UK to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 - FT
Britain had originally planned to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered cars from 2040, as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and in February Johnson brought this forward to 2035.
Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a speech on environmental policy he is expected to give next week.
If that doesn't include hybrids then I expect the market will have killed off those sales by 2030 largely anyway. Already more than a quarter of all sales are either electric etc or hybrid anyway and it is fast increasing annually. By 2030 I doubt there'd be many such sales left even without a ban.
This is a classic case of substitution activity. What a lot of people need to know right now is the terms and conditions of trade for cars on 1st January 2020. To be certain about 2030 when you have no idea about 7 weeks time is delusional.
Boris is clearly making the mistake of believing that Eco issues are the top of people's priority list. Sure lots of people mention their concern for the environment, but when it comes to brass tax, the vast majority of the public, especially red wall voters, aren't XR lot that see everything through the lens of we must totally change our whole economy, regardless of potential economist impact, to save the planet, and anything slower than yesterday is a war crime.
I doubt Boris will gain a single extra vote for making a big play out of moving forward this deadline another 5 years.
No, he won't directly win any votes.
However, if done properly the huge level of investment needed to achieve this could be directed at the poorer parts of the nation, often around the coast where power is plentiful, to create plenty of job opportunities in businesses that could genuinely grow to be world leading.
Far too much of governing is done on the basis of will it win votes rather than will it be effective. The UK, as with most Western economies, is going to have replace large swathes of its economy with new industries over the next decade - green tech should absolutely be at the front of that effort, popular or not.
But the point is, that it is neither a good policy nor a vote winner. We aren't going to have expanded capacity online and built the nationwide charging infrastructure in 9 years.
Why not?
As has already been said a quarter of all cars meet these conditions already and that quantity is growing exponentially year on year already.
Unless you're going to ban electric car sales then they're going to displace petrol and diesel anyway. By 2025 it's forecast that new electric vehicles could be as cheap as new petrol at which point why would people choose petrol?
Saying that the government needs to deal with the capacity issues and charging infrastructure and holding them to account for that is more necessary than simply wishing them away by wishing this transformation would be put off.
The cat is already out of the bag. The infrastructure needs to be built now and it needs to be built within the decade. There aren't excuses to put it off or we will suffer the consequences.
You mean the genie is out of the bottle probably.
Conservative bedrock principle: let market forces do the work. Libertarian bedrock principle: don't ban stuff. So "its happening anyway so let's stick in a ban as a gesture" does not seem the kind of approach you should be instinctively supporting. Is it good because it's Boris?
The problems won't be sorted in 10 years time and will differentially affect those who live in the country and used to vote tory. This is as intelligent and helpful as the self imposed brexit deadlines.
It won't do the rustic tory vote any good, is the instant reaction of someone familiar with the Scottish Borders. Low population density, fewer and later charging stations away from the main arterials passing through, longer distances between them, weather blocks on roads. Like mobile phone coverage, only worse (we're not talking about banning landlines). Perhaps biodiesel will be needed for those.
(The Tories already have trains planned lugging the weight of two locomotives (effectively) on each - electric and diesel - as they have ****ed up railway electrification. Trouble is, their idea of out in the railway sticks is not very progressive - IIRC Swansea and Oxford are beyond the rails with the amps thanks to Mr Grayling. Which is nopt a happy precedent.)
If you live in a rural area I would have thought more people would be able to charge at home. You only need charging points if you can't charge at home.
And, if you are rural you are often faced with tens of miles from the nearest petrol station anyways.
Some parts of Epping Forest are a hundred miles from the nearest petrol station
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
I know where you’re coming from but I’m not sure that’s a perfect comparison. Speech recognition and translation services were essentially play things until neural nets were applied to the problem. The right lesson should be the rapid improvement in language recognition and translation service since 2016. It’s become quite remarkably good, even for complex speech to translation such as Mandarin to English.
Equally, most of the actors trying to crack the self driving car problem (including Waymo) have been barking up the wrong tree, because their engineers’ approach pre dates the revolution in neural net image recognition from 2012 onwards and hence they’ve been relying on LIDAR, high def mapping and geolocked routes. The clock hence did not start on driving autonomy until quite recently and even now there are vanishing few players attempting it properly.
Once the right neural net is in place, it largely becomes a data accumulation and labelling problem to crack perception. The DOJO supercomputer Tesla are building to accelerate labelling (essentially automating labelling of 3D 360° video rather than just static frames) will likely be the gamechanger that moves us very close to full autonomy, by solving the perception problem. Personally I think it needs another neural net laid on top to solve the Action stage once you’ve solved Perception but that would be the home straight.
The more interesting question is not when autonomous cars will arrive but what else will the technology bring with it? If you’ve solved complex perception, what else can it do apart from drive cars?
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Currently according to AP - and reflected by NYT - there are 14 seats in the US House of Representatives that are still undecided 11 days after EDay: AND no less than eight of these are in New York State.
Below are the six still-undecided HoR seats from states other than NY. Note that at this stage, the candidate current ahead in the count is most likely to prevail in the end.
CALIFORNIA - two seats > CA CD21 (San Joaquin Valley) = Republican challenger David Valadao (50.7%) currently leads incumbent Democrat TJ Cox (49.3%) by margin of 2,257 votes. > CA CD25 (northern exurbs of LA) = Republican incumbent Mike Garcia (50.02%) now leads Democratic challenger Christy Smith (49.98%) by just 104 votes
IOWA - one seat > IA CD02 (southeast & southcentral Iowa) = open seat now held by Democrat, with Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks (50.01%) holding a lead of 48 votes over Democrat Rita Hart
LOUISIANA - one seat > LA CD05 (central Louisiana plus part of Florida Parishes) = open seat now held by Republican, will be decided by December 5 runoff general election between the top 2 November vote-getters, both GOPers: Luke Letlow (got 33% in Nov) and Lance Harris (17%); rest of vote was split between seven also-rans.
NEW JERSEY - one seat > NJ CD07 (northwest-central New Jersey) = incumbent Democrat Tom Malinowski (50.5%) currently leading by 4,339 votes over Republican challenger Thomas Kean (49.5%); note that Kean is member of a Garden State political dynasty that includes his father (former governor) and many others over the past several centuries.
UTAH - one seat > UT CD04 (Salt Lake City & environs) = Republican challenger Burgess Owens (47.47%) now leads by 1,946 over incumbent Democrat Ben McAdams (46.95%)
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
If you want access to the spreadsheets of various aggregations I generate from this, PM me.
Thanks very much.
I was thinking about creating a model to predict the actual numbers for current days given the partly reported data. Today's total clearly being reported in stages. I'll let you know if I pull my finger out and do so.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
Its not general rewiring. You need up to about 8kW peak to the heat pump, which is the same as the connection to an electric cooker, ie 32A. So its probably an extra cable from the meter cupboard to the heat pump in the worst case.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
I completely agree with that. The work Demis and co* have done is incredible, but while we're getting really good at getting specialist "deep" problems solved, we're becoming painfully aware how difficult some of the broader issues are. It's another reason why I think the last 0.1% of fully autonomous cars is a long way away.
