Tag Archives: technological progress

Trends in Ecology and Evolution 2018 Horizon Scan

Trends in Ecology and Evolution does an annual “horizon scan” of hot topics for the coming year. Below is their list for this year. The article is open access.

  • “Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines” – Thiamine is a form of vitamin B. Pollution and subtle changes in algae eaten by fish and birds may be causing its depletion. This is not fatal in and of itself but may be weakening animals so that they succumb to other things.
  • “Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines” – It’s affecting deer, moose, and elk in North America, and now reindeer in northern Europe.
  • “Breaks in the Dormancy of Pathogenic Bacteria and Viruses in Thawing Permafrost” – Some viruses and bacteria may be able to lie dormant in permafrost for thousands of years, long enough for populations of animals and humans to lose their immunity. Permafrost is melting.
  • “RNA-Based, Gene-Silencing Pesticides” – Messing with RNA can control pests such as the mites affecting honey bee colonies. The good thing about this form of genetic engineering is that it is not passed down from one generation to the next.
  • “Genetic Control of Mammal Populations” – Islands such as New Zealand are trying to use gene drives to wipe out pests such as rats. Not control them, but completely eliminate them once and for all. There are some obvious benefits, but this is also a little terrifying when you think that we now have the ability to engineer the complete extermination of a particular species in short order.
  • “Use of Lasers in Commercial Deep Water Fishing” – Sounds a little scary, but it’s an alternative to dragging heavy nets that destroy the bottom. 
  • “Use of Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) for Harvesting Atmospheric Water” – This is literally sucking humidity out of the air. Of course, we can all do this with our air conditioners and dehumidifiers, but that takes a lot of energy and this process apparently does not.
  • “Aquaporins Engineered to Increase Plant Salt Tolerance” – This is messing with plants so they can grow in saltier soil. Seems like a good idea, except there is potentially moral hazard here because good farming practices should stop good soil from becoming salty in the first place.
  • “Effect of Culturomics on Conservation Science, Policy, and Action” – This is just processing and analyzing large amounts of text.
  • “Changes in the Global Iron Cycle” – Iron can actually be a limiting nutrient in some ecosystems, particularly in the oceans. Melting glaciers and ice bergs have an effect on this – I won’t pretend to fully understand it.
  • “Underestimation of Soil Carbon Emissions” – Soils contain a lot of carbon, the decay of organic soils may give off more carbon than thought, and there could be an accelerating feedback loop as warmer temperatures accelerate the decay, which in turn cause warmer temperatures.
  • “Rapid Climatic Changes on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau” – This affects the Southeast Asian and Indian monsoons, among other things.
  • “International Collaborations to Encourage Marine Protected Area Expansion in the High Seas” – Okay, I guess they had to throw in something positive.
  • “Belt and Road Initiative in China” – Basically, China talks a good game on sustainability and the potential is there, but the on-the-ground reality is not very sustainable so far.
  • “Potential Effects on Wildlife of Increases in Electromagnetic Radiation” – This is about cell signals causing cancer. In wildlife, because this journal is about wildlife. But it’s a little concerning for us humans too.

A Deepness in the Sky

I just finished A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, and it was the most enjoyable book I have read in the last couple years. I’m not going to spoil the plot, but like all Vernor Vinge books it has layers upon layers with themes such as civilizations rising and falling, technological progress (and sometimes regression) with its opportunities and dangers, interactions between civilizations at different levels of technology, and at similar levels of technology but with different cultures and values. The plot unfolds over long periods of time while the characters are very real, accessible, and human, even if not all of them are actually human.

OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2016

The OECD publishes a Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook every two years. They name “ten key emerging technology trends”:

  1. The Internet of Things
  2. Big data analytics
  3. Artificial intelligence
  4. Neurotechnologies
  5. Nano/microsatellites
  6. Nanomaterials
  7. Additive manufacturing / 3D printing
  8. Advanced energy storage technologies
  9. Synthetic biology
  10. Blockchain

This report has a little bit of everything. They talk about the “water-food-energy” nexus and how it is likely to interact with new technologies, climate change, the drop in public research funding and increasing importance of non-state actors, and cities as engines of innovation.

