A Russian court levied a 7.2 billion rouble ($98 million) fine against Google on Friday for what it claims are repeated failures by the company to delete content the country has deemed illegal. Though Russia has tagged numerous tech companies throughout the year with fines for not following its increasingly restrictive internet content rules, Friday's judgement marks the first time that the court has imposed fines based on a company's annual revenue.
Additionally, the Russian court fined Meta (and its subsidiary, Instagram) 2 billion roubles ($27.15 million) for similar offenses. Per Reuters, Meta is accused of failing to remove around 2,000 banned items while Google had reportedly failed to take down 2,600 bits of illicit content. Those include posts promoting drug use or dangerous behaviors, instructions for making improvised weapons and explosives, as well as anything regarding what and who it designates as extremists or terrorists. Or the spreading of "gay propaganda," apparently.
Google has announced it will review the court documents before deciding how to proceed. The company has 10 days to file an appeal.
This ruling is only the latest in Moscow's attempts to exert greater degrees of control over not just its national network but the internet as a whole and sets up an even larger confrontation come January 1st, when Russian authorities have demanded tech companies set up local servers for their online services.
For the past 31 years the Hubble Space Telescope has been an invaluably versatile observation platform for astronomers but it’s begun showing its age of late. Last serviced in 2009, the telescope has had to enter the partial-shutdown “safe mode” multiple times over the last few years — most recently, this October. And while optimistic estimates suggest that the Hubble could remain in operation through the end of the decade, NASA, with its ESA and CSA partners, have already spent more than a dozen years developing a successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). When the Webb launches — currently set for liftoff on Christmas Day — it will take over as humanity’s preeminent eye in the sky for decades to come.
The 7.2-ton JWST will be the largest telescope NASA has ever put into orbit. Its 6.5-meter primary mirror array — composed of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments — is more than twice the size of the Hubble’s and nearly 60 times larger in area than the Spitzer Telescope, which retired in 2020. The sun shield it uses to protect its delicate infrared sensors is nearly as long as a tennis court, and the telescope apparatus as a whole stands three stories tall. The 458 gigabits of data collected daily will be first routed through NASA’s Deep Space Network, then transmitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which will collate and disseminate that information to the greater astronomy community.
When it reaches its orbital home at the L2 Lagrange point 930,000 miles from Earth, the JWST will begin its four-point mission: searching for light from the earliest post-Big Bang stars; studying the formation and development of galaxies, examining the evolution of stars and planetary systems; and seeking out the origins of life.
To do so, the Webb will take a different approach from the Hubble before it. While the Hubble looked at the universe in the visible and ultraviolet spectrums, the JWST will see in infrared, just as the Spitzer used to but with far greater resolution and clarity. Using this infrared is critical to the Webb’s mission as that wavelength can peer through clouds of interstellar gasses and dust to see otherwise obscured objects beyond.
NASA/Chris Gunn
The Webb’s camera suite is made up of four individual components: the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph/Fine Guidance Sensor (NIRISS/FGS). These instruments are actually so sensitive that they can detect their own heat radiation when they’re operating. To minimize these infrared emissions, three of the sensors are chilled to negative 388 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 degrees C). The especially sensitive MIRI is cooled even further to -448 degrees F (-266 degrees C) — that’s a mere 7 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.
Getting the MIRI that cold is no easy feat. After the JWST makes its way into orbit, the telescope will spend weeks slowly chilling the sensor to its optimal operating temperature using a helium-based refrigeration system.
“It’s relatively easy to cool something down to that temperature on Earth, typically for scientific or industrial applications,” said JPL cryocooler specialist Konstantin Penanen in a recent NASA blog post. “But those Earth-based systems are very bulky and energy inefficient. For a space observatory, we need a cooler that is physically compact, highly energy efficient, and it has to be highly reliable because we can’t go out and repair it. So those are the challenges we faced, and in that respect, I would say the MIRI cryocooler is certainly at the cutting edge.”
The extra effort that MIRI requires will be well worth it as ground-based infrared telescopes — especially those operating within the mid-infrared spectrum as MIRI is, are largely hampered by heat emissions from the devices themselves and the surrounding atmosphere.
“With the other three instruments, Webb observes wavelengths up to 5 microns. Adding wavelengths out to 28.5 microns with MIRI really increases its range of science,” George Rieke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said earlier this month in a NASA blog. “This includes everything from studying protostars and their surrounding protoplanetary disks, the energy balance of exoplanets, mass loss from evolved stars, circumnuclear tori around the central black holes in active galactic nuclei, and a lot more.”
NASA
Given the JWST’s highly specific low temperature needs, keeping the telescope’s sensor suite out of direct sunlight (and blocked from other light sources like the Moon and Earth) is crucial. To ensure that those cameras are perpetually shaded, NASA engineers have built a five-layer sunshield made from aluminum-coated Kapton film to keep them in the cold, cold dark.
"The shape and design also direct heat out the sides, around the perimeter, between the layers," said James Cooper, the JWST’s Sunshield Manager at Goddard Space Flight Center. "Heat generated by the Spacecraft bus at the ‘core,’ or center, is forced out between the membrane layers so that it cannot heat up the optics."
