Klint Finley

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“It’s A Battery Company That Happens To Make Electric Cars”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I would love to know if Elon Musk originally viewed Tesla as solely an automaker and realized he had another business, maybe a better one, selling batteries consumers could use to power their homes when some began to repurpose them to do just that.

Electric cars often need power stations between points A and B, houses and commercial buildings don’t have that challenge, and while the company still has plenty of near-term challenges, a developing non-mobile market could ultimately be gigantic. And that’s a market that Tesla has now fully dived into. The opening of Klint Finley’s astute Wired piece labeling Tesla as primarily a battery company:

TESLA IS ADMIRED for building the cars of the future. But it’s not really a car company. It’s a battery company that happens to make electric cars.

At least, that’s the trajectory suggested by the news that Tesla will soon sell mega-batteries for homes and electric utility companies. CEO Elon Musk mentioned the possibility during an earnings call last February, and the plan was reportedly confirmed in an investor letter revealed yesterday. The official announcement is set to come next week.

Selling batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities may seem like a departure for a car company. But for Tesla, it makes perfect sense. An electric car is only as green as the electrical grid that powers it. And if Tesla’s batteries become widespread, they could help utilities take better advantage of inconsistent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. As demand for renewables rises, whether through regulatory mandate or consumer desire, so would utilities’ demand for batteries that could help maintain a consistent flow—a demand Tesla is well-positioned to meet.•

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“One Day You Might Even Have Your Own Personal Robot Journalist”

March 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The dream, if that’s what it is, of machines writing in the manner of humans is not a new one. It’s difficult to imagine a time when computers can give us anything beyond basic, templated prose, but perhaps that’s not the point. Maybe each of us will have a robot collecting and writing simple and personalized information for us, the long tail taken to its extreme conclusion. That could be helpful or it might encourage us all to be nations of one. From Klint Finley at Wired:

Is anyone actually reading any of this machine generated content? Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen says that’s the wrong question to ask. Although the company generated over one billion pieces of content in 2014 alone, most of this verbiage isn’t meant for a mass audience. Rather, Wordsmith is acting as a sort of personal data scientist, sifting through reams of data that might otherwise go un-analyzed and creating custom reports that often have an audience of one.

For example, the company generates Fantasy Football game summaries for millions of Yahoo users each day during the Fantasy Football season, and it helps companies turn confusing spreadsheets into short, human readable reports. One day you might even have your own personal robot journalist, filing daily stories just for you on your fitness tracking data and your personal finances.

“We sort of flip the traditional content creation model on its head,” he says. “Instead of one story with a million page view, we’ll have a million stories with one page view each.”•

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“Competitions Between Societies, Which Historically Took The Form Of Warfare, Drive The Evolution Of Complex Societies”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Did agriculture lead to complex societies or was it something less nurturing? Cliodynamics provides an alternative cause: war. From Klint Finley at Wired:

“The standard theory, which [Peter] Turchin calls the ‘bottom up’ theory, is that humans invented agriculture around 10,000 years ago, providing resource surpluses that freed people up for other ventures. But what Turchin and his team have found is that the bottom-up theory is wrong, or at least incomplete. ‘Competitions between societies, which historically took the form of warfare, drive the evolution of complex societies,’ he says.

To test the two competing theories, Turchin and company designed two mathematical models for predicting the spread of complex societies. One based only on agriculture, ecology and geography. The other included those three factors, plus warfare. Then, they used data from historical atlases to determine whether these models matched up with the way the different states and empires actually evolved.

The model that included warfare predicted about 65 percent of the historical variance, while the agricultural model explained only about 16 percent, suggesting that warfare was more important in the spread of social norms that lead to complex societies.”

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“These Machines Will Kill The Bad Kind Of Weeds”

September 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Perhaps weedbots will soon be busy in your garden, doing the work now done by herbicides. From Klint Finley at TechCrunch:

“Blue River is designing weed elimination robots for agriculture. No, the company’s not making marijuana crop destructobots — these machines will kill the bad kind of weeds that farmers would otherwise use chemicals, or a legion of weed pullers, to destroy. Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla claims that Blue River’s technology can reduce herbicide use in the U.S. by 250 million pounds a year.

Blue River was founded by Stanford alumni Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden. To make it work, the team has done extensive development of machine vision algorithms for recognizing different types of plants. It’s one of the most ambitious applications of machine vision I’ve seen.”

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