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What is most interesting to me is the sense that you get, even from the brief trailer, that while there is a growing awareness that technological innovation is the cause of some of our current problems, it can also be our saviour. The quote 'We have a chance to control our destiny' is telling. We see this all over the place at the moment, from Andrew Charlton's Quarterly Essay to a recent Pardee Center research report tracking global sentiment on key issues — 'knowledge and technology' is the only category where positive sentiment far outweighs negative, and is seen as 'a panacea for all global woes'. New energy technologies, synthetic biology, etc etc.
So, we have all these problems caused by innovation, but somehow – magically – technology and innovation will solve them. Problem is, our policies and other approaches to science, technology and innovation haven't really changed much in the last few decades.
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Roger Pielke's talk here at ANU in February, based on his book 'The Climate Fix'.
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Stop and think for a moment about the basic elements of the planetary boundaries hypothesis: apocalyptic fears of the future, a professed desire to return to an earlier state of nature, hypocrisy about wealth, appeals to higher authorities. These are the qualities of our worst religions, not our best scientific theories.
If the UN is to fulfill its promise of being a global leader, it must direct humankind's powers into shared endeavors, like making clean energy cheap, and agricultural innovation for adaptation to a hotter world. The nations of the world will never unify around policies aimed at slowing or reversing growth in order to return to the Holocene, but they might come together around common technology investments to create a better Anthropocene.
This will require getting comfortable with humankind's role as high-tech stewards of a rapidly-changing planet, and a new global ethic. Drawing on recent discoveries in archeology, the two of us argue for a new ecological worldview in the environmental magazine Orion (below). It was technology that made us human. We have been engineering ecosystems since before we were Homo sapiens, and will continue to do so long into the future.
Faced with serious ecological challenges, "saving the world" can no longer mean protecting it as it once was but rather constantly re-creating it through the intelligent application of our technologies. For civilization to thrive in the Anthropocene, we must make the most of them.
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If the United Nations were seeking to further alienate the rapidly-growing developing world from common ecological action, it could do no better than to embrace this hoary, unscientific Malthusianism. China has done more than any nation in recent years to make solar, nuclear and wind energy cheap. Brazil has become a soy powerhouse through agricultural innovations that hold promise for increasing food production in Africa. The last thing the UN should be telling the four out of ten human beings who rely on wood and dung as their primary power sources is that we've reached the limits to human development, and technology can't save you.
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Per capita food production has risen steadily ever since the 18th Century aristocratic British economist Thomas Malthus called for greater celibacy and cutting off assistance to the poor in the name of environmental limits to technology. And yet, to this day, putting limits on human development continues to appeal to those who have been wealthy for so long that they have forgotten the material foundation of their affluence and are delusional about their ability to live without it.
manufacturing is not the nation’s only cutting-edge industry. Many of the most innovative firms are not manufacturers but service companies. Apple is very competitive. But so are the companies that design applications running on its iPhones and iPads. Hollywood studios and marketing companies are big exporters. These firms need highly trained workers and pay high wages.
Mr. Moretti says each job in an “innovation” industry, broadly understood, creates five other local jobs, about three times the number for an average job in manufacturing. Two of them are highly paid professional positions and three are low-paid jobs as waiters or clerks.
Innovation — not manufacturing —has always propelled this country’s progress. A strategy to reward manufacturers who increase their payroll in the United States may not be as effective as one to support the firms whose creations — whether physical stuff or immaterial services — can conquer world markets and pay for the jobs of the rest of us.
Innovation — not manufacturing —has always propelled this country’s progress. A strategy to reward manufacturers who increase their payroll in the United States may not be as effective as one to support the firms whose creations — whether physical stuff or immaterial services — can conquer world markets and pay for the jobs of the rest of us.
This is a bit of a wonky and technical post on an important debate over how we measure innovation, and in fact, what innovation actually means in the economy. Much of the debate over innovation in manufacturing has focused on the notion of productivity defined as a measure of the ratio of inputs to outputs. This is all well and good, but how should we define inputs and outputs? By their quantity? Their weight? Their color? Or perhaps economic value? If so, should that value be adjusted for price changes over time?
The Information Technology and Information Foundation and a few others argues for the importance of using quantity as a metrics of manufacturing output, whereas most economics prefer to use economic value. Which measure makes more sense?
Japanese firms tried to compete with newcomers like Samsung on cheap capital and manufacturing prowess instead of product innovation. They kept producing formerly world-beating products that now lose money year after year. Forty percent of Japan's electronics output still consists of consumer audio-video products and semiconductors.
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Seventy-seven percent of Japan's entire electronics output now consists of parts and components that often go into other firms' products. Yet a cost breakdown of Apple's iPod or iPad or Samsung's Android smartphone shows that the real money does not go to the parts producers but to the product inventors. Japanese firms are competing against Samsung when they should be competing against Apple, Intel and Microsoft.
Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions. The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us. Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate.
