Category Archives: Web Article Review

internet of things

Here’s a McKinsey report on the potential economic value of the internet of things – they say $3-11 trillion per year in 2025, or up to 11% of the world economy.

The digitization of machines, vehicles, and other elements of the physical world is a powerful idea. Even at this early stage, the IoT is starting to have a real impact by changing how goods are made and distributed, how products are serviced and refined, and how doctors and patients manage health and wellness. But capturing the full potential of IoT applications will require innovation in technologies and business models, as well as investment in new capabilities and talent. With policy actions to encourage interoperability, ensure security, and protect privacy and property rights, the Internet of Things can begin to reach its full potential—especially if leaders truly embrace data-driven decision making.

the Gartner hype cycle

The Gartner hype cycle plots technologies on curve from emergence to “peak of inflated expectations” to the “trough of disillusionment” and finally arriving at the “plateau of productivity”. For example, in 2014, they had quantum computing in early emergence, the “internet of things” arriving at the peak of expectations, big data crashing into the trough, virtual reality beginning its assent to the plateau, and speech recognition arriving on the plateau.

DoD and Climate Change

The U.S. Department of Defense believes in climate change:

DoD recognizes the reality of climate change and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally. The National Security Strategy, issued in February 2015, is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.1 These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.

Will the U.S. public finally be ready to just laugh science-denying Presidential candidates off the stage next year?

ignorance and confidence

I always suspected that ignorance and arrogance were closely related, and that the truly competent know their limits and are appropriately uncomfortable when beyond them. But now here is proof!

In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

everything I know about cities is wrong?

Planetizen called this anti-urban article “frank, tough talk at it’s [sic] most provocative”. It sounds somewhat scholarly on the surface, but dig in and it stinks. They use the same scare tactics Joel Kotkin used recently, descriptions that suggest people are being forcibly marched out of the countryside and into urban high-rise towers. Sure, that has happened in a few places and times in history, but it is not the norm. In fact, you could argue that history’s greatest tragedies (if you measure simply by body count) were caused by the exact opposite, people being marched out of cities and onto rural farms at gunpoint, only to starve in the tens of millions (Ukraine, China, Cambodia). For the most part, cities form organically when people concentrate in pursuit of economic opportunity. Agriculture and mining are just as necessary as they ever were, but we don’t need large numbers of people engaged in these any more because they are largely automated. For large numbers of people to achieve a high living standard, the bulk of us have to be working together in higher-tech pursuits like manufacturing, design and invention of new products, processes, and ideas. This is the direction our species has evolved, and there is no stopping it now.

Much of their argument rests on the idea that cities can be stressful, and that they are linked to diseases of the affluent and physically inactive such as diabetes and heart disease. Concentrating people certainly gives rise to obvious stressors like noise, air pollution, heat, and traffic deaths, and less obvious ones like reduced leisure time and contact with nature. Richer and more egalitarian-minded cities are doing more to mitigate these stressors, while developing cities and cities where the pursuit of profit dominates everything else are doing little. There are ways to mitigate the stressors – noise abatement, non-motorized transportation, parks and green infrastructure to name a few. We need to focus on maximizing the positive aspects of cities while removing the stressors.

We should all welcome serious, scholarly thinking about the form future human settlements could take to maximize the potential and minimize the impact of all of us, but this is not serious scholarly thinking so let’s not take it seriously.

the economics of extinction

Here are some economists tying themselves in mental knots on how you would do cost-benefit analysis on complete annihilation of humanity.

…estimating these benefits means that we need to determine the value of a reduction in preventing a possible future catastrophic risk. This is a thorny task. Martin Weitzman, an economist at Harvard University, argues that the expected loss to society because of catastrophic climate change is so large that it cannot be reliably estimated. A cost-benefit analysis—economists’ standard tool for assessing policies—cannot be applied here as reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable. Other economists, including Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University and William Nordhaus of Yale University, have examined the technical limits of Mr Weitzman’s argument. As the interpretation of infinity in economic climate models is essentially a debate about how to deal with the threat of extinction, Mr Weitzman’s argument depends heavily on a judgement about the value of life.