* And a shout out to my own guys at Just who using ML for detecting driving beaviour that leads to accidents
I have a modest investment in IP Group (a listed tech fund), and they have a modest investment in the above.
It simply can't forever be beyond our ability to tap into the source of power that the universe uses for free, and so ostentatiously! (Might be 10,00 years though)
I'm a big fan of stored, indirect fusion.
The way this works is that we use a fusion generator to produce energy concentrated in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. We then use a series of chemical reactions to to turn this fusion into solid fuel. Because this is of insufficient energy density, we subject it to great pressure in an oxygen free environment for a period of time. This reduces the components to CH4, which we can then mix with O2 to generate electricity and charge batteries.
Believe it or not, this is actually done COMMERCIALLY today.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
For some reason when I pressed the link above I got a full blooded argument between Trumps press secretary and a CNN interviewer. This is it. Much more effective in uncovering facts than Andrew Neil's incessant bullying
If you want access to the spreadsheets of various aggregations I generate from this, PM me.
Thanks very much.
I was thinking about creating a model to predict the actual numbers for current days given the partly reported data. Today's total clearly being reported in stages. I'll let you know if I pull my finger out and do so.
Last time I looked at it (for cases), the curve of percentages of reporting - how much of a given day is reported when - seemed to bounce around quite a bit. You could get a crude guesstimate - but not much good for working out if there was going to be a change in the actual case rate...
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
With a heat pump you still have hot water circulation to heat your home. One problem is that the water temperature is lower, so you need to replace all of your radiators to get the same heat output.
I have a modest investment in IP Group (a listed tech fund), and they have a modest investment in the above.
It simply can't forever be beyond our ability to tap into the source of power that the universe uses for free, and so ostentatiously! (Might be 10,00 years though)
I'm a big fan of stored, indirect fusion.
The way this works is that we use a fusion generator to produce energy concentrated in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. We then use a series of chemical reactions to to turn this fusion into solid fuel. Because this is of insufficient energy density, we subject it to great pressure in an oxygen free environment for a period of time. This reduces the components to CH4, which we can then mix with O2 to generate electricity and charge batteries.
Believe it or not, this is actually done COMMERCIALLY today.
Yes, but I understand the stock of reserves generated at an earlier date are being reduced by high levels of consumption, and restocking isn't proceeding at a high enough pace.
Isn't there a TV show called something like "I'm a celebrity get me out of here"? Where they have to tolerate creepy bugs and eat octopus testicles and stuff like that?
Well, why not make one of the tests to spend a week with the Trumps?
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
I know where you’re coming from but I’m not sure that’s a perfect comparison. Speech recognition and translation services were essentially play things until neural nets were applied to the problem. The right lesson should be the rapid improvement in language recognition and translation service since 2016. It’s become quite remarkably good, even for complex speech to translation such as Mandarin to English.
Equally, most of the actors trying to crack the self driving car problem (including Waymo) have been barking up the wrong tree, because their engineers’ approach pre dates the revolution in neural net image recognition from 2012 onwards and hence they’ve been relying on LIDAR, high def mapping and geolocked routes. The clock hence did not start on driving autonomy until quite recently and even now there are vanishing few players attempting it properly.
Once the right neural net is in place, it largely becomes a data accumulation and labelling problem to crack perception. The DOJO supercomputer Tesla are building to accelerate labelling (essentially automating labelling of 3D 360° video rather than just static frames) will likely be the gamechanger that moves us very close to full autonomy, by solving the perception problem. Personally I think it needs another neural net laid on top to solve the Action stage once you’ve solved Perception but that would be the home straight.
The more interesting question is not when autonomous cars will arrive but what else will the technology bring with it? If you’ve solved complex perception, what else can it do apart from drive cars?
Sure: and that brings really assisted driving. And you know what? It'll probably be safer than a human by 2030.
But people are a lot less forgiving of machines that make mistakes than people that make mistakes.
I have a modest investment in IP Group (a listed tech fund), and they have a modest investment in the above.
It simply can't forever be beyond our ability to tap into the source of power that the universe uses for free, and so ostentatiously! (Might be 10,00 years though)
I'm a big fan of stored, indirect fusion.
The way this works is that we use a fusion generator to produce energy concentrated in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. We then use a series of chemical reactions to to turn this fusion into solid fuel. Because this is of insufficient energy density, we subject it to great pressure in an oxygen free environment for a period of time. This reduces the components to CH4, which we can then mix with O2 to generate electricity and charge batteries.
Believe it or not, this is actually done COMMERCIALLY today.
Yes, but I understand the stock of reserves generated at an earlier date are being reduced by high levels of consumption, and restocking isn't proceeding at a high enough pace.
Just put a wind turbine on the roof of every car, so we generate electricity when we drive. When you're finished your drive, you plug the car in to feed the excess electricity into the grid.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
Its not general rewiring. You need up to about 8kW peak to the heat pump, which is the same as the connection to an electric cooker, ie 32A. So its probably an extra cable from the meter cupboard to the heat pump in the worst case.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
With a heat pump you still have hot water circulation to heat your home. One problem is that the water temperature is lower, so you need to replace all of your radiators to get the same heat output.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Just put a wind turbine on the roof of every car, so we generate electricity when we drive. When you're finished your drive, you plug the car in to feed the excess electricity into the grid.
Problem solved.
Now ask me about peace in the Middle East.
I suspect that, with your cognomen you may know science and are taking the pee. But I actually did hear that suggestion a year or so ago soberly delivered as a solution to energy conservation.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
I know where you’re coming from but I’m not sure that’s a perfect comparison. Speech recognition and translation services were essentially play things until neural nets were applied to the problem. The right lesson should be the rapid improvement in language recognition and translation service since 2016. It’s become quite remarkably good, even for complex speech to translation such as Mandarin to English.
Equally, most of the actors trying to crack the self driving car problem (including Waymo) have been barking up the wrong tree, because their engineers’ approach pre dates the revolution in neural net image recognition from 2012 onwards and hence they’ve been relying on LIDAR, high def mapping and geolocked routes. The clock hence did not start on driving autonomy until quite recently and even now there are vanishing few players attempting it properly.
Once the right neural net is in place, it largely becomes a data accumulation and labelling problem to crack perception. The DOJO supercomputer Tesla are building to accelerate labelling (essentially automating labelling of 3D 360° video rather than just static frames) will likely be the gamechanger that moves us very close to full autonomy, by solving the perception problem. Personally I think it needs another neural net laid on top to solve the Action stage once you’ve solved Perception but that would be the home straight.
The more interesting question is not when autonomous cars will arrive but what else will the technology bring with it? If you’ve solved complex perception, what else can it do apart from drive cars?
Sure: and that brings really assisted driving. And you know what? It'll probably be safer than a human by 2030.
