Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
This recent piece is a must read for anyone following this story byTimothy B. Lee
Tesla is clinging to an old conventional wisdom
In 2014, the same year Tesla started shipping the first generation of
Autopilot hardware, the Society of Automotive Engineers published a five-level taxonomy
of autonomous driving systems that envisioned driver-assistance systems
(known as "level 2" in SAE jargon) gradually morphing into fully
autonomous systems that could operate without human supervision (levels 4
and 5).
But the last five years have seen a dramatic shift in industry
thinking. Most companies now see driver assistance and full self-driving
as distinct markets.
No company has done more to change industry thinking here than
Google, whose self-driving project was spun off as Waymo in 2016. Around
2012, Google engineers developed a highway driving system and let some
rank-and-file Googlers test it out. Drivers were warned that the system
was not yet fully autonomous, and they were instructed to keep their
eyes on the road at all times.
But the self-driving team found that users started to trust the system way too quickly. In-car cameras showed users "napping, putting on makeup and fiddling with their phones." And that created a big safety risk.
"It's hard to take over, because they have lost contextual awareness," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in 2017.
So Google scrapped plans for a highway driver assistance product and
decided to pursue a different kind of gradualism: a taxi service that
would initially be limited to the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix has
wide, well-marked streets, and snow and ice are rare. So bringing a
self-driving service to Phoenix should be significantly easier than
developing a car with self-driving capabilities that work in every part
of the country and all weather conditions.
This approach has some other advantages, too. Self-driving cars benefit from high-resolution maps. Gathering map data in a single metro area is easier than trying to map the whole world all at once.
Self-driving cars also benefit from lidar sensors, and the best ones
cost thousands—if not tens of thousands—of dollars each. That's too
expensive for an upgrade to a customer-owned vehicle. But the economics
are more viable for a driverless taxi service, since the self-driving
system replaces an expensive human taxi driver.
Over the last three years, most other companies working on self-driving technology have followed Waymo's lead. GM bought a startup called Cruise in 2016 and put it to work developing an autonomous taxi service in San Francisco. Ford made a similar bet on Argo AI in 2017—the company is now developing autonomous taxi services in Miami and Washington DC.
Volkswagen and Hyundai have deals with Aurora—a
startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, the former leader of the Google
self-driving project—to develop fully autonomous taxi services.
Technology companies like Uber and Zoox are planning to introduce
autonomous taxi services.
Tesla’s business model locks it into the old approach
Tesla, meanwhile, has stubbornly pushed forward with its original
strategy. For more than two years, Tesla charged customers $3,000 or
more for a "full self-driving" package. But progress has been slow. And
that has put Tesla in a bind. Abandoning the old strategy would likely
require refunding customers who paid for the Full Self-Driving
package—which would be both embarrassing and expensive.
Instead, Tesla's solution has been to move the "full self-driving" goal posts.
"We already have full self-driving capability on highways," Musk said
during a January earnings call. "So from highway on-ramp to highway
exit, including passing cars and going from one highway interchange to
another, full self-driving capability is there."
Obviously, this statement comes with a big asterisk: the driver still has to supervise the car to make sure it doesn't crash.
It's late and this hits a lot of threads, so I'm just going to hit the high points.
Lots of fans feel a sense of ownership over the characters and franchises they follow.
The intersection between fandom and the alt-right has
grown increasingly, if you'll pardon the word, fanatical. Perhaps the
ugliest corner is dominated by the men's rights movement.
Such
messages are, of course, not actually reviews of Captain Marvel the
movie — that there’s no way any of these people have actually seen a
film that hasn’t been released yet is a clue, perhaps — but instead the
very fact that Marvel is finally releasing a movie with a woman at the
forefront, and that the actor playing the role has been outspoken about
real-world issues surrounding sexism, racism and ableism. In other
words, it’s more of the same kind of attempts to derail progressive
Marvel movies that saw faked accounts of assault by African-Americans at
Black Panther screenings last year.
That shouldn’t come as much
of a surprise, considering the kind of sexist and racist trolling that
surrounded 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and particularly Kelly Marie
Tran’s character Rose Tico; genre properties, especially tentpole
projects and those released by massive studios like Disney or Warner
Bros., have had to contend with increasingly vocal swathes of bigotry
online in recent years as power structures inside the movies shift away
from white male heroes.
