More photos of the Eldon Rover

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A couple of weeks back I posted about an old Land Rover (spotted by one of my coffee shop buds) wasting away in Eldon, MO, a small town about 30 miles southwest of Jefferson City. Since then another coffee shop pal purchased the the truck and it’s now sitting in the garage of another coffee shop friend who has the task of bringing the truck back to life.

She needs some work but that’s a good thing. This is the exact year and model as my truck, right down to the 2.25 litre diesel engine. As pal #3 (a talented mechanic) works his magic, I’m hoping to watch (quietly) from a corner of the garage. (I assume I’ll have to pay for the privilege)

There has also been some question as to whether my truck would fit through my garage door. I kept hearing different measurements from the guys in San Diego. This is important because we don’t want a diesel engine sitting outside during mid-Missouri winters. I now know it will pass easily into my garage (84 in clearance).

My truck scheduled to be transported from SoCal to NoCal this week.

The robots are here

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“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.” — Scott Adams

“When robots start doing all of the medical research, the speed of discoveries will increase a hundredfold. Robots will simply try every idea until someday there is a cheap pill that keeps your body young and healthy. The government will get out of the healthcare field when the cost of medical services becomes trivial, and I think robots will get us there.” — Scott Adams

“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.” — Mockingbird (Walter Tevis)

“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.” — Scott Adams

“The highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.” — Kevin Kelly

Spare tire in “the tub”

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Very pleased with the spare tire mounted in the “tub” of the Land Rover. The bottom photo makes it appear to take up more space than it does. It was either here or on a swing-arm at the back of the truck. I prefer this. And the rear seats will be replaced with a couple of custom cushions (and no back).

Self-Driving Trucks

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“Since early October, autonomous trucks built and operated by the startup Embark have been hauling Frigidaire refrigerators 650 miles along the I-10 freeway, from a warehouse in El Paso, Texas, to a distribution center in Palm Springs, California.”

“For now, the Embark milk runs are designed to test logistics as well as the safety of the technology. On each trip, a human driver working for Ryder (a major trucking company and Embark’s partner on this venture) heads over to the Frigidaire lot in El Paso, picks up a load of refrigerators, hauls them to the rest stop right off the highway, and unhitches the trailer. Then, a driver working for Embark hooks that trailer up to the robotruck, cruises onto the interstate, pops it into autonomous mode, and lets it do its thing. The truck mostly sticks to the right lane and always follows the speed limit. Once in Palm Springs, the human pulls off the highway, unhitches the trailer, and passes the load to another Ryder driver, who takes it the last few miles to Frigidaire’s SoCal distribution center.”

WIRED

Grayson Wolf and Luke Richards

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Big day for The Land Rover Project. Mr. Wolf (left) is in San Marcos doing a final inspection on the truck. Luke Richards (right) was in charge of the restoration. Assuming the truck does well on this afternoon’s test drive, it’s back to the Bay Area for the final shakedown cruise.

UPDATE: Okay. Looks like the restoration is done and the truck will head for Mr. Wolf’s garage before the end of the month. Not sure how long he’ll need to “break it in” but I’m hoping to have it before the end of the year.

Trust

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“There’s plenty of trust out there. It just isn’t where it used to be. Trust, the glue that holds society together, has shifted from institutional trust to a new form of distributed trust. Instead of flowing upwards to institutions, experts, authorities and regulators, it now flows horizontally to peers, friends, colleagues and fellow users. […] And because trust is moving into the hands of the many, there will be more of it around.”

“Distributed trust, combined with technology, also means that within the next decade, we’ll be comfortable trusting well-trained bots, whether they’re driving us around, giving us financial advice, or telling us if we have cancer.”

World Economic Forum: Trust in 2030