Economists estimate this value based on people’s personal choices: we purchase bicycle helmets, pay more for a safer car, and receive compensation for risky occupations. The observed trade-offs between safety and money tell us about society’s willingness to pay for a reduction in mortality risk. Hundreds of studies indicate that people in developed countries are collectively willing to pay a few million dollars to avoid an additional statistical death. For example, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recommends using a value of around $8m per fatality avoided. Similar values are used to evaluate vaccination programmes and prevention of traffic accidents or airborne diseases…

The value of life as a concept is a natural candidate for a tentative estimation of the benefit of reducing extinction risk. Yet the approach seems somewhat awkward in this context. The extinction risk here is completely different from the individual risk we face in our everyday lives. Human extinction is a risk we all share—and it would be an unprecedented event that can happen only once.

I’m not sure we want to turn over the keys to civilization’s future to these guys, who insist that their science must be values-free. In other words, they try to discern people’s values through their actions and statements, but try to make no ethical judgments independent of those observations. I think there is room in this world for ethical principles of right and wrong that are not economic in nature, and more of us need to be actively thinking every day about what those might be. Even though all 6 billion of us would certainly not agree on the details, we could certainly come to a consensus on the broad outlines. Couple this with better mental tools for understanding the complex nested systems we are embedded in, and it could really guide our choices as a civilization in a better direction.

getting started with Raspberry Pi

The official Raspberry Pi magazine has a nice “getting started” article. And starting on page 58, they tell you how to simulate the solar system. This is how kids should learn about how real systems work, rather than just memorizing the arbitrary names of their bits and pieces. I’m counting down my 25 years to retirement when I might actually have some leisure time to play with this sort of thing.

Canada’s Eco-Fiscal Commission

Canada has something called an eco-fiscal commission, and it has a blog.

Technological change has transformed the quality of our lives. It has removed terrible diseases that maimed, crippled, and killed — plague, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and leprosy, to mention only the most common. In 1900, death from botulism and ptomaine poisoning from contaminated food was common. Chemical additives virtually eliminated these killers and allow us to live long enough to worry about the long run cancer causing effects of some of these additives. Now they are being replaced by safer preservatives.

Technological change has also transformed how we make both existing and new commodities. Most new technologies useless of all inputs per unit of output than do the older technologies that they replace thus moving us towards an increasingly economical use of the world’s resources. Furthermore, many newer technologies are much less polluting than many older technologies.

In summary, economic growth driven by new technologies not only increases our incomes; it transforms our lives through the invention of new, hitherto undreamed of products that are made in new, hitherto undreamed of and more economical ways. We can indeed be thankful that no anti-growth advocate persuaded governments in 1950, let alone in 1900, to stop all growth on the grounds that resources were limited and that we did not need more of what we already had too much of, thereby denying us of all the products and processes just mentioned and the new resource saving and less polluting production methods ̶ and others too many to list here.

This thinking is logical on its face. But of course, the logical flaw is when it is not paired with the idea that the absolute physical footprint can’t grow forever. Put another way, you can’t just keep producing each unit of output more efficiently, and producing ever more output, unless the growth in efficiency is faster than the growth in output. It could theoretically be done, but we’re not close to turning that corner.

AI Weapons

Stephen Hawking and others have signed a letter urging the world not to start a new artificial intelligence arms race, arguing that these weapons will be…

…feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

street congestion ideas

Here is a nice compendium from Plan Philly on dealing with urban street congestion. Although, the term congestion to most people implies high traffic volumes and low speeds, which you could argue are acceptable in cities. I will admit though that here in Philadelphia we need solutions to temporary delivery, loading and contractor parking. These legitimate business activities block bike lanes, sidewalks, and travel lanes because they often have no choice. I’ve done it myself. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers can curse at each other all day – but the same person can be all three at various times, so we are cursing at ourselves. We need solutions and compromises that work for everyone. There are some good, pretty obvious ideas in this article that really shouldn’t encounter bureaucratic or political resistance: larger loading zones, metering loading zones, letting people reserve them in advance, congestion pricing, and off-hours delivery, to name a few.