Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
It is certainly true that there are similarities between what Smith called ‘the system of natural liberty’, and more recent calls for the state to make way for the free market. But if we dig below the surface, what emerges most strikingly are the differences between Smith’s subtle, skeptical view of the role of markets in a free society, and more recent caricatures of him as a free-market fundamentalist avant-la-lettre. For while Smith might be publicly lauded by those who put their faith in private capitalist enterprise, and who decry the state as the chief threat to liberty and prosperity, the real Adam Smith painted a rather different picture. According to Smith, the most pressing dangers came not from the state acting alone, but the state when captured by merchant elites.
The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets.
As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’
The merchants had spent centuries securing their position of unfair advantage. In particular, they had invented and propagated the doctrine of ‘the balance of trade’, and had succeeded in elevating it into the received wisdom of the age. The basic idea was that each nation’s wealth consisted in the amount of gold that it held. Playing on this idea, the merchants claimed that, in order to get rich, a nation had to export as much, and import as little, as possible, thus maintaining a ‘favourable’ balance. They then presented themselves as servants of the public by offering to run state-backed monopolies that would limit the inflow, and maximise the outflow, of goods, and therefore of gold. But as Smith’s lengthy analysis showed, this was pure hokum: what were needed instead were open trading arrangements, so that productivity could increase generally, and collective wealth would grow for the benefit of all.
The real Adam Smith
Play is so important that nature invented it long before it invented us. Almost all young mammals play, as do birds like parrots and crows. Play has been reported in reptiles, fish, and even spiders, where sexually immature animals use it to practice copulation. But the world champion of animal play may be the bottlenose dolphin, with 37 different reported types of play. Captive dolphins will play untiringly with balls and other toys, and wild dolphins play with objects like feathers, sponges, and “smoke rings” of air bubbles that they extrude from their blowholes.
Such widespread play must be more than just a frivolous whim of nature. The reason: It costs. Young animals can spend up to 20 percent of their daily energy budget goofing around rather than, say, chasing dinner. And their play can cause serious problems. Playing cheetah cubs frequently scare off prey by chasing each other or by clambering over their stalking mother. Playing elephants get stuck in mud. Playing bighorn sheep get impaled on cactus spines. Some playful animals even get themselves killed. In a 1991 study, Cambridge researcher Robert Harcourt observed a colony of South American fur seals. Within a single season, 102 of the colony’s pups were attacked by sea lions, and 26 of them were killed. More than 80 percent of the killed pups were attacked while playing.
With costs this high, the benefits can’t be far behind. And indeed, where the benefits of play have been measured, they can make the difference between life and death. The more feral horses from New Zealand play, for example, the better they survive their first year. Likewise, Alaskan brown bear cubs that played more during their first summer not only survived the first winter better, but also had a better chance to survive subsequent winters.
Andreas Wagner - Why It Pays to Play Around
A signal from the past about the future. This is an interesting 11 min video with an interview that includes one of the founders of the Club of Rome.
Civilisation peaked in 1940 and will collapse by 2040: the data-based predictions of 1973
In 1973, near the height of the ‘population bomb’ panic, a computing programme called World1 offered up some predictions for the future. It anticipated a grim picture for humanity based on current trajectories. Tracing categories such as population, pollution and natural-resource usage, World1 calculated that, by 2040, human civilisation would collapse – a century after the best year to have been alive on the planet: 1940.
This film was originally broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News as part of a report on predictions for the coming decades made by cutting-edge computing technology and leading thinkers of the time. The second segment features interviews with members of the Club of Rome, an elite think tank composed of government officials, academics and business leaders focused on the future of humanity. Their view is a bit sunnier, anticipating a world where global governments are forced to cooperate to solve complex problems, people widen their cultural horizons and work fewer hours, and limited consumption – not wealth – becomes a mark of prestige. Viewed today, it makes for an engrossing artifact, raising far more questions than it answers about humanity’s ability to effectively predict its future and correct its course.
This is a strong signal of the future of work and reputation. One’s career path history is generally provided via resumes - but the advent of social media platforms makes one career path evermore transparent - for good and ill.
