Breaking Glass
Notwithstanding Elon Musk’s embarrassing moment a few months ago when Tesla’s Cybertruck window cracked during a demonstration of its toughness, all his company’s futuristic projects are here to stay.
For the moment.
And the sarcastic memes will continue ad infinitum. But he probably doesn’t care.
Considering it was a minor blip on the plethora of mishaps in the business life of the South African tech billionaire, rest assured Musk is determined Tesla will make it over the finishing line. One of his pet projects (among many) is in driverless cars.
Highlighting two of the biggest challenges to a driving revolution, Musk said last year that:
‘Intersections with complex traffic lights and shopping mall parking lots are the two biggest software challenges…’
Hollywood’s Role
Apple and Russian internet company Yandex are just a few of the dozens which are trying and testing the technology that but two decades ago was unique to Hollywood: Johnny Cab in 1990’s Total Recall with Arnie. Timecop, made in 1994 with the Muscles from Brussels Jean Claude van Damme, showed cinema goers what the future could be like.
Waymo, formerly Google’s self-driving car project, an American autonomous driving technology development company, is yet another which intuits that sooner rather than later there will be enough Herbies on the roads to make their efforts worthwhile.
Whatever the future, there is technology out there that can make sci-fi a certain reality.
Quantum physics, too, has taken its place in the technological sphere and morphed into the ever-popular bywords of ‘quantum’ and ‘computing’ (QC) by manipulating qubits — ultramicroscopic quantum phenomena in the form of atoms, photons or electrons — to send information, replacing the ‘bits’ in classical computer models.
One startup, seeing a niche market evolving, has grasped the chance to see what one nascent industry can do for another.
BardeenQ Labs
BardeenQ Waves, a ‘Quanta’ of the greater BardeenQ Labs’ — an initiative set up to ‘set up’ other startups ‘focusing on specific quantum technologies’ — business goal is:
to build ambient temperature quantum devices, vision sensors and quantum AI edge processors for self-driving cars
The startup claims that AI Vision is the future of safe self-driving cars, and judging by the six deaths which have sadly occurred when Level 2 and Level 3 self-driving cars have been involved, TQD hopes it is.
Although the statistical data seems trivial against the number of road deaths involving human-controlled vehicles since the great Henry Ford woke up one day with a lightbulb moment, a death is a death.
Anything to avoid the Grim Reaper, and an expensive lawsuit, should be avoided at all costs, I say.
BardeenQ Labs’ lead is Ayo Kolapo, who gained a Ph.D. from the University of Houston in condensed matter and material physics.
As of yet, not much is known about the ‘Quanta/startup’ that is BardeenQ Waves, though I reckon its focus on the up-and-coming tech niche of room temperature quantum-powered AI chips and driverless vision systems for my Bugatti Chevron is a good thing.
