Episode 150 - City Living, Waymo Driving, Protein Folding, and Bitcoin Popping
Max takes on all of the tech stories that we want to cover on The Local Maximum by the end of the year. First an announcement about New York City, and comments on the new leadership philosophy espoused by politicians with a contrasting view on what they need to do. Then, a series of self driving car updates with Waymo, Uber, Aurora, and Tesla. Third, the breakthrough in protein folding in AlphaFold 2 and what it means. And finally, we cover the big moves in the Bitcoin markets along with some lesser known crypto-related stories.
Links
City Journal: How to Keep new York City’s Tech Sector Strong
City Journal: Local Pols New Mantra of Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable
New York Post: Reprint
Forbes: Waymo Opens up to the Public
JJRicks: A Waymo Ride through a Parking Lot and Neighborhood in Chandler, Arizona
Wired: Uber sells autonomous Vehicle Division to Aurora
Engadget: Tesla Teasing Self Driving Subscription for 2021
Blopig: What AlphaFold2 Really Means
Nature: DeepMind makes Gigantic Lean in Solving Protein Structures
GeekWire: Pedro Domingo and Anandkumar Twitter Spat
Bitcoin.com: US Trasury Wants new Rules
Naomi Brockwell: Mnuchin’s Disastrous Regulation
Related Episodes
Episode 149 on the Timnit Gibru controversy at Google AI Research
Episode 132 with some frustrations with New York Politics
Episode 112 with Naomi Brockwell on Internet Freedom
Episode 92 on the Beleaguered Uber Autonomous Vehicle Division
Episode 43 on Waymo’s Testing of Self Driving Cars in Chandler
Episode 28 with our expert predictions about the future of urban life
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to the local maximum Episode 150.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: You've reached the local maximum once again, welcome to Episode 150. That's a big milestone. Since we're winding down the year 2020, a little bit, and also starting a new decade of episodes, let's say for lack of a better term like the 150s. I thought that this would be a good time to update you on the emerging technologies that we follow here on The Local Maximum. Basically, anything that I didn't get to by the end of the year that I wanted to get to by the end of the year, that is going to go on this show.
So there's a lot—this is going to be a good episode for someone who has a short attention span, because—well, relatively, because we're gonna jump from topic to topic. maximum.locals.com is where our online community is. So check that out and stay for the end for our plans for the rest of the year and early 2021.
Many of these stories could be full episodes on their own, but this is the stuff we've been covering before on The Local Maximum. I'm going to get you all up to date today. We're going to go over the self-driving car industry, we're gonna go over protein-folding. And this is important I know. Well, we'll get to it. And finally, Bitcoin and crypto, which—look, Bitcoin winter is clearly over and has been for some time. So even though real winter is here, we're entering real winter, we are leaving crypto winter in the virtual currency realms. That's great. These are all like decade long trends that are good to follow, that we follow, areas, where we’ve actually taken step forward, steps forward this year, but these stories probably get lost in? Well, I don't know I don't, I don't have to say why stories got lost to this year that don't have to do with particular like two or three issues.
So first, a little bit of an update for me I currently have... My home base has been New York City for 14 years. And that is over for now. I've currently made my home base outside of New York City, currently in an unassuming location in Connecticut, but that's probably temporary. So you'll hear more about this in 2021. And what's going on? This could be part of a larger trend, which we actually spoke about, all the way back during our expert prediction panel back in 2018. That was Episode 38. Where technology will make suburbs and outer suburbs more desirable, no doubt exacerbated this year by the coronavirus pandemic. And that's primarily why New York City is a tough place to live right now. And it's also just me getting older.
But let's talk about New York City for a minute. I think that this topic applies to all your cities out there throughout the country. Maybe the world too. The political leadership here in New York City is also a reason why people are fleeing. I definitely think that it's possible to adopt, or adapt to the new reality and make urban life more desirable than ever. And I think some cities are going to do it. And there's still a huge advantage to seeing people in person, but it's going to take some work, you need to figure out what benefits remain for living close together. And there are a lot. I got to sell people on those benefits. You had to look for companies in industries that are best positioned to take advantage of those benefits. But that's just not what they're doing right now. So I'm going to link to two newspapers from city-journal.org and the New York Post which reprinted the article. I know that these are both kind of right-leaning papers, but City Journal actually has a lot of articles right now about just what I'm talking about. They're very specific policy articles. They're prescriptions for keeping city strong and keeping tech companies in New York City.
