Flying Taxis; Supersonic Flight; Self-driving Trucks; Future Factory | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

If you've ever fantasized about

flying

over bumper-to-bumper traffic in a

flying

vehicle, that may be possible sooner than you think—not with a flying car but with a battery-powered plane called Evol, a clunky acronym for electric. vertical. takeoff and landing vehicle As we first reported in April, dozens of companies are spending billions of dollars to make electric toll vehicles that will function as air

taxis

that take off and land from what are called verp ports at the top from buildings, parking lots or helipads in congested locations. EV TOS cities promise a faster, safer and greener mode of transportation, potentially changing the way we work and live.

It sounds too good to be true. We went for a joy ride to find out. I'll assemble the plane if you're ready. Yes, confirm totally clear above if this. It looks like an oversized drone that I'm about to take off in, that's pretty much what's breaking ground right there, it's a single seat evl called a hexa powered by 18 propellers, each with its own battery, no requires jet fuel, you are in control, the onboard computers automatically adjust the altitude and wind, you can really feel the wind here, so all I had to do was use a joystick to control the movement and speed of the hexa .

It took me about 30

minutes

of pre-

flight

training to master it. Use that yaw to Turn 90° The wonderful hexa is still in its testing phase, so I had to stay close to chief pilot Jace Maau and his ground crew, but they say it has flown up to 195 feet in the air at 24 mph. When you are ready, you can return. To get home, the batteries last up to 15

minutes

. I was going to try to land on the camera, yes absolutely to land, I maneuvered hexa into position, pressed a button and the computers did the rest, there you are, on the ground and the propeller spinning down.

It's great, so much fun, a piece of cake, it was amazing, it's so much fun, wow, I just want to like taking off with it. I know Matt Chason is the CEO of an Austin-based aerial lift craft that manufactures hexa. He imagines a

future

where travelers use it. to avoid rush hour traffic you can fly 10 miles in 10 minutes instead of spending over an hour on the roads during rush hour congestion, would this be something that in the

future

an individual owns and flies from home to some place we don't see? individual ownership is very practical, these are very expensive airplanes, we see that we put fleets of airplanes in places where we provide maintenance, we provide training and people can come and basically pay per

flight

, but that is still a long way from federal, state and Local regulators fail to mention that the nation's airspace isn't ready for hundreds of thousands of travelers piloting their own TOS EVs in the skies over congested cities, so to give people a taste of the future, Chason has now designed Hexa as an ultralight vehicle, meaning it does not have to go through the complex Federal Aviation Administration certification process, but it also cannot fly over populated areas.

Chason plans to start offering rides to paying customers for $250 by the end of this year. The initial market that you see is essentially Joy travel for people, yes. I think there is a huge market for people to simply experience the thrill and joy of flying around the world. All kinds of EV TOS, cargo carriers, air ambulances and a host of air

taxis

are being developed, some with pilots, some without, the Air Force is investing. So are Airbus and American Airlines, and dozens of companies are already working with the FAA. They're not the flying cars that sci-fi movies anticipated, no, but when you think about it, I look back on the arc of my own career after being a driver for 42 years. and I'm amazed at the amount of innovation that has taken place Billy Nolan was FAA safety chief before being named acting administrator in March, how difficult the CU certification process is, there are a lot of moving parts to this first thing we have to certify the design of the aircraft it

self

and then we look at how it's going to operate, if it's piloted, if it's autonomous, we look at where we're going to operate, that means, how we're going to position it within our nation's airspace, once that's accomplished. security threshold and only until that security threshold is reached will we be prepared to certify it.

Some evaluation companies are on the way. We flew in a gas guzzling helicopter with one of the favorites in this Air Taxi arms race, Joe Ben Beverly, CEO of Joby Aviation took us to this remote facility in California where he was testing his Evol plane Joby when we landed, it felt like The old guard will meet the new, obviously it's a combination of a helicopter and a plane exactly so it can take off like a helicopter. but it flies with the efficiency of the plane Beverly has been working on for more than a decade, has six propellers and four batteries in its wings and will function as an air taxi with a pilot and four passengers.

He says it can fly 150 miles on a single charge and has a top speed of around 200 mph. Why is this very vertical takeoff design important so we can get you where you want to go? We don't need a huge runway and then with a wing it gives you the Efficiency to fly far and fly fast. The BLX Alpha flight was approved because it is still being tested. The Joby was remotely piloted by a nearby ground crew for the flight when they started the engines. Unlike a helicopter, the Joby needed no time to warm up. It took off in about 20 seconds, that's it, it's really quiet.

