Kingsbury Associates

  Many thanks to Pennsylvania Neuro Surgeon Jonathan Slotkin for his Dec 2 NYT Op Ed about the Waymo data dump.  Gift link below.  His conclusion to treat this not through the lens of tech but instead through public health is a striking contribution.  The graphic above is the most probative in his article - possible because of the completeness of Waymo’s data dump.  Slotkins’s point is that the data included all the miles and routes taken by the Waymo vehicles allowing a head to head comparison with human drivers resulting in the chart.  He is critical of regulations only requiring self driving companies to report crashes, because as he says, "We need the denominator [all miles traveled and where], not just the numerator [of crashes]." In a tech user presentation not long ago by a local town manager that I know, he challenged our audience with "how much safer will it have to be?"  Well, Slotkin’s data analysis answers that convincingly!  I’ve shar...

 This was a most interesting NYT opinion piece dated Non 23, 2025, by David Gruber, a marine biologist.   Here is a gift link to the article:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/whale-language-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k8.CIB8.4orrrrq5D8xU&smid=url-share This interested me partly because my daughter and son in law may be starting a family soon and during their Thanksgiving visit, I joked that in their child's life, we'd be able to understand and converse with whales and crows!  When soon after their departure, I read this opinion piece, it took on greater significance to me.  Because of the great work by scientists like Dr. Gruber, and their use of new AI tools, the time to understand whales might be much sooner than I'd thought!   As a tease, here's a paste from Dr. Gruber's article that got my attention:   Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intric...