Tick-Tech-Toe

By Omar Billawala

Yes.  I confess.  I am a nerd.  I have been for the better part of forty years.  In junior high school (now called “middle school”), kids would endlessly tease me by calling me, “Bowmar” (the name of a calculator sold at that time).  In high school I played chess at lunch, was on the math team, and had zero social life.  But, throughout this time, I loved gadgets–slide rules, digital watches, calculators, and computers–they were my constant companions.

My oldest daughter is starting her first year of high school.  And I am doing a most un-nerd-like (and arguably hypocritical) thing–I am denying her a smartphone.  Her deprivation extends well beyond a smartphone.  She does not get a tablet, a laptop, or even an iPod.  As she tells me, she is almost the only high school student who must do without.  I do truly appreciate the sacrifice that is being forced upon her.  She is losing out on a plethora of resources.  The internet is not at her fingertips–for that she must use a shared computer in our kitchen where we can keep an eye on her or a library computer.  She cannot stream music whereever she is.  She cannot text her friends to coordinate meeting and she cannot shop/read/check weather/review her calendar/etc. from wherever she happens to be.

Just to show that I am not totally inhuman, I did let my daughter get an email account this summer and, along with it, a Google Plus account.  I also let her use a flip-phone.  Still, she feels deprived.

I assuage my conscience by reasoning that my daughter now will spend less time:

• texting;
• snapchatting;
• (insert any social network here)’ing;
• surfing the web;
• shopping on the web;
• playing highly addictive computer games;
• checking email; and
• watching videos.

I know this hurts.  She feels left out.  Coordinating rides to after-school activities is more of a challenge.  Keeping up with her friends is more difficult.  

Not having a smartphone makes many things more difficult.  She will have to be more resourceful without the tech version of a swiss army knife constantly at her side.  She will need to be more coordinated and more foresighted in her planning.  She will have to use pen and paper more and write things down.  She will have to find things to do with the time that video games would otherwise be taking up.  She may even have to spend more time talking with people.  These are indeed heavy burdens to place on a fourteen-year-old girl, but, as I think more about it, these are the kinds of challenges that I want my daughter to face, to conquer.

I am certain that I would receive much appreciation and gratitude if I were to give her a smartphone.  As a parent these are things you cherish receiving from your children.  But, as a parent, we are tasked with doing what we can to give our children the best chance to succeed later in life.  Though I feel a bit isolated in my beliefs (and, at some point, I may end up joining the crowd), at present I feel I am doing right by my daughter.

A 1956 Vision of the Self Driving Car

By Omar Billawala

In the future, we hear, cars will be able to drive themselves!  We will be able to summon a car that we effectively share, to come pick us up in the morning and drive us to work while we eat breakfast, get a little extra sleep or start our workday.  When we arrive, there will be no need to park it as it will just drive off.  The advantages are staggering.  We will be able to live further from where we work, in less expensive neighborhoods, with less commute inconvenience.  Traffic accidents and insurance costs will plummet as smart cars will avoid collisions with silicon’s-far-quicker-than-hand-eye coordination/decision-making capabilities.  We won’t even need put out the large sums of money required to own and maintain our own cars as we can more efficiently share cars or hire cars on an as-needed basis.  Parking, taxis, and trip transportation scheduling will no longer be a significant concern.  We will finally realize the promise of the first cars–to be, in a limited geographic sense, free! 

Self driving cars are the future!  So, when will this future arrive on our doorstep?

This is where the opinions begin dramatically diverging.  Google, which is presently demonstrating self-driving car technology, albeit with a person at the wheel and an engineer along for the ride, predicts this will happen by 2020.  Also in the 2020 camp are Audi, BMW, GM, Mercedes and Nissan.  Daimler and Ford are a little more conservative, predicting 2025.  Even the IHS Automotive, a market intelligence company, agrees with the 2025 date and goes further to predict that the majority of vehicles on the road will be self-driving by 2035.  If industry consensus is to be believed, self driving cars should be wreaking havoc with our established way of doing things in just over 10 years!

For those of you who insist on holding onto that steering wheel tightly, there is some hope that that the future can be put on hold for a few more years.  Even if the fundamental technology solutions relating to making a car smart enough to intelligently maneuver on our roads in a safe manner were completely solved, there are a number of potential speed bumps on our road to automaniation.

