The Washington Post: “Uber offloads troubled self-driving unit to startup Aurora”

The company is selling its self-driving division to start-up Aurora in a deal that values the ride-hailing giant’s autonomous vehicle unit at about $4 billion, according to the companies and people familiar with the matter. Uber executives have long pointed toward a future in which the company could automate its fleet, removing a huge portion of the costs that help prevent it from attaining profitability.

The sale represents the final chapter for an ambitious but troubled division that was left reeling after one of its vehicles was investigated in the first known pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle.

Uber has been the dominant player in the ride-hailing industry over the past decade, but the pandemic has strained its business and forced it to rely more on food delivery while cutting back on longer-term investments and experimental projects.

Faiz Siddiqui

Hardly surprising, considering how little progress Uber was making in the area and the broader context of the pandemic and economic recession. After cost cuts and several rounds of layoffs, and the realization that the home delivery business may be more lucrative for the near future, a speculative line of business with little prospect of success over the next five years at least was bound to be the next to go. In case anyone remembers, in early 2017 Uber also started a flying car initiative, Uber Elevate, which Uber is now selling to Joby Aviation.

‘Annihilation’ (Netflix)

Annihilation – Poster Concept by Kyle V. James

After mentioning Peter Watts earlier this week, I went back through his blog posts and found his review of the Annihilation movie adaptation. Because it was immediately available on Netflix, I watched it shortly after release and have been meaning to write a couple of thoughts about it. I have not read any of novels in this trilogy, so I cannot compare the result with the written original, as Peter Watts did.

The overall idea behind Annihilation sounds similar to Roadside Picnic, maybe even Greg Egan’s Teranesia, though I have not read either book yet. The movie does a nice job of setting up a mysterious, tense, even threatening atmosphere once the characters reach the alien zone where many disappeared before them. There is a constant sense that the group is being watched, that something is moving and closing in just off screen, out of their field of view.

Despite this, and various complaints from critics, I felt that the movie was not weird enough. The oddly shaped animals and strange plants are mostly recognizable, having added relatively minor random parts from other species. There is some emphasis on the human element – we get a bear with eerie human voice, in a scene that veers towards horror rather than sci-fi, and bushes that grow in the shapes of people – which could have been interpreted as an attempt by the unseen entity to communicate with the explorers, but the movie does not follow up on this idea in any meaningful way.

The Atlantic: “Your Individually Rational Choice is Collectively Disastrous”

Most people are capable of learning difficult skills like swimming, riding a bike, or cooking a decent meal because these activities provide a lot of instant feedback on what you’re doing right, or wrong. If you put far too much salt in the sauce, your pasta will taste memorably bad. The next time, you’ll know what mistakes to avoid.

But some activities, including dangerous ones, provide negative feedback only rarely. When I am in a rush, I often cross the street at a red light. I understand intellectually that this is stupid, but I’ve never once seen evidence of my stupidity. In fact, every time I cross on red, the world sends me a signal that it’s safe: After all, I’ve never (yet) been hit by a car! So I keep crossing on red.

Exposure to COVID-19 works the same way. Every time you engage in a risky activity—like meeting up with your friends indoors—the world is likely to send you a signal that you made the right choice. I saw my pal and didn’t get sick. Clearly, I shouldn’t have worried so much about socializing! But that is just as wrong as thinking that jaywalking is safe because you haven’t yet been hit by a car.

Yascha Mounk

Excellent observations about how everyday human choices and routines can become harmful during a pandemic. I was getting at a similar point in my latest article about the coronavirus when I was writing about the need for flexibility, to adapt our habits to this exceptional situation, at least temporarily. I would add that, in the case of infectious diseases, dangerous situations do provide negative feedback – when we or people around us get sick – but unfortunately that feedback arrives much later, and in our minds becomes disconnected from the actual behavior causing the infection. A similar problem arises with pollution and global warming, both issues that affect the whole planet, but whose ultimate consequences are hard to grasp on short timescales.

The Guardian: “Collision course: why are cars killing more and more pedestrians?”

Here is what the frustrated safety experts will tell you: Americans are driving more than ever, more than residents of any other country. More of them than ever are living in cities and out in urban sprawl; a growing number of pedestrian fatalities occur on the fringes of cities, where high-volume, high-speed roads exist in close proximity to the places where people live, work, and shop. Speed limits have increased across the country over the past 20 years, despite robust evidence that even slight increases in speed dramatically increase the likelihood of killing pedestrians (car passengers, too – but the increase is not as steep, thanks to improvements in the design of car frames, airbags and seatbelts). American road engineers tend to assume people will speed, and so design roads to accommodate speeding; this, in turn, facilitates more speeding, which soon enough makes higher speed limits feel reasonable. And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit.