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Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s?
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As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.
I am skeptical of Peter Thiel's view that regulation is holding back progress. I recall Ray Kurzweil's remark that regulations are like stones in a river. They do not slow down the river. Abundance gives me the impression that if progress is slow, it is because problems are complex. The authors see opportunities in water conservation and purification, energy production and conservation, health care, and education. However, the picture I come away with is one of a number of competing potential solutions, not all mutually compatible, and none yet proven to work at scale.
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In the field of alternative energy, I think it would be hard to argue that government is holding back innovation, even though it certainly is distorting the market. I think that the best argument one can make for Thiel's view is that water conservation is being held back by resistance to genetically-modified organisms, but that would not be quantitatively significant. In the grand scheme of things, I think that what is standing in the way of the innovations described in Abundance is the need for more research and trial-and-error learning; regulation is at most a minor hindrance.
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Bill Joy.
"It used to be that you were considered healthy and wealthy if you were fat," says Joy. "Now it's not. So now we think it's healthy and wealthy if we have all these things; well, what if it's actually the opposite? What if healthy and wealthy means that you don't need all those things because, instead, you've got these really simple devices that are low maintenance and encapsulate everything you need?" - 1 more annotation(s)...
Right now, American manufacturing is struggling to fill 200,000 vacant positions. There are 450,000 openings in trades, transportation and utilities. The skills gap is real, and it's getting wider. In Alabama, a third of all skilled tradesmen are over 55. They're retiring fast, and no one is there to replace them.
Alabama's not alone. A few months ago in Atlanta I ran into Tom Vilsack, our Secretary of Agriculture. Tom told me about a governor who was unable to move forward on the construction of a power plant. The reason was telling. It wasn't a lack of funds. It wasn't a lack of support. It was a lack of qualified welders.
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We've elevated the importance of "higher education" to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled "alternative."
Innovation means change, and change is not always welcomed amongst the public and their represenative. But the perversity of the innovation economy is such that resisting innovation does not mean that things will stay the same. Innovation has consequences and so too does aversion to innovation.
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BASF, the German chemical giant, is to pull out of genetically modified plant development in Europe and relocate it to the US, where political and consumer resistance to GM crops is not so entrenched.
The headquarters of BASF Plant Science will move from Limburgerhof in south-west Germany to Raleigh, North Carolina, and two smaller sites in Germany and Sweden will close. The company will transfer some GM crop development to the US but stop work on crops targeted at the European market – four varieties of potato and one of wheat.
The decision, which involves the net loss of 140 highly skilled jobs in Europe, also signals the end of GM crop development for European farmers. Bayer, BASF’s German competitor, is working on GM cotton and rice in Ghent, Belgium – but not for European markets. -
The move, according to BASF, is the consequence of aversion to genetically modified crops in Europe. Setting aside whether such aversion is appropriate or justified, it exists and has consequences, just as the aversion to stem cell research by the administration of George W. Bush during the last decade prompted relocation of researchers in that field.
Whatever one thinks about shale gas today — we worry about its environmental consequences — there’s no denying the extraordinary economic return on taxpayer investments. Shale gas is likely to allow the United States to go from net gas importer to a net gas exporter over the next decade.
While details vary, the story is basically the same for nuclear power, natural gas turbines, solar panels, and wind turbines — pretty much every significant energy technology since World War II. That’s because the private sector alone cannot sustain the kind of long-term investments necessary for big technological breakthroughs in the midst of volatile energy markets and short-term pressure to produce profits.
No doubt, government energy innovation investments could be made more efficiently and effectively. But it would be a mistake to imagine that we’d be better off without them.
The Vasa was to be a technological marvel of its day, during a period when “international competitiveness” had a familiar meaning. Based on the perception that Sweden was losing ground in the race for naval technology, particularly to neighboring Denmark, Swedish King Gustav II Adolph (better known in English as Gustavus Adolphus) had commissioned the bigger and better-armed Vasa. As I explored the museum that day, I couldn’t help but think that the tragedy of the Vasa and its fate since that day more than 380 years ago hold lessons for how we think about contemporary innovation policies.
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1. Politicians have a long history of meddling in technology implementation
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technologies are often subject to the whims of larger political forces.
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A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
Republicans may think that they are making an important political statement about being anti-government, but in reality they are making a strong statement about being anti-innovation, anti-jobs and, ultimately, anti-growth.
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The lighting industry has been gearing up since 2007 -- when the standards were originally enacted -- to make light bulbs that meet the requirements.
The opposition to the standards comes from the Tea Party right, but is supported by many Republicans and not too-strongly opposed by many Democrats. But even some Republicans object:
All five of the major light bulb manufacturers are already selling new incandescent bulbs that give off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb using about 30 percent less energy. And while they are not planning to pull those bulbs from the shelves if the controversial language is enacted, they are faced with numerous questions moving forward.
