Billy Riggs (00:33)
All right, everybody, welcome to Rewiring the American Edge. I'm Billy Riggs, and here we are with a episode really focusing on automation, but also systems. And if you notice, we've been talking a lot about economic systems and...

we talked about big-time college sports, so maybe let's start with where we were in March into April and just maybe some background

I had a background in sports people as a football aficionado and if folks didn't remember, I'm a former Division I athlete. I ran cross country and track. So, one thing that really fascinated me in watching some of our sporting events, of course, me from Kentucky watched the Kentucky Derby and

did not very do very good in my Derby selection because I was definitely pulling for Commandment. But long story short, know, my Kentucky Wildcats, we have a long story short, we have a $22 million college basketball program kind of the

courtesy the way amateur athletics are now becoming funded. Amateurism is becoming a thing of the past and the most expensive college basketball program in history took an early exit from the national college basketball tournament; not because they were not talented, not because they lacked the resources, but just because

the way the system has operated is changing and systems are changing. But at the same time, I think my argument is just throwing money at things is not the way to change systems. And if I was going to make it parallel, in December we had

some automated vehicles that for a variety of froze in place, in San Francisco. And the headlines called it a failure. But I think engineers would call it something else. They'd call it the system doing exactly what it was designed to do. And I think that's what I want to interrogate today, is system design. Because...

I think in both cases we're looking at systems under pressure and systems problems. And maybe that systems are doing what they're designed to do. They're encouraging pressure testing. particularly in the case of automated vehicles, I'm worried about is over-regulating the safest systems. And it's something that

I wrote an op-ed about recently in the San Francisco Chronicle and we'll come back to this because it's about under regulating the ones that cause the most harm and particularly the ones that jeopardize pedestrians. And no matter, I have a lot of colleagues that want to debate how safe is safe. They want to endlessly debate how

how we quantify who the driver is, whether or not it's the average driver or it's the driver that is the Max Verstappen of all drivers, the professional driver. Now, how many of us are professional drivers? That's my question. I'm probably a below average driver to be quite candid. And to be honest,

drivers like many of us need to be in automated vehicles. And I think that's the point where likely for 90 % of the population over-regulating the safest systems being automation and under-regulating the ones that do harm. So let's dive into this. Today I want to just go deeper on both these issues and dive into the changes that we're seeing across

higher education, labor markets, and emerging tech, because it's not just change, it's pressure. And as we've talked about on many of these issues, the pressure we see today will define the systems tomorrow. And it's a lot about what we talked about at our Autonomous Vehicles in the City conference a couple of weeks ago. I'm gonna post the video for that online as well.

We're going to interrogate that. Let's go in. What happened at Kentucky? the Kentucky signal, March madness. Let's start with that. Vipul couldn't join us today, but we forge on. Kentucky, land of bluegrass, and bourbon. My favorite place on the planet; where I'm from. If you didn't know it already, Louisville.

Kentucky.

Bluegrass, basketball, bourbon, Kentucky, Louisville, Indiana. You know, it's the Cards, Hoosiers, Wildcats. I actually didn't go to Kentucky. went to Louisville. So they're arch rivals. I actually went to, you did notice my pronunciation there, by the way, Louisville, three syllables, right? And when I get into the mode, I just get into the pronunciation. So you'll see, you'll see, I just get excited about talking my homestate.

There's challenges about living in the Bluegrass State, but it's delightful place. And I have a lot of passion for my hometown. But

here we have a campus that used the financial mechanisms in place to raise $22 million dollars through investment, alumni support, and what we call the name, image and likeness rules to bolster their coffers.

And yet they had an early exit from this prestigious tournament. Now, of course that happens, but I don't think that's the story. I think that the story is what happens underneath. I think what used to be amateur athletics is becoming a market and players aren't just students anymore. They're literally assets and they're part of these portfolios.

And we have these donor collectives and there really are investment vehicles. So they're really things that can be almost assetized. And you could think of them is almost bond instrument. And I think here's that get where that gets really interesting and maybe concerning because when some of these programs potentially could take on debt.

to getting that.

competitive system. Let's pretend that they take on a loan. Maybe that's no longer athletics. That becomes the fiscalization of something that's not particularly within the mission of the educational institution where we're not just paying student athletes. We're pricing them. And

I think as a former athlete, I was never compensated. I was an athlete in a different era. And I think a different type of athlete and a non-revenue sport. But I think this correction was long overdue in terms of how particularly athletes in revenue gymnarying sports were being exploited.

by their institutions. So the correction was overdue, but now we're seeing this fiscalization of athletes and of programs and just this escalation of an arms race.

As a faculty member, what I see is something that's a vast departure from when I was a Division-I student athlete. When I was playing, when I was running, athletics complimented education, but now it's almost as if the education compliments the athletics. And that's a really

big shift. And my worry, and I think I said this in our episode last fall is that you worry it's an incentive shift for the institution. And when there's an incentive shift, you worry there's a mission drift and

you worry that this changes the workforce incentives. When we think about what we talk about on this podcast, we think about the future of how we develop the workforce for the AI economy. If the mission of universities to develop that future workforce and the mission of our academic institutions is drifting towards becoming factories,

for athletics, now that is a misalignment of mission. And if we're not developing the people who concede in a 22nd century economy, in the economy of the Web3 future, then that's a dismal story. You know, in my mind, rankings, brand, athletics, that should be a secondary mission, but...