We wanted this to sound more like wind in the trees than a helicopter. Noise levels are a critical issue since TOS EVs are intended to take off and land close to where people work and live. This is below the background noise level of many cities. You know, I go around with my deciel meter on my phone and I like to measure sound levels. That's exactly what you've been doing for 10 years because we needed to make sure the plane was going to be ever studied mechanical engineering at Stanford, where he invented this popular flexible camera tripod and then created a company that made flying wind turbines, but Joby was still a dream difficult to achieve.

There were definitely skeptics. Even you know good friends of mine who didn't. I don't think you can do this with batteries and electric propulsion. Battery technology simply didn't exist, it wouldn't work. Yes, I never hired John Wagner from Tesla, where he helped develop the revolutionary car batteries. In Joby, he discovered a way to do. batteries are lighter but still powerful enough to get the two-ton EV Vall off the ground, you had to play with the strengths of the battery power and the strengths of the electric motors, so typical airplanes can have one big engine, but we can have six engines distributed everywhere. the plane and in that way operate in a much more efficient way, the weight of everything must be the most important thing, so how do you make an airplane as light as possible?

Basically, each piece has to be designed, the exterior of the work is made with layers of lightweight carbon fiber, the batteries, as well as the computers, electronics and motors, are built under the supervision of John Wagner and his team shakes them up and spins them to ensure they meet the rigorous FAA safety standards they have to certify the aircraft is safe. and capable of flying to their standards, they also have to certify the production of all the parts exactly and the operation, the pilot training, the maintenance, uh, the steps, every facet is heavily regulated, all of this costs a lot of money.

Toyota has invested about $400 million in Joby and Beverly took the company public last year. I think the texture is good. Billionaire Paul Shiara, co-founder of the website Pinterest, has also invested a small fortune. He is the CEO of Joby and says that they will launch up to three cities and that passengers. I'll eventually end up paying around $3-4 per mile to fly a little more than an average Uber ride. Can you take me as a passenger? How do I look like I want to get to JFK airport? There is bumper to bumper traffic. What I do?

Take out your phone, pull out an app and with one click you're booking the entire trip, so a car will come to wherever you are in Manhattan, take you to the take-off and landing site, to the vertical port and you'll get in your Joby and you'll go. is leading to your final destination now, maybe there is a car at the other end or you are just walking to the end if people take cars to and from Verte ports, doesn't that just increase congestion if we are? Can I take out 80% of the miles people could be traveling and move those miles from congested roads into the air?

I think that will have an impact, but just a few weeks after we saw this Joby plane fly, it crashed. In February, due to what federal investigators called a component failure, no one was injured, but the total number of electric vehicles was totaled. Bever says that's all part of the testing process, and he's as optimistic now as he was when we interviewed him. How far are you from getting the first one? Jobi in the sky with passengers, so we will launch our service in 2024. You think you can do it that fast. Yes, there have been many companies that have said, "We're going to do this in 2 years, and then we won't." "If this happens, we are very confident that there is also a lot of confidence in Whiskey Arrow, although the Vall they are developing will be even more complicated to bring to market because it is completely autonomous, there will be passengers but there will be no pilot on board." You're not just discovering an electric vehicle, you're discovering a

full

y autonomous flying vehicle, that's right, let's go for it.

You and I talked about that. CEO Gary Gon says they are on track to spend around $2 billion that funds the company. Larry Pagee, co-founder of Boeing and Google, have been testing the technology for the past eight years. He controls Z in position for takeoff. So how many test flights have you actually done? About 1,600 test flights before you know it, knock on wood without an incident selecting LIF off now we saw one of those test flights in Hollister California the engineering team about a half mile away started the Vall with the click of a mouse the entire route was pre-programmed why autonomous why follow this route so we are going directly to the automatic search, several reasons: one is safer, he says, because most plane crashes involve human error.

Much of commercial aviation is already automated and he sees the entire electric vehicle industry going in that direction. Eventually he is determined to get there first. We do it primarily from a safety perspective but also from a scale perspective, so if you don't have experience flying the plane, it's less expensive, you don't have to do pilot training, you're flying for passengers, we can charge less, we don't want this Whether it is a premium helicopter-like service we want this to be a service that is affordable to the masses. There is a psychological obstacle to people getting on an airplane that doesn't have a human at the controls, of course, and so what are we trying to do with that?