Measuring 69.5 feet by 46.5 feet by .001 inches, the kite-shaped sun shield is stacked five layers high so that energy absorbed by the top layer radiates out into space between them, making each successive layer slightly cooler than the one above it. In fact, the temperature difference at the outermost (383K, or 230 degrees F) and innermost layers (36K, about -394 degrees F) is roughly an order of magnitude.
NASA
In order to collect enough light to view the fainest, most distant stars possible — some as far as 13 billion light years away — the JWST will rely on its massive 6.5m primary mirror array. Unlike the Hubble, which utilized a single 2.4m-wide mirror, the Webb’s mirror is divided into 18 individual segments, each weighing just 46 pounds thanks to their beryllium construction. They’re coated in gold to enhance their reflection of infrared light and hexagonal in shape so that, when fully assembled in orbit, they’ll fit together snugly enough to act as a single, symmetrical, gapless reflective plane. Their small size also allows them to easily be split up and folded down in order to fit within the tight confines of the Ariane 5 rocket they’ll ride into orbit.
ESA
The role of coordinating these segments to focus on a single spot in a distant galaxy falls to the mirrors’ actuator assembly. Seven small motors sit on the backside of each mirror segment (one at each corner and a seventh in the middle), enabling precise control of their orientation and curvature. "Aligning the primary mirror segments as though they are a single large mirror means each mirror is aligned to 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair,” said Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager, Lee Feinberg.
After 20-plus years of development and delays, costing $10 billion and involving the efforts of more than 10,000 people, the Webb Telescope is finally ready for launch — and hopefully this time it’ll actually take. The program has seen delay, after delay, after delay to its launch schedule. NASA abandoned the initial date of March 2021 in the wake of the initial COVID-19 outbreak and its associated lockdowns — though, to be fair, the GAO in January 2020 had only given the JWST a 12 percent chance of getting off the ground by the end of this year — and set a vague “sometime in 2021” timetable for its launch.
NASA
NASA later revised that estimate to a firm “sometime in October 2021,” eventually settling on a Halloween launch window, only to delay it again to late November/early December. Of course, early December quickly became late December, specifically the 22nd, which was then nudged back once again to its current date of December 24th. Actually, make that the 25th.
These delays have been caused by the myriad factors that go into getting an instrument of this size and sensitivity ready for launch. After completing its construction, the JWST had to undergo an exhaustive battery of tests, then be gently loaded into a shipping container and transported to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Once there, the actual task of prepping, fueling, and loading the JWST onto an Ariane 5 rocket took another 55 days.
That timeline was further extended due to an “incident” on November 9th wherein, “a sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band — which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter — caused a vibration throughout the observatory,” per NASA. The Webb’s anomaly review board initiated an additional round of testing to ensure that those vibrations didn’t damage other components or knock anything important out of alignment.
NASA
Now that the telescope has been deemed A-OK, final preparations are underway. Barring any more setbacks, the JWST will launch at 7:20 ET on Christmas Day (watch here live!) to begin its 30-day, 1.5 million kilometer-long journey out the Lagrange 2 where it will spend the net two weeks slowly unfurling its mirrors and sunshield, then begin exploring the depths of the early universe.
The close of 2021 finds Tesla wealthier than ever — and, in CEO Elon Musk’s case, wealthier than everybody else. The electric vehicle manufacturer notched records for both deliveries and profits this year despite a global chip shortage that decimated supply chains worldwide, effectively kneecapping the rest of the automotive industry’s production capacity. However its financial successes were often overshadowed by Tesla’s continuing production quality issues, multiple NHTSA and SEC investigations, high profile failures of its vaunted “Full Self Driving” system, as well as numerous vehicle recalls and delays for upcoming models. And with existing industry stalwarts like Ford, GM, Honda and the Volkswagen Group making concerted efforts to electrify their own offerings, could 2022 be the year that Tesla’s reign as top EV automaker finally ends?
The Good
2021 was, without a doubt, a banner year for Tesla’s bottom line. The company entered this year having met its 2020 goal of producing a half-million vehicles (of which it delivered 499,550 to customers), a nearly 133,000 unit increase over 2019. By April, Tesla had produced a record 180,338 vehicles and delivered 184,800 of them. Demand remained strong throughout the first half of the year thanks, in part, to price cuts on both the Model 3 and Model Y.
The company then broke its same record in July, having built 200,000 vehicles over the past three months, earning Tesla $1.1 billion in net income during the same period. “Public sentiment towards EVs is at an inflexion point and, at this point, I think almost everyone agrees that electric vehicles are the only way forward,” Musk said during the Q2 earnings call.
The company was also beset by a wide array of production woes and vehicle recalls this year. In February, Tesla bowed to pressure from the NHTSA and recalled 135,000 Model X and S vehicles on account of faulty touchscreens. That same month, Tesla was forced to issue a recall for another 12,300 Model Xs on account of loose trim panels. In April, customers reported that the company had double-charged them for their vehicles, up to $71,000 in some cases, though Tesla was quick to reimburse the affected buyers and even threw in a $200 gift certificate for the company store.
Tesla’s parade of crises also extended to the production lines themselves with the Fremont factory facing a sizeable COVID outbreak shortly after reopening in March. Musk complained often and loudly throughout 2020 over California’s quarantine lockdown laws and finally made good on threats to take his toys and go home, officially moving Tesla’s headquarters to Texas in October.
