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Our right then, Anthony Townsend is an internationally known expert on Information Technology cystine your Research Scientist at nyus center for transportation policy and management where he supervises research on the impact it information and Communication Technology on mobility, land use and transportation planning. He also teaches a course on intelligent citizen nyus urban planning program. Townsend is a member of the inaugural class of fellas it has been duly founded which is redundant isnt it . The inaugural class of fellows at the Research Institute based in new york city. His Fellowship Research focuses on the new emergence of a new urban science with the current influx of funding, talent, data and ideas in the field of urban studies as well as impact of research of this research on government and the research itself. His writing can be found in Scientific American stanford social innovation review along with other publications but he is the author of 2013 smart city, big data, civic taxes in the case for new utopia. And that be an physical town help his latest book is ghost road, beyond a driverless car. Please help me enjoining anthony tauzin. Good evening everybody. Thank you for joining me tonight. It has been a tumultuous 48, 96 hours in the country. I really appreciate your attention given all of the other distractions. That said be filled to monitor cnn or whatever else you have running in your other window is a lot that needs to be paid attention to and i fully understand the distraction. One of the things it is been really jarring watching this book into the pandemic has been the need to reexamine all of the conclusions and all of the evidence because the book was written over the course of the past three years. And thankfully, i think ive done a pretty good job as a forecaster. A lot of the things that have been fast forwarded at us from the future and the last couple months, namely around the increase in delivery to homes is something that i think came on very quickly. But in the last week, we basically have seen the future vanish. I think were in in this really, really weird. For forecasting where its coming through total standstill. Its going to be really weird conversation to talk about Technology Sort of as an abstract thing. I think what we can do is keep drawing it back to what is important, big picture, and also its going on right now. There are some connections i will do my best to do that. So let me just hop over to the Keynote Presentation i put together. Its going to be quite a bit of videos in this. So long as you can see the main images. You look at the main gist of what im talking about. Its really to create some flavor to the presentation as opposed to being the main focal point he dont see part of the video dont fret. Ill explain whats going on. Think the place to start with this is to really understand what is it that Silicon Valley into a lesser extent detroit and all the other auto Manufacturing Centers around the world have been telling us is coming our way in the form of driverless mobility . For the most part this has been Driverless Cars. And this has been going on ten years now since google on veiled their stealth project the google self driving car will actually be ten years ago this october when they unveiled it and whats more fascinating is this is an old idea its a film from 1956 it was gm future its a fictional representation of a system that rca actually developed that would have basically its a camera following a painted line along the road there other variants of this that followed a guide wire laid down in the concrete they were cost estimates done at the time of what it would cost to fit the interstate highway system with this kind of capability, same kinds of things people are talking about Driverless Technology today. It wasnt pursued because the market demand was not there. People wanted to drive even though it could be a drag sometime. It was still fun in them feel like they were in control. Whats funny is the vision juicy of Automated Mobility, this was a tesla product video. In many ways are not that different. In fact teslas product there driverless car product, autopilot is actually taken from the video i just showed you. They basically borrowed a brand name that gm had developed 50 years previously. There is so much of this is the fulfillment of a dream that the Auto Industry has had from close to 60 or 70 years now that really didnt have technology to deliver. And in fact its a much much older dream than that. If you look, almost every mythic tradition on the planet you go back and there is some hero or king over god whose often in the sky but just as often on the ground, sometimes its in the sea they have a self driving sailboats. King morgan the generous, in wales who is a mythic character had a chariot he could teleport a lot of chinese emperors and myths have flying thrones see here the flying carpets. Those of you who played dungeons dragons may remember she makes an appearance in that game world who runs around the steps of eastern eurasia in a magical hut thats carried along by two chicken legs so this idea of self driving selfpropelled vehicles is a very, very old technological longing we are just now making it possible. Finally fulfilling this dream at the same time we are achieving this is often cited the beginning of the 20th century is about 50 urban by the end of the 21st century will be about 20 urban. This is just a phenomenal City Building and it is creating tremendous challenges for mobility making solutions that have sort of worked for a while private single passenger automobiles obsolete its a huge search for new solutions. The driverless vehicles or Autonomous Vehicles or self driving vehicles and i think one of the things i deal with a very early on in the book are these words we use. Then what they mean and what they are trying to achieve. These demos are really, really compelling. So this is google self driving car vehicle oil played again really quick so you can see basically theyre saying this is a car that will keep grandma or a visually impaired person or they didnt put kids in these, unintended children in these. I think for a lot of stressed out parents trying get kids all the different activities there like hey theres a robo card or shovel your kids safely rounds you dont have to do it. And i think they were really testing the waters here to see if this is the next great product they could deliver to the masses. And i think again these are been going on for 50 years this is the mercedes self driving van from the 80s had a bunch of computers in the back which would probably fit in like one order of the inside of your iphone now. This is the first self driving vehicle to really drive itself on a road across the country almost fully under computer control using Computer Vision to interpret imagery of the road and traffic can safely navigate around it. Weve really picked up the pace since then. So in the last two or three years with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on automated driving. Is dwarfing what we think of as a huge area r d driven industry like aerospace. If anybody did not catch the dragons launch yesterday was pretty exciting. It was a distraction from the bad news. The thing is this has been both commercially exciting, technologically exciting its been kind of a slow burn and slow to come to fruition. What weve seen is as the promise and hype of automated driving has grown, that the