Writing about the present is relatively easy.

If you want to write about a thing that exists today and say “this is good,” you’ve got a lot of resources at your disposal. Most importantly, you’ve probably got the actual thing in front of you that you want to write about. In a close second, you’ve got all the rest of the things in the world with which to compare to your subject. “This new iPhone is great,” for example, “because the screen is really big and it turns out I really like having a nice, big screen.”

If you want to write about a thing that exists today and say “this is bad,” you’re also in pretty good shape. What makes this easy is the fact that we live in a world that has rules and limitations which necessitate sacrifice, compromises, and even granular lapses in attention to detail. “This new Samsung phone sucks,” for example, “because lololol look at this tiny ‘gap’ of absolutely no consequence but you can squeeze a business card in there.” Also, it’s generally much easier (and less helpful!) to say “this sucks” than it is to say “here’s how this can be better.”

Writing about the future is very hard.

If you want to write about a thing that will exist in the future, you can’t hold the actual thing in front of you. Perhaps more importantly in this case, you can’t compare your subject to the rest of the things which will exist in the future world. The future is not subject to the same rules, limitations, sacrifices, compromises, and attention to detail which are all manifest in the present.

As a result, writing about the future is exercise where you’re not just likely to be wrong, but you’re often exposed to being laughably wrong.

For example: As recently as July 2013, I wrote about having a phone that was too big:

I picked up a case for the phone that had an extended battery built in. Sort of like this one.

This effectively solved the battery problem, but it created others. Specifically: my phone was now large enough to win modest disapproval from the King of all Cosmos. (In other words, it was the size of a small planet.)

Thinking back to our criteria above, I wrote off “big phone” because in my phone exploration my frame of reference was the people and phones that surrounded me that day. I abandoned my giant phone because I was tired of drawing cynical inquisitiveness from every one of my peers. I’m certain that if I went back to my old Galaxy SII + case today, my friends wouldn’t bat an eye. In fact, there are companies devoted to solving the problem of “my phone battery sucks but I don’t want to look like a doofus.”

While it’s hard to be right when writing about the future, the exercise has incredible benefits: It’s profoundly educational, constructive, enjoyable, and humbling. I often recommend it to my peers who talk to me with aspirations of improving themselves and building great things.

Also, since it’s hard to be right, I’m not linking you to all of the predictions, hypotheses, and recommendations I’ve made which have turned out to be pretty bone-headed. (They’re on this site, you’ll just have to browse through the archives at your own peril.) On the other hand, as of today, you can jump right through to the litany of shining examples of the Times I Was Right.

Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon:

 

Danny Glover in Frozen:

 

Danny Glover in Rounders:

 

Danny Glover in Titanic:

 

Danny Glover in Indiana Jones:

 

Danny Glover in Helvetica:

 

 

Danny Glover in Community:

 

Danny Glover in Playboy:

 

Danny Glover in Glengarry Glen Ross:

 

Danny Glover in The Fast and the Furious:

 

Danny Glover in JoshPetersel.com:

 

 

(h/t Logan)

This past week Tesla unveiled the “D” model, which has a lot of cool features — but as per the post title, I want to talk about its advances towards our future self-driving reality.

Check out the demo here (particularly, the second half of the video):

On the one hand: It’s pretty incredible to actually see these sorts of features in real life as opposed to just in fantastic theoretical prose about the future. It’s definitely a little intimidating — the reviewer for TheVerge actually titles his piece “My Lap of Terror.”

I’m terrified, but for entirely different reasons.

As should be clear at this point from my recent update history, I’m rather zealously looking forward to the day when cars are driving themselves around the road. It’s worth noting that assisted driving features have been publicly available in cars since around 2003, when Toyota began selling a car which could parallel park itself. I have the same level of confidence in car technology’s ability to safely and effectively navigate both Toyota’s parking and Tesla’s lane changing and speed limits.

What I have very little faith in is people.

For example: How long do you think it’s going to take for some lunatic to post a video to YouTube of himself turning on Assisted Driving and then just completely abandoning the drivers seat?[ref]We already had the Ghostride fad circa 2006.[/ref]

You think it’ll take a few weeks? A few days?