But people are a lot less forgiving of machines that make mistakes than people that make mistakes.
Road injuries and deaths might become a relatively rare phenomenon before the decade is out if these efforts are allowed to continue. Those that do occur might seem like quite eccentric errors to a human driver but I’m not convinced people will argue too hard against the cold numbers. And the convenience. People are willing to forgive a lot for convenience.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Well, if I had to choose between running over a child, two OAPs, or a spurious apostrophe in "it's", I know which one I would choose
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
But did not old style town gas contain hydrogen (as well as CH4, CO etc.)?
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
Is it not for this reason something of a myth that the natural gas distribution network can be easily turned towards H2 distribution?
Just put a wind turbine on the roof of every car, so we generate electricity when we drive. When you're finished your drive, you plug the car in to feed the excess electricity into the grid.
Problem solved.
Now ask me about peace in the Middle East.
I suspect that, with your cognomen you may know science and are taking the pee. But I actually did hear that suggestion a year or so ago soberly delivered as a solution to energy conservation.
Oh, you're worried about the conservation of energy? That's easily solved. You just start every journey at the top of a hill.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
With a heat pump you still have hot water circulation to heat your home. One problem is that the water temperature is lower, so you need to replace all of your radiators to get the same heat output.
Actually I might have one room that runs a little cooler than intended, about 19 degrees, rather than 21, but I haven't had to change any radiators.
The difference is that it takes longer to heat up. With a gas boiler you might have hot water at 70 degrees. So it heats up quickly. The heat pump can get to about 55 degrees for hot water, but it works much more efficiently at lower remperatures because of thermodynamics, it takes less energy to pump heat when the temperature difference is smaller. So currently I get 6 times as much energy out as electricity in with an output at 35 degrees and only about 3 times as much at 50 degrees.
So the pump sets its temperature for heating based on the outside temperature at enough to keep the house warm, but it might only be 30 degrees. It does get the room to temperature but it takes longer.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Well, if I had to choose between running over a child, two OAPs, or a spurious apostrophe in "it's", I know which one I would choose
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
Is it not for this reason something of a myth that the natural gas distribution network can be easily turned towards H2 distribution?
Yes - to be frank, the experiments in adding H2 to natural gas are a bit.... interesting....
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Well, if I had to choose between running over a child, two OAPs, or a spurious apostrophe in "it's", I know which one I would choose
PB Pedants Rule, OK!
It wasn't my intention to be pedantic, I just wanted to dodge the age-old intentions/consequences debate. The consequence was pedantry, but my heart was in the right place.
Is this the alleged dialogue where NS tells Leslie Evans, the senior civil servant in Scotland, to show zero tolerance towards subjects of sexual harassment complaints - months before she said she knew about the AS allegations?
It is well known that everyone involved in medical research is white... 🙄 EDIT: ah, you deleted it before I clicked "quote". Probably a belatedly good idea.
Is this the alleged dialogue where NS tells Leslie Evans, the senior civil servant in Scotland, to show zero tolerance towards subjects of sexual harassment complaints - months before she said she knew about the AS allegations?
What I don't understand is why this should be a surprise. It was a response to the MeToo business and the various Westminster and Holyrood) scandals. I would have thought that she could do nothing else in the circumstances and given her feminist beliefs.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
National Grid are on the case with regard to embrittlement. And there's no problem with the lower pressure plastic pipes.
I have a modest investment in IP Group (a listed tech fund), and they have a modest investment in the above.
It simply can't forever be beyond our ability to tap into the source of power that the universe uses for free, and so ostentatiously! (Might be 10,00 years though)
I'm a big fan of stored, indirect fusion.
The way this works is that we use a fusion generator to produce energy concentrated in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. We then use a series of chemical reactions to to turn this fusion into solid fuel. Because this is of insufficient energy density, we subject it to great pressure in an oxygen free environment for a period of time. This reduces the components to CH4, which we can then mix with O2 to generate electricity and charge batteries.
Believe it or not, this is actually done COMMERCIALLY today.
The problem is that your fusion generator is now brighter than when it used up some of the carbon dioxide feedstock for creating your CH4, so when you close the cycle you raise the temperature of the Earth in a way that destabilises agriculture and ice sheets.
It is well known that everyone involved in medical research is white... 🙄 EDIT: ah, you deleted it before I clicked "quote". Probably a belatedly good idea.
Just like old times
What do you make of Sir Keir's Islamophobia problem?
When on a German autobahn in my holiday hire car I would typically set cruise control to 150km/h.
Presumably high speeds in e-cars means that the range becomes far less than what's advertised?
What would the range be of a normal e-car today, if the full charge was used at about 80-85mph on a clear motorway ?
I went electric in June with a Kia e-niro. The range of 290 miles is accurate, and isn't much affected by motorway speeds. It is far as I want to drive in a day.
It is not speed so much as using the heating and lights that reduces the range in winter, but still 240 miles.
It is a great car to drive, the quickest car that I have ever had, and really well made. I am a convert, and the tax advantages if you buy as a company car make for excellent value.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
With a heat pump you still have hot water circulation to heat your home. One problem is that the water temperature is lower, so you need to replace all of your radiators to get the same heat output.
Actually I might have one room that runs a little cooler than intended, about 19 degrees, rather than 21, but I haven't had to change any radiators.
The difference is that it takes longer to heat up. With a gas boiler you might have hot water at 70 degrees. So it heats up quickly. The heat pump can get to about 55 degrees for hot water, but it works much more efficiently at lower remperatures because of thermodynamics, it takes less energy to pump heat when the temperature difference is smaller. So currently I get 6 times as much energy out as electricity in with an output at 35 degrees and only about 3 times as much at 50 degrees.
So the pump sets its temperature for heating based on the outside temperature at enough to keep the house warm, but it might only be 30 degrees. It does get the room to temperature but it takes longer.
21? That's our overnight set point!
With poorly insulated older properties getting them to warm up can be an issue. Unless we also apply loads of thermal insulation to the outside of single walled houses people are going to have to invest in woollens.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
No, I am really encouraged to hear that @isam has awakened to the issues of islamophobia in British society, and its presence in all parts of society. He will become a progressive yet 😇
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Well, if I had to choose between running over a child, two OAPs, or a spurious apostrophe in "it's", I know which one I would choose
PB Pedants Rule, OK!
It wasn't my intention to be pedantic, I just wanted to dodge the age-old intentions/consequences debate. The consequence was pedantry, but my heart was in the right place.
Oh, what a shame. Love a bit of pedantry myself. In fact was thinking of changing my moniker to Peter_the_Pedant.
When on a German autobahn in my holiday hire car I would typically set cruise control to 150km/h.
Presumably high speeds in e-cars means that the range becomes far less than what's advertised?
What would the range be of a normal e-car today, if the full charge was used at about 80-85mph on a clear motorway ?
I went electric in June with a Kia e-niro. The range of 290 miles is accurate, and isn't much affected by motorway speeds. It is far as I want to drive in a day.
