(p. B1) Can Watson cure cancer?
That’s what International Business Machines Corp. IBM 0.03% asked soon after its artificial-intelligence system beat humans at the quiz show “Jeopardy!” in 2011. Watson could read documents quickly and find patterns in data. Could it match patient information with the latest in medical studies to deliver personalized treatment recommendations?
“Watson represents a technology breakthrough that can help physicians improve patient outcomes,” said Herbert Chase, a professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University, in a 2012 IBM press release.
Six years and billions of dollars later, the diagnosis for Watson is gloomy. Continue reading “IBM’s Watson AI Platform Is Not Curing Cancer”
Author: Art Diamond
Huawei “Spent All Their Resources Stealing Technology”
(p. B1) On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there.
A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&T Corp. , and a list of six companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.
The man identified himself to conference staff as Zhu Yibin, an engineer. The word on his lanyard read “Weihua”—an accidental scramble, he said, of his employer’s name: Huawei Technologies Co.
. . .
(p. B6) A review of 10 cases in U.S. federal courts, and dozens of interviews with U.S. officials, former employees, competitors, and collaborators suggest Huawei had a corporate culture that blurred the boundary between competitive achievement and ethically dubious methods of pursuing it. Continue reading “Huawei “Spent All Their Resources Stealing Technology””
“Only 5% to 10% of Jobs Can Have the Human Element Removed Entirely”
(p. A15) Careful studies using a task-based view of this sort find that, although substantial parts of many jobs can be automated—that is, technology can help still-needed workers become more productive—only 5% to 10% of jobs can have the human element removed entirely. The rate of productivity growth implied by the coming wave of automation would thus look similar to historical rates.
. . .
. . . the best insights into the future of work may be found in the trenches of everyday management. Take “Human + Machine,” by Accenture leaders Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson, which opens in a BMW assembly plant where “a worker and robot are collaborating.” In their view, “machines are not taking over the world, nor are they obviating the need for humans in the workplace.”
The authors explain, for instance, why making robots operate more safely alongside humans has been critical to factory deployment—the very breakthrough emphasized by Dynamic’s CEO, but ignored by Mr. West. They describe AI’s role alongside existing workers in decidedly unsexy fields like equipment maintenance, bank-fraud detection and customer complaint management. And they illuminate the promise and pitfalls of implementing new processes that allocate some tasks to machines, requiring new forms of oversight and coordination.
Even in their overuse of acronyms and the word “reimagine,” the authors bring to life the realities of modern management. Readers gain a tactile sense of how technology changes business over time and why “the robots are coming” is no scarier an observation than ever before.
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 24, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Future of Work’ and ‘Human + Machine’ Review: Reckoning With the Robots; Automation rarely outright destroys jobs. It instead augments—taking over routine tasks while humans handle more complex ones.”)
The book under review, in the passages above, is:
Daugherty, Paul R., and H. James Wilson. Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.
The “Amazon Effect”: Customers Now Expect Other Sellers to Deliver Reliably Fast
(p. B4) Many Amazon.com Inc. customers have become accustomed to reliable two-day shipping, forcing other retailers to offer similar service. Businesses are making new demands of their suppliers as they trim inventories and reduce supply-chain costs. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in July said it would penalize companies that made deliveries too late or too early.
“It’s the Amazon effect—customers are putting more pressure on their supplier to know where their product is,” said Bart De Muynck, a supply chain analyst with Gartner Inc.
For the full story, see:
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 29, 2017, and the title “‘Amazon Effect’ Sparks Deals for Software-Tracking Firms.” Where there are minor differences in wording, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)
“Every Contingency Has Been Thought of, State Planners Say”
(p. A8) AMARAVATI, India—The government planners now dreaming up India’s first “smart city” realize they have a problem.
. . .
The problem is that none of India’s modern-day planned cities have lived up to their hype. Instead, they have succumbed to slums, crowding and chaos. Continue reading ““Every Contingency Has Been Thought of, State Planners Say””
Stephen Moore Was a Threat to Groupthink at Fed
(p. A15) The following declaration may shock many of my academic colleagues: I support the nomination of Stephen Moore to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.
I say so despite being immersed in the “professor standard” Herman Cain recently decried. I received my doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did postdoctoral work at Harvard, was a professor of business economics at the University of Chicago, and for the past 43 years have taught finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The truth is that “professor standards” change. Early models of gross domestic product emphasized John Maynard Keynes’s model of aggregate demand—the amount of goods consumers and businesses’ desire to buy—as the source of national prosperity. Today, the vast majority of economists recognize that it is the supply side—increases in productivity driven by technological innovation—that creates long-term economic growth.
