01:10
  who stood up and said this, is that, you know, we just need to walk more.
• 1:01:15
  We need to design communities that are set up around walking.
• 1:01:20
  And Stanford is an ideal illustration of a community which is set
• 1:01:25
  up around walking and cycling.
• 1:01:28
  And yes, it's weather based.
• 1:01:30
  But with electric cycles, you know, we can extend that range.
• 1:01:33
  We can all be a bit more like Amsterdam and a bit more like the
• 1:01:39
  London of the 1970s that I knew.
• 1:01:41
  So you can see I'm conflicted here, can't you?
• 1:01:43
  You can see I'm conflicted by the efficiency on the left hand,
• 1:01:48
  but I just Oh man, nothing is more safety than, nothing is more
• 1:01:52
  important than safety and security.
• 1:01:54
  I mean, it's, oh, oh, it just makes me want to, oh, I don't know.
• 1:01:59
  It just makes me come over all.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah.
• 1:02:01
  Get Enya off the stereo and wear the fucker slayer.
• 1:02:06
  Like the eight videos.
• 1:02:08
  Let me talk about those next.
• 1:02:10
  The first one was from Robert Bosch, and it was looking at what it called chauffeur
• 1:02:18
  deceleration for autonomous cars.
• 1:02:21
  Um, so really what it was saying was that, you know, we looked at the way that
• 1:02:27
  chauffeurs slow down and it showed like, you know, a graph representation of that.
• 1:02:34
  And then we tried to replicate that with autonomous, with an autonomous cars.
• 1:02:39
  Current autonomous systems tend to just do one step, whereas the chauffeur tended
• 1:02:46
  to do a two step deceleration stage.
• 1:02:49
  It felt a little bit like boiling the ocean to me, but this is, this is where
• 1:02:54
  we are with autonomous car Research at the moment that we're fixing the sort
• 1:03:01
  of edge cases and I said to you one of the, I mentioned earlier, you know, one
• 1:03:05
  of the striking things about the Waymo was that it worked brilliantly, you know,
• 1:03:10
  it drives like I might want to drive at no point could I fault it's driving the
• 1:03:15
  times that I've, uh, that I've ridden, that I've ridden in Waymo's, I must
• 1:03:20
  have done, you know, three or four rides now around, around the city here, none,
• 1:03:24
  nothing on the highway, nothing longer than about, uh, Uh, than about 20 minutes.
• 1:03:28
  So, um, you know, I guess this is necessary, but it feels, you know, it's,
• 1:03:33
  it, it shows the incremental steps that we're taking this, this, this video.
• 1:03:39
  Uh, the next one was about resting better in EVs.
• 1:03:43
  Now, what I thought this might be about was I thought it might be about, you
• 1:03:49
  know, basically turning your car, you know, instead of like economy class
• 1:03:54
  plane seat, turning your car seat into something that was more like business
• 1:03:59
  class, or maybe even Emirates first class, you know, where you could actually
• 1:04:03
  sleep properly in the car, because with autonomy coming with people, you know,
• 1:04:08
  with Uber drivers who come from, you know, they drive from a poor part of the
• 1:04:13
  state, you know, into the city because they can earn more money over the weekend
• 1:04:17
  in the city, but then they won't go home.
• 1:04:18
  They'll just sleep in the car and work throughout the weekend.
• 1:04:23
  Um, you know, I thought it might be something around facilitating,
• 1:04:27
  facilitating that, but it wasn't, it was.
• 1:04:31
  Some bollocks mode where if you did the school run every morning, the
• 1:04:36
  school, the car knew that you were doing the school run and it knew if you
• 1:04:40
  reclined the seat, you wanted to sleep.
• 1:04:42
  So it automatically, you know, turn some soothing music on and, you know, put the
• 1:04:47
  seat to your favorite like heater setting.
• 1:04:51
  It knows that you're about to get to school.
• 1:04:53
  So a minute before you arrive, it like shakes the seat to gently wake you up.
• 1:04:58
  I mean, I just had no idea what the rest mode added that
• 1:05:03
  reclining the seat and turning the heater on yourself couldn't do.
• 1:05:07
  Totally solving a problem that didn't bloody exist.
• 1:05:12
  Such a, like, bollocks thing, I thought.
• 1:05:15
  The next one was dorim and i'll put a link into this because this is really
• 1:05:22
  bizarre so this is uh uh electric minibus which travels around the community which
• 1:05:29
  is glass sided so you can see people inside it so it's easy for you to make
• 1:05:35
  friends with them i know i know it was south korean And I guess it's aimed at the
• 1:05:42
  fact that a lot of people, uh, have real, like, social isolation in, in South Korea.
• 1:05:49
  So the example was like some old bloke who got out to play Mahjong,
• 1:05:53
  or another example was an only child who had no friends and
• 1:05:57
  played the computer all the time.
• 1:05:59
  Now he could play the computer with, like, people in the Dorim bus or something.
• 1:06:04
  It looked shiny.
• 1:06:06
  Who knows it.
• 1:06:06
  I know nothing about the problem that it was purporting to solve.
• 1:06:11
  It seemed to be very regionally specific problem.
• 1:06:16
  And the solution seemed, you know, the problem, the problem
• 1:06:21
  seems like a real problem.