The last part of the report talks about the future of research, research funding, private vs. public research, and research policies. One term that was new to me was Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) which attempts to manage risks and ethical concerns of new technologies.

Magic Leap

According to this article in Wired, the “world’s hottest startup” is virtual reality company Magic Leap.

Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. (The goggles are semitransparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating mixed-reality technology, but right now the quality of its virtual visions exceeds all others. Because of this lead, money is pouring into this Florida office park. Google was one of the first to invest. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others followed. In the past year, executives from most major media and tech companies have made the pilgrimage to Magic Leap’s office park to experience for themselves its futuristic synthetic reality. At the beginning of this year, the company completed what may be the largest C-round of financing in history: $793.5 million. To date, investors have funneled $1.4 billion into it.

That astounding sum is especially noteworthy because Magic Leap has not released a beta version of its product, not even to developers. Aside from potential investors and advisers, few people have been allowed to see the gear in action, and the combination of funding and mystery has fueled rampant curiosity. But to really understand what’s happening at Magic Leap, you need to also understand the tidal wave surging through the entire tech industry. All the major players—Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung—have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, and they’re hiring more engineers daily. Facebook alone has over 400 people working on VR. Then there are some 230 other companies, such as Meta, the Void, Atheer, Lytro, and 8i, working furiously on hardware and content for this new platform.

Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman has a new book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. Here’s the description from Amazon:

A field guide to the twenty-first century, written by one of its most celebrated observers

We all sense it—something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your kids. You can’t miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are being transformed in so many realms all at once—and it is dizzying.
In Thank You for Being Late, a work unlike anything he has attempted before, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. You will never look at the world the same way again after you read this book: how you understand the news, the work you do, the education your kids need, the investments your employer has to make, and the moral and geopolitical choices our country has to navigate will all be refashioned by Friedman’s original analysis.
Friedman begins by taking us into his own way of looking at the world—how he writes a column. After a quick tutorial, he proceeds to write what could only be called a giant column about the twenty-first century. His thesis: to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest forces—Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)—are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.
Why is this happening? As Friedman shows, the exponential increase in computing power defined by Moore’s law has a lot to do with it. The year 2007 was a major inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips, software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform. Friedman calls this platform “the supernova”—for it is an extraordinary release of energy that is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world—or to destroy it.
Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a field manual for how to write and think about this era of accelerations. It’s also an argument for “being late”—for pausing to appreciate this amazing historical epoch we’re passing through and to reflect on its possibilities and dangers. To amplify this point, Friedman revisits his Minnesota hometown in his moving concluding chapters; there, he explores how communities can create a “topsoil of trust” to anchor their increasingly diverse and digital populations.
With his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, Friedman shows that we can overcome the multiple stresses of an age of accelerations—if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use the time to reimagine work, politics, and community. Thank You for Being Late is Friedman’s most ambitious book—and an essential guide to the present and the future.

Robert Gordon

Robert Gordon has an op-ed in the New York Times talking about productivity growth, inequality, and the Presidential candidates’ stated policy positions.

Rapid productivity growth in the dot-com era of the late 1990s originated in computer manufacturing — information and communication technology equipment — but this manufacturing has vanished since almost all such equipment is now imported.

This effect of that new technology was another important source of growth. Out went typewriters and calculating machines, replaced by personal computers, spreadsheet and word-processing software, web browsers and e-commerce. Productivity also boomed in retailing, as Walmart and other “big box” stores revolutionized retail selection, layout and supply chain management.

But by 2004, the digital revolution had achieved most of its transition in business methods. Not much has changed in offices and at retail stores since then.