If each passenger can be in verbal communication with the ground, he can talk to a pilot whenever he wants, so everything is designed for comfort. It will take time. This will not happen overnight. He wants to launch the WHS four-seater. Air taxi service in the world's 20 busiest cities over the next decade does not give a date for when it believes it will be operational. Yeah, you know why we don't do it because we don't have control of that part. the fa is uh in Europe it's called yasa they're in charge so when they certify planes to fly that's when you fly the FAA doesn't say when an autonomous electric vehicle might be certified, but acting administrator Billy Nolan told us by calling to a piloted air.

Taxi by 2024 is within the realm of possibility, the challenge for us is to ensure that innovation does not come at the expense of safety, but we are clearly seeing the emergence of something fantastic. I think this is real. I mean, this is not like that. These are no longer just fantasy things, we want to be very careful, we want to be very measured, but you are absolutely right, this is real and this is happening. We've come a long way from where we were, you know, just a decade ago. Have you ever endured what seemed like an endless flight on a cramped plane, you could take advantage of the opportunity to get to your destination in half the time New York to Los Angeles in under 3 hours sounds appealing, the last commercial

supersonic

flight was Almost 20 years ago, and even then, superfast flights were only carried out on very limited routes, most of today's aircraftThey fly slower than they did 20 or 30 years ago to save fuel, but that may be about to change, it's still a long shot, but as we first reported last November that private startups with a big helping hand from NASA could give us Everyone got another chance to fly faster than the speed of sound when British Airways Flight 2 roared into the sky over New York on October 24, 2003.

Everyone on board, passengers and pilots knew something special was coming to them. Finally, enjoy the moment as you are the last people in the world as passengers to travel at twice the speed of sound. The

supersonic

Concord, a joint effort of the British and French governments, was making its last flight after almost 30 years in paralyzed air. Due to a combination of sky-high costs and safety concerns after a fatal accident in 2000, even people who saw the final landing in London were moved. I love airplanes and there will be nothing like Concord again. Maxim Never Say Never super Sonic returns and this time it will be different, he is back to stay Blake Scha is the founder and CEO of Boom, his audacious goal is to build a new supersonic plane from scratch.

Has a private company ever built a supersonic airplane? airplanes nowhere, nowhere, has been the only rise of the government and the military, is not the only American startup in the new supersonic sweep. What's at stake is the development of an ultra-fast executive jet and Hermus aspires to make a hypersonic plane that would fly five times the speed of sound, but boom it's the only ticket to building a plane, this is it, oh wow, up now Blake sha and boom have built this unique Cedar test plane that they hope will work. flying this year, the airliner that will follow is called Overture, it only exists in artists' renderings, but it is real enough for one of the largest airlines in the United States to get on board, as is the Overture, the plane which United recently ordered.

That's right, United just ordered 15 Overture planes. So more proposals than Concords were put into service. This deal with United is like a seal of approval. I think it's incredibly validating. You know, when you're together, you take these things seriously enough to produce a slick promo video that's already playing. many United flights, the ad may say Supersonic is here, but it isn't here yet. Blake Scha is a software engineer who started his career at Amazon, not aerospace, but insists he'll make it happen when he looks back several decades, you know what I want. It is being able to be anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 dollars, that is not the starting point, but that is the ultimate goal.

Concord charged thousands of dollars for a one-way flight from New York to London, what's it going to be like? You might have a similar flight experience for $100, you keep iterating and in the same way you know, for example, electric cars when they first came out were quite expensive, but we kept working on them and the price went down, they got better and better and That's why we are going to do the same with the Supersonic Jets we are going to continue working on them we are going to continue innovating this industry needs people who dream big that is essential this industry was built on that John Ostra is the editor-in-chief of The Air presents a publication which tracks all the advances in commercial aviation, including the boom, and Blake admits that what he is proposing is something that has never been done before by a private company, but he is still convinced that he can do it.

Do you think it can? I think you can't ignore the obstacles that will be in the way of getting there and I think the amount of money that is required to make this happen makes this a very long shot. How much money will probably be needed in the neighborhood of at least 15 or 20 billion asra says that's about what it cost Boeing to develop, build and certify a new subsonic aircraft and they already have a huge boom in facilities manufacturing, didn't Blake tell us that he can build Overture for 7 to 8 billion, but that's a lot more than the 300 million he has raised so far and money is not the only obstacle, and United has promised that his new The plane will run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel, but that doesn't exist yet in the quantities that they will need, and another thing is that they are going to need an engine to do this and they don't have the engine yet.