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There is simply a very good business reason for car companies to sell people a future where everything is better, especially when the way to get there is by purchasing a lot of cars, says Peter Norton, perhaps the most prominent historian of how Americans think about traffic safety. As Norton pointed out, car manufacturers have long made a practice of stoking consumer dissatisfaction, and yoking it to utopian visions of the future in which cars of the future solve problems created by cars of the present. I don’t think there’s any chance that autonomous vehicles will deliver us a safe future, and I don’t necessarily think the companies think so either. I think they think we’ll buy a lot of stuff. The safe future will recede before our eyes like a desert mirage.

Peter C Baker

I have linked to this article before, after Tesla launched the Cybertruck, the ultimate symbol of car-centric culture to the detriment of pedestrians – and on some level of the American ‘Cult of Selfishness’ that has damaged the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Washington Post: “Apple will pay $113 million for batterygate slowing of iPhones”

The company’s much maligned throttling efforts drew nationwide scorn when they came to light in 2017, stunning consumers who at the time saw it as an attempt to nudge them into buying newer, more expensive devices. States led by Arizona, Arkansas and Indiana soon opened a probe of the matter, and on Wednesday, they secured a financial penalty and legal commitment from Apple to be more transparent in the future.

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Apple’s approach ultimately left many users feeling as if the only way to get improved performance was to purchase a newer-model iPhone from Apple, the Arizona complaint contends. As a result, the company relied on unfair and deceptive acts and practices to boost its sales potentially by millions of devices per year, according to Arizona’s attorney general.

Tony Romm

The list of lawsuits and fines for Apple’s ‘battery-gate’ does not stop here: the latest was filed just yesterday in Belgium and Spain by consumer advocacy group Euroconsumer; Apple agreed to another settlement earlier this year in the US, and was fined in Italy and France over the same issue. This is a situation where I wish fines and enforcement would be handled by the EU instead of individual countries – after all, there are iPhone buyers in every state, not just Italy, France and Spain, and Apple should be held accountable in front of all their customers. In a more general sense, it is another example of global companies exploiting the lack of global tax policy and legal framework to avoid scrutiny and maximize their profits.

TechCrunch: “Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal”

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield was no less effusive than his future boss. As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going, Butterfield said in a statement.

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Ultimately, Slack was ripe for the taking. Entering 2020 it had lost around 40% of its value since it went public. Consider that after its most recent earnings report, the company lost 16% of its value, and before the Salesforce deal leaked, the company was worth only a few dollars per share more than its direct listing reference price. Toss in net losses of $147.6 million during the two quarters ending July 31, 2020, Slack’s uninspiring public valuation and its winding path to profitability and it was a sitting target for a takeover like this one. The only surprise here is the price.

Ron Miller & Alex Wilhelm

Fun fact, Stewart Butterfield was also the founder of Flickr, before selling the photo sharing site to Yahoo! for some $35 million. I don’t know enough about Salesforce to have an opinion about how this acquisition will turn out in a couple of years, but at least its founder continues to manage Slack from within its new owner. So maybe it has a better chance long term to not end up like Flickr…

The Guardian: “How our home delivery habit reshaped the world”

The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worry about shipping – about how much it cost, or about how long it would take – and he relentlessly shredded delivery times to make shipping incidental to the purchasing experience.

Amazon’s emphasis on speed compelled other retailers to hurry, too, and encouraged us to believe that if something cannot be had quickly, it is barely worth having at all. It is as if we have forgotten that a product is an object moving through space, fighting gravity, air resistance and other forces of nature. Companies, though, are only too aware of it. While we choose and buy our purchases with mere inch-wide movements of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world so that our deliveries pelt towards us in ever-quicker time.

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But as our urban lives have grown more pressed for time, we have diced our opportunity costs finer and finer; from budgeting days or slabs of hours, we have come to rationing minutes. Delivery schedules have shrunk in parallel. You might now reason that even a 12-minute walk to the store to buy a can of beans is too great an expenditure of time, and that the fee paid for one-hour delivery is a fair price to snatch those minutes back into your life. Of course, the principle of opportunity cost assumes that we will earn the value of that fee back in some way in those 12 minutes – whereas the truth is that we are most likely to squander them on Instagram. The internet promises us time, then takes it right back.

Samanth Subramanian

Wonderful overview of the complicated field of logistics, where companies aggressively optimize transportation and packaging to deliver an increasing variety of goods to our doorsteps as fast as possible. Another article from pre-corona times, but the information here is just as relevant as before, if not more. The improved logistic developed over the past decade has allowed a large number of people to comfortably and safely work from home, and the disruption of the pandemic has in turn benefitted e-commerce companies, a sector which this year has seen growth equivalent to several years under normal circumstances.