California opens its roads to test autonomous cars. Will yours be an Audi?

Ars Technica reports that California has finally approved rules for the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads, effective this September. (Until now Google has mostly been driving around their hometown of Mountain View.)

Cali’s DMV isn’t making it easy to get a testing permit – manufacturers who want to participate have to put up a $5 million bond per vehicle, and the individual testers will have to apply for a special “Autonomous Vehicle Testing Program Test Vehicle Operator Permit”. 

Whatever the hoops are, they’re perfectly reasonable when you consider that these cars will be tested on the same roads driven by that guy in the next lane brushing his teeth at 75mph. 

And lest you think this just means more Googlemobiles, Audi plans to release a “cruise control for stop and go traffic” in one of its cars by next year, which likely means they’ll be testing as soon as possible.

In fact, we’re likely within two or three model years of the first self-driving cars being made available to the public. So it’s entirely possible the next new car you buy could be the last one you drive home yourself.

This has been a long time coming. Automation has been steadily seeping into our cars ever since Oldsmobile ditched the clutch and gave us the Hydra-Matic transmission back in 1940. 

Since then we’ve gradually let our cars do more and more of the work. Antilock brakes work better than our feet at pumping the brakes; adaptive cruise control makes highway driving safer (and easier); so do lane departure warning systems and stability control. And because parallel parking is hard, a lot of cars do that for you too. Mercedes latest M Class SUV will even stop to avoid an accident, whether you hit the brakes or not.

These features sound normal because they are. They’ve been gradually introduced to us as technology has advanced. And bit by bit they’ve either taken away control of the car, or made driving easier – depending on your POV.

It makes you wonder what automotive branding be like when the cars all drive themselves. Cars (and car culture) were built and sold on “the feel of the road”, “responsiveness”, “torque”, “acceleration”. What will be the mindset of Ultimate Driving Machine when you’re no longer a driver? 

As exciting as the technology is, it’ll be really interesting to see where brands hang their hats when it comes to selling it. 

The tricorder is a thing now. You can have one for about 200 bucks.

A company called Consumer Physics is developing a consumer-grade molecular sensor that lets you “see” the nutritional content of the food on your plate in a couple of seconds.

Called the SCiO, the device is a “near-infra-red spectrometer” similar in function to the larger devices used at labs and universities, but much tinier. You aim a beam of light at your food and in a couple of seconds your phone shows a readout telling you the nutritional content. (Check out their Kickstarter video here.)

Even beyond food scanning, the web is buzzing about possible applications. SCiO is being developed with an open API, so once the database of scanned materials has grown there’s no telling where developers could take this. A great article in Tech Hive featured this quote:

“In the future, Sharon envisions, the SCiO scanner could be used by home brewers to establish a beer’s alcohol content; by consumers to suss out allergens in food and cosmetics; by shoppers to authenticate luxury goods like gemstones and leather; and by anyone who wants to identify an obscure plant species.”

Business Insider had a different, kind of depressing take:

“The scanner harnesses the power of physics and chemistry to figure out…whether or not that drink you left on the bar has been drugged.”

Um…okay. Way to bring down the party, Business Insider. Anyway, back to the future:

The guys at Consumer Physics believe this technology will eventually make its way into devices – phones, obviously, but then our refrigerators (which could advise us on which strawberries are the ripest, or whether the milk has gone bad) and eventually wearables.

From a marketing perspective, it should be a race to see who gets to be the most useful first. So why wouldn’t Jenny Craig provide a branded app (or stand alone sensor) with a year’s membership, to help their clients monitor what they’re eating day-to-day.

Or is this a great opportunity for GNC and other health stores to get out of the snake oil business and rebuild their brands by truly being about whole-body health?

Whether it’s this technology or something else, as sensors and chips become more and more invisible, brands that provide the most utility will create the most loyal customers. So smart marketers should be setting aside a portion of their marketing dollars for “brand R&D”.

Because these days branding isn’t just about good communication. It’s about smart science too.

 

I click, therefore I am: How tech makes you a better human.

Last week Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova wrote an excellent article on Clive Thompson’s new book, “Smarter Than You Think“. The book posits that the fragmenting of our memories and the offloading of important mental information to search engines and connected devices is actually making us smarter.