It is not speed so much as using the heating and lights that reduces the range in winter, but still 240 miles.
It is a great car to drive, the quickest car that I have ever had, and really well made. I am a convert, and the tax advantages if you buy as a company car make for excellent value.
Yes the company car tax advantages are significant. Cold weather affects range more than anything else, though there is some difference with motorway driving.
Interestingly tesla are putting heat pump in the upgrade to the model X to reduce the battery drain from heating or cooling. I wonder if other suppliers will adopt the same idea.
No, I am really encouraged to hear that @isam has awakened to the issues of islamophobia in British society, and its presence in all parts of society. He will become a progressive yet 😇
No, I am really encouraged to hear that @isam has awakened to the issues of islamophobia in British society, and its presence in all parts of society. He will become a progressive yet 😇
I dislike hearing my name and the word "progressive" from a Doctor thankyou
I have a modest investment in IP Group (a listed tech fund), and they have a modest investment in the above.
It simply can't forever be beyond our ability to tap into the source of power that the universe uses for free, and so ostentatiously! (Might be 10,00 years though)
I'm a big fan of stored, indirect fusion.
The way this works is that we use a fusion generator to produce energy concentrated in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. We then use a series of chemical reactions to to turn this fusion into solid fuel. Because this is of insufficient energy density, we subject it to great pressure in an oxygen free environment for a period of time. This reduces the components to CH4, which we can then mix with O2 to generate electricity and charge batteries.
Believe it or not, this is actually done COMMERCIALLY today.
The problem is that your fusion generator is now brighter than when it used up some of the carbon dioxide feedstock for creating your CH4, so when you close the cycle you raise the temperature of the Earth in a way that destabilises agriculture and ice sheets.
You're just not thinking long term enough. In time another equilibrium will be reached, it just may not involve human beings.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Regarding your earlier point: "...not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump...".
We have had an airsource heatpump for 10 years now. It's maintentance-free and heats our three bed bungalow really well.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
But did not old style town gas contain hydrogen (as well as CH4, CO etc.)?
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
On that point, would the current standards for rewiring a house be OK for future conversion to electric heating, do you know? We have a gas c/h system which is newish. And need to rewire soon. Not keen on dumping the gas c/h at present till the costs are more similar. I'm just wondering if the rewiring needs a degree of future proofing. Or if the heating system will be so disruptive in its installation that some rewiring won't add more h assle.
With a heat pump you still have hot water circulation to heat your home. One problem is that the water temperature is lower, so you need to replace all of your radiators to get the same heat output.
Actually I might have one room that runs a little cooler than intended, about 19 degrees, rather than 21, but I haven't had to change any radiators.
The difference is that it takes longer to heat up. With a gas boiler you might have hot water at 70 degrees. So it heats up quickly. The heat pump can get to about 55 degrees for hot water, but it works much more efficiently at lower remperatures because of thermodynamics, it takes less energy to pump heat when the temperature difference is smaller. So currently I get 6 times as much energy out as electricity in with an output at 35 degrees and only about 3 times as much at 50 degrees.
So the pump sets its temperature for heating based on the outside temperature at enough to keep the house warm, but it might only be 30 degrees. It does get the room to temperature but it takes longer.
21? That's our overnight set point!
With poorly insulated older properties getting them to warm up can be an issue. Unless we also apply loads of thermal insulation to the outside of single walled houses people are going to have to invest in woollens.
I think improving insulation on older houses is going to happen under any 'green deal' programmes any government initiates. Its a lot cheaper in the long run to insulate instead of building a national infrastructure to heat a lot of poorly insulated properties. Peak power is the most expensive by far.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
But did not old style town gas contain hydrogen (as well as CH4, CO etc.)?
On that basis, water contains hydrogen!
I do have a chemistry A-level *hurt face*. Town gas, as made from coal in the old days, in places like th is
It is well known that everyone involved in medical research is white... 🙄 EDIT: ah, you deleted it before I clicked "quote". Probably a belatedly good idea.
Just like old times
What do you make of Sir Keir's Islamophobia problem?
As someone who thought Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech wasn't racist I'm scratching my head what Keir Starmer might have said that you found offensive to Muslims?
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Doesn't electrolysis or water just produce hydrogen and oxygen?
I went to an eco talk where the speaker was saying that offshore wind farms are so cheap now we should install enough to cover our needs even when the wind is relatively light. On the days when the wind blows hard, the excess capacity could be used to generate hydrogen.
It is well known that everyone involved in medical research is white... 🙄 EDIT: ah, you deleted it before I clicked "quote". Probably a belatedly good idea.
Just like old times
What do you make of Sir Keir's Islamophobia problem?
As someone who thought Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech wasn't racist I'm scratching my head what Keir Starmer might have said that you found offensive to Muslims?
Scratch it no more Rog! It isn't that Sir Keir has said anything, more that Labour's Muslims feel that Islamophobia in the party isn't tackled under his leadership. I have linked to the report, I am sure it will be covered in a thread header soon anyway
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Then I guess you get into carbon capture issues, which feels like it needs to be done centrally rather than every boiler havng a second pipe to route the carbon back for disposal. Or perhaps into community schemes where there is a central boiler and heat is distributed like in parts of Europe.
There isn't really an easy answer. Though wearing another jumper each to take the thermostat back to 21 might help?
When on a German autobahn in my holiday hire car I would typically set cruise control to 150km/h.
Presumably high speeds in e-cars means that the range becomes far less than what's advertised?
What would the range be of a normal e-car today, if the full charge was used at about 80-85mph on a clear motorway ?
I went electric in June with a Kia e-niro. The range of 290 miles is accurate, and isn't much affected by motorway speeds. It is far as I want to drive in a day.
It is not speed so much as using the heating and lights that reduces the range in winter, but still 240 miles.
It is a great car to drive, the quickest car that I have ever had, and really well made. I am a convert, and the tax advantages if you buy as a company car make for excellent value.
I am looking for a new car, probably hybrid but possibly electric. The e-niro is on my list and it is certainly the quickest (0-60 in 7.5 secs). But is is also the most expensive. I am tempted by the hybrid replacement for my existing Skoda Superb ( which it is!).
When on a German autobahn in my holiday hire car I would typically set cruise control to 150km/h.
Presumably high speeds in e-cars means that the range becomes far less than what's advertised?
What would the range be of a normal e-car today, if the full charge was used at about 80-85mph on a clear motorway ?
I went electric in June with a Kia e-niro. The range of 290 miles is accurate, and isn't much affected by motorway speeds. It is far as I want to drive in a day.
It is not speed so much as using the heating and lights that reduces the range in winter, but still 240 miles.
It is a great car to drive, the quickest car that I have ever had, and really well made. I am a convert, and the tax advantages if you buy as a company car make for excellent value.