How the former employees of Theranos explain themselves on LinkedIn
When Elizabeth Holmes and her blood-testing startup Theranos were charged with fraud, many rank-and-file workers were put in a tough spot—and not just because the company laid off much of its staff in the aftermath before finally shutting down in September 2018.
Even if an employee left Theranos years before the company’s astonishing deceptions were exposed, seeing the infamous name on a resume might still make hiring managers think twice.
Or would it?
At its peak in 2015, Theranos had 800 employees. Many other people had stints at the company before or after that time. Quartz tried to find out what happened to all of them by analyzing the LinkedIn profiles of anyone who listed Theranos as a “past company” on their accounts on the networking site.
There were a total of 804 such accounts; 46 were private and could not be accessed, one was a Holmes parody account (since deleted), and one person had two accounts. We accessed the profiles from April 14-20 and found that while some former employees have had trouble landing new gigs, many ended up employed at some of the best-known companies in the world.
These are the companies that currently employ the most Theranos alumni, according to our analysis of the personal LinkedIn profiles:
For many this is a very ominous signal and it certainly has a few dimensions - one of the world’s biggest platforms creating a global currency which could challenge traditional payment systems and sovereign currencies.
Those who are skeptical about Libra’s potential point to Facebook’s approach to data collection and its well-known privacy missteps, which are particularly troublesome in a crypto industry that prizes “decentralized” power. Some crypto investors and executives are deeply skeptical that a company as rapacious as Facebook could ever seriously commit itself to the value of decentralization that’s at the core of the crypto industry.
Facebook may have too many users for its cryptocurrency to fail — even if you don’t trust it
Libra, Facebook’s new virtual coin, is the most consequential cryptocurrency effort undertaken in several years.
Facebook doesn’t have much consumer trust. But it does have a hell of a lot of consumers.
And that’s enough to make Libra, the new virtual coin that Facebook is announcing on Tuesday, the most consequential cryptocurrency effort undertaken in several years.
Cryptocurrencies can be used to digitally pay for goods and services, like a credit card, and to transfer funds, like Venmo. So far, most people haven’t adopted them as a common form of payment. The most well-known virtual coin, bitcoin, has instead functioned more like an investment asset. But Libra has the potential to become a way millions of people make payments and conduct cash transactions online.
Facebook is creating a new outside foundation to support Libra, a coin that the company is hoping will trade among its 2 billion users around the world and with Facebook’s 28 partner organizations that are preparing to accept the currency in 2020. It is the most aggressive step taken yet by any of the US tech giants toward blockchain technology. It also represents a strategic gamble by Facebook that enough people will trust a scandal-plagued and data-hungry company with their personal finances.
Another key signal of the emerging new paradigm in delivery of consumer goods. There is a 1 min video illustrating the drone in flight.
Watch Amazon’s all-new delivery drone zipping through the sky
Amazon has taken the wraps off the latest iteration of its Prime Air delivery drone that it says could be delivering online orders to customers’ doors “in the coming months.”
Considering the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) cautious approach to commercial drone deliveries, it’s a bold claim, but more on that later.
First, the drone. Amazon unveiled its new-look flying machine at its re:MARS Conference (Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space) event in Las Vegas on Wednesday, June 5.
The autonomous electric-powered aircraft features six rotors and can take off like a helicopter and fly like a plane. A video (above) showing it in action reveals a look quite unlike any we’ve seen before, with a protective hexagonal frame that tips once it starts flying through the air, and a central chamber — presumably for holding the packages — pointing forward as it flies.
A key challenge for the future of the digital environment is the development of a better fundamental business model - one appropriate to zero-marginal cost and network-effects-exponential-increase-in-value of information. And more appropriate institutions and institutional innovations to ensure the universal right to not be interfered with and accountability for harm done through violations of that right.
Apple created the privacy dystopia it wants to save you from
Apple invented privacy problems on mobile devices. And now only Apple can fix them.