The company was also ordered to pay $137 million to former employee Owen Diaz after a San Francisco federal court jury found Tesla liable for the unconscionable racial bigotry Diaz faced while working at the Fremont plant. That lawsuit has been followed up by another, filed in November by Jessica Barraza who alleged “rampant sexual harassment” as well as continued verbal and physical abuse while she worked at the Fremont location.
If you want the Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta downloaded to your car, let us know. Doubling beta program size now with 8.2 & probably 10X size with 8.3. Still be careful, but it’s getting mature.
Tesla’s Full Self Driving beta also turned out to be a mixed bag for the company in 2021. Following its debut in October of last year, beta 8.3 rolled out in May, doubling the size of the test program, before releasing beta 9 in July. Version 9’s rollout coincided with a new FSD subscription program charging customers $199 a month (or $99 a month if they’d previously purchased the now-discontinued Enhanced Autopilot feature) — assuming they already had the $1,500 FSD computer hardware installed in their vehicle.
FSD beta 10 arrived to great fanfare in September with owners noting smoother turns on city streets, improved display visuals and an overall improvement in the vehicle’s off-highway navigation. Those feelings were short-lived when, in October, the company was forced to revert its beta 10.3 implementation after becoming aware of "some issues," per Musk, including a "regression" with left turns. Users also reported phantom forward-collision warnings and auto-steering bugs.
The FSD feature also prompted a 300,000-unit recall at the behest of the Chinese government over the ease in which FSD can be activated, though that was far from the only issue Tesla faced with the nation. In April, China banned Tesla vehicles from its military bases and “key state-owned companies” over fears that the cars’ myriad cameras could be leveraged for espionage. After nearly a month of wrangling and appeals to social media, Tesla finally caved to China’s cybersecurity demands and established a local clearinghouse for that data.
The Musk
And what would a Year in Review of Tesla be without a look back at CEO Elon Musk’s unique brand of shenanigans? Last October, Musk unilaterally disbanded Tesla’s PR department, thereby making his personal Twitter account the first, last and only stop for confirmation of the company’s decisions. This January, Musk reversed course slightly and, instead of reforming the department, began hiring people to respond to customer complaints made toward him on the social media platform.
Speaking of tweets, Tesla was also sued this year for allegedly breaking a previously struck deal with the SEC by allowing Musk to continue sending unapproved, "erratic" tweets as well as for the company failing to obtain a neutral general counsel to reign in its CEO. The National Labor Relations Board also went after Tesla in 2021, finding that the company had illegally fired a union activist. The NLRB consequently demanded that the worker be rehired and Musk delete a 2018 union-busting tweet related to the case.
And then there was the whole Tesla “Robot” debacle, which I can’t even, I mean, it was literally just an actor in a spandex jumpsuit dancing around while Musk made a bunch of wildly unsubstantiated claims.
What’s Next
Looking ahead to 2022, Tesla appears to be on track for continued success. Its Berlin Gigafactory is nearly ready to start production and is expected to do so by the end of this month – barring any unforeseen setbacks. The company’s stockpile of chipsets and aggressive maneuvers to shore up supplies of battery precursor materials will insulate Tesla from many of the production bottlenecks that many other EV automakers are likely to struggle with throughout the new year.
However, even with Tesla’s record-breaking production figures from the past couple of years, the number of vehicles it delivers annually is still a small fraction of what more established automakers sell. BMW, for example, sold 2.3 million vehicles worldwide in 2020. In the same year, GM sold 2.5 million in the US alone. And as those companies increasingly turn their attention to the EV market while leveraging economies of scale that Tesla cannot match, Musk’s company could soon find itself relegated back to being a niche EV brand rather than an industry titan.
We’re in the midst of a modern day space race. Where once the two most powerful empires on the planet vied to be first to the moon, we now have corporations led by billionaire barons — Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic — boasting a future filled with exo-planetary tourism. In 2021, the heads of these private companies finally made good on their myriad promises, successfully launching civilians, astronauts and, in two cases, themselves into the uppermost reaches of Earth’s atmosphere.
SpaceX’s endeavors to get its Starship prototype off the ground have not been nearly as successful as Starlink, mind you. The 100-passenger spacecraft, which was designed to help fulfill CEO Elon Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars and, presumably, titling himself God Emperor of the Red Planet (or some such), spectacularly exploded on the launchpad following a high-altitude test flight in March.
SN10 engine was low on thrust due (probably) to partial helium ingestion from fuel header tank. Impact of 10m/s crushed legs & part of skirt. Multiple fixes in work for SN11.
"We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASA's decision, but the GAO wasn't able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction," the company said following the GAO’s announcement.
Still seething from the GAO’s rebuke, Bezos then filed suit against NASA in Federal Claims court, essentially trying to “sue [its] way to the moon,” per Musk. Blue Origin claimed this was done "in an attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA's Human Landing System," a spokesperson for Blue Origin told Engadget in August. "We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America." Blue Origin eventually lost that lawsuit as well.
And that’s when a prestige competition between the two richest men on Earth devolved into a middle school slap fight with SpaceX accusing Amazon of intentionally delaying proposals for its Starlink service while Amazon countered with incriminations that Musk and SpaceX “don’t follow the rules.”