One of the classic objections asks, in a situation where a self-driving car will get into a situation where it will have to hit one of two pedestrians (say an old person and a child), how the choice will be made as to who will be injured, maimed or killed.  While this seems like a difficult, perhaps intractable, ethical and philosophical dilemma, the solution to which path should be taken is likely easily solved by choosing the perceived less of two evils.  Cars will be constantly evaluating the relative safety of alternative courses of action and based on programming and algorithms, the chances that two different courses will have the same damage score is about the same chance as picking two identical random 20-digit numbers (i.e., effectively, zero.)

Some of the lesser-talked-about but more challenging problems that self-driving cars present relate to privacy, safety, and economic upheaval.  I am not referring to the privacy compromise related to there being a complete record of everywhere you have been driven, or even to the possibility that your routes could be skewed based on commericial considerations–as one commentator put it, your route could be modified to always taking you by a Krispy Kreme Donut location in the hopes of inducing you to impulse purchase some of their diabetes dunkers)–but rather the nearly total potential visual and audio record of everything you do when you are out in public within sight of self-driving cars.  Self driving cars will be deeply aware of their surroundings in a digital sort of way and, as with anything digital, it can be easily stored.  We are at the early stages of a loss-of-privacy revolution and we will still getting accustomed to loss of location privacy and that we can be photographed in public.  How are we going to feel when our whereabouts are not just tracked but videoed.  Jaywalkers, vandals, drug dealers, nose-pickers prepare to be publicly outed or arrested.

No one realistically questions that self-driving cars, as a whole, under normal operating conditions are going to drive more safely than their human counterparts.  The more pernicious safety issues arise as a result of how self-driving cars can be used by those with nefarious motives.  Cars are heavy–even the smaller Smart Cars weigh in at about 2,000 pounds.  Combine significant weight with velocity and, from a physics perspective, you have a weapon.  Add intelligence and it starts to look like a smart bomb.  Add a further layer of anonymity and it starts to look like the protagonist is a perfect murder movie.  Imagine you could send a self-driving car on an errand to run over your worst enemy, or just someone whose annoyed you, without any criminal or civil consequences.  You might not take advantage of this new found freedom but the sociopaths next door might.  It might seem like the final ingredient, anonymity, is, per se, impossible.  After all, self-driving cars are going to know everything about who they are serving.  When we call for a smart car to go somewhere we will invariably be providing some sort of identification.  In Utopia this would always happen.  Unfortunately, we live on Earth and things don’t always happen as they should.  Try as we might, we seem unable to prevent virus writers and all sorts of other malware from invading our systems.  Do you feel confident that we will have perfectly hackproof self-driving cars in the next decade or so?  I do not!

Finally, there has been talk about some of the economic ramifications that will result from self-driving cars.  We are already seeing companies such as Uber, Lyft and Zipcar as the beginning of the end of the taxi-driver profession.  Self-driving cars (and trucks) will spell the end of so much more.  Truck drivers, transit drivers, delivery drivers might fall by the wayside.  The approximately 50% of insurance dollars that are spent insuring cars will be reduced to a small fraction, and the insurance labor force will necessarily have to shrink.  Not owning 100% of your car will become common.  Many people own multiple vehicles because sometimes they need a truck to carry heavy loads or a minivan to take a larger group somewhere.  The inexpensive rental/sharing of such vehicles which can show up at your door when you need them will contribute to the devastation in automobile industry jobs as people purchase fewer extra “convenience” vehicles.  The real estate market, particularly in urban areas, will similarly experience upheaval.  Location-based pricing pressures will be reduced hitting certain home values hard while more outlying real estate will be come more attractive and provide an accretive effect to home values.  Self-driving cars will shake up our economy.  Are they the only innovation that will do this in the near future?  No!  3D printers, robots, biotech and nanotech advancements, online education, and many other marvels of modern technology will also contribute to the economic roller-coaster that we will be riding in the future.  Since there is no getting off, you might as well just enjoy the ride!

By Omar Billawala

Raising a high-functioning autistic child is no walk in the park.  Despite my experience with tantrums of unusual ferocity, I was not prepared for the phone call I received at work from my son’s elementary school.  “The Principal needs you to come to the school right now to meet with her and the Sheriff!”  I know my son is capable of aggressive acts and was expecting the worst when I arrived at the school.  So my surprise was great, indeed, when I found out that my son was being suspended because he had used his classroom iPad to show pornographic images to another boy in the class.  As the Sheriff explained to me, my 10-year-old son could be charged with “Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor” for sharing the results.  He said there are filters are in place such that “no 5^th-grader should be able to bypass them.”  The Principal explained that my son had googled the word, “porn,” and had clicked on “images.”  I was somewhat taken aback thinking that virtually any 5^th-grader would know how to do a Google image search.  But, the school was not to be gainsaid and my son was suspended.