“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” The message was printed 14 stories high, in simple black and white, on the side of a building at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The proclamation was quintessential Apple: a bold spectacle, a well-timed verbal play, and a calculated jab at Google, Amazon, and every other competitor about to show off its latest products on the world’s biggest stage. It was also misleading. Apple, after all, practically laid the groundwork for the surveillance economy with its powerful App Store.
that doesn’t stop the 2 million or so apps in the App Store from spying on iPhone users and selling details of their private lives. It’s not just Facebook and Google that are using their iOS apps to hoover up your personal information for the benefit of marketers or back-alley data brokers. Beneath the App Store lies a flourishing ecosystem of businesses devoted to collecting, analyzing, and profiting from user data.
“Tens of millions of people have data taken from them—and they don’t have the slightest clue,” says Will Strafach, founder of the San Francisco–based cybersecurity firm Guardian. His company released a report last fall that identified 24 popular iOS apps—including the image-hosting service Photobucket and real estate portal Homes.com—that contained code from data-monetization firms, which can collect location information as often as every 15 seconds, even when an app is closed. Guardian has spotted similar code in hundreds of other iOS apps.
An investigation by The New York Times last December uncovered nine seemingly innocuous apps, including Weatherbug and a gas-savings app, GasBuddy, that routinely gave precise user-location information to more than 40 different data-monetization companies. The Wall Street Journal studied 70 iOS apps in February and found several that were delivering deeply private information, including heart rates and fertility data, to Facebook through an analytics tool in the social media company’s software developer kit.
It should now be common understanding that humans (and most other plants and animals) are complex ecologies of species. We’ve know how our microbiome is fundamental to physical and mental health - now we are learning how the microbiome affects our medicines.
Gut microbes eat our medication
Researchers have discovered one of the first concrete examples of how the microbiome can interfere with a drug's intended path through the body. Focusing on levodopa (L-dopa), the primary treatment for Parkinson's disease, they identified which bacteria out of the trillions of species is responsible for degrading the drug and how to stop this microbial interference.
Since the human body cannot digest certain substances -- all-important fiber, for example -- microbes step up to perform chemistry no human can.
"But this kind of microbial metabolism can also be detrimental," said Maini Rekdal, a graduate student in the lab of Professor Emily Balskus and first-author on their new study published in Science. According to Maini Rekdal, gut microbes can chew up medications, too, often with hazardous side effects. "Maybe the drug is not going to reach its target in the body, maybe it's going to be toxic all of a sudden, maybe it's going to be less helpful," Maini Rekdal said.
Using the Human Microbiome Project as a reference, Maini Rekdal and his team hunted through bacterial DNA to identify which gut microbes had genes to encode a similar enzyme. Several fit their criteria; but only one strain, Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis), ate all the L-dopa, every time.
With this discovery, the team provided the first strong evidence connecting E. faecalis and the bacteria's enzyme (PLP-dependent tyrosine decarboxylase or TyrDC) to L-dopa metabolism.
Our increasing capacity to sense the world in ever newer and deeper ways continues to astound me.
“The whole-body machine is another quantum jump in medical imaging,” says Abass Alavi, a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He is collaborating with Badawi to use the modified PET scanner to study atherosclerosis, a condition where plaque builds up in a person’s arteries.
Whole-body PET scanner produces 3D images in seconds
The modified scanner also requires less radioactive exposure, vastly broadening its applications.
A medical imaging device that can create 3D renderings of the entire human body in as little as 20 seconds could soon be used for a wide variety of research and clinical applications.
The modified positron emission tomography (PET) scanner is faster than conventional PET scans — which can take an average of 20 minutes — and requires less radiation exposure for the person being imaged. Researchers presented video taken by the device last week at the US National Institutes of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Symposium in Bethesda, Maryland.
It creates a rendering in 1/40 of the time of a conventional scanner, using 1/40 of the radiation dose and so reducing the radiation risk. The researchers can also leave someone in the scanner for longer periods and take motion-capture images to see how a radioactive tracer spreads through the body.