• 1:06:23
  The bus with transparent sides.
• 1:06:26
  It seemed like, you know, people are really lonely.
• 1:06:29
  So we made this great bacon.
• 1:06:31
  It seemed a bit like that to me, you know, now everyone's eating the bacon
• 1:06:34
  and they can make friends with each other because they're eating the bacon, you
• 1:06:37
  know, it seemed like the bus, it could be, you know, or, you know, It could be
• 1:06:42
  anything, it could be eating bacon, it could be eating ice cream, it could be,
• 1:06:45
  you know, rolling naked in the grass, you know, it could have been anything.
• 1:07:03
  Fox just chewing up my action plan, I guess it's better if it's chewed up isn't
• 1:07:06
  it, then I won't know what I'm meant to do and, uh, and then failing to do by, uh,
• 1:07:11
  spending too long, too long doing this.
• 1:07:13
  BMW dynamic light.
• 1:07:16
  That was the fourth video.
• 1:07:17
  I mean, I put here cheesy and pointless, but a really clear
• 1:07:21
  application, which is just making BMW seem even more futuristic and cool.
• 1:07:27
  I wrote down here, this is beautiful from the video.
• 1:07:30
  Imagine a light that is mindful.
• 1:07:34
  So that's right, when you get in the car, if, if it senses that you're in an aggro
• 1:07:38
  mood, it'll be all like mellow or, you know, if you're driving aggro, it'll like
• 1:07:43
  be aggro, do like red, like lighting.
• 1:07:47
  Also, that thing I was talking about earlier, where it can,
• 1:07:50
  you know, shoot different light.
• 1:07:52
  It has like, it can shoot different light onto different surfaces
• 1:07:55
  inside the car, and that light can also be in the form of, buttons.
• 1:08:00
  So this is getting away from the business of, you know, you have to go
• 1:08:03
  into a menu and a drop down and all of that to change the heater or to put
• 1:08:07
  the window down to get away from that.
• 1:08:10
  Um, you can have, you know, but to also get away from the business
• 1:08:14
  of, you know, being able to.
• 1:08:16
  Design a clean interior that doesn't look like the flight deck of
• 1:08:19
  Concorde in terms of the number of switches and dials and all of that.
• 1:08:24
  So you don't need to do that.
• 1:08:26
  Um, the, the idea is that this dynamic lighting can, you know, so
• 1:08:31
  you can do, you know, you can have like the lighting for the heater
• 1:08:35
  button, say, on the dashboard there.
• 1:08:38
  So you.
• 1:08:38
  Or, and the passenger can hit the button and adjust it, or you could, you know,
• 1:08:43
  if, or what my student was telling me is that yes, you can have it on the back of
• 1:08:48
  your hand because that's what the video was showing, but you need to do like a
• 1:08:52
  haptic movement to tell it to do that.
• 1:08:54
  So I'm going to find out more about this BMW dynamic lighting, but
• 1:08:58
  this was a really, really weird, really cool, really like futuristic
• 1:09:03
  y kind of, uh, kind of a thing.
• 1:09:23
  The video number five, I just read while I wrote down human takeover of autonomous
• 1:09:29
  cars, important, hard for deaf mofos.
• 1:09:33
  And I guess it would be right.
• 1:09:34
  Cause in that moment that we were talking about, I was talking about
• 1:09:38
  earlier that three to five seconds where the cars alerting you to the
• 1:09:42
  need that it can't drive anymore.
• 1:09:44
  It's got some issue.
• 1:09:45
  It needs you to drive.
• 1:09:46
  A lot of those warning methods are going to be some kind of the
• 1:09:50
  ubiquitous beep, aren't they?
• 1:09:52
  And, and, uh, obviously that's not going to work for people
• 1:09:55
  who, who don't hear properly.
• 1:09:57
  So look, right, it's, this was another one that was sort of about lights,
• 1:10:03
  um, and how you can use different lights to, you know, uh, basically
• 1:10:10
  communicate to people, you know, they need to do something or go in a certain
• 1:10:14
  direction or, or something like that.
• 1:10:16
  Number six was the one that I voted for.
• 1:10:21
  I felt like this was the, the, the best solution, although I felt like that the
• 1:10:24
  BMW one was clearly the most baked and the most ready for market, I felt like
• 1:10:28
  the BMW one was kind of, you know, it's like a cool thing, but it was a trinket.
• 1:10:34
  It wasn't, you know, doing anything really meaningful.
• 1:10:37
  This number six one I felt was, was really kind of a, a, a
• 1:10:40
  meaning, uh, was more meaningful.
• 1:10:43
  It was communicating.
• 1:10:46
  What the autonomous vehicle is doing to people who are inside it, you know,
• 1:10:52
  like what, but really it's that moment where you get in the way now and you
• 1:10:57
  say, take me downtown and suddenly it starts driving not in the direction
• 1:11:02
  that you normally go now in that moment.
• 1:11:06
  You don't know that there's been an accident and this is why
• 1:11:09
  it's driving a different way.
• 1:11:11
  If it communicates that to you, you're like, oh great, you know, you're
• 1:11:16
  relieved the car's doing a great job.
