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s, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.
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we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.
We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower. I remember breathlessly waiting for the next-generation processor so that my computer would be capable of a whole new galaxy of activities. Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.
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Meanwhile, despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most. It turns out building a superfast, ultrareliable cellular network that's as fast as a wired connection is really, really hard.
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Opponents of gun control in the United States have a famous slogan that says, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." It states the obvious, that unless you inhabit the world of Terminator or the Transformers, humans shouldn't be blaming machines for their problems.
As obvious, though, is the fact that people can kill people is by failing to control the harm they can inflict with their machines. We already have speed limits, and the government has promised to step up enforcement. But, in this and all other cases of speed-related deaths, we seem to accept without question the right of manufacturers and merchants to sell fast cars that maybe just don't belong in a crowded city.
The comparison with guns is instructive. The standard defence of gun rights in the US is that guns aren't used only to commit violent crimes: they can also be used for hunting and self-defence. But then you don't need a military assault rifle like an AK-47 for such purposes, so these are more tightly regulated.
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We have no speed-unlimited autobahns nor a cross-country rally course. Yet, luxury sports models like Ferraris and more-affordable racers such as the Subaru WRX ply our roads freely, packed with the kind of horsepower that has no legal purpose.
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human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.
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As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
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Americans are more productive than ever, but hourly compensation has stagnated for decades.
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In a perfectly capitalist system, increased profit produced by automation flows to the owners of the business. Worker compensation stagnates because, while automation makes each worker more productive, it doesn't make them any more valuable. While all these machines and IT infrastructure do require a quasi-elite caste of Mandarins to keep them running, on the whole, the skill required of individual laborers has actually gone down.
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The facile explanation for this trend is that we outsourced all our manufacturing jobs. Except that our manufacturing output is higher than ever, and we're in a dead heat with China for the title of world's leading manufacturer of stuff.
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wage stagnation roughly tracks with stagnation in worker total factor productivity, or productivity minus all those machines and automation we've brought on board to make our megacorporations more profitable than ever.
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Publishers need to reinvent their own future. They could offer packages. They could partner more with communities of interest, from environmentalists to religious conservatives. And, most important, they could start believing in tomorrow, instead of being afraid of it.
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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Coding is as hot as it’s ever been and yet we graduated more students with CSci degrees in The Year of Our Orwell as we do today? What’s going on here exactly? A little more from the same blog post:
In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
We are raising a generation of American Idols and So You Think You Can Dancers when what we really need is a generation of Gateses and Zuckerbergs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF download) computer and mathematical occupations are expected to add 785,700 new jobs from 2008 to 2018. It doesn’t take a math major to see that we’re graduating students at a far lower rate than required to meet demand.
But what’s important is not just what is happening but also why it’s happening. If there’s both security on the downside (computer science majors experience rock-bottom unemployment rates) and untold riches on the upside, it seems the rational economic choice for people to flock to majoring in computer science and engineering. And yet, that’s not what’s taking place.
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People don’t get excited by technology. The glamour and glitz of Hollywood that attracts thousands of Midwestern prom queens every year is undeniable. And the stereotype of the lone coder sitting alone in a cube somewhere can’t quite match up to the thrill, however unlikely, of one day performing in front of Steven, Randy and Jennifer.
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Technology is hard. OK, now perhaps we’re getting a little closer to the truth. It’s not that learning how to program has gotten noticeably more difficult over the years. If anything, frameworks like Rails for Ruby make it easier. But there is a basic level of understanding that, if you don’t have it, drastically reduces the likelihood that you’ll become an engineer.
Indeed, at each level of our education there’s a chance to miss out on fundamental knowledge that, if not acquired at that point, becomes progressively more difficult to pick up later in life. Salman Khan said it best in his TED talk that should be mandatory viewing:
“…you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it’s usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation.”
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program of low-cost laptops for developing countries has not led to any measurable impact in academic achievement, according to a recent report.
Instead, the study concluded that Peru might be better off spending funding on acquiring and training high-quality teachers, and not investing in technology without complementary instruction.
The paper, published in February, concluded that the "intense access to computers" the program provided "does not lead to measurable effects in academic achievement, but it did generate some positive impact on general cognitive skills."
Technology tends to make people optimistic. But are the scientists being realistic about people without the mathematical, scientific and engineering skills, that are highly valued and compensated in today’s economy? What happens to people without those skills?
If I were a worker in Amazon’s warehouses and could eventually be given a pink slip and replaced by an orange robot, I don’t think I would be so cheerful about this new work force.
