Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:

In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.

One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.

This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle "tipping point" sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.

I don't know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.

Seeing people out at bars and at amusements parks in this WSJ video about Wuhan, China is a little odd given that in this part of the world we are decisively in our second wave. But that is what is happening. In fact, the title of the video is, "Wuhan, Former Pandemic Center, Emerges as Tourist Hot Spot."

Over a recent public holiday, the city saw nearly 19 million tourists -- the most of any Chinese city. And while tourist revenues are still thought to be down by some 30%, Chinese people are seemingly feeling confident enough to get back out and do things.

Based on what the WSJ is reporting, this seems to be supported by a few things. International travel isn't happening, so it's becoming a boon for local tourism, which is not that dissimilar from what's happening in other countries. (Domestic air travel is rebounding faster than international travel when you look at flight volumes across major airlines.)

At the same time, Wuhan implemented what sounds like some pretty extensive testing, which is in turn supported by a national healthcare platform that presumably makes contact tracing easier. These things seem to have given people the confidence to go out again. And I don't doubt that the same will eventually happen in the rest of the world.

Smartphone user data is hugely valuable at a time like this. Which is why governments all over the world from Israel to South Korea are using aggregated telecom data to try and track how their citizens are moving during this pandemic.

Some are calling this a violation of digital rights. I don't know enough to comment on that specifically, but I do know that the value to society as a whole is clear. It strikes me that if we knew (1) who was infected (you know this by doing widespread testing), (2) where people have been, and (3) where people are today, we would be in a much better position to contain the spread.

To that end, Singapore's Ministry of Health has been publicizing a surprising amount of information regarding its cases. And that data has been in turn made into interactive maps. You can see who is infected, where they live and work, which hospital they were admitted to, and so on. Is this an overshare? Or is this price of collective health and security?

The New York Times has similarly gone and visualized the movement of people and the virus using data from major telecoms, Baidu, and other sources; though in this case it is more of a retrospective view of what went wrong as opposed to a proactive management tool. The argument they make is that Wuhan's lockdown was too little, too late.

According to the NY Times, 175,000 people left Wuhan on January 1st alone. Throughout the month of January, outbound travel from Wuhan accelerated as many started to fear a lockdown. About 7 million people left in January. Where they travelled to can be found here. Would it be too draconian to use this kind of mobile phone data to see who is obeying a lockdown and who is not?

Images: New York Times