Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 939

Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Partnership for New York City launched a new vertical accelerator dedicated to public transit. The mission is to make the city a global leader in this space.

Applications are open until November 30, 2018 and they are looking for early and growth stage companies that address one or both of the following challenges:

1. How can we better predict subway incident impacts and serve customers?
   

2. How can we make buses faster and more efficient?
   

Selected companies will go through an 8-week accelerator and, at the end of it, the most promising companies will partner with the MTA on a 12-month pilot. So it is an opportunity to potentially test your product(s) on the largest transit authority in the US.

If you’d like to apply, you can do that here .

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Jamaican-Canadian billionaire, Michael Lee-Chin , was in ROB Magazine last week talking about how he grew up, how he got into the investment industry, and how he thinks about wealth creation.

I met Michael once back in 2009 thanks to an introduction by my father. And at that meeting I remember him explaining the five rules of wealth creation. It’s his formula and he’s been practicing it since 1978.

Everybody who creates wealth does five things: They own a few high-quality businesses. They make sure they really understand those businesses. They make sure those few businesses are in strong, long-term-growth industries. They use other people’s money to invest in them. And they vow to hold them as long as they remain great businesses.

That’s consistency. And he’s a pretty consistent guy. The other quote I would like to share from the article is this one here:

Outside wealth is created when there’s a difference between perception and reality, when there are inefficiencies, and when there’s a lack of equity capital flowing into the country, sector or company.

This is something that we have talked about before on the blog. The real value creation happens when you believe in and you’re right about something that most people think is wrong.

As Michael says in the article, you have to be willing to swim upstream, because floating downstream is far too easy and will only get you to the same place as everyone else.

One of the challenges that self-driving vehicles present is not about technology per se, it is about ethics. The typical example scenario is this one: If a pedestrian were to step out in front of an autonomous vehicle illegally , should the car be programmed to hit the pedestrian or veer off the road at the risk of potentially harming its passengers?

I believe that self-driving vehicles will ultimately result in fewer accidents. Statistically they will be safer. But self-driving vehicles, particularly early on, are going to get a lot of attention when they do get into accidents, even if they are still safer as a whole. And that’s because they will make for good headlines.

Safety and statistics aside, in turns out that the answer to the above moral question could depend on where you’re from. Nature recently published what they are calling the largest ever survey of “machine ethics.” And out of this survey they discovered some pretty distinct regional variations across the 130 different countries that responded.

The responses were able to be grouped into 3 main buckets: Western, Eastern, and Southern. Here is the moral compass that was published in Nature :

And here are a few examples. In North America and in some European countries where Christianity has historically dominated, there was a preference to sacrifice older lives for younger ones. So that would guide how one might program the car for the case in which a pedestrian steps out in front.

In countries with strong government institutions, such as Japan and Finland, people were more likely to say that the pedestrian – who, remember, stepped out onto the road illegally – should be hit. Whereas countries with a high level of income inequality, often chose to kill poorer people in order to save richer people. Colombia, for example, responded this way.

Also interesting is the ethical paradox that this discussion raises. Throughout the survey, many people responded by saying that, in our example here, the pedestrian should be saved at the expense of the passengers. But they also responded by saying that they would never ever buy a car that would do this. Their safety comes first in the buying decision. And I can see that.

There’s an argument that these are fairly low probability scenarios. I mean, the last time you swerved your car, you probably weren’t driving on the edge of a cliff where any deviation from the path meant you would tumble to your death. But I still think that these are infinitely interesting questions that will need to be answered. And perhaps the answer will depend on which city you’re in.