letdowns and failures have also grown equally spectacular. And we have seen videos, mostly a self driving cooper command from the right of the screen and blow through the red light in downtown san francisco. Their fatal accidents involving both hoover self driving vehicles and teslas, and this is something that i think is really endemic to the testing of that technology is that it is going to fail, all Automated Systems fail. Because we rely so heavily on automobiles, theyre going to be many failures. And so the reckoning thats associated with that has given people pause about if its going to be great as we have been promised. I dont write that much about the safety issues around Automated Vehicles in the book because i am pretty much of the school of thought that if they werent safe there wont be an industry. Clearly an engineering problem that the industry has to solve. And potentially can self regulate. I am more interested in the other problems around the fact it isnt really cars that we need to fix. Need to fix urban mobility more broadly. And the fact that the way we travel has changed so much, we go different places. We travel at different times of day. We travel in groups. We have different desires in terms of how much we pay. And the impact of our travel. On and it all adds up to, there is a supply and demand at work. It is clear that the Business Case for automation is growing going to be a bit of a slow burn for the next few years this will have to get adjusted depending how the next Great Depression works out. This is kind of a classic technology and start slowly and builds and builds and builds us, what the virus actually. People come into contact with others who have used it will definitely be seeing these things out on the streets on a regular basis. In some places faster than others. And in some uses multicolor little bit about that in a Second Period really important not necessarily going to be automobiles that we First Encounter this technology of automated driving. If youre waiting for David Hasselhoff and kit to rollup, youre going to be pretty disappointed. I think we can pass this one its kind about a sequence. So, i think the point of the book is to break out of very simplistic narrative that automated driving means we are going to perfect the car and that the future of Automated Mobility basically is what we saw in minority report. Its little individual pods moving in synchronization along a traffic free highway imperfect safety. Its going to be different, going to be weirder. I think we really have some new myths of Driverless Technology to help us understand what the future could be like. I think that is what i set out to do with the book. So the book is really organized around this is actually going to give interest to you guys. The cover of ghost road, was actually a painting by mary iversen who lives in the Pacific Northwest area. I did not force the art the author did but i have become quite an fan of hers. This style is to juxtapose Natural Beauty and images of infrastructure and logistics and globalization. She will often do these things like this works kind of like the reason i picked this one is its almost like the dawn of life seen at the beginning of time on earth, juxtaposed with this grid of data representing sort of the way the computer might see the world. And i think its a really sublime way of understanding what this thing, this metaphor goes through it actually is. To me not even 100 what sure what it is. Its kind of a challenge, i think it is a placeholder one to put in your head of a future when we go out into these spaces will remove about, that we are the minority and machines are in control. And often alienating, often may be individually working us. But collectively not. And trying to raise the possibility that things may get out of control. And we have to be vigilant against that. So anyway, thats enough about that. I think you will figure out what the ghost road is if you want to get to the book. It is a mysterious place. To the big three big stories that i think well give it some shape im going to run through these real quick and then we will open up for questions. This is really an answer to, thats not perfecting the automobile, perfecting the car so i talked about minority report. This is to me what i think elon musk and some of the folks at gm and some of the german car companies, when they fantasize about a future of automated driving, this is what they envision. Its a city that is been once again we rationalized around highspeed, individual transportation and it has lots of expensive High Precision manufactured products in it. That will keep them busy for decades to come. And again, i dont think this is terribly plausible given the direction things are going. Again, i spoke back through the past and it is remarkable how durable in misleading some of these images of the future work. This is an ad from the 1950s that was run by a consortium of the electric power utilities. This is a future of automated driving but its like a future that never was i guess is the way i think of it. There on a road theres no traffic theres not even any commercial vehicles theres no cities or buildings of any kind is a totally unrealistic way of thinking this is in the mid 50s so your grandparents may have opened a magazine and seeing this. This is what they may still think of driverless car is. This shows up in every venture capitalist every entrepreneur presentation sometimes are making a joke about it but often they look at it and say yes weve always thought this was the future isnt great its finally here . I just find that so ridiculous. The reason i find it ridiculous is there are a number of a kind of Automated Vehicles that are just multiplying. So the moment we are in is a massive explosion of species that has happened at various times with the evolution of life for we are finding this capability allows all different kinds of forms to emerge that can capitalize upon it. And a lot of the book, or a good part the beginning of the book is going through in naming these things, driverless shuttles, teenyweeny french buses for some reason they cornered the market on these things and its a good story its worth reading. And has a lot to do with the different style of innovation in europe in the Silicon Valley. I do and others have architects have started to explore the question of what is it mean if we put this into things that are basically small buildings. And start to move them around . This is an idea and architecture that goes back to the 60s. If youve ever been to the airport in washington d. C. Youve been on whats essentially a small building traveling in mobile lounges between terminals. To get a sense of just how far we are pushing the boundaries between vehicles and buildings. This was a concept in china which i think is super relevant to whats going on now. The idea of self driving popup stores, the goods are closer to you. If you cannot get out, we may ep in the future were lots of shops close and our main street to di die. And you know maybe theres another configuration not just everything going straight to the home. This is actually a bit of a joke. Its an april fools prank that googles Amsterdam Office told. Its a visualization of the self driving bike. I think its a funny joke but they sort of got the case for the bike wrong. Their matching people are doing other things with her riding the bike or to drive itself to the charging pointer in the covid world to the distance they want the automated driving capabili