People can’t drive

I’m consistently impressed by the ability of Spotify’s Discovery Weekly to predict and introduce me to music I’ll like. It gets about a 50% hit rate. I have good friends that know what I’ll like musically and are more than capable of putting together a list of 20 tracks with the same degree of success. Unfortunately, none of my friends have the time or inclination to do this for me. Perhaps if I was a better friend they might do. Regardless, Spotify does have the time and the inclination to design and refine something that introduces me to new music, because then I’ll keep using their service. Clearly it gives them something that’s highly defensible in the market for streaming music. For such a long time, machine-learned recommendations have been utter shit. Amazon’s ‘People that like this also like this’ has zero insight into what’s new and it doesn’t seem to take into account what I’ve read and what I haven’t, despite the last 40 books I’ve read being being accessible to them.

And I’m excited to see how autonomous vehicles impact our lives. Already I’m planning a road trip around Croatia in which my whole family get to sit around playing card games in the back of an autonomous VW California, gliding through the night while we’re expertly stewarded around lakes and mountains. People can’t drive. We’re emotional idiots, easily distracted, we get tired. In 2013, there were almost 200k road traffic accidents in the UK. Take a look at this table of causes of road traffic accidents. You can pretty much categorise each of the reasons into “People are idiots”.

Computers and more broadly, machine learning is an extension of our own brains. The bits of our brain that have been around the longest, like the limbic brain are most closely associated to emotions and automatic responses, while the bits on the outside, like the neocortex are much more rational — those are the areas that have developed most recently. But it’s as if we’ve given up on evolution now. It’s too slow, so we’ve started to outsource the more boring, difficult thinking to the machines. And that’s brilliant.