Silicon Valley wants to drive your car but can’t reliably seat you at a restaurant
An episode of CNBC’s Billion Dollar Buyer featured a restaurant reservation and seating app, SeatNinja, that seems to have nifty new features but repeatedly bombed during demonstrations, frustrating and angering billionaire Tilman J. Fertitta, who Forbes calls the “World’s Richest Restaurateur”—hence the last person they’d want to disappoint.
TILMAN FERTITTA: Y'all said that it was done, and it’s not happening.
TILMAN FERTITTA (voiceover): The SeatNinja boys are testing their jump-in-line feature at my restaurant Willie G’s and so far the only thing jumping is my blood pressure from dealing with these two.
SEATNINJA CEO: It’s working for us.
TILMAN FERTITTA: It doesn’t work—I mean, come on!
SEATNINJA CEO: We can fix it, though.
TILMAN FERTITTA (voiceover): When [I previously met with them for a demonstration and] I gave them a second chance in Sacramento, I made it very clear: if this app does not work, do not come to Houston, and now once again, they’re trying to spin it.
SEATNINJA EXECUTIVE: The hosts and hostesses liked using the system—it’s new, it’s exciting, it’s easy to use. When the manager came up and told the girls to put it away, the reaction was “Aww” [disappointment].
TILMAN FERTITTA: Do y'all just believe everything that comes out of your mouth? I went over there and I asked that manager, “Do you like this system?” and he looked right at me and goes, “No.”
SEATNINJA EXECUTIVE: I don’t think he understands the system at all. I don’t think he took enough time to see how much easier the system is.
TILMAN FERTITTA: Stop being a salesman! You had one issue after another and you come in here like you’re cocky sales[men], like you really have your act together, and you know damn well you didn’t. I’m not happy.
Stating the obvious: businesses approaching billionaires should come with their A-game, but if they still flop and are given time to remedy their problems (as Mr. Fertitta graciously did), they should have them fixed.
This classic example of Silicon Valley overconfidence and underestimation of the difficulty of interfacing with the real world—and people in it—underscores the risks we will face when Silicon Valley begins driving our cars.
Virtually every day, I see Silicon Valley products screw up, even when they’ve been around for many years (giving their developers plenty of time to work the bugs out) and do simple tasks a thousand times easier than driving a car. No matter how simple the task—such as displaying text on a page, which LinkedIn hasn’t yet reliably mastered—they still find ways to botch it yet often cannot find ways to fix it. Thus they foist these not-ready-for-primetime apps, websites, and gizmos on us, with their developers often tickled pink with their brilliance but users turning red in anger—but with cars, it will also literally be blood red after accidents that will inevitably result from unforeseen software flaws.
As an ER doctor, I saw car accidents end and shatter countless lives, which inspired me to develop a way to prevent most accidents and substantially mitigate the severity of others. I built several prototypes (for a range of vehicles—not only car and trucks) and successfully tested them on a variety of conditions: icy, wet ice, slushy, snowy, sand, gravel, mud, and dry roads (pavement or asphalt), with the results thrilling me by working better than expected but with me always thinking of ways to make it even better. As it stands now, I can make any car (standard or driverless—they also need this technology) stop much quicker than supercars on dry roads or the 2011 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Carbon Edition, which Motor Trend reported braked from 60 – 0 mph in 93 feet.
The irony: if Silicon Valley wasn’t so arrogant and closed to outsiders, you’d already have this on your car. Your auto insurance rate would plummet, and when a loved one left on a trip, you could be almost certain you’d see them again, fully intact. Today’s cars are much safer than they once were, but considerably too many people are injured in them.
According to the World Health Organization, 20 to 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year and almost 1.24 million die as a result: about as many as are killed by HIV/AIDS. Car accidents cause $518 billion globally in property damage—over $5 trillion per decade.
Current vehicles are clearly not safe enough, even in the United States and other advanced nations. I’ve been injured in a car accident and personally (apart from my work as an ER doc) know many people who’ve been either killed or injured, with some permanent life-altering injuries (such as brain damage, paralysis, and disfigurement) serving as a constant reminder of their danger.
Thus by ignoring this problem and focusing on its trivial apps and websites they still can’t get right, Silicon Valley is helping kill and injure (not directly but via neglect) more people per day than terrorists did on 9/11. The United States poured about $6 trillion (see Time magazine’s 2011 article The $5 Trillion War on Terror) into the War on Terror yet won’t spend a dime on new technology that would have zero net cost—it would save us money—yet save considerably more lives.
Even Mark Zuckerberg eventually realized how wrong he was by previously exhorting his programmers to “move fast and break things.” Only sociopaths with overclocked ambition think it is a good idea for a handful of programmers to scrimp on time so millions of users are inconvenienced by their mistakes. However, this half-ass is good enough attitude isn’t unique to Silicon Valley; it is prevalent in healthcare and elsewhere.
I posted a related article Driverless cars (an accident waiting to happen) and unexamined change and Jack Nicas published a superb one, Silicon Valley Stumbles in World Beyond Software: Google parent’s struggle to launch a delivery-drone business is part of tech’s broader problem with physics; no space elevators or jetpacks.
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”— paraphrasing Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Steering ships in unchartered waters
6 年Interesting article about a product I founded called "SeatNinja". Although our beta didn't work as "perfect" as the TV show made it sound, we still ended up getting into Outback Steakhouse, Claim Jumpers etc. There was a great deal of "shock value" they wanted to add to the show. This falls in line with the age old saying, "you can't always believe everything you see on TV."
Leadership and Keynote Speaker and member of the Data Science Research Centre at University of Derby
7 年A critical problem is that Silicon Valley and, as Vishal Kataria points out, many other software developers, only deliver a permanent series of Alpha and Beta Test standard software. Almost never providing what we used to call Production standard robustness and reliability. What has happened to software quality standards?
Assistant Managing Editor @ Sportskeeda | Creator @Daily Sāttvik
7 年This is not just an endemic issue for Silicon Valley, Kevin. I see a lot of it happening in India too. Packing a product with too many features, but failing the testing of basic functions. We were taught about this myopic view during MBA. Unfortunately, most founders / developers just care about whether their product works for them. That's their benchmark. P.S. Have you thought about putting up your invention on Kickstarter to crowdsource funds for it?