But the main takeaway is that it's not going to happen automatically. You have to bring together all the universities that are around so you have the best research in one area, you have to have the urban amenities that your knowledge workers might want. You have to update zoning—innovation zones for say, kind of next-generation connectivity or self-driving cars and things like that companies want to—and the most innovative people would want to build on top of. So I'll link to that.
And the danger zone here is the new political philosophy that some—in New York City's political elite are their leadership philosophy that they've been espousing, including our Public Advocate which is kind of like the mayor in waiting or your current Mayor de Blasio was the previous Public Advocate. And it's also a phrase being used by people in city council and by people in the city government. The phrase that they've been using is “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” They say it's from the New Testament and that's something I'm less familiar with. But if you read the book of James that they cited actually doesn't say anything like that. It says—it definitely, it's open to interpretation. But it definitely does not say that your mission is to go around making everyone feel the pain of your perceived injustice. So it's sort of iffy there.
And then they're taking this theological point, like, if you're a rich man, you could be humbled by faith and life, just like everybody else, and turning it into a political program. And there are actually a lot of people who want to do this, there are a lot of voters who are on board with this, which is also concerning. So the quote is actually from a newspaper in 1890, which was, it was actually satire and not a description of what you're supposed to do. But apparently, politicians are taking it as divine gospel, and they're attributing this quote. Excuse me. They are attributing this quote to the New Testament, they're attributing it to Martin Luther King, without any evidence, it comes from like a satire and newspaper article.
So what's this going to mean? in practice? What do they mean by this, I've lived here for 14 years. I've met some of the people in the political elite. I have gone to their speeches I've seen, I've gone to events, not like events—I was, you know, they were kind of open events. But you can meet it—you know, it's just it's local people. So it's not like, you know, it's not like you have to go jump through hoops to meet the president. It's kind of easy. But you know, you can go to events and see them talk casually. And many of these people are practical, and it's possible to stop this. But if the true believers kind of like the Born Again, political believers have their way and comfort the afflicted. And while afflicting the comfortable, what does that actually mean?
Well, first, they don't really comfort the afflicted, I haven't seen much of that there have been no policies proposed for better schools or care for the homeless or anything like that. But in terms of afflicting the comfortable, I could guess what that means. I'm basing this off of the specific instances where they're using the phrase, so we could start with another extra tax on the rich. Okay, another 5%. But we'll be pretty lucky if it stops there, although the super-rich, probably aren't going to stay. But it also means more crime on the streets, more lockdowns, more boarded-up stores, more barricades. Every week another favorite restaurant, shop, store closes. You know, according to them, we definitely need to put public housing for high crime populations in the nicest neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. And if you complain, then you're a horrible person. Remove the police where violent crime is concerned and redirect them toward the minor infractions of ordinary citizens, like breathing or something like that.
They want to have less nonpolitical events and more overtly political events. If you must have a nonpolitical event, you must politicize it. Otherwise, your silence is an insult to the cause of justice. But the subway and public transportation continued to decline and let there be more and more crime down there. So come to think of it, the people they want to afflict are actually not the most comfortable at all.
Now, the difference between New York and say some city like San Francisco kind of California, is that New York has a lot more practical oriented people in it and people involved in government, and I think there's a chance that they get the upper hand next year. But for now, I personally am out. I have had enough affliction in 2020. And I'm pretty sure I'll be perceived as comfortable. And even though I'm not like part of the super-rich. And I don't think you're morally superior for suffering. That's just a bunch of malarkey, as Joe Biden would say. So that's that. I know that's kind of my story. That's now we're going to get away from the political stuff.
