The Handoff Problem

Source

Around twelve years ago, Google figured out the fundamental problem facing Tesla's Fake Self Driving. Almost nine years ago in Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency, John Markoff wrote:

Three years ago, Google’s self-driving car project abruptly shifted from designing a vehicle that would drive autonomously most of the time while occasionally requiring human oversight, to a slow-speed robot without a brake pedal, accelerator or steering wheel. In other words, human driving was no longer permitted.

The company made the decision after giving self-driving cars to Google employees for their work commutes and recording what the passengers did while the autonomous system did the driving. In-car cameras recorded employees climbing into the back seat, climbing out of an open car window, and even smooching while the car was in motion, according to two former Google engineers.

Gareth Corfield at The Register added:

Google binned its self-driving cars' "take over now, human!" feature because test drivers kept dozing off behind the wheel instead of watching the road, according to reports.

"What we found was pretty scary," Google Waymo's boss John Krafcik told Reuters reporters during a recent media tour of a Waymo testing facility. "It's hard to take over because they have lost contextual awareness."

Follow me below the fold for a wonderful example of Tesla's handoff problem, and a discussion of the difference between Tesla's and Waymo's approaches to self-driving.

Metastablecoin Fragmentation

A fundamental problem for decentralized systems like permissionless blockchains is that their security depends upon the cost of an attack being greater than the potential reward from it. Various techniques are used to impose these costs, generally either Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS). These costs have implications for the economics (or tokenomics) of such systems, for example that their security is linear in cost, whereas centralized systems can use techniques such as encryption to achieve security exponential in cost.

Shin Figure 3

Now, via Toby Nangle's Stablecoin = Fracturedcoin we find Tokenomics and blockchain fragmentation by Hyun Song Shin, whose basic point is that these costs must be borne by the users of the system. For cryptocurrencies, this means through either or both transaction fees or inflation of the currency. The tradeoff between cost and security means that there is a market for competing blockchains making different tradeoffs. In practice we see a vast number of competing blockchains:

Tether’s USDT sits on 107 different ledgers. ... USDC sits on 125.

The chart shows Ethereum losing market share against competing blockchains.

Shin's analysis uses game theory to explain why this fragmentation is an inevitable result of tokenomics. Below the fold I go into the background and the details of Shin's explanation.

Skynet Progress Report (updated)

Source

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

Kent Brockman in "Deep Space Homer", The Simpsons

In recent months Cyberdyne Systems Corporation and its many subsidiaries have made very encouraging progress towards removing some of the major road-blocks standing in the way of the initial deployment of Skynet. Below the fold I report on the most significant ones.

Tesla's Not-A-Robotaxi Service

Source

I have now seen the fabled CyberCab three times in real life. It has two seats, one of them fully equipped with human driver interface equipment. In each case a human was using them to drive the car, which is necessary in California because Fake Self-Driving is a Level 2 driver assistance system that requires a human behind the wheel at all times. A Robotaxi that requires a human driver and can carry at most one passenger isn't going to be a economic success.

Fred Lambert has two posts illustrating the distance between Musk's claims and reality. Below the fold I look at both of them:

The Kessler Syndrome

LEO in 2019 (NASA)

In 1978 Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais published Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt. Wikipedia notes that:

It describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions between these objects cascade, exponentially increasing the amount of space debris over time.

This became known as the Kessler Syndrome. Three decades later, shortly after Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collided at 11.6km/s, Kessler published The Kessler Syndrome, writing that the original paper:

predicted that around the year 2000 the population of catalogued debris in orbit around the Earth would become so dense that catalogued objects would begin breaking up as a result of random collisions with other catalogued objects and become an important source of future debris.

And that:

Modeling results supported by data from USAF tests, as well as by a number of independent scientists, have concluded that the current debris environment is “unstable”, or above a critical threshold, such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them.

Below the fold I look into the current situation.

Mind The GAAP Again

Source

A bit over three months ago I wrote Depreciation and started with this graph from my 2022 post Generally Accepted Accounting Principles about the way Bitcoin miners were inflating their profits through misleading depreciation of their rigs.

The key message of the graph is the contrast between the 5-year straight-line depreciation and the curves showing the value of the remaining Bitcoin that the rig will generate. I suggested that the same mismatch between straight-line depreciation and remaining value generation would apply to AI hardware. I don't claim to be the first to flag this issue; The Economist's The $4trn accounting puzzle at the heart of the AI cloud was about a month earlier.

About a month later I returned to AI economics with Mind The GAAP, but that was mostly focused on other parts of the puzzle.But now, thanks to Bryce Elder's Big tech’s $680bn buy-now-book-later problem it turns out that both Michael Burry of The Big Short and Morgan Stanley Research agree with me that there's a problem:

Below the fold I go into the details, with many thanks to Bryce Elder.

Funding Open Source?

$BLEEBZORX chart

Most of the world's software infrastructure is, or is based upon, open source. The developers and supporters of some of it, for example the Linux kernel, and the major compilers, are paid by technology companies because they are critical to their business. Other, less visible but similarly critical parts are supported by lone volunteers. Apart from the unfairness, this can lead to serious vulnerabilities. Back in 2018 I wrote about one such vulnerability, the event-stream hack, in Securing The Software Supply Chain

The attackers targeted a widely-used, fairly old package that was still being maintained by the original author, a volunteer. They offered to take over what had become a burdensome task, and the offer was accepted. Now, despite the fact that the attacker was just an e-mail address, they were the official maintainer of the package and could authorize changes.

The change they authorized included code to steal cryptocurrencies.

In 2020 I wrote a detailed post about this problem entitled Supporting Open Source Software. Recently the topic re-surfaced on an e-mail alias I read. But what triggered the post below the fold was that this coincided with yet another fascinating piece from Matt Levine and his laugh-out-loud follow-up the next day.