• 1:11:18
  If it doesn't communicate that to you, you're like, what are you doing,
• 1:11:21
  you crazy computer, stop, like, no, go the other, you know what I mean?
• 1:11:24
  You, you, and, and many of us have had that situation.
• 1:11:28
  It's, you know, compute, we're, we're all familiar with computers that are spinning
• 1:11:33
  and spinning and spinning and spinning.
• 1:11:35
  And you wish they just say to you, look, I'm broken.
• 1:11:38
  I can't do this.
• 1:11:40
  You know, this won't work, but they don't do that.
• 1:11:42
  Do they, they, they spin endlessly.
• 1:11:43
  And, and what, what we're saying is that this was some research
• 1:11:48
  that was thinking about how to communicate to people in a way that
• 1:11:54
  they, uh, they, they trust the car.
• 1:11:57
  And the net of the research was, was the for normal things, you
• 1:12:03
  don't need very much information.
• 1:12:04
  In other words, when my wife calls the Waymo, it comes, she
• 1:12:09
  gets in, she tells it, take it, take me downtown to my office.
• 1:12:13
  It, you know, this is where she goes every day.
• 1:12:15
  Um, when she gets in the car, you know, and, um, and it sets off, it's
• 1:12:20
  not going to make a big song and dance over the fact that the time that
• 1:12:23
  it's going to get there is normal.
• 1:12:25
  The.
• 1:12:27
  And the route that is going to take is normal.
• 1:12:29
  However, if there's been an accident and it's going to take a different
• 1:12:33
  route, then it needs to communicate a lot more information to tell her
• 1:12:38
  that that's what the situation is.
• 1:12:41
  So, um, Again, you know, I feel a little bit like the research that
• 1:12:45
  revealed that if you listen to Motorhead, you tend to drive faster.
• 1:12:50
  It's kind of obvious, right?
• 1:12:51
  If you're listening to Motorhead, you're probably either in the mood for driving
• 1:12:55
  fast or somebody who drives fast anyway.
• 1:12:57
  Definitely, listening to fast music is going to make you drive faster.
• 1:13:01
  I didn't really need a research paper to prove that.
• 1:13:04
  But you do, right?
• 1:13:05
  Because until somebody does the research, it's just, conjecture, something I pulled
• 1:13:12
  out of my ass and, and that won't do.
• 1:13:15
  So I like this because this was some research around something that I
• 1:13:21
  think's really, uh, really important.
• 1:13:25
  The other environment is, you know, the illustration I just
• 1:13:28
  gave was, was my wife and Waymo.
• 1:13:30
  Um, the.
• 1:13:32
  Use cases that a lot of, of, of these researchers see, and a lot of
• 1:13:39
  the researchers that are based in, in Asia, they're based in Germany.
• 1:13:43
  A lot of them were based in Utrecht.
• 1:13:46
  Um, these tend to be communities where people are riding the bus
• 1:13:49
  more, and they tend to be communities that might be really well served.
• 1:13:54
  By small buses, and I know, you know, where I was talking, I prattle endlessly
• 1:13:59
  about my class, didn't I, at the beginning of, uh, of, of this pod, one of the
• 1:14:04
  very early on in the class, when we were talking about urban mobility solutions,
• 1:14:11
  you know, the idea of the small bus.
• 1:14:14
  Um, really crops up again and again.
• 1:14:17
  I, it really works well in, in certain communities.
• 1:14:20
  There was a small bus that got around the medieval Borgo bit of Rome.
• 1:14:25
  I remember the medieval Borgo bit of Rome.
• 1:14:28
  I remember when I, when I lived there before I, before I was
• 1:14:31
  rudely interrupted by the corgi.
• 1:14:33
  Arthur, knock it off.
• 1:14:35
  It's just the postman, dude.
• 1:14:52
  So number seven was about.
• 1:14:54
  infotainment complexity and how that affects driving concentration.
• 1:15:01
  I wrote that it seems obvious that a complicated stereo
• 1:15:04
  equals distracted driving.
• 1:15:07
  Um, they concluded that more research was needed.
• 1:15:10
  So that seemed.
• 1:15:12
  You know, the next one was, um, I wrote a talking AV butler
• 1:15:20
  or autonomous vehicle butler.
• 1:15:22
  I then wrote fucking annoying.
• 1:15:25
  I then wrote video with silly, squeaky AI voice.
• 1:15:30
  So, yeah, I think people like that one.
• 1:15:51
  I'm not hesitating, aren't I?
• 1:15:53
  Because I don't want to offend the researcher who did that work.
• 1:15:56
  And really, I might find it fucking annoying.
• 1:16:00
  But really, it might be a useful thing for a lot of people.
• 1:16:04
  You know, and I'm struck by the fact that I'm now moving into old age.
• 1:16:10
  The reality is that these students that I teach, they're like half my
• 1:16:17
  age and they might never have need to drive as far as, as I have over
• 1:16:27
  the years that the, for many people driving is in the city experience.
• 1:16:34
  You never would.
• 1:16:35
  drive a long way, you know, an hour and a half up the freeway to Napa,
• 1:16:40
  you know, that, that's, that's it.
• 1:16:42
  And interestingly, of course, that's the kind of thing that the
• 1:16:46
  autonomous car can do really well.