Let's get into all of the new technology. First up is the self-driving car industry. So a bunch of moving parts here have happened. We last talked about Waymo in Episode 43, which was two years ago. We seem to talk about self-driving cars at the end of the year, every year. So in Episode 43, that was two years ago, we're talking about Waymo and they are practicing—not practicing—they're testing out their self-driving cars in the area of Chandler, Arizona. So you know, nice big flat spaces like nice open space, you can kind of see what's going on. I assume the weather is—well, I mean, look, the weather is going to be clear. That might not necessarily be the best weather in the country. It is probably too hot. But it's very clear weather. And you know, there it's not like New York City where you have buildings obstructing, you have kind of short buildings kind of spread out. So you can see very far and it's not like wooded, so it's desert. So that's really a great place for them to start.
But the kind of lame part was when they started was, first of all, they had a safety driver in there. So if you call the self-driving car, there'd be somebody in there. And they'd say, ‘Welcome to your self-driving car. It will drive itself’, but there's still kind of a person in there. So that's sort of weird, and it wasn't open to the public. You had to be part of their special beta program. And last year, in Episode 92, it looked like they were starting to open to the public. And now it looks like they are completely open to the public. But still—and no more safety driver. So that's great. And they are now—oh, sorry, they got rid of some of the safety drivers in Episode 92 so last year. So now they are completely rid of the safety drivers and it's completely open to the public but just for that one town in Chandler, Arizona, and I'm sure the surrounding area, I don't know exactly what the area is, but it's a town in Arizona.
Now, now that it's open to the public. And the people who are in it don't have to keep secrets, and they don't have to sign release forms and consent forms and NDAs and all that. Or NDAs or whatever nondisclosure agreements and all that. Now they can show us what's going on. So there are some videos out there. And I'm going to link to this video at localmaxradio.com/150, on the show notes page. This is a video posted by the YouTube account JJRicks who apparently lives in Chandler, Arizona, and is taking videos and showing us what it's like. So he's taking a video in the backseat of the one that I linked, there's maybe—there’s 15 minutes of it. So it's pretty long. He gets into the backseat, there's no one in the front seat. And he's videoing it from the middle seat in the backseat. So it's, it's already pretty freaky.
And my takeaway is that, yes, it works. But it's very frustrating. So he got the self driving car in a parking lot. This is not like a totally rural area. This is something like a very suburban area with lots of people in it. He went to a shopping center, and there all sorts of people and cars in the parking lot and all that. And the car took forever to get started because it was so non—it was not aggressive enough. And basically, it took five minutes just to get going. Because there are all these people with bags and shopping bags and cars coming back and forth. And it just had to wait for that perfect moment. And that's kind of what happened throughout the drive, which, you know, in one hand, it's safe. But on the other hand, you might not want to actually get from point A to point B on this, although maybe if you save some money you would. There was one case where he kept having to open the window and say, “Yes, it's okay. It's a self-driving car.”
There was one case where there was a family, with young kids on bikes, and they wanted to cross the street and the car, like, they were waiting for the car. But the car wouldn't cross the street because they were there and the car was kind of expecting them to cross the street. So they kind of had a standoff there. So they sort of had to wait for a really long time for the car to go.
So yes, all these interesting things are going on. But you know, it does work. And it is exciting to see that technology take another step forward. It's gonna, there's gonna be right now it doesn't have a huge effect on our lives. But there's gonna be some turning point like a snap boom where the lights come on, and it starts working in larger and larger areas of the country.
And right now, you might think, hey, they've got to get on this in terms of, you know, worse conditions, lower visibility, bad weather, but it looks like still Justin's Chandler, Arizona, there's a lot that they need to get done in terms of how do you deal with other people? How do you deal with other cars? And there was one time where he was trying to merge into a lane when the lanes merged, and the bus behind them was honking at him because he wasn't merging in because they were waiting for the perfect time to merge and the other cars weren't letting him in now a human would be able to kind of slip in there at the right time. But the car had to just wait and wait and wait, wait. So that's, that's really interesting. That's a lot of stuff that we all have to learn when we start driving. And that seems to be right out.