“Whether it is launching satellites with unlicensed antennas, launching rockets without approval, building an unapproved launch tower, or re-opening a factory in violation of a shelter-in-place order, the conduct of SpaceX and other Musk-led companies makes their view plain: rules are for other people, and those who insist upon or even simply request compliance are deserving of derision and ad hominem attacks,” Amazon’s FCC filing reads.
Looking ahead, Blue Origin is working on a spacecraft capable of handling a Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system for DARPA — and competing against Lockheed Martin to successfully demonstrate it outside of low Earth orbit in 2025. The company also announced at the end of October that it hopes to build and deploy a commercial space station called the Orbital Reef — think, the ISS but with more intrusive advertising — by the second half of this decade. NASA has since awarded the project a Space Act Agreement, along with funding through the design phase, as part of its Commercial LEO Development program.
Virgin Galactic, on the other hand, started its 2021 off in a holding pattern. The company’s SpaceShip II test at the end of last December — its first major flight out of the Spaceport America site in New Mexico – ended in abruptly after the ship’s engine failed to ignite. A subsequent redo test scheduled for February was also delayed to May after the company opted to make additional “technical checks.”
While these aren’t major setbacks in the same vein as say an exploding StarShip, VG’s continued delays have pushed back the company’s goal of commercial space tourism flights to at least 2022. They did not, however, impact Virgin Galactic’s unveiling of SpaceShip III in March.
Branson’s flight was not flawless, however, and that raised the ire of the FAA. During SpaceShip II’s landing, the spacecraft “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance as it returned to Spaceport America,” per the FAA. In a subsequent statement from the company, Virgin disagreed with the FAA’s characterization.
“When the vehicle encountered high altitude winds which changed the trajectory, the pilots and systems monitored the trajectory to ensure it remained within mission parameters,” the company argued. “Our pilots responded appropriately to these changing flight conditions exactly as they were trained and in strict accordance with our established procedures. Although the flight’s ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity 22 to successfully reach space and land safely at our Spaceport in New Mexico. At no time were passengers and crew put in any danger as a result of this change in trajectory.” A brief investigation by the FAA eventually cleared the company to resume test flights.
Despite these advances in private spaceflight systems, don’t expect the space tourism industry to take off before at least the start of the next decade. If Virgin Galactic’s recent price hike from $250,000 to $450,000 per ticket is any indication, very few people will be able to afford such a trip for the foreseeable future. So while two of the world’s richest men may have had the honor of temporarily escaping our gravity well, don’t think you’ll get your chance anytime soon — unless you can win it like a Golden Ticket like Keisha S did.
In his new book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future, author David Rose delves into the current state of the art of augmented reality, discussing how the technology is already transforming myriad industries — from food service to medicine to education to construction and architecture — and what it might accomplish in the near future. In the excerpt below, Rose takes a look at two companies leveraging computer vision and generative adversarial networks to reimagine existing properties as 21st century electrified smart homes.
We should all be using solar panels. Period. The average cost for a sustainable energy system has fallen about 70% in the last decade, from $5.86/watt to $1.50/ watt, so it’s a financial no-brainer. For no money down, you can finance an installation and start saving a hundred dollars a month in the first month, and even more if you live in the sun-saturated South.
So why aren’t we? It’s complicated! Math, logistics, taxes, and aesthetics all play a role. Many homeowners fear it will make their houses shiny and reflective like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. The process of figuring out the number of panels in what size you need requires learning to “talk solar” in unfamiliar units like kilowatt-hours. And change always comes with risk, whether actual or just perceived.
The pro-climate mission of Boston-based company Energy Sage is to get people to electrify their homes. That means solar panels on your roof, an electric car, a home battery system, automatic blinds, and a smart thermostat that precools or preheats as you drive home. And they’ve partnered with us at Continuum to get potential customers more comfortable with the idea by showing them what an electrified version of their home might look like. Using publicly available Google Home satellite images, we size solar panels, digitally overlay them on clients’ roofs, and then show them what their pad would look like from both the street and their neighbor’s fence. We then take those images and pair them with data from Project Sunroof, a Google project that helps you work out the solar savings potential of your roof. Once you’ve seen the beautiful pictures of your electrified home and realized how much you’re going to save over the years—and you have the visual and financial data in hand—it’s a simple decision to go forward and make that change.
Other home improvement projects will benefit from a similar SuperSight-envisioned approach. Let’s consider landscaping: another complicated, potentially expensive project with its own disorienting language, risks, and desperate need for pre-project visualization.
I met landscape designer Julie Moir-Messervy at an MIT pitch competition and was immediately intrigued with her mission: to give homeowners the confidence and tools they need to change their barren yard into a collection of outdoor living spaces. Her company, HomeOutside, helps people see new possibilities for their backyards using AI and computer vision. Once they’ve visualized their yard in a compelling way, the company makes it easy for them to make that vision a reality by hiring the landscape installer, getting materials delivered, and even helping spread the payments out over time.
