Notices by Christopher Mims (mimsical@mastodon.social), page 2

2/🧵

🚦 A major source of congestion in cities is poorly-timed traffic lights.
(Yes, I know, we should just have fewer cars.)

🚗💨 They're also a *huge* source of lung-killing pollution. It's 29x worse at intersections, because of those stops and starts.
You might say "oh, how foolish, surely there is a 'smart' traffic light option?"

💰 And there is. But it's expensive. Good luck paying for it at all 300,000+ of America's traffic signals, much less the billions worldwide.

The world is *full* of collective action problems we *could* solve except it would require, well, collective action.

Our civilizations are so big and complicated that we have trouble doing that, because how even to prioritize?

I found one of those collective action problems. I want to tell you about it. It's such a perfect exemplar of the form.

The best part: there is a (new!) known solution.

1/🧵

3/🧵

So what if we could start to solve congestion in cities without the huge spend required to update all our 300,000+ traffic lights?

That's the idea behind new systems from the U of Michigan, and Google.

Project Green Light uses existing data from mapping apps, and/or connected vehicles, to figure out traffic densities 24/7, then tell cities how to adjust the timing of their traffic lights.

gift link:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/google-green-light-traffic-light-optimization-992e4252?st=x3anmak1ajlf1eg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

4/🧵

Here's the key thing: Once you start monitoring traffic in cities 24/7 using data that's *already available* from our cars + mobile devices (and yes, it's anonymized) you can actually chop down the cost of maintaining existing traffic signals.

No more expensive traffic studies to re-time lights. Crews can be redeployed to adjust timing on existing signals. "Green waves" of lights can be orchestrated to speed traffic from one signal to another when needed.

5. We’ve got more power than we think

"Having all the wealth and technology in the world doesn’t matter if we don’t have the wisdom to use it in the right manner. Early in my career, I bought into the notion, espoused by science-fiction author William Gibson, that all cultural change is driven by technology.

I’ve now witnessed enough of both technological and social change to understand that the reverse is also—and perhaps more often—true."

Here's the full article:

(new gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/what-i-got-wrong-in-a-decade-of-predicting-the-future-of-tech-06420bba?st=rriznlgai9aw8y7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

In ten years of writing about tech, I've gotten *many* things wrong.

Some of these errors in judgment are surprisingly common.

Here, gleaned from a decade of taking my lumps, is a thread about the 5 most common mistakes people make when thinking about the future:

1/🧵

(and here's a gift link to the full article)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/what-i-got-wrong-in-a-decade-of-predicting-the-future-of-tech-06420bba?st=hcuxciink30xal3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The first thing I, and many others, get wrong in predicting the future:

1. Disruption is overrated

"The most-worshiped idol in all of tech—the notion that any sufficiently nimble upstart can defeat bigger, slower, sclerotic competitors—has proved to be a false one.

It’s not that disruption never happens. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as we’ve been led to believe."

2/🧵

this is what I feel like anytime I try to use LinkedIn

“If we have these [generative AI] tools, and large volumes of people are doing dangerous things as a result of receiving garbage information from them, I’d argue it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to assign cost or liability as a result of these harms, or to make it unprofitable to offer these technologies.”

-- Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at UCLA

6/🧵

(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-industry-is-steaming-toward-a-legal-iceberg-5d9a6ac1?st=5rjze6ic54rocro&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

At least one litigator I talked to said that without action from Congress (which is unlikely) the threat of legal liability from using generative AI could become an "unsustainable burden" for many companies.

(Others argued it would mean only the biggest would continue to offer it to the public.)

Could this be an existential threat to today's public chat-bot LLMs?

I mean, yes! Which is why it's wild that so few people are talking about it, as far as I can tell.

5/🧵

“Generative AI is the wild west when it comes to legal risk for internet technology companies, unlike any other time in the history of the internet since its inception.”

-- Graham Ryan, a litigator at Jones Walker who will soon be publishing a paper in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology the legal risks of generative AI and why Section 230 doesn't protect companies that use it

3/🧵

“If in the coming years we wind up using AI the way most commentators expect, by leaning on it to outsource a lot of our content and judgment calls, I don’t think companies will be able to escape some form of liability.”

-- Jane Bambauer, professor of law at the University of Florida

She's written a whole paper on yet a *third* category of legal risk using generative AI could open companies up to, which I didn't even have space for:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4432822

2/🧵

“Artificial intelligence generates poetry. It generates polemics today that would be content that goes beyond picking, choosing, analyzing or digesting content. And that is not protected.”

-- Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, opining last year during a case that wasn't about AI, signaling how he'd rule were the question of whether companies are responsible for what their AIs say and do to come before the court

4/🧵

There's a host of legal risks AI companies and companies that use generative AI are putting themselves in the path of, that we don't talk about enough:

📜 It's pretty clear Section 230, the foundational law enabling today's internet, DOES NOT protect AI-generated content like that from ChatGPT, Claude or Google's generative search experience

🚗💥🚙 Generative AI could also put companies at risk of product liability claims

My deep dive:

1/🧵

(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-industry-is-steaming-toward-a-legal-iceberg-5d9a6ac1?st=fzthflzxv4l5hgn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Little else can be said about whatever happened with this ship and bridge until there’s more disclosure. Which I imagine will happen soon. Whatever happened, everyone on board knows. No point talking about it until rescue is complete.

I just hope the seven reported missing people are all found and safe.

As a person who has actually ridden with harbor pilots before and wrote a whole book about shipping goods across oceans here’s a tiny bit of possibly clarifying detail about this horrible bridge tragedy:

If as reported there was a power failure on this container ship that could have been enough on its own to send it into the bridge.

Maneuvers for ships this large are incredibly tight when they are going in and out of harbors. We don’t think about it but harbor pilots perform miracles every day

@WarnerCrocker thanks Warner!

Here's the thing about ChatGPT and the like: The reason it has close to 200 million users is that there are tons of people -- freelancers, small businesses -- who find it genuinely useful.

You're doing your own marketing in your spare time and you need tools to make it much easier to get your message out? This is the way.

Wordsmiths (like me) and artists might not like it, but this is the future of a lot of tossed off but important "content"

2/🧵

This is not to say that today's GPTs think, or reason, or any of that nonsense.

But their everyday utility gets lost in all the noise about turning them into AGI, or a future in which everyone's on UBI because the machines took over, or whatever.

4/🧵