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those who are paving the way to a world with robots don’t see it that way. “Those who lose jobs to robots will have an incentive to acquire skills that are currently beyond the skills of robots — and there are many human skills that will not be surpassed soon by robots,” explained Colin Allen, co-author of the book “Moral Machines” and a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University.
These experts believe that jobs in creative fields, including musicians, writers and artists, will never be replaced by robots. No matter how smart robots are, they will also never be better than humans at physics or psychology.
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Lawrence H. Summers, the economist, former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, explained that society has been down this road many times before. The rise of the industrial revolution gave way to fears of extensive job loss, as did the automation of agriculture. But, he said, although these “adjustments were in some cases painful,” people always find new work.
This paper focuses on Information Warfare—the warfare characterised by the use of information and communication technologies. This is a fast growing phenomenon, which poses a number of issues ranging from the military use of such technologies to its political and ethical implications. The paper presents a conceptual analysis of this phenomenon with the goal of investigating its nature. Such an analysis is deemed to be necessary in order to lay the groundwork for future investigations into this topic, addressing the ethical problems engendered by this kind of warfare. The conceptual analysis is developed in three parts. First, it delineates the relation between Information Warfare and the Information revolution. It then focuses attention on the effects that the diffusion of this phenomenon has on the concepts of war. On the basis of this analysis, a definition of Information Warfare is provided as a phenomenon not necessarily sanguinary and violent, and rather transversal concerning the environment in which it is waged, the way it is waged and the ontological and social status of its agents. The paper concludes by taking into consideration the Just War Theory and the problems arising from its application to the case of Information Warfare.
From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age.
We're used to thinking of war as a physical phenomenon, as an outbreak of destructive violence that takes place in the physical world. Bullets fly, bombs explode, tanks roll, people collapse. Despite the tremendous changes in the technology of warfare, it remained a contest of human bodies. But as the drone wars have shown, that's no longer true, at least for one side of the battle.
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What might the ability to launch casualty-free wars do to the political barriers that stand between peace and conflict? In today's democracies politicians are obligated to explain, at regular intervals, why a military action requires the blood of a nation's young people. Wars waged by machines might not encounter much skepticism in the public sphere.
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t information warfare, warfare pursued with information technologies, distorts concepts like "necessity" and "civilian" in ways that challenge these ethical frameworks. An attack on another nation's information infrastructure, for instance, would surely count as an act of war. But what if it reduced the risk of future bloodshed? Should we really only consider it as a last resort? The use of robots further complicates things. It's not yet clear who should be held responsible if and when an autonomous military robot kills a civilian.
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"We are in the midst of a technological upheaval; and financial rewards are flowing to the elites who create and control the new machines. Almost everybody else is threatened – including sophisticated bank executives at Citi and WellPoint’s healthcare analysts... Even if displaced workers do find jobs, will these jobs be dignified? A society divided between master-programmers and servants may not appeal to the servants, who will be the majority. But neo-Marxist visions of burger flippers on the barricades seem a touch too paranoid. In the 19th century, the shift from farm to factory was decried as dehumanising. But the supposedly alienated proletariat soon morphed into proud welders and machinists and today it is the decline of factories that is perceived as a problem. The lesson is that attitudes adjust and job status is elastic. There may be real unhappiness during the adjustment phase, but eventually the nannies of yesterday will be the respected childcare professionals of tomorrow. Cooks will turn into executive chefs. And so, in the last analysis, Watson’s most enduring impact will be to accentuate the trade-off between equity and growth"
Being religious doesn’t mean that you stop thinking. In fact if you are serious about it, like everything else in life, it demands a high level of self awareness and an open mind. You can not check your brain at the door if you are going to be effective at living out your faith, not if you intend your life to be a visible and compelling argument for the value of your religion.
San Francisco is trying to shorten the hunt with an ambitious experiment that aims to make sure that there is always at least one empty parking spot available on every block that has meters. The program, which uses new technology and the law of supply and demand, raises the price of parking on the city’s most crowded blocks and lowers it on its emptiest blocks. While the new prices are still being phased in — the most expensive spots have risen to $4.50 an hour, but could reach $6 — preliminary data suggests that the change may be having a positive effect in some areas.
Every year, innumerable packaged-food products worldwide are withheld or recalled from the market due to the presence of “all natural” contaminants like insect parts, toxic molds, bacteria, and viruses. Because farming takes place outdoors and in dirt, such contamination is a fact of life. Over the centuries, the main culprit in mass food poisoning often has been contamination of unprocessed crops by fungal toxins – a risk that is exacerbated when insects attack food crops, opening wounds that allow fungi (molds) to get a foothold.
