Category Archives: Science & Technology
The robots are here
“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.” — Scott Adams
“When robots start doing all of the medical research, the speed of discoveries will increase a hundredfold. Robots will simply try every idea until someday there is a cheap pill that keeps your body young and healthy. The government will get out of the healthcare field when the cost of medical services becomes trivial, and I think robots will get us there.” — Scott Adams
“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.” — Mockingbird (Walter Tevis)
“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.” — Scott Adams
“The highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.” — Kevin Kelly
WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us
Author Tim O’Reilly says the central theme of this book is understanding how algorithmic systems shape our society. If that’s what you’re after, I recommend two books by Kevin Kelly: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future and What Technology Wants. Then I’d read Homo Deus and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I’m sorry, but Mr. O’Reilly’s ideas just didn’t flow. The book felt… patchy. And he seemed overly proud of his personal contribution to the Internet, to Web 2.0, and a bunch of other “innovations.” I don’t question his contributions but isn’t it better if other folks acknowledge them? Anyhoo, here are some passages I underlined:
Our experience is shaped by the words we use.
Abstractions – the process by which reality is transformed into a series of statements about reality.
“For all practical purposes, there is now only one computer.” — Clay Shirky
The first principle of Web 2.0 was that the Internet was replacing Windows as the dominant platform on which the next generation of applications was being built.
Another key to what distinguished the web applications that survived the dot-com bust from those that died was that the survivors all, in one way or another, worked to harness the collective intelligence of their users.
“Global consciousness is that thing that decided that decaffeinated coffee pots should be orange.” — Computer scientist Danny Hill
Once an event occurs, all possibilities collapse into the one reality that we call the present, and then, in an instant, the past. But even the past, seemingly fixed as it appears, is an illusion constantly updated by new knowledge from the present.
A key lesson for every entrepreneur – Ask yourself: What is unthinkable?
“Apps can do now what managers used to do.” — Finnish management consultant Esko Kilpi
More than 63 million Americans (roughly half of all households) are now enrolled in Amazon Prime. Amazon has more than 200 million active credit card accounts; 55% of online shoppers now begin their search at Amazon, and 46% of all nine shopping happens on the platform.
A company is now a hybrid organism, made up of people and machines.
There are more than 2 million apps for the iPhone and they have been downloaded 130 billion times. App developers have earned nearly $50 billion in revenue.
With the rise of GPS, we are heading for a future where speeding motorists are no longer pulled over by police officers who happen to spot them, but instead automatically ticketed whenever they exceed the speed limit. We can also imagine a future in which that speed limit is automatically adjusted based on the amount of traffic, weather conditions, and other variable conditions that make a higher or lower speed more appropriate than the static limit that is posted today.
One of the simplest algorithmic interventions Facebook and Twitter could make would be to ask people, “Are you sure you want to share that link? You don’t appear to have read the story.
Subscription-based publication have an incentive to serve their readers; advertising-based publications have an incentive to server their advertisers.
We are increasingly creating an economy that is producing too much of what only some people can afford to buy.
“The job” is an artificial construct, in which work is managed and parceled out by corporations and other institutions, to which individuals must apply to participate in doing the work.
“There may need to be two kinds of money: machine money, and human money. Machine money is what you use to to buy things that are produced by machines. These things are always getting cheaper. Human money is what you use to buy things that only humans can produce.” — Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)
The rich still live in a world where doctors make house calls and personal tutoring is the norm.
“If you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today.” — Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist
In a connected world where knowledge is available on demand, we need to rethink what people need to know and how they come to know it.
More than 100 million hours of how-to video were watched on YouTube in North America during the first four months of 2015.
Who will buy the products of companies that no longer pay workers to create them?
Things I’m Older Than
I don’t recall when I first had the experience of looking around and realizing I was the oldest person in the room. It’s been long enough that I no longer notice but I had a bit of a flashback while hanging out on Mastodon.Technology. Am I — I wonder — the older person posting there? I then began ruminating on just how much technology is younger than I (3/8/48). A few examples:
- Commercial Jets – “The British Overseas Aircraft Corporation (BOAC), the national British carrier, first introduced a commercial jet airliner into service. The 36-seat Comet 1, built by De Havilland, flew for the first time on July 27, 1949. BOAC inaugurated the world’s first commercial jet service on May 2, 1952.”
- Color TV – “Color television had its beginnings in the late 1940s alongside black and white television. It was not a commercially viable until the early 1950s. At that time, two competing color mechanisms were being championed separately by CBS and RCA (which at the time was affiliated with NBC).”
- The Honda motorcycle – “The first complete motorcycle, with both the frame and engine made by Honda, was the 1949 D-Type, the first Honda to go by the name Dream.”
- TV Remote – “The first remote intended to control a television was developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1950. The remote, called “Lazy Bones”, was connected to the television by a wire. A wireless remote control, the “Flashmatic”, was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley.” Before remotes, one walked up to the TV and turned a knob to change channels. As more and more became available, this knob was used more and more (a child was ordered to get up and change to channel x). These plastic knobs quickly stripped from constant turning and a pair of wire pliers had to be used. It was common to see pliers sitting on top of the living room TV in the ’50s.
- Power Steering – “Chrysler Corporation introduced the first commercially available passenger car power steering system on the 1951 Chrysler Imperial under the name “Hydraguide”.”
- Cable TV – “Cable television originated in the United States almost simultaneously in Arkansas, Oregon and Pennsylvania in 1948”
- ATM – “It is widely accepted that the first cash machine was put into use by Barclays Bank in its Enfield Town branch in North London, United Kingdom, on 27 June 1967.” (Wikipedia)
The rise of the internet of value
Blockchain: the ledger that will record everything of value to humankind
The internet is entering a second era that’s based on blockchain. The last few decades brought us the internet of information. We are now witnessing the rise of the internet of value. Where the first era was sparked by a convergence of computing and communications technologies, this second era will be powered by a clever combination of cryptography, mathematics, software engineering and behavioural economics. It is blockchain technology, also called distributed ledger technology.
This is much more than the financial services industry. Innovators are programming this new digital ledger to record anything of value to humankind – birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, rights to intellectual property, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical history, insurance claims, citizenship and voting privileges, location of portable assets, provenance of food and diamonds, job recommendations and performance ratings, charitable donations tied to specific outcomes, employment contracts, managerial decision rights and anything else that we can express in code.