Month: October 2018

“No Clear Path” for A.I. to Match Humans in “Broad, Integrated, Flexible and Robust Understanding of the World”

The author of the comments quoted below is a Duke University Professor of Computer Science.

(p. A15) For those not working in AI, it can be difficult to interpret achievements in the field.
. . .
. . . the AI system solves problems in a very different way than humans.
. . .
Tasks that require responding to the same kind of standardized input over and over, with a clear measure of success, are a natural fit. Such tasks range from the diagnosis of medical images to flipping burgers. On the other hand, jobs that are messy and unpredictable and require an understanding of people and the broader world–I like to think of kindergarten teachers–will likely remain safe for a long time.
Much progress has been made in AI in a short time, so future breakthroughs are not unthinkable. For now, humans remain unsurpassed in their broad, integrated, flexible and robust understanding of the world.
. . .
. . . currently there is no clear path toward building such systems.

For the full commentary, see:
Vincent Conitzer. “Natural Intelligence Still Has Its Advantages; AI is disruptive, but it hasn’t rendered humanity obsolete.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 28, 2018.)

Automation Predicted to Destroy 19 Million Old Jobs and Create 21 Million New Jobs

(p. B5) At least 21 new job categories may soon emerge from technological and other societal changes, says a new report from IT-services and consulting firm Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.
With titles such as “genetic diversity officer,” “virtual store sherpa” and “personal memory curator,” these roles aren’t science fiction, the study’s authors argue. Rather, they are identified as jobs many employers will have to fill within the next decade.
“It’s easier to understand what types of jobs are going to go away,” says Ben Pring, director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, . . .   The idea behind the report, he says, was “to craft a credible narrative of what we’re going to gain.”
. . .
Mr. Pring and his colleagues say the dawning age of intelligent machines won’t be without painful upheaval: They estimate about 19 million positions in the U.S. will be automated out of existence in the next 15 years, while employers create some 21 million new roles. At the same time, the majority of existing ones will likely be enhanced. “Work will change, but it won’t go away,” Mr. Pring says.

For the full story, see:
Vanessa Fuhrmans. “A Future Without Jobs? Think Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, November 16, 2017): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 15, 2017, and has the title “How the Robot Revolution Could Create 21 Million Jobs.”)

The Cognizant report, mentioned above, is:
Pring, Ben, Robert H. Brown, Euan Davis, Manish Bahl, and Michael Cook. “21 Jobs of the Future: A Guide to Getting – and Staying – Employed for the Next 10 Years.” Teaneck, NJ: Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, Nov. 15, 2017.

“Much Less” Poverty in U.S. Now Than 30 Years Ago

(p. A15) Instead of focusing on reported incomes, our work measures poverty based on consumption: what food, housing, transportation and other goods and services people are able to purchase. This approach, which captures the effect of noncash programs and accounts for the known bias in the CPI-U, demonstrates clearly that there is much less material deprivation than there was decades ago.
Other indicators support this finding. According to the American Housing Survey, the poorest 20% of Americans live as the middle class did a generation ago as measured by the square footage of their homes, the number of rooms per person, and the presence of air conditioning, dishwashers and other amenities. In terms of housing problems like peeling paint, leaks and plumbing issues, today’s poor haven’t quite matched the living standards of the 1980s middle class, but they are getting close.

For the full commentary, see:
Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan. “Hardly Anyone Wants to Admit America Is Beating Poverty; The White House tells the truth, but partisans on both sides are wedded to the idea of failure.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 6, 2018.)

Hershey Gave the World Chocolate Candy and a Single, Very Rich, Residential School

(p. A19) In the early 20th century, Milton Hershey transformed chocolate from a luxury good to a working-class staple. It made him a fortune, which he used to establish Hershey, Pa.–a model company town 100 miles west of Philadelphia and the self-proclaimed “sweetest place on earth.” He also established an orphanage, the Milton Hershey School, to provide housing and education primarily for children from the area.
. . .
Other early-20th-century philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, left behind massive general-purpose foundations that underwrote experiments in medicine, science and higher education, Mr. Kurie observes, while Hershey “gave us chocolate candy and a single residential school in south-central Pennsylvania that remains little known outside the region.”
. . .
. . . , [Mr. Kurie] suggests that the trust can be viewed as a model of philanthropic responsibility, even by institutions without a devoutly local focus. Mr. Kurie’s most significant contribution here is to draw attention to philanthropy’s “external stakeholders,” those people and organizations “who are neither agents nor subjects of philanthropy but who are, for better or worse, caught up in its activities.” He demonstrates how a philanthropic institution can continue to reflect a founder’s vision while shaping and being shaped by the community that grows up around it, one whose bonds can often be bittersweet.

For the full review, see:
Benjamin Soskis. BOOKSHELF; A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, March 26, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 25, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In Chocolate We Trust’ Review: A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.”)

The book under review, is:
Kurie, Peter. In Chocolate We Trust: The Hershey Company Town Unwrapped. Philadelphai, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Kilby Invented Transistor While Flouting Mandated Summer Vacation

(p. A15) Sixty years. But how much longer? In 1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby–from Great Bend, Kan.–created one of the greatest inventions, a great bend, in the history of mankind. Kilby recently had started at Texas Instruments as an electrical engineer. Most everyone left on a mandated summer break, but he stayed in the lab and worked on combining a transistor, capacitor and three resistors on a single piece of germanium. On Sept. 12, he showed his boss his integrated circuit. At a half-inch long and not very wide, it had ugly wires sticking out, resembling an upside-down cockroach glued to a glass slide.
. . .
Brace yourself. When Moore’s Law finally gives up the ghost, productivity and economic growth will roll over too–unless. The world needs another Great Bend, another Kilbyesque warp in the cosmos, to drive the economy.
. . .
Let’s hope the next Jack Kilby skipped this summer’s vacation.