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For example, fumonisin and some other fungal toxins are highly toxic, causing esophageal cancer in humans and fatal diseases in livestock that eat infected corn. Fumonisin also interferes with the cellular uptake of folic acid, a vitamin that reduces the risk of neural tube defects in developing fetuses, and thus can cause folic acid deficiency – and defects such as spina bifida – even when one’s diet contains what otherwise would be sufficient amounts of the vitamin.
Many regulatory agencies have therefore established recommended maximum fumonisin levels permitted in food and feed products made from corn. The conventional way to meet those standards and prevent the consumption of fungal toxins is simply to test unprocessed and processed grains and discard those found to be contaminated – an approach that is both wasteful and failure-prone.
But modern technology – specifically, the genetic engineering of plants using recombinant DNA technology (also known as food biotechnology or genetic modification) – offers a way to prevent the problem. Contrary to the claims of food-biotech critics, who insist that genetically modified crops pose risks (none of which has actually occurred) of new allergens or toxins in the food supply, such products offer the food industry a proven and practical means of tackling the fungal contamination at its source.
The World Economic Forum asked some of the leading minds in its Council on Emerging Technologies Network to come up with a top-ten list of emerging technologies 'expected to have major social, economic and environmental impacts worldwide in 2012'
I was intrigued to see an argument being made in a recent Brookings Institute report (Helper et al. here in PDF) that productivity gains do not lead to job losses in manufacturing. This post explains why I think that this argument is not well characterized and probably just wrong.
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Helper et al. make the following argument (pp. 9-10):
Some argue that strong productivity growth has caused much of America’s manufacturing job loss, especially in the last decade. This theory, which contends that technology is replacing workers, stems from the observation that apparent productivity gains have coincided with manufacturing job loss in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Yet there is no economic reason why increased productivity must lead to job loss.
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The first thing to note is that Brookings is talking about overall productivity gains, and not labor productivity. The different is important. Labor productivity is according to the BLS "is the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output." Overall ("multi-factor") productivity "relates output to a combination of inputs used in the production of that output, such as labor and capital or capital, labor, energy, materials, and purchased business services (KLEMS). Capital includes equipment, structures, inventories, and land." The distinction is crucial to understanding employment changes in manufacturing.
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Drones play an increasing and controversial role in modern warfare. From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iran and Yemen, they have become a ubiquitous symbol of Washington's war on terrorism.
Critics point to the mounting drone-induced death toll as evidence that machines, no matter how sophisticated, cannot discriminate between combatants and innocent bystanders.
Now drones are starting to fly into a more peaceful, yet equally controversial role in the media. Rapid technological advances in low-cost aerial platforms herald the age of drone journalism.
But it will not be all smooth flying: this new media tool can expect to be buffeted by the issues of safety, ethics and legality.
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Instead of acquiring military-style multi-million dollar unmanned aerial vehicles the size of small airliners, the media is beginning to go micro, exploiting rapid advances in technology by deploying small toy-like UAVs to get the story.
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Last November, drone journalism hit the big time after a Polish activist launched a small craft with four helicopter-like rotors called a quadrocopter. He flew the drone low over riot police lines to record a violent demonstration in Warsaw. The pictures were extraordinarily different from run-of-the-mill protest coverage.
Posted online, the images went viral. More significantly, this birds-eye view clip found its way onto the bulletins and web pages of mainstream media.
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increasing the population by opening the floodgates is the easiest way to increase GDP – and GDP figures seem to make headlines every week, highlighting this Government’s “success”, “pragmatism“ and “enlightened” economic policy.
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simply increasing the population by 1% increases GDP by 0.4%.[1] This is even though GDP per capita consequently falls by 0.6%.[2]
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a recent experience in which he was recruited by "a prestigious venue" to review a paper that related in some ways to research he had done. Barlow's work wasn't mentioned anywhere in the piece. Barlow said he realized that the journal editor figured Barlow would be annoyed by the omission. And although he was, Barlow said he didn't feel assigning the piece to him was fair to the author. "It was a set-up. The editor didn't want a positive review, so the burden of rejection was passed on to someone the author would not know."
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traditional peer review simply delays publication and leaves decision-making "in the dark." Peer review -- in the sense that people will comment on work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not -- doesn't need to take place prior to publication, he said.
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