Blake Schol says there's an engine on the way from the same company that built the supersonic engines for the Concord, and we're working with Rolls-Royce on a custom jet engine that will power Overture. You are working with Rolls-Royce. Not so, this engine does not exist yet, it is a slightly customized engine and part. Blake SCH doesn't dismiss the skeptics, but points to the example of Elon Musk and says that not long ago no one thought he could build Teslas and reusable rockets. Where does this passion come from? It's because we stop progressing in the speed of travel.

You know, the planes we have today are no faster than the ones we had when my parents were little, and there's no good reason why they shouldn't be. Can we solve it? When do you expect the first paying customers to fly on one of your planes by the end of the decade? Supersonic really only makes sense on flights of four or five hours or more, but thousands of those routes are out of reach. For Boom the reason is in the very name of their company that is the sound of a sonic boom created by a plane breaking the sound barrier listen again the first boom was made by Chuck Jagger's X1 rocket plane when it passed through Mach 1 at about 660 mph back in 1947 and it does, what is the sonic boom?, what creates it, when an airplane flies faster than the speed of sound, it creates disturbances.

Mike Buano is a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks aircraft design studio in California. Dave Richardson is his boss many times. Many of us understand the wake generated by a ship or a boat and then we imagine that wake from a speedboat or whatever, all those different waves turning into one big wave, those individual disturbances created by the plane combining to make a strong double burst. The Federal Aviation Administration tested the impact of that big bang in 1964 by flying supersonic military planes like these over Oklahoma City for 6 months. The Result Broken bricks and roofs shattered nerves and public outrage;

It was evident that no one was going to tolerate it. With such a loud noise on a day-to-day basis, the result was a ban on civil supersonic flights around the world, except in open water, and that basically stopped the development of commercial air travel in terms of the speed of advance up to uh , that ban every decade, air travel had become increasingly faster, the ban remains in effect today, so if the boom achieves its opening in the air, it will only be able to serve long transoceanic routes similar to those flown by the Concord, so if you want to go from JFK in New York to Paris, that's fine, but a lot of us want to fly places by land, here we live in Los Angeles, almost everywhere.

I want to go, flying east requires traveling by land and that is one of the big problems we are dealing with. to solve wano and Richardson and his Lockheed Martin team have been commissioned by NASA to build a test plane that can fly twice as fast as current planes without upsetting nerves or breaking windows. Your mission is to get rid of this sonic boom. That is the point. of the plane is to reduce Sonic Boom the plane is called x59 it will look like this when it makes its first flight later this year for now it looks like this inside the Lockheed Martin assembly building you are looking at the cockpit of the plane and there is no front windshield, That's right, every part of the x-59 is streamlined and smooth to disperse sound waves and transform the loud Sonic Boom into a much quieter thump.

If you look at it, it's quite slippery, I mean, it looks like a dart. Nils. Larsson is the NASA test pilot whose job will be to demonstrate that the x59 can replace the sonic boom with a simple punch. Later this year he will pilot some of the first test flights and then the first sound tests coming to a nearby city. So our investigators are going to work with the public and we are going to fly over various cities and towns and they are going to give us the answer that that hit was too strong. Know? Did you hear it?

So if you can fly over populated areas and provide this data, then the FAA will use this data perhaps to lift this ban. Exactly are we likely to see planes in the future flying super on it that look like this? I certainly hope so. and I think you will, so there are definite things that you would see if you walked into a commercial airliner, you know, a supersonic airliner here, you know, 10 or 12 years from now and you would look at that, you could see, you know, some DNA that goes back a x-59 sim lson took us to NASA's x-59 flight simulator and the first thing we noticed is that there is a television screen in place of the missing windshield.

Does it work that well? Yes, I think so far, using your own eyes. is about to go through Mach One, there's Mach One, you know, you see, so now we're going supersonic, yeah, now you're supersonic. Larsson gave me a turn in the cockpit not to fly supersonic but to land the x59, which is complicated since it is pencil-shaped, has no windshield and I am not a pilot, plus signs appear, follow them a little, so back up a little , a little more and keep it there, keep it there, there. Come on, the x59 just landed and in the middle of the runway I had better register it.

Nels Larsson will start testing the real x59 later this year and shortly after he will fly it over us and, if he is calm enough, in the future. Planes that follow his design could eventually take us to many places twice as fast as we can get there. Now, when could you fly from New York to Los Angeles in a supersonic mode? So, there's a long list of things that have to happen. starting with the x59, but I think 2035 is your answer, uh, if everything goes the way it's supposed to, it's something that people have been trying to solve for decades, have they solved that problem that we think we have?

