Biographies: Brad Templeton
Brad Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. ClariNet publishes an online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers machines. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized conference on that network, and today the world's longest running blog. He has been a software company founder, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products. He is chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He also sits on the advisory boards for a few internet startups. Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone call. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute (A Nanotech think-tank) and BitTorrent, Inc.
The Finger of AI: Automated Electrical Vehicles and Oil Independence
One of the most exciting near-term AI prospects is cars that drive themselves -- robocars. Thanks to DARPA's contests, prototype cars are already a reality, and technogical barriers should fall in around a decade. The consequences of making transportation a software problem and bringing Moore's law to cars are breathtaking. They begin with the million people killed each year in accidents and the hundreds of billions of human-hours wasted driving, and extend to providing a way to make light, efficient electric cars based on existing technology marketable to the public. Bought and used by early adopters, and spreading like the internet, robocars can assure most trips use the right vehicle and enable both electric cars and new fuels. Energy use by cars can be cut more than in half, elminating the need to import oil, and eventually to use it at all.