Perhaps the best commentator on the alt-right wing of fandom and andd one of the best on the business of pop culture is Bob Chipman. Here, he points out that Disney does have a hidden agenda and it has nothing to do with social justice, and everything to do with lax enforcement of anti-trust laws.
With the feasibility of a high-speed Missouri Hyperloop route connecting Kansas City to St. Louis in about 30 minutes now established, the conversation has shifted tracks to ergonomics, said Diana Zhou.
Perhaps even more than Mars One, the hyperloop narrative illustrates the power of ignoring irrefutable criticism. Since long before Elon Musk coined the term (still his only real intellectual contribution to the project), the obstacle that has prevented maglev vactrains from catching on has been the enormous costs of major construction with tolerances that tight, followed by the still unsolved problem of high speed stability.
Other than some hand waving and a few unsupported and comically unrealistic numbers, it does not appear that there has been any substantial progress toward addressing those challenges. Instead, proponents have simply kept changing the subject to trivial issues like ergonomics and video screens, before going back to the literal pipe dreams of a world with all of our transportation problems solved.
The key here is that the journalists covering the claims really want to believe them and that makes it all too easy to go along.
In thinking about media criticism, I want to link to these tweets by Matt Yglesias:
They bring up the central issue with the Clinton email issue -- there has been no consistent follow-up with succeeding administrations. It is one thing to say national security is very important (and it is). But if you set the standard that a minor breach of security protocols requires congressional hearings, you are stuck in the face of a major one with either:
Admission that the previous claims were specious
Rigorously pursuing the new (more serious) claims
Otherwise we end up with an odd sort of double standard that undermines any sort of ability to actually plan for political outcomes. Very much like the "deficits matter only as long as the other party holds the presidency". These odd double standards undermine coherent debate about national priorities and what voters want. Insofar as the press has a privileged position as the 4th estate, it is to guide us in debate and not to cultivate random scandals just to drive interest. In this sense, social media models may be failing us even worse than I had previously worried.
All three companies contend that because of energy cost advantages over other forms of transportation, a system will be able to break even in a decade after full-scale operations begin.
No one knows how much it would cost to build and operate a hyperloop over a great enough distance to make the speed worth while. Using existing methods, a project requiring this level of precision on this scale would be obscenely expensive. In order to make a serious attempt, a company would have to come up with radically new approaches and technology.
If Virgin and the rest were each pursuing possible breakthroughs independently, we should be seeing big differences in their cost estimates, even if those estimates were wildly unrealistic. The fact that all three give the same time to break even point is curious.
I'm afraid the most likely explanation is that they haven't really done anything substantive on the construction side. They're still using the orifice-derived numbers from the original whitepaper, which are even more nonsensical since all of them have abandoned Musk's original air-caster proposal.
All three companies contend that because of energy cost advantages over other forms of transportation, a system will be able to break even in a decade after full-scale operations begin. Not only will commuters be able to get from place to place faster, but doing so will allow people to comfortably live far from their work, giving access to educational, cultural and health services normally out of reach.
“Hyperloop Alpha” emphasizes that the hyperloop technology will be completely solar powered. However, maglev and HSR are also electric and could in theory also be solar powered. Focusing on the amount of energy required, HT found that for most routes hyperloop would be 2 to 3 times more energy efficient than air on a passenger mile basis; however, maglev and HSR also use 1/3 the energy of air on a passenger mile basis. The emphasis on solar power tends to obscure the fact that no technology is entirely clean because there is energy consumed in manufacture and construction of the technology.
Picking up where we left off on the painfully credulous New York Times Hyperloop story, here are a few passages I want to single out.
“From the point of view of physics, hyperloop is doable,” said Garrett Reisman, professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California and a former astronaut on the International Space Station.
The experience will be no different from riding in an airplane with the shades drawn, and technical issues around maintaining the vacuum within the tube will be solved, he believes.
Instead, hyperloop projects will face more mundane challenges.
“Getting innovative things through the regulatory and certification environments is very difficult,” Mr. Reisman said. “This could face an uphill battle in the U.S.”
