Lifeboat Foundation

Back when the Cadillac CT6 was the new hotness for the brand still trying to stand up to its full height, rumors abounded of a new model well above that to challenge the rarified trims among German luxury competition. The most oft-repeated portion of that rumor was that the model would cost well more than $100,000. When Cadillac’s electric turn gathered momentum, we began hearing about a sedan called the Celestiq that would be the pride of the fleet. It doubled the potential starting price of the previous flagship, as recently as this month being touted as costing more than $200,000. A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that is correct. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the paper said, “the Celestiq price tag could run well beyond $300,000 depending on added features.”

A straight reading suggests an MSRP somewhere above $200,000 and an options menu with enough pricey choices to cross the $300K tier. In itself, that’s not outrageous. The 2023 BMW i7 can be optioned from a starting price of $120,000 to $155,000. The Porsche Taycan Turbo S can be optioned from $188,000 to $237,000 by checking a few boxes in just five of the potential 31 menu categories. The jumps go logarithmic when one steps up to superluxe models from makers like Aston Martin and Bentley and Rolls-Royce. So throwing $50,000 in options at a car that starts at $275,000 isn’t much of a story.

The story is that we’re talking about Cadillac, and these kinds of numbers would represent huge changes for the brand’s pricing and options. The 2023 Escalade-V doesn’t have a configurator yet, so starting with the $112,500 Escalade ESV Sport Platinum 4WD in four-wheel drive, clicking every mechanical and luxury accessory got us to almost $135,000, representing $23,500 in options. If the WSJ is even close in its assessment, the Celestiq could start around $100,000 more than the $150,000 Escalade-V and then unveil the kind of options menu that’s usually read in a British accent by someone wearing $3,000 shoes.

Elon Musk may be an oddball online, but he helped bring a lot of technology to the world. Happy Birthday Elon Musk! Here’s a Look on the Tech CEO’s Significance in the World.

Elon Musk talked about the advantages of Tesla ads in an interview with Tesla supporters, including the President of Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, the President of My Tesla Adventure, and the Kilowatts founder.

Musk noted that public support for Tesla is appreciated, and the Tesla community’s efforts to shoot down FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) for the company have also been helpful. Musk has opposed the idea of Tesla ads in the past. However, during the interview, he acknowledged that Tesla ads might have some advantages.

Continue reading “Elon Musk acknowledges the advantage of Tesla ads” »

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Anyone intending to toss the bike up on a car rack or into a truck should note that it isn’t lightweight, tipping the scales at 75 lb (34 kg). You can remove 9 lb (4 kg) of that just by taking the battery off. With a massive motor and large battery, you didn’t expect it to be a featherweight though, did you?

Continue reading “CSC FT1000MD high-powered electric bike review: Hitting 34 MPH on a 1,000W fat tire e-bike” »

The differences? The new Mayflower—logically dubbed the Mayflower 400—is a 50-foot-long trimaran (that’s a boat that has one main hull with a smaller hull attached on either side), can go up to 10 knots or 18.5 kilometers an hour, is powered by electric motors that run on solar energy (with diesel as a backup if needed), and required a crew of… zero.

That’s because the ship was navigated by an on-board AI. Like a self-driving car, the ship was tricked out with multiple cameras (6 of them) and sensors (45 of them) to feed the AI information about its surroundings and help it make wise navigation decisions, such as re-routing around spots with bad weather. There’s also onboard radar and GPS, as well as altitude and water-depth detectors.

The ship and its voyage were a collaboration between IBM and a marine research non-profit called ProMare. Engineers trained the Mayflower 400’s “AI Captain” on petabytes of data; according to an IBM overview about the ship, its decisions are based on if/then rules and machine learning models for pattern recognition, but also go beyond these standards. The algorithm “learns from the outcomes of its decisions, makes predictions about the future, manages risks, and refines its knowledge through experience.” It’s also able to integrat e far more inputs in real time than a human is capable of.

Stacking solar cells increases their efficiency. Working with partners in the PERCISTAND project, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have produced perovskite/CIS tandem solar cells with an efficiency of nearly 25%—the highest value achieved thus far with this technology. Moreover, this combination of materials is light and versatile, making it possible to envision the use of these tandem solar cells in vehicles, portable equipment, and devices that can be folded or rolled up. The researchers present their results in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

Perovskite solar cells have made astounding progress over the past decade. Their efficiency is now comparable to that of the long-established silicon solar cells. Perovskites are innovative materials with a special crystal structure. Researchers worldwide are working to get perovskite photovoltaic technology ready for practical applications. The more electricity they generate per unit of surface area, the more attractive solar cells are for consumers.

The efficiency of solar cells can be increased by stacking two or more cells. If each of the stacked solar cells is especially efficient at absorbing light from a different part of the solar spectrum, inherent losses can be reduced and efficiency boosted. The efficiency is a measure of how much of the incident light is converted into electricity. Thanks to their versatility, perovskite solar cells make outstanding components for such tandems. Tandem solar cells using perovskites and silicon have reached a record efficiency level of over 29%, considerably higher than that of individual cells made of perovskite (25.7%) or silicon (26.7%).

How to use causal influence diagrams to recognize the hidden incentives that shape an AI agent’s behavior.

There is rightfully a lot of concern about the fairness and safety of advanced Machine Learning systems. To attack the root of the problem, researchers can analyze the incentives posed by a learning algorithm using causal influence diagrams (CIDs). Among others, DeepMind Safety Research has written about their research on CIDs, and I have written before about how they can be used to avoid reward tampering. However, while there is some writing on the types of incentives that can be found using CIDs, I haven’t seen a succinct write up of the graphical criteria used to identify such incentives. To fill this gap, this post will summarize the incentive concepts and their corresponding graphical criteria, which were originally defined in the paper Agent Incentives: A Causal Perspective.

A causal influence diagram is a directed acyclic graph where different types of nodes represent different elements of an optimization problem. Decision nodes represent values that an agent can influence, utility nodes represent the optimization objective, and structural nodes (also called change nodes) represent the remaining variables such as the state. The arrows show how the nodes are causally related with dotted arrows indicating the information that an agent uses to make a decision. Below is the CID of a Markov Decision Process, with decision nodes in blue and utility nodes in yellow:

Continue reading “Spotting Unfair or Unsafe AI using Graphical Criteria” »

Armed with little more than a computer, hackers are increasingly setting their sights on some of the biggest things that humans can build.

Vast container ships and chunky freight planes — essential in today’s global economy — can now be brought to a halt by a new generation of code warriors.

“The reality is that an aeroplane or vessel, like any digital system, can be hacked,” David Emm, a principal security researcher at cyber firm Kaspersky, told CNBC.

A futuristic new solar-powered vehicle is now road-legal, with first delivery expected as early as November and will give drivers the freedom to exceed 1,000 km of range between charges.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk described the electric automaker’s factories in Austin and Berlin as “money furnaces” that were losing billions of dollars because supply chain breakdowns were limiting the number of cars they can produce.

In a May 30 interview with a Tesla owners club that was just released this week, Musk said that getting the Berlin and Austin plants functional “are overwhelmingly our concerns. Everything else is a very small thing,” Musk said, but added that “it’s all gonna get fixed real fast.”

It’s not clear how much has changed in the three weeks since the interview, but last week Musk tweeted congratulations to his Berlin team for producing 1,000 cars in a week.