Meet George Hotz, the Super Hacker Who Can Make Your Car Drive Itself

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. George Hotz: The Self-Driving Car Pioneer
3. The Race to Build the First Fully Operational Self-Driving Vehicle
4. The Comma.ai Approach to Self-Driving Technology
5. The Benefits of Open Source Technology
6. Privacy Concerns and Data Protection
7. Regulatory Issues and Outcome-Based Regulation
8. The Future of Self-Driving Cars
9. Conclusion

George Hotz: The Self-Driving Car Pioneer

George Hotz is a name that has become synonymous with self-driving cars. He is the founder of Comma.ai, a company that is working to bring plug-and-play driverless technology to the masses. Hotz has taken a drastically different approach to his well-financed competition, such as Tesla and Uber, and is doing so with $3.1 million in seed money and a dozen-member team that works out of a house in San Francisco.

Hotz has become one of the world's most famous hackers, having been the first person to break into the iPhone and reconfigure it to be compatible with non-AT&T providers. He was also the first to jailbreak the PlayStation 3, allowing people to play on Sony games and use unapproved software. Hotz quickly became a cause celeb of so-called hacktivist groups, including Anonymous and LulzSec.

The Race to Build the First Fully Operational Self-Driving Vehicle

Hotz is up against Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and most of the auto industry in the race to build the first fully operational self-driving vehicle. The holy grail is level four, at which point the car can handle all driving on most roads, the steering wheel and pedals can be removed, and the human becomes a passenger who can Read, nap, or take in the landscape.

Hotz's company, Comma.ai, is trying to bring plug-and-play driverless technology to the masses. They are doing so with 3.1 million dollars in seed money and a dozen-member team that works out of a house in San Francisco. They have built technology that takes over the existing radar and drive-by-wire systems in modern cars, incorporates a smartphone's camera and processor, and then makes the car drive itself.

The Comma.ai Approach to Self-Driving Technology

Comma.ai's approach to self-driving technology is drastically different from its well-financed competition. They are using cheap sensors, such as a camera and the radar that is built into the car, to tap into the car's existing capabilities. They are not using expensive sensors like LIDAR, which is not feasible for passenger cars because there is no market for a $100,000 system.

Comma.ai's technology is designed to be shippable and feasible for passenger cars. They are trying to build something that just works on existing cars. The idea is that You would be able to plug and play your self-driving system in pretty much any production car. They are trying to support most of the top 20 cars sold in America.

The Benefits of Open Source Technology

Comma.ai is an open-source company. They have open-sourced all of their plans and products. They want to eventually work up to a consumer product and let the market figure out if they don't build the best localizer, for example, if somebody else builds an open-source localizer, they will use that. Comma.ai is trying to be like the phone companies and come out with something new every year.

Hotz believes that intellectual property is kind of like a problem of good scarcity. He thinks that we put artificial constraints on intellectual property to make it artificially scarce. He believes that we need to move the world forward in order to get the technology that we want. He thinks that we need to open our data up more and really think about it not as Facebook owns this data, Google owns this data, but we all collectively own the data.

Privacy Concerns and Data Protection

Comma.ai is collecting data about people's locations and driving habits. This data could be attractive to stalkers, hackers, government agencies, and other outside groups. Hotz says that they do not Record either the microphone or the phone-facing camera. They are not interested in pictures of your face, your name, your age, your gender, or any other personally identifiable information. They are interested in your car's data.

Regulatory Issues and Outcome-Based Regulation

Hotz believes that the regulatory issues surrounding self-driving cars are about outcome-based regulation. He thinks that the arguments that should be made for these sorts of things are statistical arguments. If it turns out that people with the system get into 50 percent fewer accidents than people without the system, the system is good.

The Future of Self-Driving Cars

Hotz believes that the self-driving car game is going to be over in five years, and we will see who the winners are. He thinks that the technology is going to be good enough that we will not have to drive ourselves anymore. He believes that We Are living in the best time ever and that we are practically living in paradise.

Conclusion

George Hotz is a self-driving car pioneer who is taking a drastically different approach to his well-financed competition. He is the founder of Comma.ai, a company that is working to bring plug-and-play driverless technology to the masses. Hotz believes that the self-driving car game is going to be over in five years, and we will see who the winners are. He thinks that we are living in the best time ever and that we are practically living in paradise.