First off, the does-not-violate-the-laws-of-physics standard is an incredibly low bar for an engineering proposal, particularly one that has been floating around in more or less its current form for about a century, but nonetheless it is frequently invoked in these articles.
The question is cost (both in terms of construction and maintenance), followed by speed and reliability. The problem Reisman cites is nontrivial (we’re talking millions of cubic feet of near vacuum), but it’s minor compared to the issue of stability, which is itself minor compared to that of manufacturing and assembling a massive structure with this level of precision.
Worrying about regulation at this point in the process is like debating what color you’ll paint your mansion when you win the lottery.
But Reisman is a model of critical thinking next to the articles other “skeptic.”
Rick Geddes, professor in the department of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, sees a different challenge. “The biggest problems for hyperloop will be securing rights of way and permitting,” he said.
Still, Professor Geddes believes that hyperloop systems will become a reality, as the time is ripe.
“There’s a sense that things are stale; we’re just adding to existing modes of transport,” he said. “Time is more and more a valuable commodity. The transportation industry is ready for a new way of thinking.”
This perhaps the most unintentionally informative passage in the entire piece. The hyperloop is an example of a major genre of 21st Century tech writing, stories about some long promised technology that is suddenly just around the corner. Fusion reactors, Martian colonies, the end of aging, yes, even flying cars.
When you scrape away the hype from these announcements, you never find the kind of transformative advances that would be needed to make these things viable. Instead you get a desire to believe and a vague sense that “the time is ripe.” It’s like the gambler’s fallacy for futurists. we’ve waited so long. Surely we’re due
For some reason, it has become obligatory to cite pneumatic trains as precursors of the hyperloop despite the fact that the technology had little connection to Musk's hyperloops and almost none to the "hyperloops" being proposed today (which are actually just maglev vactrains).
This late 19th Century system is a much more direct ancestor.
If there's an engineer in the audience, I'd very much like to know what
the relationship is between this very cool 1890 system and the history
of linear induction trains.
This article by Eric Taub is the kind of multilayered awful that requires multiple passes to address.
Just to catch up those who are coming in late, there has never been any question as to whether or not it is possible to build a high-speed maglev vactrain. There are still some nontrivial points to be worked out about reliability and stability, but those pale next to the central challenge of cheaply and quickly constructing then maintaining hundreds of miles of tubes consistently sustaining a near vacuum.
Each segment has to be airtight, absolutely uniform (a small irregularity can make a big difference at 600 miles an hour), and each joined with perfect seals. Add to that the cost of the magnetic levitation track and linear induction system and you have a fantastically expensive and time-consuming project.
It has become the norm for hyperloop puff pieces to ignore these main challenges in order to breathlessly announce major advances in what invariably amount to trivial side issues, but this piece manages to break new ground.
Anyone who has seriously followed the climate change debate over the past 15 or so years will be familiar with the first level of false balance where a minority, even fringe position is given equal standing with the scientific consensus. If you followed the coverage of Mars One, you've seen this taken to the next level where the majority of time is spent credulously recounting the fringe position with the mainstream skeptical view addressed briefly somewhere past the halfway point of the articles.
Now, the New York Times takes things even further. No one represents the mainstream consensus. The experts who are presented as "skeptics" are actually true believers brought in to introduce that incredibly tired Silicon Valley line about regulations being the only things holding us back from a technological utopia.
We've been through this before and I'm certain we will cover it again, but almost invariably if you hear someone going on about evil regulators holding back the development of a new technology (with the partial exception of medical fields), you can be fairly certain it's an attempt to distract from nonviable tech.
The highly-estimable FT Alphaville has long had a series: This is nuts. When's the crash?. That is my reaction to learning that Hoover Institution senior fellows are now crypto...
It is not at all clear to me whether they are grifters or griftees here...
I had known about John Taylor, but had thought that was a strange one-off. And now Niall Ferguson. Is anybody even pretending to have a business model other than pup-and-dump?
The New York Times' Eric Taub really goes for the gold here. For depth of buried lede alone, he may have set a record.