It is gratifying to see it built. but I think that real aha moment for me will be when I hear that first boom in the shape of test flights your x59 sometime this year? For its part, Boom has chosen the location for the

factory

where it intends to build the Overture plane in Greensboro, North Carolina, but it still doesn't have an engine for the Overture - you know that universal signal we give to truckers in the hope of Let them sound their horns. In the future you will hear many fewer horns and with good reason, the absence of a real driver in the cabin can focus us on autonomous car, but autonomous Road transport is not an if it is a when and the wind comes sooner than one would expect Already, companies have been quietly testing their prototypes on public roads.

Right now, the stakes are high in a high-speed race that pits the usual suspects Google and Tesla and other global tech companies against small startups that smell opportunity. The driverless semi truck will shake up the trucking industry and the 2 million American drivers who turn a wrench and maneuver their big rig every day, and the winners of this Derby may be set to win untold billions. They will change the US transportation network and emerge as the new kings of the road. It is one of the great touchstones of American culture. The romance and possibility of the open road all greet the 18-wheeler that hugs those ribbons of asphalt that carry all our stuff. the fruitful plains from sea to shining sea, although we may not think twice when we click the free shipping icon.

Truckers move 70% of the country's goods, but trucking saw a considerably different figure on a humid Sunday last summer on Florida's Starsky Turnpike. robotics a tech startup may have been

driving

in the right lane but they passed the competition and made this yes it's 35,000 pounds of steel rumbling down a busy highway with no one behind the wheel the test was a milestone stari was the first company to put a truck on an open road without a human on board, everyone else in the game with the knowledge keeps a warm body in the cab as a backup for now anyway, if you haven't heard about this, you're not alone in Jacksonville, we talked to Jeff , his widow. son Tanner Linda Allen and Eric Richardson, all truck drivers and all amazed at how far this technology has come.

I didn't realize until I ran into one on the Florida Turnpike and that just scares me, I can't imagine it, but I didn't do it. I don't know anything about it, nobody talks about it, nobody, ever, ever, I didn't know it had come this far and I'm thinking, wow, it's here, you're right, the

self

-

driving

truck.Revolution is here, there just isn't much discussion, not on CB. radios and not in state houses and transportation agencies are not willing to hit the brakes from Florida, turn left and drive 2,000 miles west on I 10 and you will arrive at the proving ground of a company with a fleet of 41 autonomous platforms.

The production floor or this is a laboratory, both are in the bowels of the Sonor Desert outside of Tucson. Chuck Price is the Chief Product Officer at Two Simple, a privately held, $1 billion+ global autonomous transportation company with operations in the U.S. and China at this warehouse. $12 million worth of shiny autonomous semi-

trucks

are in motion right now. We have security operators in the cabin. How far are we from driverless racing? We think we will be able to do our first demonstration with a driver. public roads in 2021, that's the time as to how our main sensor system is our set of cameras that you, on top of the vehicle, heard about improving vehicles from this Tak to a little bit different, yeah , the competition is so fierce that its technology is like a secret, but the price points us to a network of sensors, cameras and radar devices strapped to the outside of the platform, all connected to an internal AI supercomputer that drives the truck in itself, so a bad Wi-Fi signal won't do it. t wreak havoc on the road our system can see much further than any other autonomous system in the world we can see ahead over half a mile you can drive autonomously at night we can do it day and night and in the rain and in the rain at night and they We're working on driving in the snow Chuck Price has unwavering confidence in the reliability of the technology, as do some of the biggest names in shipping, UPS, Amazon and the US Postal Service.

USA, they send cargo with two simple

trucks

. Each unit costs more than A4 million, not a huge expense considering it is designed to eliminate a driver's annual salary which is currently around $45,000, another savings: the driverless truck can get coast to coast in 2 days, not in four stopping only to refuel, although a human still has to do that, we wanted to get on and experience automated transportation first-hand. Feel it's our turn. Space Mountain Price Chuck was happy to oblige. I didn't know what to expect, so we designed more cameras for the pad than NASA, attached to the Apollo rockets, they all buckled, buckled tight, three, two, one, and we press autonomous driving, we sit in the back next to the computer in the front seat.

