Category: Self Driving Cars

The business of trust.

Companies and businesses have a problem – Trust. Put simply there is a decline in how much trust is being placed in business by customers and society in general. And a business that isn’t trusted isn’t going to survive for long. But is trust that important?

I think so. Customers are spending more time researching the companies they buy from, and the fact that so much information is available on line, opens up a business to a lot more scrutiny than previously possible. As customers are subject to exponential levels of change they will look to anchor themselves through relationships based on trust.

Would you go to a Doctor you didn’t trust?

And businesses play a huge role in society, providing income and rewarding places to work, generating wealth and making tax payments to help governments support their chosen areas of investment. The problem is partly guilt by association. As Edelman reported there is a collapse in trust in 4 of the major institutions (Business, Government, NGOs and Media) in many countries around the world.

At the same time however, businesses face some challenges that while not specific to industry will have a large and potentially dramatic impact. The 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) is beginning to reshape what business is and what it does and how it does it.

And trust is going to be come one of the most important topics businesses will have to deal with.

Tags Business, Communication, company, Finance, future, IT, Mobile Phones, People, society, taxes, Technology, trust, women

Business Communication Customers Leadership Self Driving Cars Technology

Trust me – I’m in business

Post author By The Burble....
Post date July 31, 2017
No Comments on Trust me – I’m in business

Google's prototype driverless car has been unveiled at the company's California headquarters. Photograph: /Google

Trust is something that is extremely important in business. Whether it is between colleagues or between companies and their customers or between companies and their suppliers trust underpins everything that is written down in a contract. Without trust business simply doesn’t work as well as it should.

Of course trust becomes even more important when dealing internationally with people from different backgrounds and cultures.

So let’s get a definition written down

Trust as a noun is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.

The little Google Car pictured above is a prime example of a growing need to trust. In this case trusting a software engineer who has written the code that is helping you navigate your way around town. As I talked about in ‘Can sheep drive?‘ we will all to have a lot of trust in technology going forward.

But what about trust in business. Well there we seem to have a problem. According to a report by the World Economic Forum – We’re losing trust in business. How can we get it back? people are losing trust in business. And while this is not really a surprise with the focus on fake news currently it does present serious challenges, particularly to businesses that operate outside of their locality ie where the owner or staff are not known by their customers or suppliers.

The article goes on to highlight a number of areas businesses need to think through such as

how to focus on developing a narrative about the business that is not just about shareholder returns explaining how the business contributes to improving society
how to actually communicate this narrative to a broad range of people who might be interested in the business and what it is doing for society and
actually doing something about it

And while I think the irony of the World Economic Forum highlighting a lack of trust in business is interesting in itself the article seems to miss one very major aspect. The almost complete focus on the investor and shareholder above all others. The quarterly reporting cycle focusing as it does on numbers and shareholder returns is probably the biggest contributor to a lack of trust.

Perhaps its time for a quarterly reporting process on what value has been added to society rather that just focusing on the eps?

Anyone have any other ideas?

Tags Business, company, Google, New Zealand, society, Technology, trust, WEF

Self Driving Cars

Students – I might have guessed

Post author By The Burble....
Post date October 21, 2015
No Comments on Students – I might have guessed

In all the noise and excitement (not least for this blogger) around self driving vehicles one thing that is pretty clear is that how people have fun (for which read the increasing chance of a seriously spectacular crash) in cars is going to change. At the very least we will have to find ways of e enjoying ourselves that don’t involve simply driving them.

And of course students have managed to find the way. From Stanford comes this great article about a new fun thing to do with self driving cars. Although what else you can do in this car while its in action is going to require some thinking through.

Tags Business, car, change, Communication, driverless car, Risk, United States

Self Driving Cars

Can sheep drive?

Can sheep drive better than people?

I guess we will find out soon; when we get the hang of leaving the driving to the technology. When cars and lorries start driving themselves I guess we will be able to answer the question.

Is car even going to be the right word for it?