The reason why I mention this story is not to complain about the treatment my son received, but, rather, to point out that even schools in Silicon Valley can have a difficult time filtering internet content.  In this particular case, it appeared that by accident, Google SafeSearch was not enabled, which I was told, was shortly thereafter remedied.

SafeSearch can block most highly objectionable content but it is important to understand, as Google admits, that “inappropriate sites still slip through the cracks sometimes.”  SafeSearch, which can be enabled from the Google Search Settings page, blocks sexually explicit content from your search results.  However, unless locked, anyone can likewise turn it off.  In order to lock SafeSearch on, you will need to sign onto a Google account.  The lock is implemented via cookies and, therefore, you will need to lock SafeSearch on multiple times—once for every browser on every account that your children have access to.  Even then, SafeSearch can be reset by the user by deleting all cookies or by setting anonymous browsing (“inprivate” for Internet Explorer or “incognito window” for Chrome).  It is, at best, an incomplete solution.

There are more comprehensive, but also more complex, solutions available, such as firewalls, router website blocking, or by filtering all web content through your DNS server, such as by using a service like OpenDNS.  OpenDNS, because it takes over DNS server functionality has the advantage of being a single point of control for limiting access to websites for all devices connected through the router that is configured to point to it.  It does a site-by-site block and not an image-by-image, or document-by-document filtering so it is a more crude tool than SafeSearch.

The vast majority of parents I ask how they deal with limited access to inappropriate content on the web indicate that they are able to trust their children to make good decisions when online.  I wish that I could be in that camp.

By Omar Billawala

The list is long and getting longer.  Products that seemed really cool but were destined to be merely footnotes in the history of tech.  The 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas brought us one more–curved TV screens.  These elegant pieces of engineering were touted as must-have products for the family room.  Curved TVs after all provide the advantages of:

• Uniform viewing distance (distance from screen to eyeball varies less than if screen were flat);
• Wider viewing angle (the curve adds slightly to the effective field of view);
• More of a 3D feel (after all, the TV is no longer flat); and
• Better sense of immersion (on our way to having a TV surround us on all sides!).

With such compelling advantages how could curved TV screens flop?

The answer is, “very easily.”

We like aesthetics.  LCD, Plasma, and LED TVs have rapidly supplanted cathode-ray-tube-based TVs.  They are lower power, lighter, provide better contrast and higher resolution and never need to have their electron guns “aligned.”  All of these advantages pale in comparison to the true reason for the rapid tubal exodus–their elegance and their slender profile.  If you doubt this is the case, just imagine if we were to reverse the specs–we would still be buying the thin TVs we can hang on walls in droves.

With HD and now UHD TVs have become highly commoditized.  Even cheap TVs have astonishingly great specs.  Manufacturers are desperately trying to find differentiating features to drive the sales of their TVs.  The most recent feature “failure” was 3D and, though it may resurface in the future some day, 3D has done very little to drive the sales of TVs.  Manufacturers are building set-top box features into their TVs, they are turning them into native game machines, and they are trying to make them thinner and thinner, but they are running out of ideas.  Knowing that we are creatures of aesthetics they searched for and found what they would have you believe is the “next great thing”–the curved flat-panel TV.  OLED technology is used on a flexible plastic substrate instead of glass to create a curved screen.

And, if the curved TV functioned as well as a flat-panel TV, manufacturers may have hit a winner.  Unfortunately, for all but the person in the focal point (dead center) of the viewing area, curved TVs enhance angular image distortion.  The curved TVs no longer fit flush onto a wall, and they are dramatically more expensive.  If a salesperson tries to sell you one, run, don’t walk, away and to your nearest Costco and pick up a much less expensive and more functional flat-panel TV. 

Yes, curved TVs are the 2014 CES flop.  Maybe we will see the technology succeed in the personal computer space–after all, they did look very cool in Avatar–but, for now, they are a just a technology con, designed to extract dollars from your pocket while providing you all the benefits of snake oil.  

Please don’t confuse “flopping” with “fail so completely that there will not be any tiny niche market for them.”  Just as there as some manufacturers still making cassette tape players, into the foreseeable future, traditional TVs with curved screens will survive, they just won’t be the dominant or event a major feature in the home.