I am looking for a new car, probably hybrid but possibly electric. The e-niro is on my list and it is certainly the quickest (0-60 in 7.5 secs). But is is also the most expensive. I am tempted by the hybrid replacement for my existing Skoda Superb ( which it is!).
If it’s as rubbish as the new Octavia, I wouldn’t be tempted. I had a test drive in one and really disliked it.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Well, if I had to choose between running over a child, two OAPs, or a spurious apostrophe in "it's", I know which one I would choose
PB Pedants Rule, OK!
It's not even a spurious apostrophe! It is not even a spurious apostrophe!
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Then I guess you get into carbon capture issues, which feels like it needs to be done centrally rather than every boiler havng a second pipe to route the carbon back for disposal. Or perhaps into community schemes where there is a central boiler and heat is distributed like in parts of Europe.
There isn't really an easy answer. Though wearing another jumper each to take the thermostat back to 21 might help?
21? Even at its highest mine is never set above 18!
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Then I guess you get into carbon capture issues, which feels like it needs to be done centrally rather than every boiler havng a second pipe to route the carbon back for disposal. Or perhaps into community schemes where there is a central boiler and heat is distributed like in parts of Europe.
There isn't really an easy answer. Though wearing another jumper each to take the thermostat back to 21 might help?
Through the cycle, methane is simply a lot cleaner than the other fossil fuel alternatives. It's also abundant, and with the advent of LNG, is a secure source of energy.
Over time, and as batteries get better, it'll be replaced. But as a bridging fuel, it's unmatched.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Doesn't electrolysis or water just produce hydrogen and oxygen?
I went to an eco talk where the speaker was saying that offshore wind farms are so cheap now we should install enough to cover our needs even when the wind is relatively light. On the days when the wind blows hard, the excess capacity could be used to generate hydrogen.
As I said, hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source. Of all the energy storage options, I like the idea of compressing/liquifying air until energy is needed and then using it to drive turbines best I think, as its based on mature technologies and not as explosive as hydrogen (well unless the tanks warm up). But no national distribution network needed.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
But did not old style town gas contain hydrogen (as well as CH4, CO etc.)?
On that basis, water contains hydrogen!
I do have a chemistry A-level *hurt face*. Town gas, as made from coal in the old days, in places like th is
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Doesn't electrolysis or water just produce hydrogen and oxygen?
I went to an eco talk where the speaker was saying that offshore wind farms are so cheap now we should install enough to cover our needs even when the wind is relatively light. On the days when the wind blows hard, the excess capacity could be used to generate hydrogen.
As I said, hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source. Of all the energy storage options, I like the idea of compressing/liquifying air until energy is needed and then using it to drive turbines best I think, as its based on mature technologies and not as explosive as hydrogen (well unless the tanks warm up). But no national distribution network needed.
CAES works well with CCGTs and can be used to dramatically increase their efficiency. IIRC (and it's been a while since I've spent time on this), all the German CAES plants work alongside gas fired powered stations.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
But did not old style town gas contain hydrogen (as well as CH4, CO etc.)?
On that basis, water contains hydrogen!
I do have a chemistry A-level *hurt face*. Town gas, as made from coal in the old days, in places like th is
So I was very surprised to learn that embrittlement was a problem with the old mains today.
You're right - it was your referencing of methane (CH4) that confused me.
It's amazing to think that coal gas was a mix of carbon monoxide, methane and various odds and sods, and we happily piped it around the country.
Well, locally rather than in big pipes, but yes! Very convenient suicide method. I know I've mentioned this before on PB, but it also had a third use, to electrify milk. The point is that the jakies would find milk early in the morning when their red biddy and meths had run out - in the close of a Glasgow tenement which was gas lit with (I assume) coal gas.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
But did not old style town gas contain hydrogen (as well as CH4, CO etc.)?
On that basis, water contains hydrogen!
I do have a chemistry A-level *hurt face*. Town gas, as made from coal in the old days, in places like th is
So I was very surprised to learn that embrittlement was a problem with the old mains today.
You're right - it was your referencing of methane (CH4) that confused me.
It's amazing to think that coal gas was a mix of carbon monoxide, methane and various odds and sods, and we happily piped it around the country.
Well, locally rather than in big pipes, but yes! Very convenient suicide method. I know I've mentioned this before on PB, but it also had a third use, to electrify milk. The point is that the jakies would find milk early in the morning when their red biddy and meths had run out - in the close of a Glasgow tenement which was gas lit with (I assume) coal gas.
The variability of wind means lot of redundancy needed in the system (at great cost). Long term reliability and maintenance of offshore wind is another concern. A secure plan would increase nuclear and would be looking at newer nuclear technologies especially small scale fail-safe designs. There would be a plan B allowing rapid deployment of much higher nuclear component if (when) it becomes obvious that it is needed. Hydrogen can be created by the redundant backup capacity and changed into artificial petrol and gas using CO2 from the atmosphere or seawater which avoids having to change transport and domestic heating drastically over a short timeframe. I also think we have longer than the current rather alarmist timeframe but that is another argument.
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Doesn't electrolysis or water just produce hydrogen and oxygen?
I went to an eco talk where the speaker was saying that offshore wind farms are so cheap now we should install enough to cover our needs even when the wind is relatively light. On the days when the wind blows hard, the excess capacity could be used to generate hydrogen.
As I said, hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source. Of all the energy storage options, I like the idea of compressing/liquifying air until energy is needed and then using it to drive turbines best I think, as its based on mature technologies and not as explosive as hydrogen (well unless the tanks warm up). But no national distribution network needed.
CAES works well with CCGTs and can be used to dramatically increase their efficiency. IIRC (and it's been a while since I've spent time on this), all the German CAES plants work alongside gas fired powered stations.
Its a pity they don't do things like that on a domestic scale. During the summer I probably get close to generating 60kWh a day from solar panels and only use a bit of it for charging the car and general things in the house. And it's easy to get more panels. But they only produce a few kWH at best in the winter, when I probably average more than 60kWh a day for car and heating. Storing energy from the summer for the winter is the problem.
As has already been said a quarter of all cars meet these conditions already and that quantity is growing exponentially year on year already.
Unless you're going to ban electric car sales then they're going to displace petrol and diesel anyway. By 2025 it's forecast that new electric vehicles could be as cheap as new petrol at which point why would people choose petrol?
Saying that the government needs to deal with the capacity issues and charging infrastructure and holding them to account for that is more necessary than simply wishing them away by wishing this transformation would be put off.
The cat is already out of the bag. The infrastructure needs to be built now and it needs to be built within the decade. There aren't excuses to put it off or we will suffer the consequences.
Broadly agree, but at present charging stations are bottom-up, provided by local councils (apart from those that people have at home or very progressive workplaces). There are the really fast ones that charge you up in half an hour and the ones that take a few houts. My council's problem is that we are impeccably pro-change but not many people actually want the charging points yet. So how many spaces of our (normally overcrowded) car parks do we take up with them? And how ferocious should the penalty be for not moving on after half an hour on the fast ones?