Landscaping isn’t just good for property values; greenscapes filter airborne pollutants that trigger asthma, help people recuperate faster from illness, reduce summer temperatures, and even lower crime. Proper native landscaping powers a dynamic system that helps out the bees and birds, who in turn pollinate trees and reseed plants. Southwest shade trees can reduce the need for air-conditioning, and northeast hedges cut down on winter winds—and heating bills. More trees mean more carbon capture—a ton over the lifetime of each tree—as they literally suck the bad stuff we produce out of the air while reducing runoff and erosion.
But “most people don’t do anything in their yards because they don’t know where to start,” Julie told me. “They don’t know which plants to select and how to arrange them, or don’t know how to install a landscape design and care for it over time.” I was so inspired to work on the problem that I accepted a position on her board and got to work.
HomeOutside is training a generative adversarial network (GAN) to automatically compose beautiful and sustainable landscape designs, based on the thousands of designs (think of these as recipes) the firm has developed for clients over the last twenty-plus years. The company uses Google Earth Engine and photogrammetry to start with a 3D view of any address (US only, currently). The GAN architecture then uses one network (the Generator) to make a new design, and another network (the Discriminator) to judge or score the work. These two networks continue their iterative game, generating then scoring, until the discriminator judges that the landscape has a good composition: shade trees, natural pollinators, grass for playing, hardscapes/decks and furniture for gathering places, plant diversity, and so forth.
Companies that sell plants, furniture, lighting, and hardscapes are obviously interested in this type of “imagination engine” technology, because it bridges the conceptual gap between the current state of someone’s garden and what could be—thus motivating many more people to make the dream real. It’s not just great for the homeowners and outdoor retailers, either—it’s great for the environment, too. But what the company’s environmentally focused investors find most captivating about this project is the opportunity to change the landscape of entire neighborhoods at scale. What if we could create a new national park across millions of backyards that stitch together places for birds and bees? Every acre of forest absorbs about 2.5 tons of carbon a year. What if we turned neighborhoods into significant carbon sequestration zones?
I helped Julie and her team develop HomeOutside’s grand plan to proactively redesign seventy million front yards, then work with Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wayfair, IKEA, and garden centers to email their customers a 3D redesign of their yard. Customers simply go outside their home, open their phone, and,through the app’s use of spatial world anchors, walk through an immersive animated landscape superimposed on their current yard. A time-lapse view from sunrise to sunset shows why the edible garden is placed where it is. The winter visualization explains the choice of new fir trees between their yard and the neighbor’s. Spring flowers bloom with a cacophony of color.
Will people be alarmed by the idea of an algorithm proactively redesigning their yard, with new shade trees and naturally pollinating shrubs? It’s not as if your front yard is private now, thanks to Google Street View. And if you are selling your home, you might decide against hiring the landscapers and just choose to post images of HomeOutside’s makeover version instead to maximize your curb appeal.
Once this visioning technology is commonplace, lots of different fields will start taking advantage of it. Home Depot, for example, recently invested in a startup called Hover, which, after digitizing your home in 3D, visualizes and prices new paint, siding, and roofing materials. SuperSight will soon show the actual paint crew up on their ladders, finishing the last few brush strokes, so you get that delightful experience of a job just finished. Volkswagen might put a new Passat in your driveway, complete with the kayaks and mountain bikes it knows you love on top. And the company trying to sell you home and car insurance? They’ll project a disaster scenario: solar panels fallen off, the shade tree hit by lightning, and your new Passat pummeled in a hail storm. Better buy the insurance before you repaint.
How will we interact with these types of immersive designs? With our SuperSight glasses on, will we point and place trees, or paint flowers from a palette of choices, like a 3D version of Photoshop? Will we select each plant from a vast menu of options for infinite control and customization, or will we just tell the system what we like so it learns our preferences, then proposes a single solution we’ll love? I believe in the happy medium: that we’ll largely prefer to see several “expertly composed” options and choose from among them, much as we do today when working with an architect, interior designer, or wedding planner.
Experts are usually so good at what they do that it’s often a mistake to over-specify particular details. For example, you shouldn’t tell an architect that you want a window exactly here, or an interior designer that you want this particular chair in a specific color in this corner. Instead, you express your opinions at a higher level of abstraction (“I want the room to feel more connected to the environment”) or through describing a required function (“We want a vegetable garden”), and let them do the detailed work.
The same expert-guided interaction model will dominate our relationships with SuperSight AIs. For landscaping, we might ask for a more formal French garden with rectilinear layouts and exotic colorful plants, or a curvaceous organic design that prioritizes privacy from our neighbors. We might indicate a preference for an open space for play, or for a filled-in scheme with more space for a productive garden. And as we express these higher-level interests, our 3D landscape design will dynamically recalculate to match our preferences. With SuperSight glasses on, we’ll be able to test our hunches faster by seeing reconfigurations immediately and in context, superimposed on our real home.
The jury is still out on whether HomeOutside will be able to use this technology to convince millions of homeowners to invest significantly in a sustainable landscape. The testing is promising, though; customers are delighted to see their yards reimagined and restaged. In the next five years, HomeOutside plans to use Google Earth and street view imagery in a generative AI tool to automatically redesign tens of millions of landscapes, with sustainable plants, shade trees, natural pollinators, and bird-friendly berries. If it succeeds, it will mean a million homeowners will plant at least 3 million new shade trees, like oaks and beeches, that will each capture 48 pounds of carbon a year as they mature. That’s 14 billion tons of carbon sequestered over those trees’ lifespans.
