| TESLA MASTER PLANNING, INTERNET IN THE SKY, TREKNOLOGY Planning to Fail? Elon Musk has introduced the second part of his "master plan" for Tesla, and the reception is perhaps not as rapturous as he might have hoped. Will Oremus asks whether the plan is "insanely magnificent" or "magnificently insane," and the New York Times describes how it will "test the Tesla shareholder faithful." I put forward my own view, focusing on how the problems with Autopilot play a key role in derailing Musk's vision. "Last year, the argument circulating in favor of Tesla was that its real competitive advantage was its lead in self-driving technology. Tesla has taken a different, more aggressive, more daring approach compared to other automakers. It based its system on standard camera technology rather than much more expensive laser-based lidar systems used by companies like Google. And it rolled out self-driving technology earlier and on a much larger scale. Instead of spending years testing the technology in a small fleet of experimental vehicles, Tesla provided it to their entire customer base, offering wireless automatic updates as they improved the software. In effect, they were doing a live beta test on America's roadways, and the theory was that this would give them the advantage of Big Data. Being able to assess the results of autopilot working in tens of thousands of cars already on the road would allow them to improve their system faster than anyone else, beating everyone in the race to sell the first fully autonomous vehicle. "We can now see how that's working out, and it's not looking like such a smart plan." Read the whole thing. --- Development Economics A lot of the technology field is focused on wealthy First World countries, and even on the urban centers in those countries, because that's where you find people who can afford the latest gadgets. But there's also an interesting new field in "development economics" that focuses on how cheap and well-targeted new technology can transform the developing world. That brings us to Facebook's effort to link the whole world up to the Internet--from which they obviously hope to benefit--by creating a fleet of solar-powered Internet drones. They just tested the prototype. "The goal of Aquila is to provide what has been described as an 'atmospheric satellite' capability--the drones will fly for up to three months at a time, orbiting over remote areas and providing connectivity for a circle as much as 60 miles in diameter, using a laser-based network 'backbone' and radio signals for local bandwidth." --- There's plenty more at our main page, including an interesting new use of biotechnology in agriculture. Chatbot Lawyer Overturns 160,000 Parking Tickets
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Boosting Crop Yields Without GMOs, Pesticides Check it all out. --- Star Trek Physics In honor of the new Star Trek movie, "NASA Factchecks the Starship Enterprise." I'm not sure this makes much sense, though. From a scriptwriter's perspective, the beauty of Star Trek is that it projects the science and technology of the 23rd Century, and who's to say what that will be? Asking NASA to factcheck the Enterprise is a bit like asking Christopher Columbus to factcheck the moon landing. Then again, a lot of Star Trek technology has already come to fruition--flip phones, tablet computers--and more may be on the way. --Rob Tracinski
Editor, RealClearFuture Follow @RealClearFuture on Twitter. Like us on Facebook. Send comments, recommendations, and submissions to rob@realclearfuture.com. | 