Another cool thing that it does, though, there's kind of like a display on the backseat of the car. And it kind of shows everything around you. And what it knows about. It knows about all the cars, all the pedestrians, all the animals, all the objects that are around the car and the roads and what the roads are called and all that. So it does sort of have an onboard awareness thing so it can tell you what it's aware of. So that is a pretty neat feature to kind of see into what the algorithm is doing.
So second thing in the self-driving car industry is that Uber has sold off its self-driving car division. It sold it to Aurora. Now, Uber. We also talked about this in Episode 92. Uber has had a bunch of problems, they really tried to get into the self-driving car industry because they figure “Hey, we're the largest rideshare service. We convert to self-driving cars. We will be absolutely unstoppable.” I think they put in a billion dollars into that $1 billion. But their self-driving car division had a lot of problems.
First, they were accused of stealing technology from Waymo, which is—again, that's by the Waymo we talked about before from Chandler, Arizona, that's the division of alphabet, so kind of spun off Google. And they also had a fatal accident, which really has kind of hurt their brand a little bit. And so they sold it to Aurora.
Aurora is a self-driving car startup that focuses on how other manufacturers can convert their cars into self-driving cars. They work with Hyundi for example. So they're partnering up with a lot of people there. So watch those guys at Aurora. Aurora seems to be—since they were the best ones to sell to. And they are clearly moving ahead with that tech. So, Aurora is one to watch.
And finally, we have an announcement from Tesla. They claim that they're going to offer a self-driving subscription, whatever that means, in 2021, for their cars. That means you'll subscribe to the self-driving car software. Now given where the technology is, it's doubtful that the tech will be that impressive kind of level 4 technology. Remember, I’ve also—so we talked before about the levels of self-driving—these levels of autonomy. And level 4 was really the one where you kind of you don't have to pay attention to the wheel and stuff. So level four is really where you want to get to.
And so it's kind of given where the technology is elsewhere, it's doubtful that they'll they're that far ahead that they're you're actually going to have Tesla self-driving cars in 2021. In fact, they already told us that they'd have it in 2020. So we'll see I'm sure they have good technology there. But that's another announcement. So lots—and we—I don't think we spoke about self-driving cars this year, that much. But a lot of pieces are moving. That's interesting.
I don't know if you guys can hear the ambulance outside. But as soon as I'm out of New York City, permanently—I'm actually in here today, this week, maybe people have a lot less of that. So okay.
Next up, let's talk about DeepMind and protein folding. This is the most important thing going on in this episode, frankly. And it's not something that you hear about very much. But this will impact our lives in the long run. So DeepMind once again, another alphabet company. So its alphabets AI research lab that's opposed to Google's AI lab, Google Brain, which is the one we talked about last week in the when we talked about the Timnit Gebru incident.
So DeepMind has a protein folding software called AlphaFold, and now they have their new one called AlphaFold 2. And their program AlphaFold actually was participated in a contest called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, CASP for short. They outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein structure prediction challenge. And the results were announced on November 30th, at the start of the conference, which was held virtually this year. And so it wasn't just better, it was way better. Like they made huge strides in this problem.
So first of all, like why is it hard? And why should we care? Well, first of all, why is it hard? There are a lot of interactions at play here, like you know, you could have. So protein is caused by—so you basically have a string of amino acids all strung together. And all of those are very complex molecules. And there's all these forces associated with them. And every force kind of interacts with every other force. And I think computing that outright is kind of intractable. So you really need to use something like machine learning to figure out how it's all going to go in the end.
And it turns out, it's a very difficult problem because it basically uses all of the laws of physics and it's not just like a two body problem or three-body problem. It's like it's like 1000 body problem. So lots of different forces come into play. So very difficult to predict the shape that protein will end up taking. But the shape is everything. The shape determines what that protein actually does. And this will help him kind of discovering new drugs and medicines much more quickly.
It's a huge breakthrough in medical research. You could almost design a protein now, or at least search more easily like protein that folds in a certain way and has a certain function, and it can predict what will happen at the molecular level. So this is part of the speeding up of medical technology, which is going to be great in the long term for fighting new diseases and ailments.