The machine could be especially helpful for imaging children, who tend to wiggle around inside a scanner and ruin the measurements, as well as for studies of how drugs move through the body, says Sanjay Jain, a paediatrician and infectious-disease physician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
This is a vital signal - one that points to a real challenge of big data - storage and retrieval of exponentially expanding universe of data.
And Microsoft isn’t the only company working on DNA storage. Intel and Micron are also funding research, and last year MIT spinoff Catalog revealed they are building a machine the size of a couple of shipping containers that will be able to write a terabit of data into DNA per day sometime this year.
Microsoft Is Building an All-In-One DNA Data Storage Device
The modern world is facing a tsunami of data. DNA is emerging as an ultra-compact way of storing it all, and now researchers supported by Microsoft have created the first system that can automatically translate digital information into genetic code and retrieve it again.
In 2018 we created 33 zettabytes (ZB)—33 trillion gigabytes—of data, according to analysts at IDC, and they predict that by 2025 that figure will rise to 175 ZB. It’s been estimated that if we were to store all our information in flash drives, by 2040 it would require 10 to 100 times the global supply of chip-grade silicon.
DNA, on the other hand, is so compact it could shrink a data center to the size of a few dice. But for that to become practical we need a DNA-based equivalent of a hard drive that lets you upload and download data in a simple and intuitive way.
Hacking matter is a meme of the 21st century - this is a signal of accelerating progress.
nothing would prevent the new technology from being rolled out with many electron beams operating at once—with possibly smart algorithms, not human operators, steering the beams. Which could mean these single-atom electronic engineering techniques might be able to scale up to technologically useful levels, and not just be limited to one-shot, lab bench curios.
A Faster Way to Rearrange Atoms Could Lead to Powerful Quantum Sensors
The technique is also more accurate than the traditional method of poking atoms with the tip of a scanning electron microscope
The fine art of adding impurities to silicon wafers lies at the heart of semiconductor engineering and, with it, much of the computer industry. But this fine art isn’t yet so finely tuned that engineers can manipulate impurities down to the level of individual atoms.
As technology scales down to the nanometer size and smaller, though, the placement of individual impurities will become increasingly significant. Which makes interesting the announcement last month that scientists can now rearrange individual impurities (in this case, single phosphorous atoms) in a sheet of graphene by using electron beams to knock them around like croquet balls on a field of grass.
The finding suggests a new vanguard of single-atom electronic engineering. Says research team member Ju Li, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, gone are the days when individual atoms can only be moved around mechanically—often clumsily on the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.
Instead, using the electron beam of a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), the same device that can image an atomic landscape can now also be used to push individual atoms across that landscape. And because the beam is steered by magnetic fields, it can perform its operations in small fractions of the time it would take to mechanically maneuver the tip of a tunneling microscope from place to place. (Li says his group’s new technology could in fact move atoms around in the span of microseconds.)
The world of our augmented sensorium - our capacity to sense the world around us just keeps breaking barriers.
"Initially, it was simply a surprising effect that was limited in its applicability. That has all changed now. Not only can we visualize the electric fields of individual atoms and molecules, we can also quantify them precisely," explains Wagner. "This was confirmed by a comparison with theoretical calculations conducted by our collaborators from Luxembourg. In addition, we can image large areas of a sample and thus show a variety of nanostructures at once. And we only need one hour for a detailed image."
New quantum dot microscope shows electric potentials of individual atoms
A team of researchers from Jülich in cooperation with the University of Magdeburg has developed a new method to measure the electric potentials of a sample at atomic accuracy. Using conventional methods, it was virtually impossible until now to quantitatively record the electric potentials that occur in the immediate vicinity of individual molecules or atoms. The new scanning quantum dot microscopy method, which was recently presented in the journal Nature Materials by scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich together with partners from two other institutions, could open up new opportunities for chip manufacture or the characterization of biomolecules such as DNA.
The positive atomic nuclei and negative electrons of which all matter consists produce electric potential fields that superpose and compensate each other, even over very short distances. Conventional methods do not permit quantitative measurements of these small-area fields, which are responsible for many material properties and functions on the nanoscale. Almost all established methods capable of imaging such potentials are based on the measurement of forces that are caused by electric charges. Yet these forces are difficult to distinguish from other forces that occur on the nanoscale, which prevents quantitative measurements.