This may be counterintuitive to some. The book reminds us that as long as there’s been technology, there have been cranky old people telling us that it’s the end of civilization/modern discourse/human intelligence. Apparently even Socrates was against the newfangled technology of writing – after all, “knowledge stored is not knowledge at all”.

Now, of course, we don’t actually remember things – we remember where to find them. (Watch how fast Google shows up when you’re at a bar trying to remember “that guy from that movie with the robot”.)

Thompson’s view is that our reflexive reliance on tech actually makes us more intelligent: technology helps us more heavily leverage our “transactive memory”, which us humans have been doing forever anyway. Read it, it’s really fascinating.

Separately, ios9 interviewed Heather Schlegel, a prominent futurist and social scientist, about the role of technology in intimate relationships. (Learn more about her here.) Like Thompson, Schelgel also believes the technology that could, on the surface, seem to have a negative effect on society is actually a very good thing; that the social-ness and sharing of everything bring us closer to those around us. For example, in her view SMS can be used to increase and foster closer intimacy rather than separate us from the people around us.

It gets especially interesting when the discussion turns to body sensors as a way to “broadcast” your emotional state, allowing your physical arousal (or fear, or anger, etc.) to be felt by others. It’s one thing to say you’re happy, and quite another for someone to physically feel exactly how happy you are.

Whether you think this is interesting or creepy depends on your worldview and what you think of the technology. Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle created a world in which Everything Must Be Known, and Privacy is Theft. But can technology itself be good or bad? Or is what you do with it really everything?

Each of these articles is fascinating on its own. But read them back to back and they start to fill in details of how technology and sharing are changing what it really means to be human on a basic level.

YouTube goes old school with traditional OOH campaign.

To promote their new season of youth programming, YouTube wrapped an L train and took over part of Union Square subway station.

The channels being pushed are aimed at teen girls, with posters pushing programming by Michelle Phan (beauty), Rosanna Pansino (cooking) and Bethany Mota (uh, casual beauty?)

The structure of the messaging and the fact that it’s done on transit posters, which have been around since forever, makes YouTube feel more like a mainstream TV network than ever. It’s clear they’re beefing up against Yahoo’s move into programming and the other (latest) sea changes in happening in online media like original content on Amazon, as well as AOLon and Netflix.

From a branding perspective, though, the campaign seems to play against itself. The message on the all-type posters is all about You, the viewer. The “Tube” in the logo YouTube logo is replaced with empowering messages like “You make it sweet to be yourself”.

Yet the reason to believe for the actual channels seems to be that everyone else is doing it, so follow the herd or risk missing out. Pimping the number of current views to get new ones seems to be the opposite of celebrating my “YOUness”.

Regardless of what they’re saying, it’s interesting to see how they’re doing it, and to watch the line between on and offline blurring even further.

Now that porn is using CGI, you can’t trust anything anymore.

Recently Slate reported on a few industrious (and tech savvy) filmmakers in the adult film industry who found a way to work around a new law mandating actors wear condoms. They’re just digitally erasing them.

The article doesn’t get into the, um, nuts and bolts of how it works. But it’d be simple enough to mask a condom in a shot and color it fleshtone. Any decent editor with a copy of After Effects and a low embarrassment threshold could do it in an afternoon. 

The article makes the point that this isn’t that big a deal because, let’s face it, our bedroom fantasies have been “not real” since the days of corsets and false eyelashes. We’re used to faking it. 

This is true outside the bedroom as well. CGI isn’t new, and every day we see more of it without even noticing. There haven’t been actual cars in most car commercials in years. And now it seems like they’re not even trying to make them look real. (So unfair – the new Corvette is gorgeous. If I wanted to look at a fake one I’d just play Forza.)

So many shots in movies are enhanced (or just outright CGI) that the scenes getting attention are the ones that aren’t. And now that Lucasfilm showed us that CGI can be created in real time, in a few years the movie experience won’t be anything like what it is now.

Even the nightly news is mostly CGI. Aside from moving weather maps, animated medical graphics, and screen crawls, some reporters have started faking where they’re reporting from. And don’t forget the huge success of companies like Next Media, the “newsertainment” content company I’ve talked about before. NPR reports that they’ve jumped from producing one video a day to over 50. 