What if I told you… someone actually already did exactly this over two months ago?

Scarier than that, because I think it’d be far more commonplace: Just simple lapses in human judgment. I think assisted driving leads us to being lazier drivers. We already have a hard enough time checking our blindspots when we switch lanes.

Say you’re a little groggy and happen to be taking your wife’s car to work instead of your Tesla one morning. Or say you get comfortable enough with assisted driving that you justify it as a good time to take out your phone and sneak in a few text messages from behind the wheel. All it takes is one second.

I don’t want to start sounding too much like your nagging, paranoid parents here. But no question about it: Lazy driving and distracted driving lead to accidents.[ref]Tangentially: It’s worth reading up on the European cities which made their streets safer by removing every single form of traffic signal, on the premise that without all of the crutches of traffic lights, stop signs, and so on, drivers would intuitively be relegated to be hyper-aware of their own safety, so they’re more careful. Accidents have gone down precipitously.[/ref]

We’re in sort of a treacherous valley right now — at the far end of the horizon, the utopian fully-autonomous vehicle. One view of the world was that we might just make one big gigantic leap across — say, Google just deploys its self-driving car and we all hope it clicks. What it looks like, though, is that we’ll be crossing the valley baby step by baby step — inching closer to the future and deploying the self-driving car on a feature-by-feature basis over several years. There’ll be growing pains either way; I can only hope that we make it across quickly.

A few techniques I’ve grown fond of employing lately:

1. I put the greeting, and my recipient’s name, in the email subject rather than in the first lines of copy.

I think this helps email stand out in a mountain of inbox jargon. The sweetest music to anybody’s ears (err, eyes) is their own name. My sense is that my messages get turned around more quickly — especially notes to people who I haven’t spoken with in a while or who maybe weren’t expecting to hear from me.

The result looks something like this:

 

 

(Hat tip to Cy, who first brought an idea like this to my attention.)

2. I leave the period off the last sentence in the email.

A slight grammar offense, sure, but the benefits make up for it.

Here’s an example:

By leaving off the last period, I find my emails are far easier for recipients to quickly respond to. It’s more casual, but no less formal because the ease in prose doesn’t arise from the use of conjunctions or colloquial diction. It evokes a sense of briskness, but stopping well short of the childish overzealousness that was the hallmark of, say, vintage Dugout-era Jim Thome.[ref]Maybe my most obscure internet reference on this website to date.[/ref]

This is the same sort of hastiness that you’ll see in, say, Mark Cuban’s weblog. He goes a bit farther — employing haphazard capitalization, formatting, and so on — than I’d feel comfortable with in a formal email setting. I think his goal is to exude a sense that he’s not really spending more than 17 seconds on any given rant, but also, in a weird way, it makes his work easier and faster to read and react to. And that’s precisely the sort of behavior I’d generally like to extract from my email recipients.

 

3. Things I don’t do.

A) Email signatures. These started out as an okay idea. At one point, in fact, they were a huge contributing factor to the viral growth of Hotmail.

Now, they’re just stupid. Gmail (and I’d assume other modern email clients too) has figured out that they’re a waste and will clip the bottom of your message off as soon as it’s figured out you’re in the signature zone.

What’s the point of a signature? It’s not to convey important information. Most people include the following three things in their signatures: Their name, their email address, and their phone number. Any time you’d need my phone number, I’m going to be sure to write it out again for you. Something’s truly amiss if you should need to be reminded of what my name and email address are.

A signature in a hand-written letter is more a token or authenticity and care. “This was definitely me who wrote this letter, and I put thought into it.” None of that sentiment comes through when you’ve got a signature set to send automatically with every message. In fact, you’ll often see people conclude emails with an individually written “Best, Charles” — so now they’ve got two signatures.

B) Separate signature from your smartphone. “Sent from my Samsung iPhone S1000 by VeriSprint Mobile.” This was an important thing to have, but only back in like 2003 when people were sending emails using T9 Messaging on flip phones and errant words were potatoes knife like text grade dad not all that uncommon.[ref]Sent from my 2003 Mobile Device[/ref]

First of all, “Sent from my iPhone” signatures make you a participant in an Apple viral marketing campaign which you didn’t sign up for. Second, if you’re on a smartphone, you’ve been afforded an ample screen, a Qwerty keyboard, spellcheck, and every other convenience any modern computer might possess. Any errors in your message are entirely your own fault.