One more important signal of hacking matter - bridging the transformation of matter into light and back.
"We have created a hybrid consisting of equal parts of light and matter. The concept opens completely new doors in both fundamental research and applied nanophotonics and there is a great deal of scientific interest in this,"
Tiny light box opens new doors into the nanoworld
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a completely new way of capturing, amplifying and linking light to matter at the nano level. Using a tiny box, built from stacked atomically thin material, they have succeeded in creating a type of feedback loop in which light and matter become one. The discovery, which was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, opens up new possibilities in the world of nanophotonics.
Photonics is concerned with various means of using light. Fibre-optic communication is an example of photonics, as is the technology behind photodetectors and solar cells. When the photonic components are so small that they are measured in nanometres, this is called nanophotonics. In order to push the boundaries of what is possible in this tiny format, progress in fundamental research is crucial. The innovative "light box" of the Chalmers researchers makes the alternations between light and matter take place so rapidly that it is no longer possible to distinguish between the two states. Light and matter become one.
Definitely a weak signal - but one that sparks the Science Fiction imagination this is worth the watch.
This ambitious, four-year long effort is called the Magnetic, Optical and Acoustic Neural Access (MOANA) project. It’s being supported by $18 million in funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Since surgery to implant a device into the human brain can’t be used, the Rice team plans to use a combination of light, ultrasound or electromagnetic energy to read and write brain activity. MOANA will test techniques that employ all three.
New Tech Could Allow Blind People To See Through The Eyes Of Others
A team of researchers from Rice University in Houston, Texas is developing technologies that might allow a blind person to see the world through the eyes of a sighted person.
This fantastic project will involve sharing visual images between two brains. It will read the vision of a sighted person and transfer the images this person sees into the brain of a blind person "telepathically" in less than 1/20th of a second.
A team of neuro-engineers has begun working on a headset or a helmet that directly links the human brain to machines without the need for surgery. This headset and the technologies that power it will enable this telepathic visual sharing.
It works by using both light and magnetic fields to interact with specially-reprogrammed neurons in the brain of the wearer. The research team plans to transmit visual images perceived by one individual into the minds of blind patients as proof of concept.
Another weak signal - but one that could be a first target for domesticating DNA toward bio-enhancement of humans. There is a 1 min video illustrating six fingered one-handed shoe lace tying.
Extra fingers, often seen as useless, can offer major dexterity advantages
An extra digit proves useful for texting, typing and eating, a case study shows
An extra finger can be incredibly handy. Two people born with six fingers per hand can tie their shoes, adroitly manage phones and play a complicated video game — all with a single hand, a study shows.
These people’s superior dexterity, described June 3 in Nature Communications, suggests that instead of being seen as aberrations that ought to be surgically removed, extra fingers can bring benefits. The results also highlight how flexible the human brain can be, a feature that will be central to the design of brain-controlled robotic appendages.
For the study, bioengineer Etienne Burdet of Imperial College London and colleagues worked with a 52-year-old mother and her 17-year-old son, both born with six fingers on each hand. These extra fingers, positioned between the thumb and index finger, resemble thumbs in the versatile ways that they can move.
Brain scans and anatomical MRI scans revealed that the extra fingers are controlled by a dedicated brain system, along with muscles and tendons. That means that these extra fingers aren’t just along for the ride, controlled by the muscles that move the other fingers, as some doctors had thought.
This is a good signal of progress with nano-bio technology to domesticate DNA for manufacturing.
"Each cell is making millions of these chemicals and we showed they could exceed their natural yield by close to 200 percent," Nagpal said.
The microbes, which lie dormant in water, release their resulting product to the surface, where it can be skimmed off and harvested for manufacturing.
Light-powered nano-organisms consume CO2, create eco-friendly plastics and fuels
University of Colorado Boulder researchers have developed nanobio-hybrid organisms capable of using airborne carbon dioxide and nitrogen to produce a variety of plastics and fuels, a promising first step toward low-cost carbon sequestration and eco-friendly manufacturing for chemicals.
