Hopefully Interesting

Yesterday, for the first time, an autonomous car killed a pedestrian .  It isn't clear that the car was at fault but we're almost certainly going to have an accident where the car was at fault at some point.  At this point autonomous cars haven't driven enough miles for us to know if they're currently safer or more dangerous than human drivers.  But I think they have the potential to be much safer in the long run for a combination of technical and institutional reasons. Technically, cars can learn in the same way that humans can.  But while we humans are mostly limited to learning from the situations we encounter a fleet of cars can hope to learn as a unit.  Some accident occurs, engineers analyze it, and then no car in that fleet will make that particular mistake again.  It's reasonable to think about robo-cars trained on a body of experience far greater than a human could amass in a lifetime. And I think that robotic car manufacturers have the right incentiv

I was walking in to work today and as I did I was listening to a nice podcast on the Drake Equation .  The Drake Equation is an estimate of the number of civilizations in the galaxy based on things like how many planets there are, how many develop life, etc.  I learned a lot in the Podcast but it reminded me of a post I'd been meaning to make about why I think the origin of life probably wasn't the hard part in creating us.  Also, I promise this post on the Drake Equation is more pleasant than the  last one . A graph: Dates taken from Wikipedia's  timeline of life  and  timeline of the future . It was just a pretty short amount of time, geologically, from when the Earth cooled down enough for oceans to start forming until we have proof of the first life - just 120 million years.  And that's probably a conservative estimate.  But from there it took three quarters of a billion years for photosynthesis to arise.  Then one and a half billion until one bacteria