For the full commentary, see:
Kessler, Andy. “INSIDE VIEW; The Chip That Changed the World; Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit 60 years ago. We need a new Moore’s Law.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Aug. 27, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 26, 2018.)

To Bacharach, Retiring from Music “Is Like Dying”

(p. 6B) NEW YORK (AP) — At age 90, Burt Bacharach hasn’t lost faith in the power of music.
“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he said. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”
. . .
Bacharach says he has no plans to stop writing or performing. He contributes music to a new album by Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer with whom Bacharach has worked with before, and he continues to tour.
“You can throw up your hands and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ but it’s what I do. I’m not just going to stop and retire, that is like dying, you know.”

For the full story, see:
AP. “School shootings inspire song by Bacharach, 90.” Omaha World-Herald (Tuesday, September 28, 2018): 6B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Regulatory Humility” Enabled 4G “Entrepreneurial Brilliance”

(p. A15) America dominated 4G because the government largely got out of the way of risk-takers. U.S. regulators, unlike their European counterparts, didn’t try to mandate technical standards or require forced sharing of their wireless networks with competitors. Regulatory humility produced one of the greatest explosions of entrepreneurial brilliance in human history, the mobile internet.
Today the FCC is helping speed 5G deployment by modernizing regulations. Last December it removed utility-style regulations placed on wireless broadband by the Obama administration. On Sept. 26, it pre-empted localities from charging outrageous fees for 5G deployment. It is also gearing up to auction more spectrum in November to help connect the Internet of Things. Tax reform and the Trump administration’s broader deregulatory agenda have also created a more business-friendly environment.
But more should be done. Antitrust officials should update their definitions of markets to give more clarity to 5G entrepreneurs. As T-Mobile and Sprint argue in their merger filings, 5G and free Wi-Fi will compete head-to-head with cable broadband for in-home use.
Regulators also need to recognize that as 5G emerges, old categories are becoming scrambled. Consumers don’t necessarily know, or care, if their content comes from an online provider, a broadcaster, a cable channel or a “tech” company, so long as they can get it on their phone or tablet. Regulations must allow companies to invest, innovate, and merge in this new ecosystem.

For the full commentary, see:
Robert M. McDowell. “To Boost 5G, Keep the Industry Free.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Sept. 28, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 27, 2018.)

If She Could Choose Her Father, Lisa Brennan-Jobs Would Choose Steve Jobs

(p. A13) The house that Steve Jobs built had many mansions. One of them was a vast Spanish-style confection with soaring white arches. Majestic and crumbling, it sat on seven acres in the town of Woodside near Palo Alto, Calif. Inside there was an elevator, a ballroom and a church organ. Otherwise it was mostly empty. Jobs’s daughter Lisa was 9 when she began to spend overnights with him there on Wednesdays in the mid-1980s while her mother went to art school in Oakland.
Both the mansion and her father, whom the little girl barely knew, were scary and awe-inspiring, filling her with “a kind of ecstatic expectation,” as Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes in her memoir “Small Fry.”
. . .
For all the emotional injury Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes in her book, there are no villains. She portrays her father as a damaged person who in turn inflicted suffering on others. “There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and what did not set him off,” she writes. When he was not belittling her as if she were a delinquent employee, he could be spontaneously tender. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast,” Jobs would say as he arrived to take her roller skating on random weekends. “We’re livin’ on borrowed time.” She learned to navigate around his poisonous moods and not to trust too much in his moments of grace.
Nor are there any heroes here, though there are acts of heroism. Chrisann Brennan’s dedication to Lisa’s care was ironclad over the years as she struggled to support them both. Mona Simpson made helpful interventions on Lisa’s behalf, and Laurene Powell, who married Jobs in 1991, did what she could to include the child in her household. Lisa’s longtime psychiatrist became a trustworthy father figure, as did a sympathetic neighbor. Painful though this childhood was, it was not without a stumbling kind of love. Ms. Brennan-Jobs knows this, and works to forgive. About her parents she admits that, given the opportunity, “I would choose them again.”

For the full review, see:
Donna Rifkind. “BOOKSHELF; Coming of Age in Silicon Valley.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Sept. 7, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 6, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Small Fry’ Review: Coming of Age in Silicon Valley.”)

The book under review, is:
Brennan-Jobs, Lisa. Small Fry: A Memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2018.

Fashion Designers Catch Up with Arthur Diamond on Pockets

After decades of wearing shirts with two to four pockets, and cargo pants with many pockets, I am gratified to finally be vindicated as a fashion-forward trendsetter.

(p. D1) IN 1901, Levi’s gave its famous 501 jean its famous fifth pocket. It wasn’t, as many assume, the teensy pocketwatch slot above the right front pocket–that had been there since the jean’s beginnings in 1879–but rather the back left pocket. That unassuming addition granted generations of men (and eventually women) double the rear-end real estate in which to stash bifolds, bandannas, crumpled bar receipts and, of course, awkward hands. For a mere sliver of space, it marked a revolution in clothing.

These days, our relationship to pockets is undergoing a similar sea change. Whereas Levi’s took a subtle approach, menswear designers are now stitching pockets on garments with the abandon of Jackson Pollock flinging paint on canvas. No longer an afterthought or mundane change-holder, pockets are the defining component of many designs.

For the full story, see:
Jacob Gallagher. “Pick Pockets.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018): D1-D2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 6, 2018, and has the title “Think Your Clothes Have Enough Pockets? Think Again.”)