As one of the HomeOutside advisors summed up, “You are building the equivalent of a new national park—the National Park of us! Visualization tools like HomeOutside can persuade homeowners to reshape the American landscape.”
That’s the ultimate potential power of SuperSight: to help people envision and imagine a future that benefits themselves and the planet.
General Motors announced Thursday that Dan Ammann, CEO of its self-driving vehicle division, Cruise, is leaving both his position and the company. Details are remain scarce on the reason for Ammann's sudden departure, though the company has already named Cruise President and CTO Kyle Vogt the interim CEO. What's more, former Northrop Grumman CEO, Wesley Bush, will be joining the Cruise Board of Directors as well.
"GM will accelerate the strategy the company detailed in its recent Investor Day, in which Cruise will play an integral role in building GM’s autonomous vehicle (AV) platform as GM aggressively pursues addressable AV markets beyond rideshare and delivery," GM PR wrote in Thursday's staffing announcement.
Staying in your lane is a lot easier when you know how much of the road is yours to use. Unfortunately, America’s decades-long love affair with performing the absolute bare minimum of basic infrastructure maintenance has left many stretches of the nation’s highway lane markers faded, damaged and obscured. A new pilot program from Honda Research Institute USA could one day help local highway and traffic departments keep a closer eye on the state of the roads in their care, using the cars travelling upon them.
The Honda Road Condition Monitoring System leverages the cameras and GPS navigation systems already found in many of today’s automobiles to monitor the real-time conditions of roads and detect potential hazards. The onboard system will evaluate each stretch of lane marker as green, yellow, grey and red. Green and yellow denote ideal or good quality lane markers, while red indicates markers in need of repair and grey means that there are no markers present at all (like on city streets or rural roads).
The system captures road conditions using the vehicle’s cameras and other sensors, coordinating that feed with the onboard GPS to provide exact locations of any hazards or damage and then uploads that data to a secure server. Once the data is in the cloud, local highway and transportation departments will be able to access it through a web portal to see which stretches of roadway need to be repaired or repainted most urgently.
“We regularly inspect our roadways throughout Ohio and act quickly to address any issues, like faded or damaged pavement markings, that are identified. It’s a labor-intensive process. Good pavement markings are important to the drivers of today and the vehicles of tomorrow,” Ohio Department of Transportation Director Jack Marchbanks said in a statement Monday. “We’re excited to work with Honda to improve the process.”
Honda is working with the Ohio Department of Transportation for its upcoming pilot program, which is slated to begin early next year. During that study, obviously only select Honda vehicles will be recording datam, “to help enhance the efficiency of the road maintenance operation in Ohio,” according to a Monday press release. The research institute is looking to eventually connect entire fleets of Honda and Acura vehicles, allowing them to share data via V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) networks and provide real-time updates to their ADA systems.
Hyundai finally announced pricing for its hotly anticipated Ioniq 5 crossover EV, which is scheduled to hit select dealer show floors later this month. Depending on the battery size and drive type, prospective buyers should expect to pay between $39,700 and $54,500 for one of their own.
The Ioniq 5 will be available in three trim levels — SE, SEL, and Limited — and come with either a 77.4kWh pack, which is rated for 303 miles of range using RWD (256 miles with AWD), or a smaller 58-kWh battery with 220 miles of range.
Don't expect to see any of the smaller battery models on US roads to start. Hyundai is initially focusing on producing units with the larger battery pack and saving the 220 mile, 168 HP SE Standard Range until spring 2022. The 303-mile, 225HP rear motor SE starts at $43,650 ($47,150 for the 320 HP, AWD version, the RWD SEL will cost $45,900 ($49,500 for AWD) and the top of the line Limited will go for $50,600 as an RWD ($54,500 for AWD). Optional features and a $1,225 freight charges are of course extra.
Hyundai's pricing point puts the Ioniq 5 on par with the 2021 Kia Niro EV, which starts at $39,090, and the 2021 Volkswagen ID.4 with its $39,995 MSRP — even if you splurge for the Ioniq's higher trim levels, you'll only begin to stray into, say, the Mach-E's introductory price range ($42,895 for the base, $48,100 for Premium, and a smooth $60k for a GT).
Will the Ioniq 5's performance live up to the hype? Will its features overdeliver given its surprisingly affordable price tag? Find out later this week when our First Look at Hyundai's newest EV goes live. Stay tuned!
America has always been a nation segregated into haves and have-nots with rampant inequity a seemingly natural aspect of our social order — the motif impacting towns and cities just as starkly as the people who live in them. But it doesn't have to be this way, argue authors UC Davis Professor, Stephen Wheeler, and Temple University Associate Professor, Christina Rosan.
In their new book, Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier and More Equitable Communities, Wheeler and Rosan examine the steps municipalities across the country have taken in recent years in response to climate change, as well as their social and sustainability shortcomings, offering community-based solutions to ensure that urban development in the 21st century equitably raises the standard of living for all residents, not just for the rich.
In the excerpt below, the authors take a look at the myriad trials faced by residents of eastern Kentucky, a once thriving pastoral region ravaged by the intractable march towards modernization and distillation of wealth to the select few.