Way down in the 31st graf: " before such musings turn into reality, hyperloop proponents must prove that their systems work, that they’re safe for people and cargo and that they’re affordable" https://t.co/hGSLsIcqcE
"[A] cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table"
or more prosaically
“[R]educed-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air
bearings driven by linear induction motors and air compressors."
The idea of air bearings has been around for a long time and has proven
useful for a number of applications, but, after a great deal of effort,
researchers concluded sometime around the 1970s that it was not workable
for high-speed rail. When companies started trying to build even small,
very limited working models of the Hyperloop, the first thing that
most, possibly all, did was to scrap the one aspect that set Musk's
concept apart from more conventional maglev vactrains. This is a small
detail but it is enormously telling. They dropped much of the actual
idea, but they kept the name and the associated buzz.
2. Neither the Hyperlop or the “Hyperloop” offers much new.
At least in the broad strokes, there's is little new in any of the
recent proposals. Musk's original presentation relied mainly on
Disco-era technology. I believe most of the current efforts have updated
that with passive levitation systems developed in the late 90s. Either
way, the systems that are now promised as just around the corner are not
that different from proposals from twenty years ago which begs an
obvious question: why weren't these trains built a long time ago. The
answer is…
3. You didn't see supersonic trains twenty years ago for the same reason you aren't likely to see them in the near future.
Money.
Whenever people looked seriously at these projects, they concluded that
the cost was prohibitive. And no, this didn't have anything to do with
land rights or onerous regulations.
4. A question of tolerance and other things
Even under the best of circumstances, big projects cost a great deal of
money, and with maglev vactrains, the conditions are about the worst
imaginable. This is supposed to be a brief overview, so I'm not going to
make a deep dive here, but I will mention three factors: reliability,
safety, and most of all tolerance.
You've got people traveling hundreds of miles an hour in a near vacuum.
Just to get the damn thing to work, every part has to be manufactured to
the tightest possible tolerances, every piece of work has to be done
perfectly. But just working is much too low a bar here. With a
Hyperloop, even a fairly minor failure can turn catastrophic, causing
tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure damage, not to mention
loss of life. Those standards of construction and maintenance are
tremendously expensive, particularly for a piece of infrastructure that
will stretch hundreds of miles.
5. Beware science-fair level demonstrations
When trying to follow the Hyperloop discussion, it is absolutely
essential to distinguish between the easy parts and the hard parts. Many
elements of the proposed system are well understood and in some cases
widely used already. If you went through the Birmingham Airport in the late 80s or early 90s, you've probably already traveled on a maglev train propelled by linear induction.
Other elements are extraordinarily difficult to pull off. For instance,
radical new construction techniques will need to be developed to make
the system commercially viable. As mentioned before, the combination of
extremely high speeds with the need to maintain a near vacuum over
hundreds of miles requires a stunning degree of reliability and
adherence to incredibly tight tolerances. Every seam has to be literally
airtight.
You will notice that the "test runs" we have seen from various Hyperloop
companies have focused almost entirely on the aspects that don't need
testing.
[Ran across this shortly after posting.]
6. So what would a real Hyperloop test look like?
We will know that the Hyperloop is actually getting closer when we start
seeing demonstrations that address concerns of civil engineers and
transportation researchers (specifically those not in the employ of Musk
or companies like Hyperloop One). For example, a process or
manufacturing tube segments of sufficient quality cheaply or a system
for joining these segments quickly and requiring few if any skilled
workers.
7. And no, this is not just like SpaceX and Tesla.
The long-popular "we should take Musk seriously because he has done
impossible things" genre has recently spawned the subgenre "we should
take Musk seriously because he's doing the same thing with
[Hyperloops/brain chips/giant subterranean slot car tracks] that he did
with SpaceX and Tesla" This is simply not true. The approach is almost
exactly the opposite. With the latter, Musk proposed plans carefully
grounded in sophisticated but entirely conventional technology. With the
former, he made vague, underdeveloped suggestions that left experts in
the respective fields pulling out their hair.
To be clear, Tesla and particularly SpaceX certainly had their doubters,
but the skepticism was focused on the business and finance side. Elon
Musk unquestionably accomplished some extraordinary things, but he did
so by the deviating from conventional wisdom in terms of how you set up
companies while staying safely in the mainstream when it came to
technology.