The sign is Morine Fitzgerald, a truck driver with 30 years of experience, she was our safety driver and took care of the children with no intention of grabbing the wheel, but there, just in case, she was riding shotgun, an engineer John Pantela was there to monitor the software, the driverless truck was attempting a 65m loop on a weekday. traffic through Tucson, the route was mapped and programmed before the race, but that's it, the rest was up to the computer, which makes 20 decisions per second about what to do on the road as we pass distracted drivers, disabled cars , slow and sheriffs of our security.

The driver remained alert but never disengaged the driverless system watching the forward targets approach at 100, yes it had a cut out at this time. 55 mph, bad cut. This guy just blatantly cut us off, just really cut us off. We didn't honk at him, did we? disconnect we don't disconnect this vehicle will detect that type of behavior faster than humans how far are we from being able to detect the specific cars passing us? Oh, that's Joe from New Jersey with six points on his license, we can read the license. plates, so if there was an accessible database for something like that, we could throw out the price, he says it would be valuable to the company, although he admits it could create obvious privacy issues, but Simple collects a lot of data as it Map more and more routes.

His business in the southwest also includes a fleet of autonomous trucks in Shanghai, as well as a research center in Beijing. The data collected by each truck over each mile is loaded and used by two simplers, they say, just for perfect performance on the road. Morin Fitzgerald en I am convinced that two simple technologies are superior to human drivers. You call these trucks your babies. What do your babies do well and what could they do better? This truck is scanning mirrors looking thousands of meters away. It's processing all the things my brain could never do. and can react 15 times faster than me.

Most of his 2 million fellow truckers are less enthusiastic. Automated transportation threatens to destroy an entire $800 billion industry. Trucking is one of the most common jobs for Americans without a college education, so this disruption caused by the driverless truck is as profound as truckers like to say if you bought it, you brought it a truck Steve Aselli is sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and expert in freight transportation and automation. He also spent 6 months driving a big truck, what segment does he do? Do you think they will be affected by truck drivers first? I've identified two segments that I think are most at risk and they are refrigerated and dry trucking, which makes up about 200,000 trucking jobs and then what's called the line corridor and they're somewhere there. in the neighborhood of 80 to 90,000 jobs, you're talking about 300,000 jobs off the top, it's a big number, it's a big number, a lot of truck stops, the Florida truckers we met represent 70 years of experience on millions of miles of Safe driving, how are you doing Gerald?

They say they love the job and when asked to describe their job they use words like vital, honest and patriotic, it makes you feel like you can puff out your chest with the responsibility you are taking on, it makes you feel like you need to be asked about driverless trucks. They feel like they are being run off the road, but there is another problem that worries them even more. I think companies need to take security into account. You have a computer crash at that speed. You may cause some damage. there are too many things that can go wrong, one of them semi crashed into something that is small like a passenger car or something, it's a done deal.

I mean, I was on 75 uh last month through Okala and there was a serious accident, so the state The policeman came out and he was giving hand signals to people: go here, go there, how is he going to recognize an autonomous truck what the officer is trying to say or do? How is that going to work? sympathy, empathy, fear, code, eye contact, I don't know how to create an algorithm that takes into account everything that can't be done, does the public have a right to know if they are testing driverless trucks on the interstate? Absolutely, that's fine, our concern is who's watching this, who's making sure they're not throwing something out. unsafe on the road mhm, I think a lot of this is being done with almost no oversight from the government's own good governance groups.

Sam Lesh represents 600,000 truckers for truckers. He worries that federal, state and local governments will only have limited access to self-driving cars. technology, you know, it is understandable that much of this information is proprietary. Tech companies want to keep you in the dark about their algorithms and security data until they can get it right. The problem is that in the meantime they are testing this technology in public. On the roads they are testing it next to you as you drive down the road and that was consistent with our reports. Do you have to tell someone when you take the test?

No, not for individual tests. Do you have to tell them where you take the test? We currently do not have. to tell them where we test in Arizona or how often you test. No, do you have to share your data with any State Department of Transportation? We are currently not obligated to share data. We will be happy to share data. What about inspections? Does anyone from Arizona DOT come and check things out, point comes up all the time, we talk to them regularly. It is not a formal inspection process, but we wanted to ask Elae Chow, Secretary of the Department of Transportation, about the regulation of this emerging sector.

She declined an interview, but she provided us with a statement that says in part that the department needs to prepare for the transportation systems of the future by utilizing new technologies to address safety without hindering innovation to that extent. Chuck Price is emphatic that driverless trucks pose fewer dangers than we do. eliminate texting accidents texting while driving when there is a computer, no drunk computers and the computer is not sleeping, so those are big causes of accidents. He adds that driverless trucks save more fuel in part because they can stay perfectly aligned in their lane and unlike humans, the program never speeds up, but he admits the profit motive is significant.