…Then again. Suppose there is something to the idea of “Sent from my smartphone” exuding and prompting a sense of hastiness. I wonder what’d happen if I just set my desktop email signature to “Sent from my smartphone.”

C) Legalese.

This e-mail message and all attachments transmitted with it may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information intended solely for the use of the addressee(s). If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any reading, dissemination, distribution, copying, forwarding or other use of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message and all copies and backups thereof. Thank you.

My reaction when.

Trigger Happy TV (over a decade ago!) has already succinctly conveyed everything I could possibly have to say.

 

A quick moment of reflection and praise for one of my favorite boutique sites on the internet:

http://berkshirehathaway.com/

Which, for posterity’s sake, looks like this:

 

That’s it. 127 lines of HTML code.

You can almost imagine the conversation that took place:

Warren Buffett: “We don’t need a website! The hell do we need a website for?”

Advisor: “Sir, it’s the internet. It’s important. We need a website.”

WB: “Fine. Just shut up. Here’s a website. I hope you’re happy.”

And you know. I think these two imaginary figures came to the right conclusion. Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t really need stuff on its website. You’re there because you already know who Warren is and what he’s about — he doesn’t need a blog to explain himself.

The design is a little extreme — and my designer friends would murder me for coming anywhere close to paying the site a compliment in this arena — but I’ll take it. The site has no frills, no nonsense, probably costs nothing to maintain, and it pretty effectively surfaces all of the content I could conceivably have been looking for upon my arrival. They say good design isn’t “what more can you add” but “what more can you take away.”

 

Movie trailers are almost universally enjoyed. There’s lots of things which make movie trailers great.

• Explosions
• Drama
• Quick cuts of action scenes
• Some guy yelling
• The movie trailer voiceover guy
• You get the idea

That’s not what I like best.

The thing that I like best about movie trailers is a little different. It’s not a feature within the movie trailer, but a fact about the trailer itself: Movie trailers are all…actually just advertisements.

I think this combination (A: They’re ads, and B: everybody likes them) is positively one-of-a-kind. Nowhere else do consumers share the same universal joy about advertising.[ref]The Super Bowl, maybe?[/ref] The ads aren’t even all that difficult to avoid, if you just decide to show up a few minutes late to the theater or linger at the snack bar. But no! To the contrary, missing the ads at the beginning of a showing is almost like missing the best part of the entire movie-going experience.

There’s a handful of things which contribute to the success of the movie trailer. It certainly helps that trailers are advertising for pure consumer entertainment. It’s possible that consumers are more tolerant because there’s a fairly equitable ad-to-content ratio (3-4 trailers vs. 90+ minutes of movie). They don’t really have to bring up the pain point of pricing since “find your local theater and pay the cost of a movie ticket” is pretty universal knowledge.[ref]You might readily imagine how trailers would become distasteful if they all ended with “Buy your tickets today! Just $14.99 plus shipping and handling!”[/ref] But what I think deserves the lion’s share of the credit is the notion that more than almost anything else, movie trailers are incredibly articulately targeted.

With a movie trailer, you’ve got:

1. A very strong idea on demographic (theater full of self-selected people suitable for G, PG, PG-13, R)
2. A great head start on behavioral factors (viewers have already established they like going to the movies)
3. A great head start on psychographics (viewers who are settling in to see a horror movie are highly primed for other horror movie trailers)

It feels like the entire modern consumer economy is fueled by advertising — our apps, our websites, our shows, our blogs. And more often than not, that advertisement is treated as a nuisance — some disruptive noise to put up with which helps your service provider to pay its bills — which we’d all avoid if we possibly could. There’s a reason AdBlock Plus is consistently among the top-rated add-ons for Chrome and Firefox. Companies like Spotify and Pandora hedge their entire business around freemium services which basically say “Hey! If you like the product but don’t want to put up with the crappy, ad-riddled version, you can pay us money!”