• 1:16:49
  The freeway stuff, it finds easy, the The bits of driving that are really good
• 1:16:54
  fun, it finds AVs, of course, find easy.
• 1:16:57
  And these edge cases that the AV developers are wrestling with, they tend
• 1:17:03
  to lie in an urban environment because there's just so many more variables and
• 1:17:09
  so much, um, you know, unpredictability.
• 1:17:13
  And I think another thing that I'll touch on here, and it's just, such a, just
• 1:17:18
  a ridiculous irony of, of the space.
• 1:17:21
  You may have listened to the.
• 1:17:23
  A pod that I did a couple of months ago about Leadar developments in in Leadar,
• 1:17:29
  and, and you might remember that in it, I was amused that the Leadar developers
• 1:17:34
  are basically are all partnered with German car makers and the German
• 1:17:38
  car makers each have their own like.
• 1:17:41
  Clearly, technical partners in in developing autonomy and clearly that's
• 1:17:45
  because they want to make sure that their kind of autonomy is somehow
• 1:17:50
  superior or differentiated from those that their that their competitors are
• 1:17:56
  going to come to come to market with.
• 1:18:20
  Yeah, so there was another one about lane keep assist and.
• 1:18:25
  Lane center assist and, you know, adaptive cruise for cyclists, I mean, the, the
• 1:18:34
  results of the experiment were spoiled by the fact that many participants and you
• 1:18:39
  saw these poor schmucks riding on a bike.
• 1:18:43
  Wearing a VR headset because of the VR thing, people were sick, which reminded
• 1:18:50
  me of one of the students, um, one of my former students who did that, who
• 1:18:54
  was in the class, the very first time that I did it, he's a professor now
• 1:18:58
  at a university on the East Coast.
• 1:19:01
  Bravo, Dave, you know, I did a thing where in, he had a lab right there.
• 1:19:07
  Oh, actually the overlooked that the main quad at Stanford is really it
• 1:19:12
  was an impressive room and I, I, I guess, infinity I remember it paid
• 1:19:18
  for him to have this him and other researchers, of course, have this like,
• 1:19:23
  basically, it was like half of an M 35.
• 1:19:27
  It was in the room, so where you actually like sat in a real car,
• 1:19:30
  and then it was a driving simulator.
• 1:19:32
  Well, you know, you sat in a real M35, but it didn't move like that.
• 1:19:38
  And that really gave me, especially on deceleration, the worst motion sickness.
• 1:19:45
  And I sort of battled through it because I thought it might get better.
• 1:19:47
  And I wanted to do Dave's experiment.
• 1:19:51
  I lay on the grass.
• 1:19:54
  Um, you know, if you visit, if you look at pictures of Stanford, you know, the,
• 1:19:58
  the oval there, like with the palm trees.
• 1:20:00
  Now I lay there on the grass for two hours before I felt well
• 1:20:05
  enough to, to walk back to the car.
• 1:20:07
  So look, so what this reveals to me is that.
• 1:20:12
  You know, the, the, the experiments that they're doing are, in that case, many of
• 1:20:19
  the participants delivered flawed results due to the, the sort of motion sickness.
• 1:20:24
  So, I, I'm just, I don't know.
• 1:20:26
  I mean, do you need help?
• 1:20:28
  Riding in the middle of the road.
• 1:20:29
  I mean, maybe you do, but I don't think you need a technical solution.
• 1:20:33
  I just think you need to ride the bike better.
• 1:20:35
  It's a little bit like the eco driving and you can only tell people the eco message
• 1:20:40
  when they're not adjusting the stereo.
• 1:20:43
  Like, no, you know, it's no more complicated than press the throttle
• 1:20:48
  more gently, coast more, less throttle, less brake, literally
• 1:20:54
  less throttle, less brake.
• 1:20:55
  It's, it's, it's really like, ah.
• 1:20:59
  For me, like, Oh, I don't need the, I don't need the machine
• 1:21:04
  to wet nurse me like that.
• 1:21:07
  I just don't.
• 1:21:09
  And it's offensive to me that these technologies, uh, I feel
• 1:21:14
  like are being forced upon me.
• 1:21:16
  And I feel like that is, if that sounds Trumpy, it shouldn't do right.
• 1:21:22
  It's not unnatural to feel uncomfortable.
• 1:21:26
  Uh, pace of rapid progress, and it's not uncomfortable.
• 1:21:31
  It's not, there's nothing wrong about questioning whether or not
• 1:21:34
  the progress really is progress.
• 1:21:36
  Because I think when you're de inventing driving or de inventing cycling, instead
• 1:21:41
  of the freedom of cycling, now it's all going to be controlled by the computer.
• 1:21:45
  How is that remotely a step forward?
• 1:21:49
  Like how, how, who, who was really thinking clearly where
• 1:21:53
  they thought that might be.
• 1:21:55
  Again, I don't want to work.
• 1:21:57
  I probably have offended people, haven't I, but they're by if any, but Bainey
• 1:22:00
  Port Blight who did that research is the misfortune to be listening to this.
• 1:22:04
  Anyway, the next one was enhancing pro social behavior in micro mobility.
• 1:22:13
  So basically, it was people fucking hate scooters, you know, twist and
• 1:22:18
  goes, what can we do to fix that?