If we look where the potential money is going, if we look where donor departments and many of these major institutions are prioritizing their philanthropy, their giving, that's maybe not what's being prioritized. If we look what's being rewarded, where donors are focusing targeting their revenue generation, their market positioning, it is all about big time college sports. And

that's not necessarily long-term.

human capital development, That's not long-term economic competitiveness. That's not Rewiring the American Edge. So this really matters. And I since we're entering a moment when AI is,

reshaping markets, automation is redefining work, global competition is intensifying this this mission drift is important to pinpoint because this is a time for higher ed to be very clear about what its priorities are and the priorities despite the importance of name, image and likeness rules

are not to transition to $22 million athlete driven programs, but to see more $22 million academic funded programs. And as much as I love the Kentucky Wildcats, I'm not sure that that is the appropriate alignment of resources. And

You know, you might be asking, what does this have to do with autonomous vehicles,

or transportation, or safety, or anything else? And the answer is: maybe everything. Because I think those stories are really about how we structure long-term risk and responding to risk.

And, I've been thinking a lot about responses to the Waymo incident in December. Vehicles stopped operating. They didn't crash. They didn't behave erratically. They didn't harm anybody. didn't. They just stopped. The reaction was immediate. It was a system failure. But

Stopping is really a safety critical system. It's a safety feature. And they did what they were supposed to. They are required to have two-way 5G connectivity based on state code. That is a programmed requirement. Could they operate? Yes, they could have. Based on my information, the vehicles could operate.

However, the state of California based on the California vehicle code and the DMV requirements requires they have a two way redundant communication requirement. Now is this requirement maybe limits their performance when the system is competent, when it is confident with the surroundings around it, when it is actually within the policy parameters that it actually that it actually can perform in it acts when there is uncertainty, it slows.

and it may disengaged. When there is an uncertainty threshold crossed, there is a disengagement. Now, many times humans, don't do that, they've been the rules. Humans drive through uncertainty. To a certain degree, these ambiguous situations are a lot of the things that we're grappling with in the field of automation and robotics. And that's a little bit of...

paradoxes we're dealing with. And

And the more safer these systems become, the more visible these quote unquote failures sometimes look. But what they are is yielding to uncertain situations. And many times these uncertain situations are rules that we create. So, when we evaluate this bricking moment,

And I use the word bricking because that's what the popular media has created. It's not my word. It was a stress test of a system. It was a system refusing to operate within the confidence envelope. And this is how the system is supposed to operate. And what I have suggested is actually that we have a new policy framework that actually allows for

these systems to have a testing to actually operate that allows for these vehicles to operate without a two-way connectivity connection. And that would have allowed them to not break down or cede from operations when there was this two-way communications breakdown, but that would require additional policy instructions.

to allow them to not get into this paradoxical or uncertain environment. And, I think this is where

get into these highly reliable systems. So how aviation works, it's how we get into repetitive, clear, non-improvisable systems. You stop, you check, you verify. And when people saw cars in the street, when people see cars going too slowly or in front of them, obeying the speed limit,

They don't see safety, they see dysfunction, they see something going wrong. But I think that tells us something important about human behavior. In San Francisco, when a toddler is killed in the crosswalk and a pedestrian is killed another day and another hit and run and a transit vehicle is involved in a fatality. And what do we do? What do we hear?

And this is what I wrote in my op-ed. What do we say? it happens. And really, that's the closest thing we have to a transportation policy. And yet. When we have a system that reduces crashes, operates under very strict policy oversight, it requires strict reporting to the California DMV and the California CPUC.

It gets scrutinized every edge case. gets memed to the hilt. And as I said in my op-ed, we tend to then regulate the safest drivers and ignore the ones that end up killing people. Now, if we

connected the dots there between college sports and AV land. think that we're seeing kind of the same underlying issue. Incentives aren't aligned with outcomes. College sports, we see visibility, revenue, and we reward spectacle. Transportation,

We scrutinize something that's a new technology. We regulate edge cases and then we react to what we perceive in the built environment. We're not optimizing for the outcomes. We're optimizing for the optics and that's not good policy and that's not good practice. So the bigger insight.

here this has nothing to do with sports. Sports is just an illustration of something that is cavalier. It's fun. It's probably not even about autonomous vehicles. It's about systems. It's about uncertainty and it's about wicked problems. And I think what we can see is, what we sometimes punish. We do so because it feels

Uncertain, feels unfamiliar. And we ignore what's quietly improving our lives and improving real outcomes.

We debate hypothetical risks while tolerating real risks. And I guess I guess my question is, what do we do? What do you want? My suggestion is aligning incentives, getting back to true workforce and human development.

How about outcomes, not just perceptions? Let's do evidence, not just speculation and fear.

Because the end goal it shouldn't be to slow smart systems down, it should be to align them.

Clearly,

The American edge hasn't ever been about perfection. It's been about being agile. It's been about adaptation, learning faster, faster, adapting systems, better, improving, educating ourselves. As I said, what happened in December wasn't, wasn't necessarily a failure. It was an opportunity to improve. was a signal, just like we're seeing in big time college sports.

just like we're seeing in other institutions. We're gonna talk in part two of this dialogue, because this is only part one, with my colleague Bruce Appleyard about other wicked problems related to AAVs. I hope you can listen in, because this is gonna be a fun two-fold episode. For now, I'm Billy Riggs, and this is Rewiring the American Edge.

We'll be back with Bruce in part two.