By using light-activated quantum dots to fire particular enzymes within microbial cells, the researchers were able to create "living factories" that eat harmful CO2 and convert it into useful products such as biodegradable plastic, gasoline, ammonia and biodiesel.
"The innovation is a testament to the power of biochemical processes," said Prashant Nagpal, lead author of the research and an assistant professor in CU Boulder's Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. "We're looking at a technique that could improve CO2 capture to combat climate change and one day even potentially replace carbon-intensive manufacturing for plastics and fuels."
A slow signaling of the emergence of nano-bio technology and 3D printing continues to indicate ongoing progress.
Our cell only printing platform allows for the 3-D printing of cells without a classical scaffold support using a temporary hydrogel bead bath in which printing takes place
3-D printed tissues and organs without the scaffolding
Engineered tissues and organs have been grown with various degrees of success in labs for many years. Many of them have used a scaffolding approach where cells are seeded onto biodegradable supportive structures that provide the underlying architecture of the organ or tissue desired.
But scaffolds can be problematic—ultimately, they should degrade and disappear, but timing that decomposition to coincide with the maturation of the organ is tricky, and sometimes degradation byproducts can be toxic. Scaffolds also can interfere with the development of cell-to-cell connections, which are important for the formation of functional tissues.
Now, a research team led by Eben Alsberg, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Bioengineering and Orthopaedics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has developed a process that enables 3-D printing of biological tissues without scaffolds using "ink" made up of only stem cells. They report their results in the journal Materials Horizons.
One more great signal of the emerging transformation of energy geopolitics - and really this particular transformation to electric cars has barely even begun.
Electric Cars Cutting Gasoline Use By Hundreds Of Millions Of Gallons A Year
As every Tesla driver knows, electric vehicles are more reliable, more convenient, cheaper to operate, safer and more fun to drive than legacy vehicles. However, the most important reason for the transition to electric driving is to reduce the use of polluting petroleum products. As EVs proliferate, consumption of gasoline is expected to fall. It’s still very early days, but that trend is already observable.
According to a recent report from the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (via Charged), plug-in vehicles displaced 323 million gallons of gasoline in the US in 2018. That’s still a mere drop in the gas can: it amounts to 0.25% of all gasoline used in the US in that year (another dose of reality: the increasing popularity of trucks and SUVs has more than wiped out all the emissions reductions from EVs).
However, the trend of falling demand for gas is gathering speed. The amount of gasoline displaced was about 42% higher in 2018 than in 2017, and about double the amount in 2016. Furthermore, the share of pure electric vehicles is growing. Gasoline displacement from pure EVs versus plug-in hybrids was evenly split in 2012 and 2013, but in 2018, EVs accounted for two-thirds of the displacement.
This is a signal that glimpses the emergence of self-driving autonomous vehicles in a limited context very consistent with containerization. There is a 1.5 min video.
Volvo’s sporty looking Vera self-driving electric truck will go to work in Sweden
The Vera autonomous, electric truck from Volvo’s trucking subsidiary is not what you might expect in a transport truck — it looks like a road-hugging sportscar, something emphasized by its lack of a place for humans to sit. The real reason it looks like this is that it’s totally self-driving, however — and tailor-made for use in specific situations like serving the Swedish port in Gothenburg where it’ll soon begin operations.
Vera’s inaugural job will be to move goods packed in cargo trailers from a logistics center to the actual port terminal, where it’ll be loaded onto boats for transport. This first commercial use of the connected, electric freight-moving vehicle will be done in partnership with logistics company DFDS.
Use of the Vera will make up one part of a larger connected system to move goods from the logistics center to distribution destinations around the world. They’ll operate autonomously but be monitored by a central operator working out of a control tower, and they’ll be operating at a top speed of only around 24 mph.
These are basically just heavy-duty land tugs for now, but if successful, there’s a lot of potential business to be had in providing similar services for shipping-port facilities around the world.