• 1:22:20
  And if you think of it, right, actually, it's a super valid thing
• 1:22:25
  to be working on because scooters are an excellent transportation solution.
• 1:22:31
  But because of the way they were introduced in cities, people hate them.
• 1:22:35
  If.
• 1:22:37
  People had thought about how they should be introduced if, for example, instead
• 1:22:41
  of being able to just park willy nilly, they'd been corralled in a particular area
• 1:22:47
  like close to bus stops or something like that, something like that had happened.
• 1:22:51
  Then at that point, people might have, you know, if they'd have been proper,
• 1:22:55
  proper Rules and training applied.
• 1:22:57
  So people weren't feeling like they were going to be run over whilst they
• 1:23:02
  were walking their dog on the sidewalk.
• 1:23:03
  When by, you know, some speeding youth on a scooter, you know, you just needed
• 1:23:10
  to, there was, there were a couple of very easily foreseeable issues.
• 1:23:17
  The company's made no effort to head off that means that the scooters got a bad
• 1:23:22
  rap and got banned in lots of cities.
• 1:23:25
  I think in a completely unnecessary way.
• 1:23:27
  I think there's absolutely fully scooters, you know, twist and go stand up.
• 1:23:32
  Electric guys, some of these things can do 50 miles an hour
• 1:23:36
  and actually ride the bumps.
• 1:23:38
  I'm not suggesting necessarily there's a place for that.
• 1:23:40
  But what I'm saying is in cities like London and Paris and New York, where
• 1:23:45
  you might have, you might pop out of the tube and have, you know, 20
• 1:23:50
  minute walk at the end of the tube, having been able to turn that into
• 1:23:54
  a five minute ride on the scooter.
• 1:23:56
  That seems like a really meaningful way of taking foot traffic off the
• 1:24:02
  sidewalk and, you know, riding an uber.
• 1:24:06
  Or riding a Waymo or riding the bus or something like that.
• 1:24:10
  You know, it just seemed, it just seemed sensible for me.
• 1:24:12
  And then apart from anything else, you know, crudely scooters appeal to me cause
• 1:24:16
  it's two wheels and it's independent.
• 1:24:17
  And that's really what I'm getting at is I want to feel.
• 1:24:21
  Independent, I'm interested in maintaining the freedom of the open road, not in
• 1:24:28
  restricting the freedom of the open road.
• 1:24:30
  That's really my agenda in this.
• 1:24:32
  I don't want to be some chumpy Luddite.
• 1:24:34
  I just want to maintain the freedom of the open road.
• 1:24:38
  Look, so there's a lack of regulation and lack of, of trust of Scooter
• 1:24:45
  users looking at how to change that.
• 1:24:47
  It's, I can't read my own writing.
• 1:24:50
  Oh, pro social driving is driving, which is safe and, uh, considerate of others.
• 1:24:58
  Pro social driving has been about pedestrians up to now, but we thought
• 1:25:04
  about scooters in our research here.
• 1:25:06
  If you tell people what they do wrong, they can improve and be more pro social.
• 1:25:11
  So in other words, a lot of scooter riders, when they like, you know,
• 1:25:14
  cut people off, they didn't actually realize that they were upsetting people.
• 1:25:18
  Seems a bit hard for me to believe, but there you go.
• 1:25:43
  They measured space sharing conflict.
• 1:25:45
  And I guess, um, a lot of the presentations, I'm not sure if this
• 1:25:49
  one did, but a lot of the presentations use this Unity platform, which is
• 1:25:53
  an AI way of doing the research.
• 1:25:56
  In other words, they didn't do the research themselves.
• 1:25:59
  They didn't actually have real people on
• 1:26:03
  scooters.
• 1:26:03
  I don't know about this particular one, because Barbara only told
• 1:26:06
  me what Unity was afterwards.
• 1:26:07
  It's like AI.
• 1:26:08
  experimentation.
• 1:26:09
  So if you think of it, you can prototype experiments really fast.
• 1:26:13
  But at the same time, these experiments didn't take place in the real world.
• 1:26:17
  They all took place in the brain of a computer.
• 1:26:20
  So now, this experiment which took place in the brain of a computer is now
• 1:26:24
  going to somehow enhance the way that we behave riding scooters on the sidewalk.
• 1:26:31
  It's just, I mean, who knows, it might do, but I'm just telling you, I'm just trying
• 1:26:36
  to Just illustrate just how eye poppingly deep this, uh, this rabbit hole goes.
• 1:27:12
  So being pro social in the case of these scooters was basically yielding
• 1:27:16
  to other sidewalk users rather than, you know, zooming too close to them
• 1:27:22
  or, you know, cutting them off or potentially even running them down.
• 1:27:26
  Although that was not a scenario that looked at.
• 1:27:29
  So, when you gave people the feedback, that meant that they
• 1:27:33
  increased the passing gaps.
• 1:27:34
  If you were like, look, you really cut that dude up, don't do that in future.
• 1:27:38
  People were like, oh, all right, you know?
• 1:27:40
  And it also increased their willingness to yield.
• 1:27:43
  They were more ready to like, stop at things if you, you
• 1:27:46
  know, shamed them a bit.
• 1:27:48
  Who knew, right?