Legislators are struggling to keep up with the pace of change around cars that drive themselves and while I will take a bit more of a look at this aspect in later blogs I thought for this one I’d try and address what might at first appear to be a relatively simple concern. What happens when someone needs to take over the control of the car from the machinery.

In most of the cars being tested currently you need a steering wheel and a qualified driver waiting to take over from the electronics should the car ‘decide’ that there is something it doesn’t like or understand.

So that’s OK then.

Unless of course you’ve been doing the crossword and aren’t actually paying attention at all. Grabbing the wheel as your car decides it no longer wants to drive is going to really tax your reflexes, situational awareness (whatever that is), nerves etc. And of course that assumes you have actually learned to drive. What happens if the driver is new to the roads and on their first trip out? Or if you’re happily debating with your partner about the direction taking as obviously, being a man, you still know better than the technology.

Perhaps as your mind is wandering through the menu of the restaurant that you’re heading to the car will bong and simply say ‘over to you, I’m out.’ Your reply is like to be something along the lines of ‘Oh ####’ or some such at just about the same time as you disappear off the road and into the tree happy in the knowledge that the IT engineers will donwload the data and make sure that this type of crash can’t happen again.

Do you want a 17 year old with all their youthfull exuberance hoping that the car will hand them control? How will you persude the software that on no account is it to allow the car to be driven manually. Even if it has to commit the equivalent of electronic suicide.

What happens if you or the 17 year old have had a drink. If you breathe heavily inside your car after a night out could there be an argument that your car is intoxicated?

There is of course a huge argument in favour of cars that drive themselves. Not the least is the reduction in accidents and injuries that occur every year. According to the august sounding body the ‘Association for Safe International Road Travel’ 1.3 million people are killed in road accidents every year and somewhere between 20 and 50 million are injured, so the benefits of cars driven by computers that don’t sleep, play on their phones or simply forget to stop at traffic lights is huge.

But there is still a huge amount to learn about how these cars, and perhaps a lot more importantly, how humans will actually work with them; and what happens when the technology does simply have an off day.

Some of you will recall the made up, but strangely prescient, discussion between Bill Gates the then CEO of Microsoft and General Motors. In 2005 Bill supposedly compared car companies to dinosaurs while GM alledgly responded along the lines of software designed cars needing to be rebooted every couple of hours for no apparent reason. It seems to me that, where we are today it is the drivers who may need rebooting while the car quietly gets on with keeping you safe.

Until it decides not to.

Tags auto, automobile, autonomous, Business, car, change, driverless car, driving, future

Self Driving Cars

It did what? 12 secrets about Autonomous vehicles

Post author By The Burble....
Post date October 1, 2015
No Comments on It did what? 12 secrets about Autonomous vehicles

Ok that might have been a little naughty of me – just trying to grab some attention. It gets lonely out here.

Autonomous vehicles really are the flavour of the month and the pace of change is simply amazing. Every week there is a new announcement about an advance in the technology. And despite this the one announcement that we are waiting for, despite what I am pretty sure was an agreed ‘leak’ is the one from Apple confirming their entry into this market.

While on the subject of Apple (and if you’ll allow me a little diversion here {did you see what I just did}) I can confidently predict that in Hong Kong at least the new iPhone 6S will be a huge hit. And how do I know this? If you take a walk past the Apple store in Causeway Bay you’ll know why. The legion of resellers who stand outside the store selling the iPhone that they have just bought is the clue. So you can go into the store and buy a phone or pay presumably more to buy one from a street seller not 5 paces from the door to the store. The last time this happened was with the launch of the iPhone 5 and Apple themselves went on to mention that demand was extremely strong in Hong Kong. You heard it here first.

As I understand it Apple usually makes major product announcements once or twice a year so we may just have to wait for news. But if the length of lines and the resellers are anything to go by for a phone I confidently predict (here I go again) that should they develop something it will probably sell extremely well in Asia.

So Apple start here first – please….

Tags Apple, automobile, Business, car, driving, Risk, self