"Eliminating funding for light bulb efficiency standards is especially poor policy as it would leave the policy in place but make it impossible to enforce, undercutting domestic manufacturers who have invested millions of dollars in U.S. plants to make new incandescent bulbs that meet the standards," a group of dozens of lighting manufacturers, efficiency groups and environmentalists said in a letter yesterday to senators.
"In the real world, outside talk radio's echo chamber, lighting manufacturers such as GE, Philips and Sylvania have tooled up to produce new incandescent light bulbs that look and operate exactly the same as old incandescent bulbs and give off just as much warm light," Republicans for Environmental Protection Policy Director Jim DiPeso said in a statement. "The only different is they produce less excess heat and are therefore 30 percent more efficient. What's not to like?"
Blocking the standards effectively serves as a slap in the face to light bulb manufacturers, who have been working since 2007 to produce the new bulbs.
Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for others’ ideas... Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive...
The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue...
In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”
Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
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Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing was done to him. In his mind, what he did was special...
Jobs did not want the iPhone and the iPod and the iPad to be opened up and fiddled with, because in his eyes they were perfect. The greatest tweaker of his generation did not care to be tweaked.
A paper presented in June at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture summed up the problem: even today, the most advanced microprocessor chips have so many transistors that it is impractical to supply power to all of them at the same time. So some of the transistors are left unpowered — or dark, in industry parlance — while the others are working. The phenomenon is known as dark silicon.
As early as next year, these advanced chips will need 21 percent of their transistors to go dark at any one time, according to the researchers who wrote the paper. And in just three more chip generations — a little more than a half-decade — the constraints will become even more severe. While there will be vastly more transistors on each chip, as many as half of them will have to be turned off to avoid overheating.
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The problem has the potential to counteract an important principle in computing that has held true for decades: Moore’s Law. It was Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, who first predicted that the number of transistors that could be nestled comfortably and inexpensively on an integrated circuit chip would double roughly every two years, bringing exponential improvements in consumer electronics.
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In their paper, Dr. Burger and fellow researchers simulated the electricity used by more than 150 popular microprocessors and estimated that by 2024 computing speed would increase only 7.9 times, on average. By contrast, if there were no limits on the capabilities of the transistors, the maximum potential speedup would be nearly 47 times, the researchers said.
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A higher rate of global migration is desirable for four reasons: it is a source of innovation and dynamism; it responds to labor shortages; it meets the challenges posed by rapidly aging populations; and it provides an escape from poverty and persecution. By contrast, limiting migration slows economic growth and undermines societies’ long-term competitiveness. It also creates a less prosperous, more unequal, and partitioned world.
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Against the backdrop of rapid globalization, the individual risks and costs of moving internationally will continue to fall.
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If this process is allowed to take its course, it will stimulate global growth and serve to reduce poverty.
And yet, while the incremental reduction of barriers to cross-border flows of capital, goods, and services has been a major achievement of recent decades, international migration has never been more strictly controlled. The classical economists such as John Stuart Mill saw this as both economically illogical and ethically unacceptable. Adam Smith objected to anything that obstructed “the free circulation of labor from one employment to another.”
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the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.
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LAST week Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, introduced a bill to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs, which include a phasing out of incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient bulbs. The “government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” she declared.
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But this opposition ignores another, more important bit of American history: the critical role that government-mandated standards have played in scientific and industrial innovation.
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Have you ever wondered how NASA estimates the costs of space flight programs? Courtesy of Glen Butts and Ken Linton (PDF), here is how it was done for the Apollo program
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[T]he original cost [estimate] was 1.5 billion with completion targeted in 1965. The "actual" historical events went something like this. The NASA cost estimating gurus in 1961 projected an amount close to $7 Billion to do the entire program.33 34 This figure was apparently padded to $10-$12 Billion by management prior to giving that estimate to James Webb, the NASA Administrator. Mr. Webb (within hours of receiving the $10-$12 Billion figure) placed an "administrator's discount" on NASA’s ability to predict costs with due precision and by the stroke of his own pen, changed the estimate to $20 billion and submitted it to Vice President Linden B. Johnson. In the words of Robert Seamans Jr., (the Associate Administrator at the time) "We were aghast!"35 This cavalier beginning describes how Apollo's original fiscal requirements arrived at the steps of the Capitol and was subsequently blessed by Congress.
Ironically, the $20 billion amount submitted by Mr. Webb to the Vice president appeared to be a completely arbitrary and highly irregular move. In anyone's book it was a radical cost estimating maneuver to be sure. But in the end, Mr. Webb's innate business sense and the courage to follow what that sense told him validated his action. It turned out to be a leadership demonstration of profound foresight. In the end the "real cost" of Apollo ultimately surpassed Mr. Webb's $20 billion estimate with a price tag of $25.4 billion as was reported to congress in 1973. The final program cost varies depending on what we include or exclude in the calculations,36 37 38 but in all instances exceeds $20 billion.
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