• 1:27:49
  Because I'm sure there's some riders who'd just be like, you know what, fuck you.
• 1:27:54
  I guess, in the case of the experiment they did, it made a difference.
• 1:27:58
  It's just partly paid for by Honda R& D.
• 1:28:02
  I guess Honda R& D have got a lot of money they don't need.
• 1:28:06
  So one thing that came up in the questions was perhaps, um, You have
• 1:28:13
  something similar to these dongles that insurance companies have you put
• 1:28:16
  in the OBD2 slot that monitors how you drive so you can supposedly get a
• 1:28:22
  better rate or, you know, more likely so they can ding people who are bad.
• 1:28:27
  You could maybe do something like.
• 1:28:30
  Like that, that if you were a shitty rider, you could just,
• 1:28:34
  uh, you know, they'd bill you or, or ban you accordingly.
• 1:28:39
  I guess the, uh, uh, the, the other things that cropped out was, was in the
• 1:28:43
  discussion afterwards, we, we talked a bit more generally about scooters.
• 1:28:48
  And then one guy pointed out that a pothole can kill a scooter user.
• 1:28:53
  And of course they can write the big ones that they have in San Francisco.
• 1:28:56
  So this whole business of them not being allowed to be on the sidewalks that forces
• 1:29:00
  them into the road with other traffic, other traffic that's moving faster.
• 1:29:04
  It forces them to the edge of the road.
• 1:29:06
  It often, you know, it can literally force them into potholes.
• 1:29:09
  So.
• 1:29:10
  The, the thought was that it's that infrastructure point again, but, but it's
• 1:29:15
  also the, the, the sort of other point that was made was that scooters represent
• 1:29:20
  a limited solution because in order to use them, you have to rethink your lifestyle.
• 1:29:25
  So there's always that thing about, you know, you have to be like, you know, if
• 1:29:29
  you, if you're not a young, energetic person, generally speaking, you're going
• 1:29:35
  to find it quite hard to use a scooter.
• 1:29:37
  And, uh, you know, one person used, I thought, a slightly facturous
• 1:29:41
  example to talk about, you know, how do you do the Costco run?
• 1:29:44
  It's a little bit like, you know, the reason why Americans
• 1:29:46
  need a suburban North Fiesta.
• 1:29:49
  But notwithstanding that, the fact is that scooters do require a significant
• 1:29:55
  rethink of city infrastructure and users.
• 1:29:58
  It requires a significant rethink of, of, you know, driving
• 1:30:03
  lifestyle and not for nothing.
• 1:30:04
  You know, I looked at the lime scooters here, which is the only scooter sharing
• 1:30:10
  ride sharing thing that survived here.
• 1:30:12
  I used to do rebel mopeds and only Lima left.
• 1:30:16
  But to be honest, it's so bloody expensive.
• 1:30:18
  It's easier to Uber.
• 1:30:19
  You know, if you're on the thing for an hour, it costs you like 20.
• 1:30:22
  Well, that's crazy, isn't it?
• 1:30:24
  I mean, that means you ride the thing for 10 hours.
• 1:30:25
  You could fucking well buy one for Amazon.
• 1:30:27
  You know, what would it's, it's, it's, uh, exactly Arthur.
• 1:30:32
  Exactly, exactly.
• 1:30:34
  There's no point in, uh, in doing that at all.
• 1:30:37
  So moving to day three of the conference, really interesting concept,
• 1:30:42
  which was my first note of the day, which was the notion of a taxonomy, a
• 1:30:47
  glossary of terms, if you will, of the communication methods, which pedestrians
• 1:30:55
  And car users use with each other.
• 1:31:00
  So it's honking, it's headlight, flashing, it's gestures.
• 1:31:06
  Yeah.
• 1:31:07
  All of those methods of communication in order to basically teach those things.
• 1:31:15
  To autonomous vehicles so that they can, you know, so
• 1:31:18
  that they can pick up on them.
• 1:31:20
  It is funny because of course, I'm, I, when they're there, they were talking
• 1:31:24
  about how these things are in some ways nationally and regionally specific.
• 1:31:30
  And I immediately thought of that thing that people always do in France and they
• 1:31:34
  never used to do in England, which is if you're on an end road or this might used
• 1:31:38
  to be true now, if it's true anymore, that if you're on an end road and people come
• 1:31:42
  towards you or flashing their headlights, you knew there was a speed trap.
• 1:31:45
  up the road.
• 1:31:46
  They used to flash their headlights to warn you that there
• 1:31:48
  was a speed trap up the road.
• 1:31:50
  The, the talk was the, the, the, as I said, that these are nationally
• 1:31:55
  and regionally specific and, and a comment was made that these studies
• 1:31:59
  are being done in, in countries like Germany and, and Holland where people
• 1:32:03
  tend to really follow the rules.
• 1:32:05
  And, uh, Therefore, all the research is done in an environment and it's done
• 1:32:10
  in quite a controlled, sterile, you know, although it's the real world,
• 1:32:14
  it's a far more controlled and sterile version of the real world than, you
• 1:32:18
  know, Calcutta, Mombasa, Nairobi, or, or even for that matter, Minneapolis, St.
• 1:32:24
  Paul.