While this book is about reimagining sustainable cities, we pause here to connect sustainable cities with the larger national and international context in terms of spatial inequality. We live in a world that is deeply interconnected. If we want sustainable cities, we need to work on reducing spatial disparities between cities and rural areas, and between different regions worldwide. Linkages between communities need to be recognized, and resources shared and equalized. Situations must be ended in which some regions exploit others by giving them the unwanted by-products of production, such as pollution, waste, and labor exploitation, while simultaneously moving resources and profits from poor regions to rich ones.
In and around the towns of eastern Kentucky, where Stephen Wheeler’s ancestral family is from, people of English and Scottish descent lived for many generations as self-sufficient farming families. That way of life changed in the second half of the twentieth century. Better roads, electricity, and telecommunications connected Appalachia with the rest of the world. Urban job opportunities lured away the young. Farming families became part of the cash economy and acquired new desires for processed foods, appliances, motor vehicles, and personal accessories. But hill farms didn’t generate enough cash to buy such things, especially with rising federal subsidies for agribusiness in other parts of the country. So the people of eastern Kentucky became designated as poor and came to see themselves that way.
Environmental problems grew as well. Giant bulldozers scraped away hilltops and extracted coal, adding this region to the long list of others worldwide suffering from the “resource curse.” Runoff from coal mining poisoned wells and polluted waterways. Coal jobs left as quickly as they had come, leaving many even poorer.
A new, more globalized retail economy brought first Kmart and then Walmart, putting family-owned stores out of business. Fast-food outlets proliferated. But the new service economy jobs didn’t pay much. To make better money some people began growing marijuana in hard-to-reach locations in the hills. Drug use, alcoholism, and obesity spread. Fundamentalist religion gained adherents and combined with Fox News (starting in the 1990s) to promote reactionary political values. A region that had been Democratic until the late twentieth century now helped elect US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell in turn played one of the largest roles in thwarting progressive legislation from Barack Obama’s administration, supporting Donald Trump’s presidency and fueling the rise of populism in the US.
If this tale of decline were one isolated example, it might not matter much. But spatial inequality persists and spreads worldwide. Some left-behind communities are rural. Others are urban. Entire countries are stuck in poverty due to the legacy of military or economic colonization. Spatial inequality is a core challenge to the development of more sustainable cities. Every community needs to be able to thrive, not just certain favored ones within a highly unequal global system. Instead of engaging in a zero-sum approach to development, with winners and losers, communities need to support one another so that all improve their quality of life and sustainability.
The so-called winners of today’s global economic competition have their own problems. At the other end of the spectrum from Appalachia is Silicon Valley. This forty-mile corridor in the San Francisco Bay Area is an economic dynamo envied the world over. Covered by orchards and agricultural fields in the 1950s, this beautiful area was known as “Valley of Heart’s Desire.” Now no orchards remain, and the region is a congested sprawl of poorly connected office parks, subdivisions, malls, and commercial strips. Incomes are high, but the price of a home is nearly five times that in the US as a whole. Many residents cannot afford housing near their jobs and so endure lengthy commutes or are housing insecure. Social inequality, traffic congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions expanded greatly during the past fifty years, reducing the quality of life in the region and contributing to global warming.
The Silicon Valley ethic of “move fast and break things” has created dynamic companies, unprecedented technology, and great wealth for a few. But the new gig economy pioneered there often operates at the expense of workers and the environment. It often produces an enormous concentration of wealth that comes from the exploitation of others. One study found that one-fifth of San Francisco Uber and Lyft drivers earned virtually nothing when their full expenses, including things such as health insurance, were accounted for. The tech industry has also been heavily criticized for sexual harassment during the MeToo movement and racism during the Black Lives Matter movement. The combination of individualism, predatory capitalism, toxic masculinity, and lack of concern for the common good that Silicon Valley represents works strongly against a sustainable and equitable future.
Similar problems of unequal development exist in other successful urban areas worldwide, including Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Bangalore, Singapore, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Tel Aviv. Though among the world’s economic success stories, on many dimensions of sustainability they are failures. The growing core-periphery disparities that produce left-behind communities and “sacrifice zones” on the one hand and wealthy but unsustainable and highly unequal job centers on the other are at the heart of recent global development patterns.
Let us imagine instead a world where we are not content with the concentration of wealth and opportunity in a small number of global cities; where all communities have affordable housing and provide a decent quality of life; where cities meet the needs of people locally and regionally but do not drain wealth from other parts of the world; where no areas are left behind in the transition to a green economy, their populations increasingly alienated, despairing, and vulnerable to unscrupulous politicians and warlords; and where social dimensions of sustainability are well served everywhere.
Sources of the Problem
Today’s spatial inequity problems have long historical roots, illuminated by literature in fields such as economic geography, sociology, and environmental history. One starting point is physical geography. Some parts of the world have more fertile soils than others, more abundant mineral resources, more useful plant, animal, and fish species, and/or more benign topography and climate. Other places have been strategically well located to serve as trading centers and market towns or have been easy to defend against attack. Such communities have been able to accumulate modest amounts of wealth and power. The “chessboard” of geographical wealth is constantly shifting and with global warming is likely to shift in even greater ways in the future.