COVID is greatly reducing parking so we have space to think about it, but beyond that - well, we will try to gradually add chargers to stay just ahead of the curve and see what happens, but it's finger-in-the-air stuff and every council will make different assessments. I agree it's doable, but really it needs a national scheme.
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
Interesting problem. My conclusion is different to yours. I would not bloody my hands killing the innocent. Part of my decision-making process is the lack of faith I have in the premise. If I were to pull the trigger and then they said "haha!" and killed the other 19 anyway, I would feel pretty awful. I can guess others would shrug and walk away knowing the consequences are just the same, and that's ok... it's just not me.
In twenty years time we might be having this discussion with a deep artificial neural net that has swerved to avoid a child and killed two OAPs. It's defence might be - I couldn't kill the child. It's just not me.
Well, if I had to choose between running over a child, two OAPs, or a spurious apostrophe in "it's", I know which one I would choose
PB Pedants Rule, OK!
It wasn't my intention to be pedantic, I just wanted to dodge the age-old intentions/consequences debate. The consequence was pedantry, but my heart was in the right place.
Oh, what a shame. Love a bit of pedantry myself. In fact was thinking of changing my moniker to Peter_the_Pedant.
And then we'll get another poster changing his name to "Peter from Pedantry" just to keep us all on our toes!
Electric cars aren't the difficult bit of moving from fossil fuels.
Heating is a much bigger use of gas or oil. Heat pumps are great, though take a bit of time to get used too, but not everyone has the space for a ground source heat pump. I cant see how the transition from gas for heating is going to happen quickly.
Hydrogen. It does mean everyone needs a new boiler, but easier to meet the peak winter demand than with electricity. Plus we don't end up scrapping the entire gas distribution network that is still in the process of being upgraded from iron to plastic.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
Hydrogen embrittlement is such fun. Plus hydrogen loves to escape - *through* solid materials.
And then you come to the realisation that hydrogen isn't really a fuel. Its an energy storage/transport system, since the hydrogen needs to be generated first. And if you look at the big picture, its not a very good idea. You need electricity to generate it, and a network to transport it. But if you used heat pumps you need 30% or less of the electric energy, because you pump the rest from the environment, and you only need one energy transport system, not two.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
Agreed.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
Adding carbon capture to everyone's gas boiler would be a bit of a faff.
Adding it to a central hydrogen plant is a piece of piss.
As has already been said a quarter of all cars meet these conditions already and that quantity is growing exponentially year on year already.
Unless you're going to ban electric car sales then they're going to displace petrol and diesel anyway. By 2025 it's forecast that new electric vehicles could be as cheap as new petrol at which point why would people choose petrol?
Saying that the government needs to deal with the capacity issues and charging infrastructure and holding them to account for that is more necessary than simply wishing them away by wishing this transformation would be put off.
The cat is already out of the bag. The infrastructure needs to be built now and it needs to be built within the decade. There aren't excuses to put it off or we will suffer the consequences.
Broadly agree, but at present charging stations are bottom-up, provided by local councils (apart from those that people have at home or very progressive workplaces). There are the really fast ones that charge you up in half an hour and the ones that take a few houts. My council's problem is that we are impeccably pro-change but not many people actually want the charging points yet. So how many spaces of our (normally overcrowded) car parks do we take up with them? And how ferocious should the penalty be for not moving on after half an hour on the fast ones?
COVID is greatly reducing parking so we have space to think about it, but beyond that - well, we will try to gradually add chargers to stay just ahead of the curve and see what happens, but it's finger-in-the-air stuff and every council will make different assessments. I agree it's doable, but really it needs a national scheme.
I guess Godalming, if that's where you are, has most of the houses having drives to park in, so very different from London or other cities, and zi can see why demand would be low. I think people like the big supermarkets with large car parks might be well placed to make a business out of charging electric cars for people without facilities at home.
The variability of wind means lot of redundancy needed in the system (at great cost). Long term reliability and maintenance of offshore wind is another concern. A secure plan would increase nuclear and would be looking at newer nuclear technologies especially small scale fail-safe designs. There would be a plan B allowing rapid deployment of much higher nuclear component if (when) it becomes obvious that it is needed. Hydrogen can be created by the redundant backup capacity and changed into artificial petrol and gas using CO2 from the atmosphere or seawater which avoids having to change transport and domestic heating drastically over a short timeframe. I also think we have longer than the current rather alarmist timeframe but that is another argument.
This is the error everyone makes: they think that the infrastructure (power stations) is expensive.
Modern combined cycle gas turbines are cheap to build, and have very low maintenance costs. They're also efficient, and relatively green.
Open cycle gas turbines are even cheaper (albeit nowhere near as efficient).
You could build enough gas generating capacity for total peak UK demand for less than the price of Hinckley Point C. And you have massively lower maintenance and operational costs too. (Albeit you pay more for the natural gas itself than for the uranium.)
2030 is an age away in AI development terms. I’d say better odds than not that drivers won’t be needed for cars by then. And if that happens, the economic forcing factors will mean it becomes quite rare for individuals to purchase, service and charge cars in large parts of the country.
As for the choice of drivetrain, it blows my mind with incentives and depreciation curves as they are, that anyone apart from apartment dwelllers or enthusiasts are still buying petrol or diesel new. Money down the toilet even today. No doubt the refuseniks will come crying for a taxpayer funded scrappage scheme when they realise what a poor decision they made buying petrol/diesel anytime after about 2024.
The government giving clear signals on the direction of the market (dressed up as a future ban) is great news because it lessens the scale of dissent when we get there.
Self driving cars are like speech recognition. It's easy to get to 99.9% (we got there with Dragon Dictate and IBM Naturally Speaking in 1999), but getting the last 0.1% that takes it from convenience feature on the highway, to actually be able to take full control of the car is not easy.
I'm in Phoenix next week and will try and travel in the Google self driving taxis while I'm there. It will be very interesting to experience.
And of course unlike speech recognition mis-translating say one word in a 1000, a self driving car making a mistake once in a 1000 miles = massive increase in road traffic accidents.
Oh, it's even worse than that. Imagine that a self driving cars realises that an accident is inevitable. It has to make a choice between hitting a baby in a pram or swerving and taking out an old person.
What should it do?
The old trolley problem :-)
My point was even without the ethics issues, we aren't close on the fully autonomous driving cars. Part of the problem is their reliance on deep neural networks, which are great at the low hanging fruit, but increasingly we are finding that they don't actually learn what people think they do and getting from great to perfect is basically impossible with the current paradigm even with the attitude of "just throw more labelled data at it".
Increasingly leading lights in the AI / ML world are saying that deep neural nets aren't the solution, they aren't the future, and that there needs to be a lot of work on thinking about different ideas. Meanwhile, Waymo have gone full "throw every bit at data at the neural net will do the trick" approach.
Deep artificial neural nets can't explain or justify their actions. Deep human neural nets are experts at explaining and justifying their actions. The artificials will catch up.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
The issue is that you’re turning an ‘accident’ into a ‘deliberate’, a solution that has been thought through in advance that leads to human death.