Sure, CGI isn’t real, but neither was Rudolph, and he’s still melting our hearts 40 Christmases later. And when IKEA made this aww-inspiring commercial years ago they used a desk lamp that didn’t move at all. 

 

The fact is, CGI is great at making fake things look real. But whether it’s pixels or clay models or inanimate objects, the only way to make things feel real is to write them that way. All the processing power in the world can’t help you if you don’t have an idea. Just ask Michael Bay.

That’s why you know who Aaron Sorkin is but have never heard of Dennis Muren.

Story is everything.  

While you were at CES playing with the new Roomba, these guys created a life form.

Check out this worm. See how it moves? How real it is?

Yeah. Science.

This “living” organism is a programmed replica of an actual living creature, C. elegans nematode. There’s no body, but it’s a real worm in that its cells, muscles and reflexes all react independently. And it lives in a computer.

Singularity Hub puts it this way. “The parameters are programmed. But the worm acted on its own.”

Read that quote again: “The worm acted on its own”.

According to the creators “OpenWorm is an open source project dedicated to creating a virtual C. elegans nematode in a computer.”

In other words they are recreating life, one line of code at a time.

Let’s jump ahead. What will an Arduino be like when it’s not just controlling sensors, but an actual sentient creature? When the software you write isn’t controlling your light switch but something like this:

Now your bomb sniffing dog is 100% dog – smart, trainable, strong survival instinct – but he’s also built to be stronger; to withstand heat or lack of oxygen; and programmed (evolved?) to “see” the heat signatures of disaster victims.

Closer to home, why couldn’t our domestic pets be “trained” to scan our vital signs or behavior, and make a call when we need help?

Now let’s jump way ahead, to when AI becomes feasible enough that we humans start dipping our toe in. If we can run program that “is” a worm, it’s easy to see how a motivated programmer could create a software patch to repair (or even enhance) some brain functions. (A prosthetic version of this was just developed and could be a great help to stroke victims.)

Would there be a market for DropBox-sponsored personality uploading?
Google Analytics-optimized memories?
Fast-twitch muscle reactions provided by Nike?

Will running a “root” program to overclock your brain be viewed the same as popping an Adderall before finals? One’s a hardware hack, one’s software – other than that, what’s the difference?

We’re well into Asimov territory at this point, but the fact that even the tiniest steps are are reality is amazing in itself.

If a robot lies to you, can you still be friends?

Earlier this week a reporter from Time magazine got a call from a really friendly girl trying to sell him health insurance. Turns out she was a robot and was lying about it the whole time, that mechanical minx.

Obviously somebody anticipated the “are you a robot” question. Programming a machine to deny that it’s a robot is obviously a lie…but how is that different from the car salesman going to the back room to “talk to his manager” about dropping the charge for the clear coat? Neither the manager or the telemarketer really exist.

Should “Samantha” have disclosed that she’s a robot? Manners would dictate yes. Saying “Yeah I’m a robot, but I can still get you a great deal” in a really perky voice could even have been kind of charming. But is there an ethical imperative? A business responsibility?

Put aside for a minute that this wasn’t a real company with a reputation to protect – just a sketchy Florida cold-caller selling questionable insurance. (They pulled the site down as soon as the Time story broke.) The job of a brand is to create a seamless, enjoyable experience for customers, right? So how is what the robot did different from a customer service rep in India calling himself Brian from Tampa? 

Pace Picante also got in trouble when they let a robot do the talking for them. But it was only noticed because of how fake and robotic the tweets were. 

If their tweetbot did a better job, no one would have been the wiser – and if we did know, would we care? Companies automate all kinds of communications. Any brand manager will tell you people like to feel like they’re talking to someone, whether they are real or not. That’s why companies like Delta Airlines and Bank of America go to such pains to put the most realistic intonation, pauses and tones of voice into their automated systems. It makes us more comfortable.

So why should the robot have to tell you it’s a robot? It’s not a cop. (Heads up, even if it was it wouldn’t have to tell you.) Robots are already part of our everyday lives, and that will only increase with time. They won’t just be doing brain surgeries and flying our planes or driving our cars. They’ll take over more and more mundane tasks too. Like stocking grocery shelves and, yes, being telemarketers.