There’s research which suggests we consumers see an average of 5,000 ads per day. That’s crazy. Five thousand disruptions on a daily basis. 1.85 million annoyances annually.

Movie trailers give me hope. They prove that it’s possible for ads which fund the world around us to be something much, much better than the pesky bother we halfheartedly put up with today. That’s exciting.

On a related note: I’m joining a company today which aspires to do more or less exactly that.

From the comments section of my June 17th update on Self-Driving Cars, David writes:

Regarding Level 7, my guess is: a lot more downtown pedestrian-only streets, parking garages replaced by housing/commercial space, and for individual parking spaces, parklets. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parklet).

I’m really curious to see what happens with suburbs / sprawl. Any predictions for how that will change?

And in a GChat message to me, Kevin writes:[ref]Abridged for clarity.[/ref]

I think the other side of the safety element is that cars themselves have gone leaps and bounds with safety – look at modern supercar technology. Carbon fiber cockpits have people walking away from driving like dumbasses now. How much revolt will there be to that increased perception of safety, though? Will I still have to deal with dumbasses driving 120 on the highway and clipping me? Will I not be wearing a seatbelt? Would that kill me? Will this be seatbelts 2.0 (as in, fatalities remained relatively consistent after seatbelts because people felt safer and drove more recklessly)?

What about private ownership? How can I show off what a rich [consummate gentleman] I am and rub it in everyone’s faces? Do I get to house my private vehicle somewhere (in some big warehouse?) and then summon it when I want? Or do I have to use the same utilitarian pod as everyone else?

Sure, David, Kevin. Great thoughts.

We agree that housing is going to be a huge need and a likely solution for the larger spaces vacated by parking spots.

As for Parklets: Beautiful, sure. But installed across close to 21 square miles? Eep. I wonder if there’s a more practical purpose, you know?

I’d be interested to think about the sorts of microbusinesses which might move into abandoned parking spaces. We’ve seen from the food truck phenomenon that certain types of food services can get away with smaller footprints. Suppose we moved all of the coffee shops and lunch places into parklet-sized spaces and opened up those larger real estate footprints for housing and similar?

As for suburbs/sprawl: I actually think Mumbai is a fairly interesting metaphor for the future of city transportation. Cabs there are prolific, and in my experience never cost more than $1-$2 USD to take you 30-45 minutes across the city. (And that I’m assuming is after they applied a modest “foreigner” tax.)

As for rich/ownership: It’s worth noting that plenty of families in Mumbai & India still buy cars. It’s a significant point of pride, and an important display of wealth/status/success in a society that’s still today profoundly marked by the effects of the caste system. A fair estimate: I think we’ll see the same proportion of people owning private cars in the future as you see people owning private airplanes today.

As for safety: Knowing absolutely nothing about car mechanics, my guess is that cockpits become substantially safer once automakers can eliminate all the human interface components (steering wheel, pedals, etc.) and re-purpose that space for safety, and also, build cars which are more symmetrical. I anticipate seatbelts will still be necessary — you still wear your seatbelt on airplanes. Though in a perfect world, cars might be as predictable as trains — where there’s no belts usually, I think.

As for effects on suburbs: We’re actually also already seeing some of the effects of Sprawl in SF. Here’s a tech company specifically designed to deal with the commute associated with the sprawl, which also bears resemblance to the door-to-door service I’d described in my earlier post.

Two of the less straightforward self-driving car side-effects:

First: Residential real estate in downtown urban areas becomes much less of a premium good. Prices will still go up – real estate prices, as I understand things, will pretty much always go up – because our population is growing wildly.

Second: Anita Elberse’s Blockbuster effect on entertainment / destination real estate. If you thought getting into clubs like Marquee was hard today, think about how the lines will look once everybody in a 40 (80?) mile radius has easy, cheap access every single night. Everyone will want to flock to the blockbuster venues because they can. This might sadly be devastating for midlevel or rural venues which once thrived because, hey, where else are you going to go when you live in Huntington, NY, and you need to be able to get yourself home affordably once last call has been called?