His basic thesis is that we are past the peak of this particular wave of technological progress, and he doesn’t see another wave on the horizon. So technology is not providing that slow but relentless underlying trend of productivity growth right now, and the shorter-term underlying cyclical factors are also on a downward trend (size of the skilled labor force, income inequality, uncertainty over health care, retirement and education). Tax and infrastructure investment policies suggested by the candidates could help somewhat with these shorter term factors. He generally supports socialist policies like we see in “Canada, Australia, and the Nordic countries”.

My own thoughts: It’s tough for politicians to support policies that advance long-term productivity growth, like great education and a level playing field for businesses of all sizes to innovate and compete. First of all, the costs of these policies come due during their terms in office while the benefits accrue long afterward. This is a basic problem of democracy – elected officials can be punished by voters for taking on those short term costs, and solutions can involve voluntarily transferring more power into the hands of un-elected technocrats, which they have little incentive to do. (Nonetheless, many other democratic countries manage to do better than us.) Second, the interests of a few big businesses (finance, fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex) have outsize, undemocratic influence over our (U.S.) politicians allowing them to write laws unfairly in their favor and at the expense of everyone else, even businesses in other industries. This problem could be solved by a courageous amendment to our constitution, but again politicians have little incentive to cut off their own sources of funding.

Politicians can talk about infrastructure because that creates short-term jobs while also helping the economy in the long-term. We need good planning though if we are going to build the smart infrastructure that can really reduce friction in the economy while minimizing environmental impacts and improving our living environments. We don’t have that currently, just some vague ideas about building lots of roads and bridges and maybe some power lines and we’re not sure about pipelines.

Gordon rails against “defined contribution” pension plans, but I still think there is a place for them. While social security is reasonably well run at the federal level, pension plans at the state, municipal and corporate level are terribly run. So I would say either get rid of all those in favor of an expansion of social security, or go to defined contribution. Plans could be designed to help individuals manage risk more effectively (using life cycle funds and annuitization, for example). In Singapore, the system is nominally defined contribution, but the government “tops up” individuals’ contributions – everybody contributes a similar amount as a percentage of their income, then the government matches contributions from lower-income individuals at a higher rate so they can end up with similar retirement savings as higher-income individuals. This could work in the U.S., but we would have to first prevent the finance industry from hijacking the rules to siphon off money for itself.

Of course, we can also hope that the wave of technological progress is in fact not past, we are just in a momentary lull before it continues to pick up in an exponential (but episodic) fashion as it has throughout history. I am 100% positive that the history of technology is not over. The only question in my mind is whether, if we are in fact in an episodic lull, it is going to last long enough to ruin a generation or two for us puny individual humans who only live 70 years or so.

electric cars

This article argues that electric cars could be about to take off in a big way, and draws an analogy to the disruption of the cell phone industry caused by the iPhone.

In 2007, Nokia was the biggest and most fashionable name in cell phones, with an unassailable lead in hand-held technology. Things had been so good for so long that company executives saw little chance for any competitive challenge–phones were a tough business, they said, and Nokia was reaping the harvest of decades of hard work that no one else could hope to match.

That June, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. And seven years later, Nokia—worth a quarter of a trillion dollars at its apex—abjectly sold off its much-diminished phone division to Microsoft. The price was $7 billion, less than 3% of its former value…

On March 31, his Tesla Motors unveiled its long-promised Model 3, a $35,000 electric car that will go 215 miles per charge… In addition to GM’s Chevy Bolt, Nissan will produce a second-generation Leaf with the same 200-mile range and approximately $35,000 price; it will come in 2017. Before that, Toyota will deliver its Prius Prime, a plug-in hybrid; and BMW already has its pure electric i3. The other major carmakers are piling in as well by the end of the decade.

Before the iPhone, some of the best recent examples of disruption are the digital camera displacing the film camera (much to Kodak’s surprise) and the internet all but destroying the newspaper industry. And you could argue that these are no more revolutionary than the advent of automobiles, electricity, steam, and so on back through history. But the point is big technological advances happen in fits and starts on a regular basis, and will continue to do so however surprised and complacent we may continue to be.