Robots call to get you to vote for their favorite political candidates. They answer questions about why your checks are bouncing. They’ll even book you a flight to Tahiti. Right now you can tell they’re machines, but eventually they’ll get more and more believable.

They’ll start saying more than the 14 sentences approved by the brand manager. They’ll start to “react” and talk to you on the fly, coming up with word and sentence combinations unique to the conversation they are having…with you.

Once a robot can do that, once they can consistently pass the Turing Test, the machines will start flirting. They’ll go off script. They might even start making promises your brand can’t keep.

Tough question, but how is this different from some of the people tasked with speaking for brands already? At least the robots are programmable. There are days when having a smart robot would beat a kid with no common sense. Just ask Home Depot. 

Coin wants to replace all the cards in your wallet

I just ordered a new card and I can’t wait to play with it. It’s a programmable credit card called Coin. Think of it as a Universal remote for your wallet. Now instead of carrying multiple cards like Wilma Flintstone, you just carry your Coin.

It lets you select between multiple cards (up to 8). When it’s time to pay, you toggle the Coin display to show which card to charge and hand it over.

To program it you swipe all your cards using the smartphone app (it comes with a Square-like card swiper). The app is where you manage and add cards, name your cards for the display(“work” “AmEx”, “home”, etc).

My favorite part is that it sends you a text if you leave it anywhere. So no more walking away and leaving your credit card at Smith & Wollensky. (OK, Chipotle.) If you do leave it, or lose it, or someone steals it, it deactivates itself automatically until you’re back. 

You can pre-order a Coin card now for $50, or wait until they come out next summer and get one for $100. I did it now because it gives Coin the fundraising they need to manufacture these things, and lets the world know there’s interest in products that make our lives easier and more convenient.

It’s a simple idea that looks to be really well executed. We’ll see what it looks like when it comes out next year. In the meantime, if I don’t need a wallet anymore I guess it’s time to look for other ways to carry my money.

Watch this video and you’ll understand how Bitcoin works.

Give this three and a half minutes and it’ll make your brain a little bigger, you just watch.

A gorgeous video from Aussie motion graphics designer Duncan Elms explains how BitCoin works in layman’s terms. It’s a few months old now so some of the stats may be a bit off, but it’s still a great overview.

Now that you know how it works, you’ll know why this bitcoin ATM is such a big deal. It’s the world’s first, and it makes it very easy to convert this digital-only virtual currency into actual paper money and vice-versa.

Just like Tesla’s first electric charging stations, Robocoin is the first sign that a new technology could become a practical, useful thing and upend an established paradigm, in this case currency itself. The more Robocoin machines there are, the more businesses will accept bitcoin for payment. So the days of paying for your breakfast burrito with couch money may soon be over.

OK, back to the salt coin mines…

The new iPad spot feels too much like advertising.

Steve Jobs is dead, but Lee Clow isn’t. So why is this new spot for the new iPad so … commercially?

The spot is beautiful. It’s gorgeously shot. The writing is great. And Bryan Cranston’s VO gives it a big, polished feel. It’s a really good commercial.

But that’s exactly what’s wrong with it. It feels like a commercial. We’re used to Apple doing little art films in 30 seconds. Pieces of culture that move us, and have us all talking or smiling or dancing…feeling something.

I don’t mean 1984.

That’s the all-time gold standard for advertising of any kind. But that was almost 30 years ago now. I’m talking about the Jobs-era stuff. The “ads” that were as well designed and meticulously engineered as the products they sell.

The iMac spots that changed our perception about what a desktop was.

The iPod videos that made us dance, and told us what the hot new bands are. Or in many cases, made the new bands hot.

These weren’t traditional conceptual ads, with a punchline or a cute button at the end. They were something different. Something better.

That’s why the new iPad ad is such a misstep. The rug pull at the end of the spot feels like advertising. “For twenty-six seconds we’re going to show you one thing, and the copy will refer to this one thing, but then YANK! We’re actually talking about our product. Gotcha!”

This isn’t necessarily bad in itself. When a misdirect is done well it can be really powerful, like this great spot for seatbelt safety. But that’s the point – it’s a familiar structure. And just like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. This is different than the great work we’re used to from Apple. The stuff we watched over and over. The stuff that never got old.

No question this new spot is a good TV commercial. But we expect more from the company who told us to expect something different.