I was always looking into this. It's always interesting—you know, you have all this genetic code in your body. And you know there's DNA and DNA has these nucleotides, ACTG, these four nucleotides, and with those four, it kind of creates a code, but you ever wonder like, ‘Okay, how is that code actually read like’? So my body has a coordinate, is there a computer reading it?
Well, so the way I understand it correct me if I'm wrong biologist is that when these molecules are open, like your DNA, RNA or whatever, these sequences of nucleotides actually attract the amino acids in certain orders, and then they attach together, and then they come off and fold into a certain protein. So that actually creates the proteins in your body. And that ends up determining what's going on, that's probably a little too simple, or, I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but anyway. This is, this is big stuff. This is really determining, you know, getting to the bottom of how the human body works.
So just to give you a sense of the weight of this, of this breakthrough, here's a quote Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York City, and a CASP participant, “It’s eager to dig into the details of alpha folds performance at the contest and learn more about how the system works. When the DeepMind team presents its approach on first December,” which they've already did, “it's possible but unlikely, it says that an easier than usual crop of protein targets contributed to the performance out core series, strong hunches that AlphaFold will be transformational. If true, I think it's fair to say that this will be very disruptive to the protein structure prediction field. I suspect, many will leave the field as a core problem because the core problem has arguably been solved.” And he also says, “It's a breakthrough of the First Order, certainly one of the most significant scientific results of my lifetime.”
Now, how did they do it? I'm not exactly you know, we could probably dive into how they did it with a whole episode. But it is a deep learning architecture. So you know, it's kind of a black box, lots of different moving parts, right of a neural net, lots of data. So it didn't just outperform, but it's very accurate. And they're talking about it as it's some kind of breakthrough.
Continuing in the field of AI research, that last one is like big, that's where the real work is going to be done. This is just this next one's just BS. But continuing from the all of the chatter and controversy on Twitter from last week's Episode 149 about Timnit Gebru. Pedro Domingo, who's a machine learning researcher and author of The Master Algorithm. And I read his book, The Master Algorithm. He has a lot of great things to say about machine learning. My only criticism of him is I reached out to him twice about coming in The Local Maximum, he hasn't gotten back to me, but maybe I'll try again. Pedro, if you're out there, you've got to correct this injustice and come on The Local Maximum.
So he tweeted out against the ideological bias that goes on in the ethics reviews of AI research. And then another AI researcher Anandkumar, she responded by making a list of people who liked his tweets and retweeted his tweets and were defending him. Because it was seen as you know, being against ethics or whatever. You can't question them.
So first it was so it was a list of people at first that she kind of positioned it as these are the people that we need to educate that they're wrong, but then kind of admitted that it was ultimately a canceled list. If you can't be educated, you have to go. We'll give you one chance to admit your error. And she actually did back off from that because it included students, and grad students who just like Domingo’s tweets, and that was kind of too far to kind of ruin these people's careers who were—who just liked the tweets, and we're at such a lower level.
So, anyway, all this stuff is blowing up and it's gonna continue to blow up. Again, it's a lot of noise. I prefer to focus on the people looking at the protein folding. But we'll see.
So the final story of today is—man, we haven't even talked about cryptocurrency and the crypto chasm and all that this year. But, man, it's been a good year for Bitcoin. The price exploded to over 20,000 this year. I told people earlier this year that it's going to go over 20,000. You don’t believe me. And then look what happened on December 16th. That happened exactly three years to the day after the last Bitcoin high occurred. Now there's a lot of institutional interest and seems like that $20,000 price level occurred naturally, whereas last time, it was kind of a blow off top where it went from 10,000 quickly up to 20,000, and back up to 10,000. And then forevermore 20,000 was kind of seen as the benchmark, even though you know, it wasn't really there for very long.