You think you can make a lot of money here. There is certainly a lot of money to be made. There is an opportunity to solve a very big problem. Steve says the industry may be imperfect, but he believes the solution shouldn't rely solely on driverless technology. What is his response to technology companies that say look, I'm trying to make something more efficient and I'm going to improve security? This is American Enterprise, what are you doing? I'm going to get in the way of this because I mean, I would say that's wonderful, but that's not your job.

Your job is to make money. The right policy is going to decide what our results will be. Trucking is a very competitive industry. The low road approach often wins, we talk about the internal combustion engine replacing horses and buggies and the Eisenhower interstate system when we talk about these markers of transformation in transportation, yeah, where is trucking without driver? It will be one of the largest in the 1980s. a Misfits lab foresaw our future touch screens automated driving instructions wearable technology and electronic ink were developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a place they call media lab is a lab technologies for growing food in the desert control our dreams and connect the human brain to the Internet.

Take a look at what we found in a place you could call the future Factory. For Arnav Kapor, a graduate student in the media lab. The future is silent. He has developed a system to navigate the Internet with his mind. What happens is that when you're reading, when you're talking to yourself, your brain transmits electrical signals to your vocal cords. In fact, you can pick up on these signals and you can get certain clues like what the person intends to talk about, so the brain sends an electrical signal for a word that you would normally say MH but your device is intercepting that signal, so instead of saying the word, your device sends it to a computer, that's right.

Awesome, let's see how this works, so we try what is 4689 divided by 67. You're sure to silently ask the computer and then hear the answer through vibrations transmitted through your skull to your inner ear. 6 8 1.9 2 5 exactly correct one more what is the largest city in Bulgaria and what is its population, the screen shows how long it takes the computer to read the words that Sophia says to herself 1.1 million , that's right, you just googled what I did, you could be an expert on any topic you have the entire internet in your head that's the idea ideas are the Cur currency of the mit media lab the lab is a Tower of Six-story Babel where 230 graduate students speak dialects of art engineering biology physics and coding all translated into innovation the media lab is that glorious We mix up this Renaissance where we break down these formal disciplines and mix it all up and see what emerges, that's it the magic, that intellectual diversity.

She was a professor who runs an Advanced Prosthetics lab and what do you get out of that? You feel this madness when you stand like a toy designer next to a person who is thinking about what instruments will be like in the future, next to someone like me who is connecting machines with the nervous system, you get really strange technologies, you get things. that no one could have. conceived of the media laboratory was conceived in a 1984 proposal Nicholas Negron of mit wrote that computers are media that will lead to interactive systems predicted the rise of flat screens, televisionshigh definition and news whenever you want Negron became a co-founder of the lab and its director for 20 years when we were demonstrating these things and let's say 85 86 87 um, it was really considered new, it seemed like magic is indistinguishable from magic.

You were going to Main Street in 1979. MIT developed a movie map that predated Google Street View. decades you go north as street now notice what is so common today that you didn't even notice it is touching the screen if you had seen that on 60 Minutes in the 80s you would have been amazed and could have been dazzled by one of the first screens flat they were 6 inches by 6 in black and white it was a $500,000 piece of glass that piece of glass cost half a million dollars and I said that piece of glass would be 6 feet diagonal with millions of

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color pixels in 1997 the lab also gave birth to the grandfather of Siri and Alexa nematic wck up okay, I hear you go to my email where you want to go and in 1989 created a turn-by-turn navigation that he called The driver in the back seat was right at the stop sign and the MIT patent attorneys looked at it and said this will never happen, it will never be done because the insurance companies won't allow it, so we're not going to patent it, look through the glass wall.

Laboratories today and you will witness 400 projects in progress the laboratory is developing pacemaker batteries recharged by heartbeats taxis autonomous tricycles that you summon with your phone phones that do retinal eye exams Ariana I will tell you two stories and I will show you robots, so We believe that the devices of tomorrow have the opportunity to do much more and fit better into our lives. Professor Patty MZ led the graduate student admissions program for more than a decade. We really select people who have a passion for us. We don't have to tell them to work hard. We have to tell them to work less and sleep occasionally.