Who will stand behind this in an American court, against a bereaved family asking for £100m compensation from Google or Tesla?
UK to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 - FT
Britain had originally planned to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered cars from 2040, as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and in February Johnson brought this forward to 2035.
Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a speech on environmental policy he is expected to give next week.
If that doesn't include hybrids then I expect the market will have killed off those sales by 2030 largely anyway. Already more than a quarter of all sales are either electric etc or hybrid anyway and it is fast increasing annually. By 2030 I doubt there'd be many such sales left even without a ban.
This is a classic case of substitution activity. What a lot of people need to know right now is the terms and conditions of trade for cars on 1st January 2020. To be certain about 2030 when you have no idea about 7 weeks time is delusional.
Boris is clearly making the mistake of believing that Eco issues are the top of people's priority list. Sure lots of people mention their concern for the environment, but when it comes to brass tax, the vast majority of the public, especially red wall voters, aren't XR lot that see everything through the lens of we must totally change our whole economy, regardless of potential economist impact, to save the planet, and anything slower than yesterday is a war crime.
I doubt Boris will gain a single extra vote for making a big play out of moving forward this deadline another 5 years.
No, he won't directly win any votes.
However, if done properly the huge level of investment needed to achieve this could be directed at the poorer parts of the nation, often around the coast where power is plentiful, to create plenty of job opportunities in businesses that could genuinely grow to be world leading.
Far too much of governing is done on the basis of will it win votes rather than will it be effective. The UK, as with most Western economies, is going to have replace large swathes of its economy with new industries over the next decade - green tech should absolutely be at the front of that effort, popular or not.
But the point is, that it is neither a good policy nor a vote winner. We aren't going to have expanded capacity online and built the nationwide charging infrastructure in 9 years.
Why not?
As has already been said a quarter of all cars meet these conditions already and that quantity is growing exponentially year on year already.
Unless you're going to ban electric car sales then they're going to displace petrol and diesel anyway. By 2025 it's forecast that new electric vehicles could be as cheap as new petrol at which point why would people choose petrol?
Saying that the government needs to deal with the capacity issues and charging infrastructure and holding them to account for that is more necessary than simply wishing them away by wishing this transformation would be put off.
The cat is already out of the bag. The infrastructure needs to be built now and it needs to be built within the decade. There aren't excuses to put it off or we will suffer the consequences.
Range will matter as well as price.
But that becomes less important if you have a widespread reliable charging network.
If I had decided to continue with two cars, rather than one, one would be electric for commuting to work. As it is, I’ve gone with a modern engined petrol.
I will admit though I do like manual gearshift too. I’ve driven many automatics but never found one I really liked. Equally, an electric engine probably would work sufficiently differently to make that less of an issue.
Range and charging times. Its all well and good saying we have a network of charging stations, but if you have to wait 2-3hrs to recharge your car, long journeys become very problematic.
All of this will be solved, will they be solved in 9 years? And at a price that is affordable to the consumer? I don't know.
In California the fast charging infrastructure is getting really rather good. I drove 500 miles from Monterey to Los Angeles with just a single 30 minutes charging break (which we needed anyway to eat food and use the bathroom).
Will there be enough chargers to allow that trip, when half the cars on the road are electric?
Supply creates its own demand (and vice versa).
Depends on what the supply is of. The stone age didn't end because the supply of stone couldn't keep up.
The variability of wind means lot of redundancy needed in the system (at great cost). Long term reliability and maintenance of offshore wind is another concern. A secure plan would increase nuclear and would be looking at newer nuclear technologies especially small scale fail-safe designs. There would be a plan B allowing rapid deployment of much higher nuclear component if (when) it becomes obvious that it is needed. Hydrogen can be created by the redundant backup capacity and changed into artificial petrol and gas using CO2 from the atmosphere or seawater which avoids having to change transport and domestic heating drastically over a short timeframe. I also think we have longer than the current rather alarmist timeframe but that is another argument.
This is the error everyone makes: they think that the infrastructure (power stations) is expensive.
Modern combined cycle gas turbines are cheap to build, and have very low maintenance costs. They're also efficient, and relatively green.
Open cycle gas turbines are even cheaper (albeit nowhere near as efficient).
You could build enough gas generating capacity for total peak UK demand for less than the price of Hinckley Point C. And you have massively lower maintenance and operational costs too. (Albeit you pay more for the natural gas itself than for the uranium.)
I thought it was getting to the point where the whole life cost of new renewable capacity was cheaper than gas. I guess when the cost of renewable power plus storage to make it reliable goes below that of gas, then fossil fuel usage will disappear quite quickly.
And then the politics in the middle East and Russia etc gets very interesting...
Comments
Equally, most of the actors trying to crack the self driving car problem (including Waymo) have been barking up the wrong tree, because their engineers’ approach pre dates the revolution in neural net image recognition from 2012 onwards and hence they’ve been relying on LIDAR, high def mapping and geolocked routes. The clock hence did not start on driving autonomy until quite recently and even now there are vanishing few players attempting it properly.
Once the right neural net is in place, it largely becomes a data accumulation and labelling problem to crack perception. The DOJO supercomputer Tesla are building to accelerate labelling (essentially automating labelling of 3D 360° video rather than just static frames) will likely be the gamechanger that moves us very close to full autonomy, by solving the perception problem. Personally I think it needs another neural net laid on top to solve the Action stage once you’ve solved Perception but that would be the home straight.
The more interesting question is not when autonomous cars will arrive but what else will the technology bring with it? If you’ve solved complex perception, what else can it do apart from drive cars?
We're having 2020 Christmas I on 28th November and 2020 Christmas II on the more traditional day of 25th December.
Bernard Williams gave a better example of the trolley problem.
Jim is a reporter on a botanical expedition in South America. He wanders into the central square of a remote village in which twenty people are restrained against a wall and are being guarded by armed men in uniforms. Pedro, the officer in charge, informs Jim that the captives are a randomly selected group of inhabitants that are about to be killed in order to put an end to recent acts of protest against the government. Pedro would like to honor Jim’s presence by offering him the opportunity to kill one of the innocent villagers himself. If Jim accepts the offer, Pedro will release the surviving nineteen villagers. If Jim refuses, Pedro will kill the twenty prisoners. Violent resistance is not an option. Williams asks, “What should he do?”
I think that the answer is whatever decision that Jim feels he can best live with and justify to himself. How will he feel about his decision? Personally I would shoot the one person rather than hear twenty shots ring out as I walk away leaving 20 bereaved families. I could justify that more easily to myself and others.
AI deep neural nets will eventually need to justify their actions both to themselves and to others as they climb the evolutionary tree.
