Technology as intended to be
There were two events last week which seemed unrelated, yet they underline the main purpose of technology — to make things go faster and remove friction.
Both events were very exciting.
The first one — Flying cars are here!
Another sci-fi fulfilled dream is upon us. We got a flying car courtesy of Tesla.
Where did people from Tesla get inspiration?
Good depictions of flying cars are in the movies Back to the Future — ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’, or The Fifth Element — ‘You wanna play it soft, we’ll play it soft. You wanna play it hard — let’s play it hard.’
The demo of the new Tesla Roadster was impressive. It was driving up the wall, flipping mid-air, and jumping over other Tesla cars and trucks. It accelerated from 0 to 60mph (100km/h) in 1 second.
The flying, flipping and jumping were achieved by cold compressed air. Driving up the wall upside down was made possible by fans sucking the air from underneath.
There will be three versions — the fast one, the faster one using the air jets for acceleration and the one with the flying capabilities.
I hope there is a general understanding that the car is a concept car to get people excited about the future, and only the first version might get approved for the regular road.
To comply with the theme of recurrent patterns, I should point out that there are already other flying cars like Alef and many prototypes in the works. The ability to stick to the road has been used in Formula 1: the Brabham BT46B in 1978. Going from 0 to 100 km/h in under 1 second was achieved by the students during the Formula Student competition in 2023. The last one is even more impressive because, unlike the Tesla Roadster, it used only an electric motor to achieve the acceleration. The biggest issue is the tires’ grip.
The second event, where perhaps the word ‘exciting’ is not the right adjective, was the discovered vulnerability in the PHP programming language.
To appreciate the impact of this vulnerability, here are a few of the headlines:
Government websites go dark after AI-discovered flaw sparks security scramble — Reuters
AI tools discovered the PHP vulnerability that could take down 70% of the internet. Now, the race is on to patch it before AI-powered hackers attack — Fortune
Critical security issue affecting PHP — National Cyber Security Centre
Computer security firm WIZ, using an AI tool, found multiple vulnerabilities in the popular PHP language. This led to a major undertaking among many companies, Automattic, Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google, Imperva, Microsoft, Vercel, and many others, to quickly devise a fix and, most importantly, distribute it.
For details and timelines, you can check this article. The discovered flaw has been there since 2012, and even though it was known that it could become a problem, it wasn’t fixed until now.
Is this something new? Not really. One can recall the Heartbleed bug from 2012 to 2014 or Log4Shell, which existed from 2013 till 2021. When it comes to speed, honourable mention goes to Melissa and the I Love You viruses or more accurately, computer worms. They didn’t have to use rockets, just Microsoft Windows.
As interesting as all this sounds, you might be asking what the Tesla Roadster and computer vulnerabilities have to do with each other.
It is ‘technology’ which helps us to do things better, faster and more efficiently. We will get better, faster, self-flying cars. We will discover more and more bugs in our software, and we will distribute the fixes. What it will never do well is the ‘thinking’ part. Despite all the hype and promises, that part is still ours. Let’s keep that recurrent pattern to ourselves.