However, in other cases spatial inequities have resulted from military, religious, cultural, political, and/or economic systems that further centralize power and wealth. Typically these have drained resources from the periphery to the core of empires. Many parts of the world still suffer the legacy of colonization. Local traditions and cultures were disrupted, peoples were exploited, racism was institutionalized, ecosystems were harmed, and corrupt, colonizer-friendly governments were installed following independence. The damage has been so profound and long-lasting in many places that reparations may be appropriate. The need for climate justice may likewise call for reparations and repayments.
Twentieth-century economic development philosophies exacerbated spatial inequality on the assumption that economic globalization was to everyone’s long-term benefit. Various versions of “growth pole” theory, originating in the 1950s, sought to focus business development in particular geographical locales within countries on the assumption that this would leverage economic development in other parts. Such wider-scale progress was rare; growth poles instead often channeled resources to local elites, created isolated business enclaves, and harmed the environment.
The municipal economic development practice of chasing branches of multinational corporations has likewise undermined prospects for a more stable long-term economic base in cities worldwide. This “race to the bottom” competition leads suburbs to compete to host the newest shopping mall, central cities to compete for corporate headquarters, and states or countries to lower their environmental and labor standards to attract multinational corporations. However, the resulting businesses often don’t provide the expected number of jobs, pay the decent wages promised, or stay more than a few years. As Margaret Dewar has pointed out in her well-titled article “Why State and Local Economic Development Programs Cause So Little Economic Development,” politicians have an incentive in the short term to appear to be generating jobs by attracting well-known companies but little incentive to take into account long-term economic or environmental sustainabilIty. A recent example of the extreme lengths that municipalities will go to in order to attract development can be seen in the global competition for the second Amazon headquarters.
The Bretton Woods framework of post–World War II development assistance only deepened global spatial disparities, creating what economist Andres Gunder Frank termed “the development of underdevelopment.” Agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund loaned funds to developing countries for megaprojects that created wealth for elites but left others poor and displaced, while countries accumulated enormous debt to lenders in the Global North. National governments focused on what sustainability-oriented NGOs refer to as “extreme infrastructure.” These dams, power plants, industrial zones, and large-scale agricultural projects sought to jump-start an export-oriented form of economic development that was often environmentally harmful and funneled capital created by Third World labor and resources into First World bank accounts.
Yet another source of disparities has been the structural adjustment policies that neoliberal governments in wealthy nations insisted upon as a condition for international assistance during the past forty years. These require developing countries to take actions such as cutting social programs, privatizing public assets such as utilities and railroads, reducing barriers to foreign investment, and lowering taxes on the wealthy. The effect has been to make life harder for the poor while enriching elites and international corporations. It is increasingly clear that structural adjustment policies need to be discontinued and policies that promote spatial equity put in their place.
Finally, the offshoring of manufacturing from wealthy nations to low-cost and less regulated parts of the globe during the past half century has had complex effects on spatial disparities. It has impoverished the US Rust Belt as well as the British Midlands, leading to the growth of right-wing populism in both places. Meanwhile, it has helped fuel the rise of megacities and megaregions in the developing world, leading to massive internal migration and expanding economic disparities between those urban areas and the countryside. Undoubtedly, these global economic shifts have improved quality of life for many. But they have harmed others, disrupted societies, contributed to the climate crisis, and widened the gulf between rich and poor communities (figure 7).
UC Press
Although spatial disparities are still expanding in many places, there is hope for the rebirth of left-behind cities and regions. Manchester, UK, the first industrial powerhouse in Europe, lost much of its manufacturing in the middle of the twentieth century but has since rebuilt itself by focusing on culture, education, physical regeneration, and its geographical role as a transportation center. The US steel capital of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after losing 350,000 industrial jobs in the 1980s, reinvented itself as a center of renewable energy, health care, and education. Even the long-declining hulk of Detroit, one of the most hollowed-out American cities, is showing signs of a turnaround. Examples such as these indicate the possibility for left-behind places to rebound. But all of these cities had assets to start with, including a strong identity and an active elite that led revitalization efforts. Other communities and regions don’t have such advantages. And the pervasive problems associated with spatial inequality affect wealthy as well as declining places, necessitating holistic and imaginative solutions at higher levels of governance.
Starting next year, Google Play Games will be available on screens far beyond its current confines of Android and ChromeOS devices. Google executives announced on stage at the 2021 Game Awards that, come 2022, the app service will be available on Windows PCs as well.
“Players will be able to experience their favorite Google Play games on more devices: seamlessly switching between a phone, tablet, Chromebook, and soon, Windows PCs," Greg Hartrell, Product Director, Games on Android and Google Play said in a release. The company was quick to note that this is not a partnership between the two tech corporations but rather a new product altogether "This Google-built product brings the best of Google Play Games to more laptops and desktops, and we are thrilled to expand our platform for players to enjoy their favorite Android games even more.”
Details are still scarce as to when exactly the new functionality will be made public and, more importantly, if our existing controllers will be cross-compatible. But given how quickly gamers embraced playing on Chromebooks, providing Windows users with access the same access to one of the world’s largest gaming ecosystems could prove a lucrative venture for both companies.
