We're on the cusp of a new wave of virtual reality and augmented reality technology. The most exciting is probably the Magic Leap. I have yet to look through it, but friends who have describe it as hard to tell from actual physical objects in your environment. The Hololens (which I have looked through) is not that good, and has a very limited field of view, but it already shows good potential.

The past period has seen some very big robocar news. Real news, not the constant "X is partnering with Y" press releases that fill the airwaves some times.

Uber has made a deal to purchase Otto, a self-driving truck company I wrote about earlier founded by several friends of mine from Google. The rumoured terms of the deal as astronomical -- possibly 1% of Uber's highly valued stock (which means almost $700M) and other performance rewards. I have no other information yet on the terms, but it's safe to say Otto was just getting started with ambitious goals and would not have sold for less than an impressive amount. For a company only 6 months old, the rumoured terms surpass even the amazing valuation stories of Cruise and Zoox.

While Otto has been working on self-driving technology for trucks, any such technology can also move into cars. Uber already has an active lab in Pittsburgh, but up to now has not been involved in long haul trucking. (It does do local deliveries in some places.) There are many startups out there calling themselves the "Uber for Trucks" and Otto has revealed it was also working on shipping management platform tools, so this will strike some fear into those startups. Because of my friendship with Otto's team, I will do more commentary when more details become public.

In other Uber news, Uber has announced it will sell randomly assigned Uber rides in their self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. If your ride request is picked at random (and because it's in the right place) Uber will send one of their own cars to drive you on your ride, and will make the ride free, to boot. Of course, there will be an Uber safety driver in the vehicle monitoring it and ready to take over in any problem or complex situation. So the rides are a gimmick to some extent, but if they were not free, it would be a sign of another way to get customers to pay for the cost of testing and verifying self-driving cars. The free rides, however, will probably actually cause more people to take Uber rides hoping they will win the lottery and get not simply the free ride but the self-driving ride.

GM announced a similar program for Lyft -- but not until next year.

Ford also goes all-in, but with a later date

Ford has announced it wants to commit to making unmanned capable taxi vehicles, the same thing Uber, Google, Cruise/GM, Zoox and most non-car companies want to make. For many years I have outlined the difference between the usual car company approaches, which are evolutionary and involve taking cars and improving their computers and the approaches of the non-car companies which bypass all legacy thinking (mostly around ADAS) to go directly to the final target. I call that "taking a computer and putting wheels on it." It's a big and bold move for Ford to switch to the other camp, and a good sign for them. They have said they will have a fleet of such vehicles as soon as 2021.

Today, Robin Chase wrote an article wondering if robocars will improve or ruin our cities and asked for my comment on it. It's a long article, and I have lots of comment, since I have been considering these issues for a while. On this site, I spend most of my time on the potential positive future, though I have written various articles on downsides and there are yet more to write about.

It's common for people to write that those who vote for a minor party in an election are "throwing away" their vote. Here's a recent article by my friend Clay Shirky declaring there's no such thing as a protest vote and many of the cases are correct, but the core thesis is wrong. Instead, I will argue that outside the swing states, you are throwing away your vote if you vote for a major party candidate.

To be clear, if you are in one of the crucial swing states where the race is close -- and trust me, you know that from the billions of dollars of ad spend in your state, as well as from reading polls -- then you should vote for the least evil of the two party candidates as you judge it. And even in most of the country, (non-swing) you should continue to vote for those if you truly support them. But in a non-swing state, in this election in particular, you have an additional option and an additional power.

Consider here in California, which is very solidly for Clinton. Nate Silver rates it as 99.9% (or higher) to go for Clinton. A vote for Clinton or Trump here is wasted. It adds a miniscule proportion to their totals. Clinton will fetch around 8 million votes. You can do the un-noticed thing of making it 8 million and 1, and you'll bump her federally by an even tinier fraction. Your vote can make no difference to the result (you already know that) and nor will it be noticed in the totals. You're throwing it away, getting an insignificant benefit for its use.

Of course, the 3rd party candidates had no chance of winning California, or the USA. And while they like to talk a pretend bluster about that, they know that. You know that. Their voters know that. 3rd party voters aren't voting to help their candidate win, any more than Trump voters imagine their vote could help him win California, or Clinton voters imagine they could affect her assured victory.

Third party voters, however, will express their support for other idea in the final vote totals. If Jill Stein gets 50,000 votes in California, making it 50,001 doesn't make a huge difference, but it makes 160 times as much difference to her total than a Clinton vote does, or 100x what a Trump vote does. Gary Johnson is doing so well this year (polling about 8% of national popular vote) that his voters won't do quite as much to his total, but still many times more improvement than the major party votes. Clay argues that "nobody is receiving" the message of your vote for a third party, but the truth is, your vote for Clinton in California or Trump in Texas is a message that has even less chance of being received.

A big difference this year is that the press are paying attention to the minor parties. This year, you will see much more press on Johnson's and Stein's totals. It is true that in other years, the TV networks would often ignore those parties. In some case, TV network software is programmed to report only the top two results, and to make the percentages displayed add up to 100%. This is wrong of the networks, but I suspect there is less chance of it happening. Johnson will probably appear in those totals. Web sites and newspapers have generally reported the proper totals.

Does anybody look at these totals for minor candidates? Some don't, but the big constituency for them is others interested in minor parties. People want a tribe. Many people don't want to support something unless they see they are not alone, that others are supporting it. Johnson and Stein's poll numbers are already galvanizing many more votes for them.

This is how third parties arise, and it happens a lot outside the USA. In the USA it has't happened since the Republicans arose in the 1850s, tied to the collapse of the Whigs. Prior to that multiple parties were more common. Of course, there have been several runs at new parties (Perot/Reform, Dixiecrat and American Independent) which did not succeed. But if everybody refuses to actually vote for the 3rd parties they support because it is viewed as a waste, of course no 3rd parties will ever arise. Having a slim chance at that is one of the things to drive 3rd party voters, because that slim chance still means making a bigger difference than a meaningless extra vote for a major party.

This is how most political change happens. Because people see they are not alone. That's how small marches and protests grow into bigger ones until leaders are toppled. It's how small movements within big parties, and whole 3rd parties rise.