. . .
I’ve been supportive of Fed policy since the financial crisis. But any organization, even a great one, can easily fall victim to groupthink. Continue reading “Stephen Moore Was a Threat to Groupthink at Fed”
New Opiod Regulations Make Life Harder for Those in Severe Pain
(p. C4) There’s a great deal in “Dopesick” that’s incredibly bleak, but the most chilling moment for me was a quote from one of Macy’s journalist friends. Synthetic opioids had allowed this woman, despite a severe curvature of her spine, to lead an active life without risky surgery. She resented new rules that made it more onerous for her to get the pills. “My life,” she told Macy, “is not less important than that of an addict.”
For the full review, see:
Jennifer Szalai. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Ground-Level Look At the Opioid Epidemic.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 26, 2018): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 25, 2018, and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; ‘Dopesick’ Traces the Opioid Crisis, From Beginning to Blow Up.”)
The book under review, is:
Macy, Beth. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
With Tariffs, What Goes Around Comes Around
(p. A1) CLYDE, Ohio—After the Trump administration announced new tariffs on imported washing machines in January, Marc Bitzer, the chief executive of Whirlpool Corp., celebrated his win over South Korean competitors LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
“This is, without any doubt, a positive catalyst for Whirlpool,” he said on an investor conference call.
Nearly six months later, the company’s share price is down 15%. One factor is a separate set of tariffs on steel and aluminum, imposed by the U.S. in March and later expanded, that helped drive up Whirlpool’s raw-materials costs. Net income, even with the added benefit of a lower tax bill, was down $64 million in the first quarter compared with a year earlier.
. . .
(p. A10) Whirlpool had campaigned for protection from what it called unfair foreign competition. Things became more complicated as the trade conflict spread beyond its industry.
“Raw-material costs have risen substantially,” Mr. Bitzer said on the April investor call, primarily blaming steel and aluminum tariffs. Most of the 200-pound weight of a washing machine is in its steel and aluminum parts.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 16, 2018, and has the title “Whirlpool Wanted Washer Tariffs. It Wasn’t Ready for a Trade Showdown.”)
Obamacare Architect Ezekiel Emanuel “Will Be Satisfied” with 75 Years
(p. A13) Ezekiel Emanuel, a 61-year-old oncologist, bioethicist and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, says he will be satisfied to reach 75. By then, he believes, he will have made his most important contributions, seen his kids grown, and his grandkids born. After his 75th birthday, he won’t get flu shots, take antibiotics, get screened for cancer or undergo stress tests. If he lives longer, that’s fine, he says. He just won’t take extra medical steps to prolong life.
“People want to live to 100 but your horizon of what life is becomes much, much narrower,” he says.
For the full story, see:
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 20, 2019, and has the same title as the print version.)
Leapfrogged Technologies, with a Few Traits Some Value, Often Persist in Small Numbers
(p. A1) Magnus Jern was sitting around with some programmers at Google headquarters when he remembered he needed to answer an email. But when he pulled out his phone and started tapping, the room grew silent.
“What is that?” one woman asked.
The reaction was no surprise to Mr. Jern, part of a die-hard band devoted to a device that was once a status symbol, then was ubiquitous, and now is almost an endangered species: the BlackBerry. Continue reading “Leapfrogged Technologies, with a Few Traits Some Value, Often Persist in Small Numbers”
Sulston Earned Nobel, Not by “Bold Theories,” But by “Gathering Data for the Sake of Seeing the Whole Picture”
(p. A9) The nematode worm known as C. elegans is only a millimeter long and leads what appears to be a fairly dull existence. It eats bacteria, wriggles around and reaches adulthood in three days. “It consists basically of two tubes, one inside the other,” the English biologist John Sulston wrote in a memoir.
Although some colleagues thought he was wasting time, Dr. Sulston for years spent up to eight hours a day peering through microscopes at these worms. His findings on the genetics of worms won him a Nobel Prize for physiology in 2002.
. . .
His work didn’t involve “bold theories or sudden leaps of understanding,” he wrote in a 2002 memoir, “The Common Thread.” Instead, he saw his role as “gathering data for the sake of seeing the whole picture.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 16, 2018, and has the title “Sulston’s Work on Lowly Worm Led to Major Role in Mapping Human Genome.”)
Sulston’s 2002 memoir, mentioned above, is:
Sulston, John, and Georgina Ferry. The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002.