• 1:32:25
  The next one was, was entitled steering towards safety and embodied driver guide.
• 1:32:32
  So this was like having a friend in the car, directing you.
• 1:32:35
  It was, uh, uh, the way that they set it up was it was a bit like, well, it was
• 1:32:40
  one of those like mannequin kind of wooden figures, but like a hologram of it, um,
• 1:32:46
  basically on the dashboard where the, you know, where the CD player used to be, or
• 1:32:51
  the cup holder is, you know, high up on the dashboard there, um, in the middle.
• 1:32:56
  Um, but yeah, the notion was that the best way to have directions is have a friend,
• 1:33:00
  like in the car directing you, they sort of lost me on that because, you know.
• 1:33:05
  It's the surefire way for Dana and I to have a fight if she tries to
• 1:33:09
  do any kind of directions for me, I do much better in the car on my own.
• 1:33:13
  I mean, I don't worry if, you know, one of my friends is directing me.
• 1:33:17
  I feel like, I feel like if people drive like a long distance,
• 1:33:20
  they know how to direct people.
• 1:33:23
  And I feel like people who don't.
• 1:33:25
  You know, drive long distances, don't think ahead sufficiently
• 1:33:28
  to, anyway, I don't want to slate my wife's driving skills.
• 1:33:31
  I just did, didn't I?
• 1:33:32
  Totally.
• 1:33:32
  Sorry, Dana.
• 1:33:33
  I mean, to slate your driving skills is probably just our total,
• 1:33:37
  you say tomato, I say tomato.
• 1:33:39
  Anyway, they listed 21 types of gesture I wrote here.
• 1:33:45
  It was a safety AI, you know, safety AV version of rally pace notes.
• 1:33:53
  So, you know, for turn left, it's easy to find a gesture.
• 1:33:56
  But for there's a storm coming, you know, you need to be aware you might not want to
• 1:34:01
  do this long journey because the weather is really bad on this long journey.
• 1:34:04
  It's hard to find a gesture.
• 1:34:06
  for that.
• 1:34:08
  I wondered, I actually asked a question at the microphone there.
• 1:34:12
  I wondered if you could use rally driver pace notes.
• 1:34:16
  Um, I feel like they would have developed the, you know, sharp,
• 1:34:19
  right, gentle, right, you know, go straight, all of that stuff.
• 1:34:23
  They would have developed quite well.
• 1:34:24
  I wondered if that could be applied and the researcher was actually a thin.
• 1:34:31
  So I thought that might work quite well.
• 1:34:35
  The next one was, uh, how do autonomous cars illicit uncivil behavior?
• 1:34:42
  So as, or as the, the, the woman from, uh, the Swedish, uh, transportation
• 1:34:48
  ministry said to me, you know, she'd seen people abusing and yelling away.
• 1:34:53
  Mo, you know, why do people hate the autonomous cars?
• 1:34:55
  Cause you know, her own community experiment with autonomous cars, people
• 1:34:59
  have felt very positively about the way the autonomous car had moved with.
• 1:35:03
  with, with society.
• 1:35:05
  I encountered this term, the griefing of AVs.
• 1:35:09
  So that is, it's, it's obviously a British researcher that's named that, isn't it?
• 1:35:13
  Which is, uh, which is deliberately fucking with the, with the AV.
• 1:35:18
  It's deliberately like causing a situation, you know, where the
• 1:35:21
  AV can't go forward and can't go back or something like, like that.
• 1:35:25
  So it wasn't actually, so it was measuring the ways in which people grief.
• 1:35:33
  A.
• 1:35:33
  V.
• 1:35:33
  S.
• 1:35:33
  And the specific example it had was was an example of of of a delivery robot.
• 1:35:39
  The cyclist was riding around and around and around and in so doing
• 1:35:45
  was stopping it from moving forward and was doing that quite consciously.
• 1:35:49
  They wrote away.
• 1:35:49
  It started moving again.
• 1:35:50
  They wrote back.
• 1:35:51
  They did that.
• 1:35:53
  Uh, the thing again, so this was the example.
• 1:35:56
  It wasn't, it wasn't quite the, the example of the person burning
• 1:35:59
  the Waymo in, in, uh, Chinatown a couple of, of, of months ago.
• 1:36:04
  But it's poking around that idea, right?
• 1:36:07
  It's poking around the idea that because of the way the AV.
• 1:36:13
  That was used in Sweden had been used.
• 1:36:17
  You know, it was used close to a home for people with Alzheimer's.
• 1:36:23
  So it gave these people mobility and it took them to and by ice cream.
• 1:36:28
  And it did it sort of on a walkway and it went at 9 kilometers an hour.
• 1:36:33
  So I'm very slowly.
• 1:36:34
  Um, this was why people a different reaction to it from, you know, the way
• 1:36:41
  that You know, somebody who's presumably had a pretty shitty shrift of life
• 1:36:47
  in, in living in the streets in San Francisco, and they see this Jaguar
• 1:36:51
  with nobody even in it driving itself.
• 1:36:54
  It's not, I, you know, I find it understandable that as the face of
• 1:36:59
  modernity and technology and everything that they hate, I understand why they
• 1:37:03
  might want to take out their rage on the, uh, You know, better they
• 1:37:07
  take out their rage on the Jaguar than on Waymo employees, right?
