Tag Archives: technological progress

why the development gap persists

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The world’s technology, for the most part, is available to less developed, lower income countries. So why don’t they just reach out, grab it, and catch up? Well, a few have, particularly the so-called “Asian tigers”. Others have caught up on life expectancy and education, but not on income. This article by Ricardo Hausmann suggests a few reasons why it is not so easy.

  • Restrictions on trade, competition, and/or property rights. (But the point of this article is that these are the traditional answers economists give, and they are not the only reasons.)
  • University scientists are more interested in teaching, basic research, and scientific publications than in applied research that could help profit-seeking commercial firms.
  • Businesses do not invest much in R&D, either internally or with university partners.

He uses patent filings as a proxy for technological innovation, and I am not so sure about that. For one thing, he makes this statement:

Countries like Austria, Germany, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Norway, New Zealand, and Singapore patent at a rate at least one-quarter that of the US. And other countries, such as Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Iran, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia, come in at just above one-seventh the US rate.

Project Syndicate

The countries in the list above are doing quite well I believe compared to the U.S., and I know some of them have per-capita incomes greater than the U.S. Certainly, our per-capita U.S. GDP is not 7 times Norway’s and 4 times Singapore’s! (It’s lower in both cases per the CIA world fact book.)

Also, being healthy and well educated in a middle income country might not be all that terrible a life.

Those are my criticisms. But I do sometimes fantasize about how I would jump-start progress in a developing country. Certainly, I want to believe that big investments in research and education would pay off in the long term. Building universities, attracting talented professors, and then connecting them to private sector needs would seem to be important. I would want to bring in direct investment from private firms with high-tech know-how, and also seek expertise from development agencies like the World Bank, USAID and its equivalents in other countries. In all these cases though, you have to drive a hard bargain or you are likely to be exploited. I might hire Norway or Singapore to help me do that. Get the economy moving, then use the proceeds to build the infrastructure and keep the education and R&D thing going. At some point, you have to invest in health care, environmental protection, and labor standards if you want to provide a decent quality of life for people. I would probably follow Costa Rica’s lead and not bother with much of an army, but then I would probably be invaded by my neighbors or murdered by my own body guards.

AI and fusion

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This article talks about machine learning/AI helping to make sense of the data from fusion experiments, and maybe eventually designing and even running the experiments. It’s interesting to think about computers speeding up progress by being able to design and run experiments orders of magnitude faster than humans could. If it works well, they could fail a million or a billion times in short order and there would still be value in a single success. You could also imagine a computer going down a rabbit hole and coming up with a result that humans are not able to explain or replicate, and then you would have to think about what to do with that result. There’s also the question of whether a computer can ever truly “understand” a system, but I guess constructed a model, whether mental or mathematical, testing it against observation, tweaking it, and then testing it against more observation is basically how we do it.

Tesla on the water

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Some (all?) Tesla 3’s, apparently, are designed to effectively navigate flood waters in a sort of boat mode. Don’t try this at home, i.e. on the road near your home. First of all, you don’t know if your Tesla 3 has this feature. Second of all, even if you know you have this feature, you might take more risk, enter flood waters you wouldn’t otherwise enter, and end up equally dead.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst

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Bill Gates has an idea for how to accelerate research, innovation, and adoption of new technologies.

Through BE Catalyst, the airline will be able to invest in a large refinery that produces a high volume of sustainable fuel. As the refinery gets going, the airline can start buying fuel there. Even better, once the plant’s design is proven to work, the cost of building subsequent plants will drop. With more refineries in operation, the volume of available fuel will go up and the price will come down, which will make it more attractive to buyers, which will draw more innovative companies into the market. The virtuous cycle will accelerate.

Gates Notes

So if I understand correctly, once you have a promising technology, this is a way to try to accelerate the learning curve. Often promising technologies don’t catch on because the initial unit cost is to be commercially viable. Bringing the technology to market at scale will drive down the price both because the up front investment is spread over a large number of units, and because manufacturers and users will learn by doing and the technology will improve. But there is a chicken and egg problem where somebody has to stick their neck out and make that up-front investment to get the process started, then be patient while it plays out possibly over many decades, and be willing to take at least some risk that it may not work out. So the idea behind this non-profit group seems to be to share enough of that risk so commercial entities are willing to invest.

Four specific technologies are mentioned for this process: long-duration energy storage, sustainable aviation fuels, direct air capture (of greenhouse gases), and green hydrogen.

This sounds good to me. Maybe a model like this could work in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, where technological progress is painfully slow and the payoff of technology is likely to be over multiple decades at least.

Richard Branson

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Richard Branson is going to space. Which doesn’t particularly interest me. But what I find interesting is how his spaceship works. First, it is strapped to the bottom of a normal (but big) plane which takes off from a normal runway.

Once Unity reaches an altitude approaching 50,000 feet (15,200 meters), it will detach from Eve and ignite its single rocket motor. It will go supersonic within eight seconds and power up to 2,600 miles per hour (4,200 kilometers per hour), or beyond Mach 3.

