Ethan Zuckerman:

I have an excellent job at a great university. I have a home that I love in a community I’ve lived in for two decades where I have deep ties of family and friendship. Unfortunately, that university and that hometown are about 250 kilometers from one another. And so, I’ve become an extreme commuter, traveling three or four hours each way once or twice a week so I can spend time with my students 3-4 days a week and with my wife and young son the rest of the time.
 
 America is a commuter culture. Averaged out over a week, my commute is near the median American experience. Spend forty minutes driving each way to your job and you’ve got a longer commute than I in the weeks I make one trip to Cambridge. But, of course, I don’t get to go home every night. I stay two to three nights a week at a bed and breakfast in Cambridge, where my “ludicrously frequent guest” status gets me a break on a room. I spend less this way than I did my first year at MIT, when I rented an apartment that I never used on weekends or during school vacations.
 
 This is not how I would choose to live if I could bend space and time, and I spend a decent amount of time trying to optimise my travel through audiobooks, podcasts, and phone calls made while driving. I also gripe about the commute probably far too often to my friends, who are considerate if not entirely sympathetic. (It’s hard to be sympathetic to a guy who has the job he wants, lives in a beautiful place, and simply has a long drive a few times a week.)

Boris Sofman:

Thank you for your question — this is a very important one.
 
 The cars in Anki Drive are characters in a video game brought to life in the physical world.
 
 Anki Drive cars are extremely different from other types of cars (plastic, RC, etc.). They are very complex and capable robotic systems that can bring the characters they represent to life in a way that has never been possible outside of a video game: with intelligence, personality, and true interaction. For the first time, you can play a game where whatever cars you don’t control come to life and are controlled by the AI, reacting autonomously to what you’re doing and what the other cars are doing. The have a lot of sensors, motors, and computation internally (50 MHz microcontroller in each car) to make this possible.
 
 In terms of their capabilities, there are 3 key challenges of robotics that we had to solve to make Anki Drive, and the capabilities of the cars within, possible:
 
 Positioning — every car needs to understand precisely where it is, and where the other cars are relative to it. To do this, each car scans its environment 500 times per second to know with exact precision where it is located on the track, and wirelessly communicates that back to the mobile devices running the game.
 
 Reasoning — Once the cars know where they are, we use that information to make intelligent decisions and plans for the cars that are controlled by the game. We use mobile devices as the ‘brains’ behind the real-world game, thinking about thousands of potential actions every second for each car.