So there's been a lot of reaction. First of all, from the government from the federal government, Secretary of Treasury, outgoing, Steven Mnuchin, wants new rules for the cryptocurrency. Basically, he wants to know if you are in a custodial wallet like Coinbase or something else and you withdraw, he wants to know who owns the wallet that you're withdrawing to. And so people are kind of, maybe concerned about that, it means you have to like register your personal wallets that you own, of course. As some people have pointed out, it doesn't make much of a difference because you withdraw to your own personal bitcoin wallet that is registered to you. And then you could just that—it's uncensorable. So then you could just send it to wherever you want.
So some people have said this actually could speed up the development of self-hosted solution for Bitcoin, but which is possible backfire of the intense, tended effective law, which is to keep people in the custodial accounts. But we'll see. It's something—I believe I have a video here. I think it's from—yes, it's from Naomi Brockwell, who is always great on this stuff. Who is covering this story? So localmaxradio.com/150. I will post that.
Another story and this is stuff is you probably haven't heard of even if you've been, you know, following Bitcoin on Twitter. And even if you've been listening to CNBC and Bloomberg business and all that, you probably haven't heard about this. So one important or interesting Bitcoin company that I've—or crypto company that I've been following OpenBazaar. They wanted to have a decentralized marketplace. You'd think they would be, you think they'd be thriving in this environment. But they've been having some struggles, it's been hard to actually get people on to their service and buy things. It was a few years ago, it was—people said, “Well, unless people start buying things with this digital currency, it'll never be worth anything.” And we're continuously proven wrong, because it continues to be worth more and more. And people are buying less and less of everyday items.
So they said recently that they're going to go under unless they are, you know, unless they have a new infusion of capital. But an anonymous donor has saved them for now. So maybe OpenBazaar lives to fight another day. And maybe they were a little bit early. But if they can get people on their platform, then they can start to succeed in the long run. Another lesser-known coin people like “Which coins should I get into?” I don't know which lesser coins you should get into? I really don't. A Bitcoin is going to be leading the way. But here's the interesting one, it's called Filecoin that has come out recently. And that is a cryptocurrency, that is—the purpose of it is to keep documents and data basically stored for long periods of time in a decentralized manner. So you don't have to—it's essentially a decentralized Dropbox or Google Drive or something like that. So you don't have to rely on real companies to do that.
So people are like, “Well, yes, that is a really interesting use case.” Filecoin is now available on Coinbase, which is kind of a big deal. If you're listed on Coinbase, then, you know it's a lot easier for people to get that coin. So more casual people rather than people who are, you know, exchanging on kind of, you know, more professional exchanges. So, I'll link to an article here Filecoin jumps 6% after Coinbase Pro listing. So Coinbase Pro is a little bit more professional than Coinbase. But still, it's a big deal. You can buy that.
I'm not saying you should buy that one, but it is—it's definitely technology where people are like, “Hey, are these things useful for anything?” That's definitely one where it's yes. So, general thoughts on 2021 there might be a few corrections in the bitcoin price, but overall 2021 for cryptocurrency looks very bright. And this time, it appears that people are not so much focused on all the altcoins. And all that kind of, you know, me too. Even though there will be some alternative coins that are successful, looks like this time people realize that Bitcoin itself as the hardest currency, as the most limited currency will be leading the way. And we're gonna see huge changes in 2021. And I don't think we're gonna go through 2021 without having a whole lot of stories on it. I think there's gonna be tons of stories on Bitcoin for 2021.
All right, so I think we got through a lot this week. Next week, Aaron and I are going to do a look back on 2020 to finish out the year. And then I'm going to do another episode with Mariama Lee. We're going to do a math episode. Some people have been asking for more math episodes, which is surprising but a pleasant surprise. Was it Emperor Palpatine on Star Wars, a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. Okay, that's like an evil. But nope, our math episodes do very well. And we're going to talk about a breakthrough in something called Ramsey theory. And that breakthrough was made by a teenager recently.
So that's very interesting. Don't miss that. And it's a good way to set the tone for a new year to start with something—start with a cool story like that. If you don't know it, Ramsey theory is, we'll explain it. So we'll get back to that. And yes, don't miss out for next week. Have a great week, everyone.
That's the show. to support The Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and their online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.