After 70 seconds the engine will cut out, with the spacecraft coasting to its peak altitude, which for Sunday’s mission will be a height of 55 miles or almost 300,000 feet, according to Virgin Galactic.

MSN

When it is ready to come down, it spreads its wings into a sort of “feather” which sounds like a parachute, drifts back into the atmosphere (which starts at 50 miles according to NASA, but closer to 60 miles according to some international standards), then folds its wings back into airplane mode and returns to the runway as an unpowered glider.

Jeff Bezos’s version takes off as a rocket, apparently. Like I said, I don’t particularly care about the egos of these men, but it does appear that the era of private space flight is upon us.

the UFO report

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Here is one place to access the official UFO report. It says next to nothing, and is almost not worth the time. It was clearly typed out in a few hours by a summer intern. Like any good research report that concludes nothing, the authors would like to collect more data, they would like to do further studies, and they would like someone to pay for that.

Anyway, here are the possible explanations they give for UFOs:

  • airborne clutter: birds, balloons, “recreational unmanned vehicles”, and plastic bags
  • natural atmospheric phenomena: ice crystals, moisture, thermal fluctuations (because these things can show up on sensors)
  • “USG or Industry Development Programs”: they don’t bother to define USG, but I am thinking United States Government. “We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.”
  • Foreign Adversary Systems: “China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity”, such as a Bond villain. Okay, I added that last one.

Conspicuously missing from the list is aliens, a previously undiscovered deep-sea civilization exploring our atmosphere (see Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series), or entities operating in parallel universes (see Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series). I have no evidence for any of these theories, which is to say I have exactly the same amount of evidence presented in this report in support of the theories above. My recommendation is to spend your time reading science fiction/fantasy series by Charles Stross rather than this report. You will be much more entertained, and no less informed.

learning curve for lithium ion batteries

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Our World in Data has some numbers on the decline in price for lithium ion batteries.

Since 1991, prices have fallen by around 97%. Prices fall by an average of 19% for every doubling of capacity. Even more promising is that this rate of reduction does not yet appear to be slowing down.

Our World in Data

Saturn Run

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I just finished Saturn Run by John Sandford and “Ctein”. John Sandford is an extremely prolific author of detective books including the Prey series. His Wikipedia entry lists 31 books in that series alone, and it is not his only series. I haven’t read any of those, but I am interested after enjoying Saturn Run, which is apparently his first/only science fiction book. And who “Ctein”? Well, his Wikipedia says that…wait, I typed that before checking and now it seems that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia article. That in itself is strange. From what I can gather, he is from California, he is a photographer, and he has quite a beard. Photography and California both play a role in the book.

Anyway, this is a book about a near-future space expedition using technology that is just a little ahead of our time but easy to imagine. I really enjoyed it. It is pretty similar in these plot aspects to Delta-V by Daniel Suarez, which I also really enjoyed. The plot and characters are really good, and you can tell it is written by a first-rate thriller and mystery writer. It’s a page turner, although I listened to the audiobook and I don’t know what the audiobook equivalent of a page turner is, a battery drainer?

the Antikythera mechanism

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The Antikythera mechanism is a 2,000-year-old mechanical model of the solar system found in a sunken ship in the Mediterranean in 1901. It looks like a clock mechanism, but the strange thing is that there were no clocks yet at the time, so a puzzle is why, if the ancient Greeks or whoever built this had this technology, why didn’t they also have clocks? It is also a puzzle because scientists haven’t been able to recreate it using any known manufacturing technology available at the time. I’m not saying it was aliens, because the model shows the sun and other known planets (no telescopes until about 1600) revolving around the Earth, and spacefaring aliens would presumably know better, unless they were trying to trick us.

Project Syndicate predictions for 2021

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And now the 2021 predictions are starting to roll in. I blew my one free Project Syndicate article for the month on this, which seems like an okay choice.

  • Covid-19 will recede as vaccines roll out, and the economy will recover. This seems to be a near-consensus, although there is one minority report. And the average growth rate of course hides inequalities, which have gotten worse.
  • As you might expect, lots of speculation about U.S. politics and what Biden will do, but most people expect a return to the pre-Trump status quo at the UN, WHO, Israel and Palestine, the Iran nuclear deal, the climate deal, and democracy/human rights rhetoric we mostly fail to live up to. Of course, there are newfound doubts about U.S. political stability in the medium- to long-term.
  • Renewable energy will continue to be cheap and competitive with fossil fuels.
  • Electric vehicles come up a couple times – the market is pulling, and there may be a big push because the U.S. is significantly behind many other countries on adoption. (My take: The electric and auto industries are behind this, and the oil industry presumably is not but nobody seems to care. Could this break their backs?)
  • U.S.-China tensions will ramp up! Or they’ll die down…the crystal ball is murky on this one.
  • North Korea likes to test new U.S. Presidents with a missile test or two.
  • Poverty and violence have gotten worse in Africa while the rest of the world has been distracted by other things.
  • The effects of food insecurity and extreme weather events are getting worse in developing countries.
  • Cash may be dead, and if so there is at least a three-way race to replace it – “private tokens, central bank digital currencies, and efforts to upgrade the current system”.