The Driver in the Driverless Car Quotes

“Of the Star Trek: The Next Generation future, Captain Picard once said: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” That is the future that we must build together.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“The first solar photovoltaic panel built by Bell Labs in 1954 cost $1,000 per watt of power it could produce.128 In 2008, modules used in solar arrays cost $3.49 per watt; by 2018, they cost 40 cents per watt.129 According to a pattern known as Swanson’s Law, the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to fall by 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. The full price of solar electricity (including land, labor to deploy the solar panels, and other equipment required) falls by about 15 percent with every doubling. The amount of solar-generated power has been doubling every two years or less for the past forty years—as costs have been falling.130 At this rate, solar power is only five doublings—or less than twelve years—away from being able to meet 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Power usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. Taking that into account, inexpensive renewable sources can potentially provide more power than the world needs in less than twenty years. This is happening because of the momentum that solar has already gained and the constant refinements to the underlying technologies, which are advancing on exponential curves. What Ray Kurzweil said about Craig Venter’s progress when he had just sequenced 1 percent of the human genome—that Venter was actually halfway to 100 percent because on an exponential curve, the time required to get from 0.01 percent to 1 percent is equal to the time required to get from 1 percent to 100 percent—applies to solar capture too.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Yet we consume energy at an average rate of only eighteen terawatts, a miniscule fraction of the 174,000 terawatts rate of power available.121 And that is readily supplemented by wind, geothermal, and tidal energy. The Earth is literally bathed in energy. It’s the same with water; with 71 percent of its surface covered by water, Earth is a water planet. An extraterrestrial watching our news reports would think that humans are either crazy or stupid.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Access to clean water is one of the most serious problems in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases.120 Of these victims, 90 percent are children under five, mostly in developing countries. Eighty-eight percent of these cases are attributed to unsafe water supply and sanitation. It’s not shortage of water per se that is the problem; it’s access to clean water. Water obtained from rivers and wells is infested with deadly bacteria, viruses, and larger parasites. These could be killed by simply boiling the water, but the energy necessary to do that is prohibitively expensive, so people die or suffer.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Mandating autopilot for everything that moves would devastate employment in the sector. According to the American Trucking Associations, in 2010 approximately 3 million truck drivers were employed in the United States, and 6.8 million others were employed in jobs relating to trucking activity, including manufacturing trucks, servicing trucks, and other types of jobs.105 So roughly one of every fifteen workers in the country is employed in the trucking business.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Companies need to build systems with the assumption that they will be hacked. They need to develop technologies that notify us when we’ve been compromised and take automatic actions to block attackers.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“In an op-ed in Inc. magazine, Thomas Goetz explains the difficulties that Iodine and other startups in the United States have had in their efforts to revolutionize health care: Unlike so many other industries, health care has proved allergic to upstarts that would emerge, uncork a radically new model, and push the incumbents aside. There are many reasons for this, but most boil down to “health care is different.” It’s highly regulated, which makes rapid transformation difficult. The incumbents are massive enterprises with multiple services, so challenging them is nearly impossible. It isn’t a market-driven industry that responds to better, cheaper, faster. You can’t price-shop. The government is the biggest customer. All the incentives are misaligned.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“The first part of the equation, the core role of our genomes in how we function, is already on the way to becoming comprehensible. There remains a secondary layer of genetics, of perhaps even greater effect: epigenetics. This is the study of how gene function is affected by interaction with the human body, the environment, and other stimuli.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“A.I. will provide similar benefits—and take over human jobs—in most areas in which data are processed and decisions required. WIRED magazine’s founding editor, Kevin Kelly, likened A.I. to electricity: a cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything. He said that it “will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now ‘cognitize.’ This new utilitarian A.I. will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Siri is an example of what scientists and technologists call narrow A.I.: systems that are useful, can interact with humans, and bear some of the hallmarks of intelligence, but would never be mistaken for a human. In the technology industry, narrow A.I. is also referred to as soft A.I. In general, narrow-A.I. systems can do a better job on a very specific range of tasks than humans can. I couldn’t, for example, recall the winning and losing pitcher in every baseball game of the major leagues from the previous night.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Much thought and discussion with friends and experts I trust led me to formulate a lens or filter through which to view these newer technologies when assessing their value to society and mankind. This boils down to three questions relating to equality, risks, and autonomy: 1.   Does the technology have the potential to benefit everyone equally? 2. What are the risks and the rewards? 3.   Does the technology more strongly promote autonomy or dependence?”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“What is new is the degree of regulatory and systemic disruption that the savviest companies in this technology revolution are causing by taking advantage of the technology triad of data connectivity, cheap handheld computers, and powerful software to grab customers and build momentum before anyone can tell them to stop what they are doing.