My 2019 product design that nobody ever built… Top of wishlist: integrated cameras in new aircraft:
It shouldn’t be tough to make a watchable flying video automatically. Speed up taxi by 10X. Cut any portions where the aircraft is on the ground and not moving for more than 5 seconds. Do takeoff at 1X, gradually increasing to 10X as the aircraft climbs to cruising altitude, then slowing back down to 1X for landing. A one-hour start-to-shutdown trip to the beach thus turns into a 7-minute video.
There are some transportation machines with integrated cameras, notably Tesla cars. The machines are also bristling with onboard AI (not SI because Elon’s keeps delaying the AI5 chip; now “late 2027” (which means 2029?) after being announced in June 2024 and promised for January 2026; a Tesla delivered with the sluggish HW4 silicon might never reach anything like autonomy because Tesla put a more powerful processor into its Cybercab (source)).
Why can’t the Tesla’s fancy computers look for aesthetic and/or interesting photos to capture during every drive and offer the owner a highlights photo album to browse and share? It could be customized. Someone interested in fashion who drives around a city could tell the Tesla to take pictures of pedestrians in high-fashion outfits. Someone interested in architecture could tell the Tesla to take labeled pictures of historically important buildings, including those on the National Register of Historic Places and in the SAH Archipedia (from the Society of Architectural Historians; founded at Harvard in 1940 (if it were started today at Harvard would the focus be entirely on buildings in Gaza?)). A horticulture hobbyist could ask the Tesla to look for unusual trees and label them.
Here’s a photo taken from a car that a Tesla should have been able to figure out was worth keeping:
Garry Winogrand famously used a car as a rolling photo platform in Los Angeles starting in the 1950s. Sadly, he didn’t have AI5 to sort through the pictures and, therefore, died with “2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made” (times 36 pictures for each roll for those of you who aren’t old enough to remember the film days). Examples highlighting just how realistic Adobe Photoshop’s “add film grain” filters can be:
Most American drives are on ugly and/or boring roads that the owner is forced to use repetitively, e.g., to commute to work? Well, our AI overlords haven’t snarfed up every last SSD (yet) and the retention period doesn’t have to be infinite. If Tesla wants to cheap out on data center resources, it could have the owner configure a cloud service to which the albums would be uploaded whenever the vehicle got into a good WiFi coverage area.
What’s an example of a drive where one wouldn’t expect to want a memory, but something interesting appeared anyway? A friend recently took the trouble to capture a photo of a bumper sticker collection (below) on a highway leading into Boston, which ordinarily has nothing to offer aesthetically.
(Mexican flag because the American flag is a symbol of hate, oppression, slavery, and settler colonialism; University of Michigan directly above because taxpayers in the Islamic Republic of Michigan, such as Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, should be enthusiastic about subsidizing education for Mexicans; a non-compliant Rainbow flag on the opposite side (no trans-enhancement as displayed on the Biden White House); a Resist Fascism tableaux; and an infinity symbol that ChatGPT can’t identify, but Claude says “This is commonly used as a symbol for neurodiversity, particularly autism acceptance.”)
The Tesla could be told to include pictures of any interesting decorations, including bumper stickers and holiday decor. Floridians do amazing things with Jeeps at Halloween and Christmas.
Loosely related… Edward Weston pointed out that “Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic.” (sometimes the distance is quoted as 100 yards, which is about as far as I would want to carry an 8×10 view camera and the surveyor’s tripod)
Why can’t A.I. figure out a way to remove that Great White Buffalo F350 from the park, and subsequently the picture? When I was volunteering in Rocky Mountain National Park, we heard news that the pollution from the Estes Park environs outside the park was causing significant biological degradation. So on further thought, why not remove the Great White Buffalo and all the other sick mechanical cows and horses from the planet, leave the brown and black ones.
Oh, as for technological solutions to any of our problems by technologists, invert the following talk for my opinion:
> TEDx talks are about crazy ideas for saving the world. Here’s mine. Why can’t we all just get along? Why do we have war, poverty and other social ills, despite the fact that nobody wants these things? Is it that people have some kind of inborn aggression and stupidity that won’t go away? I don’t think so. What happens is that, despite their best intentions, people tend to fall into a trap: the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There’s a tradeoff between cooperation and competition. Our problem is that everything in our society is set up for competition, preventing us from cooperating with each other to solve our major problems. The good news is that technological advances will help us get that tradeoff right for the modern era. Not just by improving productivity, but in a surprising way: By making it easier for people to cooperate with one another. The main reason to compete is when there’s scarcity. But soon, with AI and 3D printing, we’ll be able to make or do whatever we need. We can end widespread scarcity. We don’t have to fight each other. Then we’ll all live happily ever after!
[So my opinion would be AI and more masses of plastic detrius ain’t going to solve Jacque Le Squatte.]
Why do they even allow the tinhorn, Elmer Fudd tourists anywhere near the animals? The cartoon physics and political theory of Bugs Bunny just doesn’t hold true any more, do it? Don’t they know that the real buffalo is distressed? There is some idea in the literature of the Old West that bison were stupid (any more stupid than the Euro-oaf that named them “buffalo”?). My opinion is that they had never seen anything as Goddamn bloodthirsty as Euro-trash. I think the real brown one in the picture is evolved enough now to know that it’s “lights out” if he goes with his instinct of overturning that penis-compensating huge white truck.