How often does a student come to you with an idea and you think we're not actually going to do that for us? the crazier the better there's usually some blood vessels running Adam Hor Horowitz's idea was so crazy that he was one of 50 new students admitted last year out of 1,300 applications. I was really interested in a dream state where you start dreaming before you are completely unconscious where you keep thinking about ideas just when you are about to go to sleep time to go to sleep the har horowitz system plant ideas for dreams remember to think about a mountain and then record conversations with the dreamer during that semi-conscious moment before you fall asleep Tell me, what are you thinking?

I'm making an origami pyramid. His origami pyramid dream was influenced by the robot saying the word Mountain. It has long been believed that this is the time when the mind is most creative. Horowitz hopes to capture ideas you often miss the next morning, so it's basically like a conversation where you can ask: Hi Jibo, I'd like to dream about a rabbit tonight. I'd watch for that unconsciousness trigger and then right when you hit your lip it triggers you with audio and asks you what you're thinking, you record all those sleep conversations and then when you're fully awake you can ask for those recordings and when he brought this idea to you, what did you think was pretty crazy? to the world of bodies and movements nearby in Hugh's lab Everett Lawson's brain is connected to his prosthetic foot a replacement for the clubfoot he was born with the very definition of a leg or a limb or an ankle is going to change dramatically with what what they're doing is not just complete, it's 150% you feel directly connected, uh, yeah, when I fire a muscle really fast, it does it completely.

His team has electronically connected the computers in the robotic foot to the muscles and nerves in Lawson's leg. He is not only able to control it through his thoughts, he can actually feel the designed synthetic limb, he feels the joints moving as if they were made of skin and bone, so he is going to try them out for the professor, his need was the mother of the invention, lost his legs to frostbite. At age 17 after a winter storm left him stranded while he was climbing mountains in the recovery process, I had my limbs amputated. I design my own limbs.

I return to my sport of mountaineering. He was climbing better than he had managed with normal biological limbs. That experience was very inspiring because I realized the power of technology to heal, rehabilitate and even expand human capacity. Beyond the natural physiological levels, you develop the legs that you wear today, each leg has three computers and 12 sensors and they run these sensory-based calculations. The information that comes in and then what is controlled is a motor system like a muscle that propels me as I walk and I can walk at different speeds. What will this mean for people with disabilities?

Technology is liberating, removing the shackles of human disability and vision. of the media lab is that one day, through advancements and technologies, we will eliminate all disabilities, so that was a big deal because then the current director of the media lab is Joey ETO, who dropped out of college four times and is one of those misfits the lab prefers I think, after success in high-tech venture capital, he came here to chair the lab's 30 professors and a $75 million annual budget, how do you pay for all this? So we have 90 companies that pay us a membership fee to join the Consortium and then because it's all in one pot, I can distribute the funds to our faculty and students and they don't have to write grant proposals, they don't have to ask. okay, they just make the things that any of these companies rely on from time to time and you say hey, we need some product, here they need it.

I fired companies for that. um, you fired them. Yes, I have told companies that you are too results oriented, maybe we are not right for you, the sponsors that include Lego. the toy manufacturer Toshiba Exxon Mobile and General Electric obtain the first inventions the laboratory has 32 patents and counting we are inside the laboratory we have Caleb Harper's idea it is so big that it does not fit in the building so MIT donated the site of a abandoned particle accelerator for this trained architect who is now building Farms welcome to the farm he calls these food computers Farms where the conditions are perfect all are able to control the climate so they make a recipe so much CO2 so much O2 this temperature so We create a world in a box, most people understand if you say, oh, tomatoes and Tuscany on the North Slope taste so good and you can't get them anywhere else, that's those genetics in those conditions that cause that beautiful tomato, so we studied it inside these boxes with sensors and the ability to control the climate Tuscany in a box Tuscany in a box Nappa in a box Bordeaux and a box now these are plants that you are growing in the air yes, these plants of Basil does not grow in the soil but in the air, the plant is super happy, no dirt, air saturated with a custom mix of moisture and nutrients, so each of these are drops falling into the reservoir, food computers grow almost anything anywhere, what have you learned about growing cotton?

So cotton is actually a perennial plant, which means it would grow, you know, all year round, but it's treated as an annual, we have a season, so in this environment, since it's perfect for cotton, we've Had plants for 12 months, how many crops can you get in a controlled environment like this? They can harvest up to four or five seasons, we are growing on average 3 to four times faster than they can grow in the field. The media lab's unusual growth arises from its refusal to be bound by target contracts or next quarter's earnings, it is simply an exploration ship that goes wherever a crazy idea takes us we can think ahead what the world is like 10 years 20 years 30 years what it should be like you know that the best way to predict the future is to invent it