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“A key difference between today’s and past transformations is that technological evolution has become much faster than the existing regulatory, legal, and political framework’s ability to assimilate and respond to it.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Meanwhile, the shortfalls in our legal, governance, and ethical frameworks are growing as technology keeps advancing.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Every major change in the technologies underlying our lifestyles, from gunpowder to steel to the internal combustion engine to the rise of electricity, has required a leap of faith and a major break from the past. Imagine the fear, traveling long distances aboard a rickety vehicle that burned an explosively flammable liquid and rode upon black rubber tubes filled with air. What could possibly go wrong?! Yet people quickly overcame their fear of cars and focused instead on how to improve safety and reliability.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Nearly ubiquitous data connectivity, at relatively high speeds, is around the corner. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere in the materially comfortable world, and it will become significantly faster. When a hurricane devastated Puerto Rico in late 2017, Google was able to provide direct connectivity to smartphones through its project Loon, which used high-altitude balloons to replace the damaged cell towers. Technologies such as this could provide both Wi-Fi coverage and overlays to cell networks through globe-girdling constellations of balloons plying the jet stream. These technologies promise to bridge the connectivity gap for the billions of people, many of them in Africa and Latin America and Asia, who still don’t have broadband.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“there are significant advances on the horizon, such as the graphics-processor unit, which uses parallel computing to create massive increases in performance, not only for graphics, but also for neural networks, which constitute the architecture of the human brain.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“It is noteworthy that, Moore’s Law having turned fifty, we are reaching the limits of how much you can shrink a transistor. After all, nothing can be smaller than an atom. But Intel and IBM have both said that they can adhere to the Moore’s Law targets for another five to ten years. So the silicon-based computer chips in our laptops will surely match the power of a human brain in the early 2020s, but Moore’s Law may fizzle out after that.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“When the team headed by biochemist and geneticist J. Craig Venter announced that it had effectively decoded 1 percent of the human genome, many doubters decried the slow progress. Kurzweil declared that Venter’s team was actually halfway there, because, on an exponential curve, the time required to get from 0.01 percent to 1 percent is equal to the time required to get from 1 percent to 100 percent.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“More and more aspects of our world are incorporating the triad of software, data connectivity, and handheld computing—the so-called technology triad—that enables disruptive technological change.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Disruption of societies and human lives by new technologies is an old story. Agriculture, gunpowder, steel, the car, the steam engine, the internal-combustion engine, and manned flight all forced wholesale shifts in the ways in which humans live, eat, make money, or fight each other for control of resources. This time, though, Moore’s Law is leading the pace of change and innovation to increase exponentially.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Moore’s Law. This is the oft-quoted maxim that the number of transistors per unit of area on a semiconductor doubles every eighteen months. Moore’s Law explains why the iPhone or Android phone you hold in your hand is considerably faster than supercomputers were decades ago and orders of magnitude faster than the computers NASA employed in sending men to the moon during the Apollo missions.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“None of us likes our electric utility or our cell-phone provider or our cable-broadband company in the way we love Apple or enjoy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Behind all of these unpopular institutions and sectors lies a frustrating combination of onerous regulations, quasi-monopolistic franchises (often government sanctioned) or ownership of scarce real estate (radio spectrum, medallions, permits, etc.), and politically powerful special interests.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“So what makes conditions ripe for a leap into the future in any specific economic segment or type of service? There are variations across the spectrum, but a few conditions tend to presage such leaps. First, there must be widespread dissatisfaction, either latent or overt, with the status quo. Many of us loathe the taxi industry (even if we often love individual drivers), and most of us hate large parts of the experience of driving a car in and around a city. No one is totally satisfied with the education system.”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future

“Smart entrepreneurs have grabbed this opportunity with a vengeance. Now online lesson-plan marketplaces such as Gooru Learning, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Share My Lesson allow teachers who want to devote more of their time to other tasks the ability to purchase high-quality (and many lesser-quality) lesson plans, ready to go. With sensors, data, and A.I., we can begin, even today, testing for the learning efficacy of different lectures, styles, and more. And, because humans do a poor job of incorporating massive amounts of information to make iterative decisions, in the very near future, computers will start doing more and more of the lesson planning. They will write the basic lessons and learn what works and what doesn’t for specific students. Creative teachers will continue, though, to be incredibly valuable: they will learn how to steer and curate algorithmic and heuristically updated lesson creation in ways that computers could not necessarily imagine. All of this is, of course, a somewhat bittersweet development. Teaching is an idealistic profession. You probably remember a special teacher who shaped your life, encouraged your interests, and made school exciting. The movies and pop culture are filled with paeans to unselfish, underpaid teachers fighting the good fight and helping their charges. But it is becoming clearer that teaching, like many other white-collar jobs that have resisted robots, is something that robots can do—possibly, in structured curricula, better than humans can. The”
― Vivek Wadhwa, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future