Machine Earning

Photo by Matt Duncan

We’ve saddled production vehicles with high-quality sensors in the interest of safety — or what is currently referred to as ADAS or advanced driver assistance systems. But while most of these sensors are on 100% of the time the vehicle is running, they’re primarily doing the job of a quiet watchdog. They’re active and sensing, but accidents are infrequent and things like advanced cruise control aren’t running but a portion of a duty cycle.

Instead, we need to consider sensors in our vehicles as our subjugates — that we can control and can use for safety, data collection and profit. During a 30-minute commute, a driver should be able to produce meaningful data from her vehicle’s sensor suite such as:

• Updating out-of-date road and map data
• Lane marking and map matching
• Traffic information
• Localized weather, road surface and visibility information
• Accident reconstruction of nearby vehicle incidents

The modern vehicle is a sensor workhorse, but has a very narrow idea of work. We need to broaden it as a networked sensor workhorse, with the owner / operator benefitting by letting her vehicle’s sensors add to a corpus of sensor data. All of the things listed above are services and markets that measure in the billions.

I call this act of selling back vehicle sensor data ‘machine earning’ and I believe that over the coming decade we will see a number of markets emerge to serve this need, some coming from within the vehicle and some perhaps operating on top. My friend Colin O’Donnell calls this ‘captcha for cars.’

e.g.

• There is a new roundabout on your route that we haven’t mapped yet. If you drive the roundabout three times we will bonus you 1GB of data this month.
• A vehicle near you on your commute was involved in accident. Press OK to provide still images from your rear-view camera that will help reconstruct the accident.
• There is a tricky intersection ahead that requires some human training. Teach the autonomous system how to drive it and we will OTA you a new, faster accelerator upgrade.

As vehicles get more sensors, the driver gets more ‘workers.’ Now we need to unleash the power of these sensors for a greater, more valuable good. Machine earning will be a new way to ‘work’ and earn for miles traveled.