• 1:37:12
  Much better they take their rage out on the car than on that.
• 1:37:16
  So we are poking around why, you know, some people want to take selfies with the
• 1:37:22
  Waymo, other people want to attack it.
• 1:37:24
  We're poking around that because we now have this term griefing, which even
• 1:37:30
  describes the way that some people react.
• 1:37:34
  To autonomous vehicles in their community.
• 1:37:37
  So I think it's interesting that we're measuring these kinds of things.
• 1:37:40
  The next thing, really interesting piece of, of research, um, and I, I think
• 1:37:48
  the most interesting thing for me about it was the fact that it incorporated
• 1:37:52
  a piece of established research, which is called the bystander effect.
• 1:37:57
  And it's quite simple, that if there's other people there,
• 1:38:01
  you're less likely to do something about something that's happened.
• 1:38:05
  So the particular example was, you're riding on an autonomous bus.
• 1:38:11
  And all of a sudden, a drunk person gets on and starts acting the GOAT.
• 1:38:15
  If only you were there, you're more likely to do something.
• 1:38:19
  Get off the bus, confront them.
• 1:38:22
  You're more likely to do something than if there's a group of people there.
• 1:38:26
  If there's a group of people there, you tend to wait and see what they do.
• 1:38:29
  And this is a proven piece of research.
• 1:38:32
  It was quoted from the 1970s.
• 1:38:33
  The quote was almost as old as I am.
• 1:38:37
  I was, which was interesting because none of the other academic research
• 1:38:41
  that was cited was earlier than the turn of the century, which, uh, you
• 1:38:46
  know, again, yet another occasion where I, I, uh, and then another moment
• 1:38:50
  where I felt a little, a little old.
• 1:38:52
  So yeah, so shuttle buses, AV, um, AV shuttle buses, um, and looking at, The
• 1:38:59
  ways in which people, um, respond to there being no staff on the bus, because when
• 1:39:08
  there's a bus driver there, you feel more secure when there's a bus driver there.
• 1:39:13
  If the traffic's not going anywhere, you can say, Oh, is
• 1:39:16
  there an accident up there?
• 1:39:17
  And the bus driver will be like, maybe, although I think there were
• 1:39:20
  roadworks earlier in the day, you can't have that kind of, of interaction.
• 1:39:26
  The bus is, is just there on its, on its, uh, on its own.
• 1:39:30
  So what it, what it did quite interestingly was it broke, I think it
• 1:39:34
  broke the process down into awareness, um, recognition, responsibility, options
• 1:39:42
  for action, and then a decision to act.
• 1:39:45
  And the bystander effect makes you less likely to move to stage
• 1:39:48
  three, the responsibility stage.
• 1:39:51
  So in other words, if the autonomous bus has a flat tire, but you're still trying
• 1:39:56
  to drive on the flat tire, if there's a group of people there, you're more
• 1:39:59
  likely just to sit there and do nothing.
• 1:40:01
  Whereas if you're on your own, you're more likely to step in, step up to
• 1:40:06
  the microphone and be like, Hey, the bus is driving on a flat tire.
• 1:40:09
  Like what the.
• 1:40:11
  You know, tell it to stop, you know, that it's more likely to, to,
• 1:40:17
  uh, you're more likely to do that.
• 1:40:38
  So I guess really what it said was it had applied the bystander effect research.
• 1:40:43
  To specifically to a very real world situation in AV buses, AV bus, and
• 1:40:51
  had noted that in a situation where.
• 1:40:55
  The more people there are on the bus, the less likely people
• 1:40:58
  are to do anything about it.
• 1:41:00
  So you need to put in place something in order to overcome that bystander effect.
• 1:41:05
  That was the gist of it.
• 1:41:07
  And that's it.
• 1:41:33
  All right.
• 1:41:33
  So to wrap this up, this is a really exciting community
• 1:41:36
  to be, uh, to be a part of.
• 1:41:38
  Really interesting research.
• 1:41:40
  Some of it, as I say, a bit half baked, but this is
• 1:41:43
  inevitable in this kind of space.
• 1:41:46
  If you're pushing the edges of thought in any space, some of the experiments
• 1:41:52
  are going to seem half baked.
• 1:41:53
  Some of the ideas are going to seem half baked.
• 1:41:56
  The important thing is, like when you go to a modern art gallery or something like
• 1:42:01
  that, you take away What you can from it and and I found it really interesting
• 1:42:09
  because I feel like, um, you just the very fact that everything that we talked
• 1:42:15
  about was about communication with a V.
• 1:42:18
  S.
• 1:42:18
  There was nothing to do with the steering wheel The seats or, you
• 1:42:23
  know, whether you should use a knob or a dial to turn the heating up, you
• 1:42:28
  know, there was nothing about that.
• 1:42:30
  It was all about thinking deeply about how we're going to communicate
• 1:42:35
  with the mobility solutions with autonomous mobility solutions.
• 1:42:41
  And that is, um, Just an exciting field to, to, to be a part of.
• 1:42:47
  I hope I've communicated some of those ideas properly.
• 1:42:49
  I appreciate you listening all the way through.
• 1:42:53
  Thank you.
• 1:42:53
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