Oculus Rift

Here’s an interview with the creator of the Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey:

Luckey argues that virtual reality is a bigger turning point in technology than Apple II, Netscape or Google. VR, he says, is the final major computing platform that’s not a transitional step to the next big thing.

“If you have perfect virtual reality eventually, where you’re be able to simulate everything that a human can experience or imagine experiencing, it’s hard to imagine where you go from there,” Luckey tells NPR’s Kelly McEvers. “If you have perfect virtual reality, what else are you supposed to perfect?” …

Things like email, and Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging — they all work reasonably well. But we use them because they’re convenient, and cheap, and easy, not because they’re the best way to communicate with somebody. Today, the best way to communicate with someone is still face-to-face. Virtual reality has the potential to change that, to make it where VR communication is as good or better than face-to-face communications, because not only do you get all the same human cues of face-to-face communication, you can basically suspend the laws of physics, you can do whatever you want, you can be wherever you want.

 

how to not pay for cable

There are lots of ways to watch TV now without paying for cable. Why include this on a blog about innovation? Well, I’m trying to figure out how Comcast is building a second skyscraper in Philadelphia if consumers really hate paying them for TV so much and there is a ton of disruptive innovation going on that would seemingly threaten their business model. The answer must be that big “cable” companies have a lot more going on besides just charging exorbitant rates for TV. I am a Comcast customer by the way, because they are the best broadband option on my street at the moment, and of course I can’t live without that. They charge a lot for it, but then they throw in basic cable and HBO Go for just a little bit more, so they got me. I’m still actively shopping for other options though so don’t get too complacent, Comcast.

F.E. Smith

BBC has an interesting article on predictions made by F.E. Smith, a British aristocrat. These were predictions made in 1930 for the year 2030. BBC calls them “strange”. A couple really are strange, but several of them either have come true or still could by 2030. If technological progress is truly exponential, then 2015 is too soon to rule out any outcome for 2030 – remember the old saw about the lily pond and day 29.

  • average lifespan of 150, and a cure for cancer – there have been huge gains in lifespan, but obviously nowhere near this; but it could still happen; I’m reading The End of Illness by David Agus right now. One of his points is that the discovery of highly effective treatments for infectious diseases (antibiotics, etc.) has led to a focus on disease as an invader to be fought, rather than a focus on the patient’s body as a complete system, which is what is needed for better cancer treatment. He is not optimistic about a cure, but thinks that with better prevention and early detection most people could live healthy lives to 100 or more. I am also reminded of Long For this World, a book about Aubrey de Grey, who has proposed a radical (and seemingly drastic, not to mention painful) cure for cancer that he believes could allow people to live for hundreds or even a thousand years.
  • a 16-24 hour average work week – certainly this is not the average work week for people who work today. But is it so weird? This guy probably knew John Maynard Keynes, who was making exactly these sorts of projections based on long-term increases in productivity (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren). These productivity increases, and related increases on overall monetary wealth, actually have come to pass. But two things have happened. First, the wealth is distributed unevenly, so that some people don’t have to work at all, while others have to work a lot. Of the richer countries, a few in Northern Europe have taken steps in the direction of sharing both wealth and work hours, while the Anglo-American countries and emerging Asia generally have not. Second, as we have become wealthier, we have come to see some things as necessities that would have been seen as luxuries in the past. Air conditioning comes to mind. Robert and Edward Skidelski talk a lot about these issues in How Much is Enough.
  • a color TV in every home 🙂 which would lead to a return to direct democracy 🙁
  • synthetic meat – has already happened in the lab, almost certainly will be commercialized by 2030 I would think
  • new “physiologically pleasant substances…as pleasant and harmless…” 🙂 “…as tobacco” 🙁

Books I mention above (which I am not selling):