For example, https://api.coronavirus.data.gov.uk/v1/data?page=1&filters=areaType=nation&structure={"date":"date","areaName":"areaName","areaType":"areaType","areaCode":"areaCode","cases":"newCasesBySpecimenDate","deaths":"newDeaths28DaysByDeathDate","hospitalCases":"hospitalCases","newAdmissions":"newAdmissions","newPillarOne":"newPillarOneTestsByPublishDate","newPillarTwo":"newPillarTwoTestsByPublishDate"}
If you want access to the spreadsheets of various aggregations I generate from this, PM me.
Below are the six still-undecided HoR seats from states other than NY. Note that at this stage, the candidate current ahead in the count is most likely to prevail in the end.
CALIFORNIA - two seats
> CA CD21 (San Joaquin Valley) = Republican challenger David Valadao (50.7%) currently leads incumbent Democrat TJ Cox (49.3%) by margin of 2,257 votes.
> CA CD25 (northern exurbs of LA) = Republican incumbent Mike Garcia (50.02%) now leads Democratic challenger Christy Smith (49.98%) by just 104 votes
IOWA - one seat
> IA CD02 (southeast & southcentral Iowa) = open seat now held by Democrat, with Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks (50.01%) holding a lead of 48 votes over Democrat Rita Hart
LOUISIANA - one seat
> LA CD05 (central Louisiana plus part of Florida Parishes) = open seat now held by Republican, will be decided by December 5 runoff general election between the top 2 November vote-getters, both GOPers: Luke Letlow (got 33% in Nov) and Lance Harris (17%); rest of vote was split between seven also-rans.
NEW JERSEY - one seat
> NJ CD07 (northwest-central New Jersey) = incumbent Democrat Tom Malinowski (50.5%) currently leading by 4,339 votes over Republican challenger Thomas Kean (49.5%); note that Kean is member of a Garden State political dynasty that includes his father (former governor) and many others over the past several centuries.
UTAH - one seat
> UT CD04 (Salt Lake City & environs) = Republican challenger Burgess Owens (47.47%) now leads by 1,946 over incumbent Democrat Ben McAdams (46.95%)
https://twitter.com/ExStrategist/status/1327266264478314496?s=20
https://twitter.com/miqdaad/status/1327573853418221568?s=20
I was thinking about creating a model to predict the actual numbers for current days given the partly reported data. Today's total clearly being reported in stages. I'll let you know if I pull my finger out and do so.
* And a shout out to my own guys at Just who using ML for detecting driving beaviour that leads to accidents
The way this works is that we use a fusion generator to produce energy concentrated in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. We then use a series of chemical reactions to to turn this fusion into solid fuel. Because this is of insufficient energy density, we subject it to great pressure in an oxygen free environment for a period of time. This reduces the components to CH4, which we can then mix with O2 to generate electricity and charge batteries.
Believe it or not, this is actually done COMMERCIALLY today.
Whichever way we do it, it will cost a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBkRIlH-bQ
Well, why not make one of the tests to spend a week with the Trumps?
But people are a lot less forgiving of machines that make mistakes than people that make mistakes.
Problem solved.
Now ask me about peace in the Middle East.
Things are probably worse now
https://www.labourmuslims.org/press
Small i pls Rog
How many of the No 10 team have resigned in solidarity with Cummings?
My count is zero.
I always rather liked it as a celebration when living in the States, and our family kept it up for some years after coming back to the UK.
https://twitter.com/LabourMuslims/status/1327403156440031232?s=20
I sincerely hope they make Game & Watch versions of the early Zelda games (and possibly Advance Wars)
Presumably high speeds in e-cars means that the range becomes far less than what's advertised?
What would the range be of a normal e-car today, if the full charge was used at about 80-85mph on a clear motorway ?
The difference is that it takes longer to heat up. With a gas boiler you might have hot water at 70 degrees. So it heats up quickly. The heat pump can get to about 55 degrees for hot water, but it works much more efficiently at lower remperatures because of thermodynamics, it takes less energy to pump heat when the temperature difference is smaller. So currently I get 6 times as much energy out as electricity in with an output at 35 degrees and only about 3 times as much at 50 degrees.
So the pump sets its temperature for heating based on the outside temperature at enough to keep the house warm, but it might only be 30 degrees. It does get the room to temperature but it takes longer.
EDIT: ah, you deleted it before I clicked "quote". Probably a belatedly good idea.
What do you make of Sir Keir's Islamophobia problem?
It is not speed so much as using the heating and lights that reduces the range in winter, but still 240 miles.
It is a great car to drive, the quickest car that I have ever had, and really well made. I am a convert, and the tax advantages if you buy as a company car make for excellent value.
With poorly insulated older properties getting them to warm up can be an issue. Unless we also apply loads of thermal insulation to the outside of single walled houses people are going to have to invest in woollens.
And there are better ways of storing energy emerging.
P.S. After Biden, how is your 'charisma' theory working out?
Interestingly tesla are putting heat pump in the upgrade to the model X to reduce the battery drain from heating or cooling. I wonder if other suppliers will adopt the same idea.
I think it's working out reasonably well. Trump was always behind, even when he became President, but outperformed the polls again
We have had an airsource heatpump for 10 years now. It's maintentance-free and heats our three bed bungalow really well.
And given most methods of getting hydrogen involve methane, why not simply use that?
https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/biggar-gasworks-museum/history/
The town gas contained free hydrogen gas, the H2 stuff, diatomic molecules and all that, in non-trivial amounts.
https://semspub.epa.gov/work/01/458914.pdf
http://www.nationalgasmuseum.org.uk/making-gas-from-coal/
So I was very surprised to learn that embrittlement was a problem with the old mains today.
I went to an eco talk where the speaker was saying that offshore wind farms are so cheap now we should install enough to cover our needs even when the wind is relatively light. On the days when the wind blows hard, the excess capacity could be used to generate hydrogen.
There isn't really an easy answer. Though wearing another jumper each to take the thermostat back to 21 might help?
Over time, and as batteries get better, it'll be replaced. But as a bridging fuel, it's unmatched.
It's amazing to think that coal gas was a mix of carbon monoxide, methane and various odds and sods, and we happily piped it around the country.
Edit to add, this is the paper I was thinking of: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12206-018-0649-z
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Electric Soup
COVID is greatly reducing parking so we have space to think about it, but beyond that - well, we will try to gradually add chargers to stay just ahead of the curve and see what happens, but it's finger-in-the-air stuff and every council will make different assessments. I agree it's doable, but really it needs a national scheme.
Adding it to a central hydrogen plant is a piece of piss.
Modern combined cycle gas turbines are cheap to build, and have very low maintenance costs. They're also efficient, and relatively green.
Open cycle gas turbines are even cheaper (albeit nowhere near as efficient).
You could build enough gas generating capacity for total peak UK demand for less than the price of Hinckley Point C. And you have massively lower maintenance and operational costs too. (Albeit you pay more for the natural gas itself than for the uranium.)
Who will stand behind this in an American court, against a bereaved family asking for £100m compensation from Google or Tesla?
And then the politics in the middle East and Russia etc gets very interesting...