Economics of Technology – Page 40

Medtronic Founded in Garage

(p. A1) In the mid-1950s, heart pacemakers were bulky devices that had to be wheeled around on carts and plugged into a wall socket. A heart surgeon in Minneapolis asked Earl Bakken if he could make something better. After consulting a back issue of Popular Electronics, Mr. Bakken within a few weeks fashioned a wearable pacemaker powered by a battery.
. . .
Mr. Bakken, who died Oct. 21 [2018] at the age of 94, had no inkling he was creating anything more than a local repair shop when he and a brother-in-law, Palmer Hermundslie, set up Medtronic. “We didn’t analyze or study the market,” he wrote in “One Man’s Full Life,” a 1999 memoir. “We just did it.”
Medtronic’s inventions eventually sustained him physically as well as financially. “I’m on my second pacemaker, and I’m on about my third or fourth insulin pump,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2010. “So I’m glad I invented the company, or I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
. . .
Noting his talents, university medical personnel sometimes asked Mr. Bakken to fix their equipment. He noticed that few hospitals had technical staffs to maintain their electrical gear. A chat with his brother-in-law, Mr. Hermundslie, prompted them to fill that niche by setting up a repair shop inside a garage.
. . .
In 1957, a power outage was blamed for the death of a baby dependent on a plug-in pacemaker. A University of Minnesota heart surgeon, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, asked for alternative technology. Mr. Bakken found a design for an electronic metronome in Popular Electronics and used that as the model for a circuit. He housed the circuitry in a metal box small enough to be taped to a patient’s chest. After a successful test on a dog, Dr. Lillehei began using the device. Articles he wrote about it created a stir, and soon Medtronic was receiving orders from around the world.

For the full obituary, see:
James R. Hagerty. “Founder Started Medtronic as a Local Repair Shop.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2018): A6.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Oct. 26, 2018, and has the title “Medtronic Founder Earl Bakken Turned a Tiny Repair Shop Into a Giant of Medical Technology.”)

The autobiography mentioned above, is:
Bakken, Earl E. One Man’s Full Life. Fridley, MN: Medtronic, Inc., 1999.

George Bittlingmayer Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

For tens of thousands of years, before the Age of Innovation, human beings merely survived by hunting, gathering or tilling, and lived in caves or dirty, squalid huts. In marked contrast, the average person alive today enjoys a standard of living and access to entertainment, medical services, travel, and communications technology that our ancestors would have regarded as miraculous. Art Diamond skillfully shows how we got the many wonders we take for granted – everything from indoor plumbing to SUVs to iPhones – by telling the stories of the determined tinkerers, iconoclasts and visionaries who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. They succeeded because they were willing to wage the good fight and because they could draw on flawed but ultimately supportive legal, cultural and economic institutions. Diamond also addresses the question of whether the Age of Innovation has run its course, and he provides a timely warning about the dangers that current political and intellectual forces pose to the many potential innovations yet to come. The Age Innovation may end, but whether it does is largely in our hands.

George Bittlingmayer, Economist, Angel Investor, and Professor Emeritus, University of Kansas.

Bittlingmayer’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

“The Death of the Dead-End Secretary”

(p. A25) Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor, died on Saturday [December 8, 2018] in Manhattan. She was 93.
. . .
In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Ms. Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.
To secretaries, who constituted 6 percent of the American work force then, Redactron word processors arrived in an office like a trunk of magic tricks, liberating users from the tyranny of having to retype pages marred by bad keystrokes and the monotony of copying pages for wider distribution. The machines were bulky, slow and noisy, but they could edit, delete, and cut and paste text.
Modern word processors, which appear as programs on computers, long ago simplified the tasks of authors, journalists and other writers — sometimes after misgivings over the risk of surrendering to a future of dystopian technology — but became so efficient in offices that they killed off the need for most of the old-fashioned secretarial skills Ms. Berezin was trying to enhance.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you that I never thought of it — it never entered my mind” that the word processor might endanger women’s jobs, Ms. Berezin said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. Though she was not an ardent feminist, she said, her first ad for the Redactron word processor was placed in Ms. magazine in 1971, hailing “the death of the dead-end secretary.”
. . .
Even in her Redactron heyday, Ms. Berezin was hardly alone in the word processing business. Her chief competitor, International Business Machines, made devices that relied on electronic relays and tapes, not semiconductor chips. I.B.M. soon caught up technologically and swamped the market in the 1970s and ′80s, pursued by a herd of brands like Osborne, Wang, Tandy and Kaypro.
But for a few years after Redactron started shipping its computerized word processors in September 1971, Ms. Berezin was a lioness of the young tech industry, featured in magazine and news articles as an adventurous do-it-herself polymath with the logical mind of an engineer, the curiosity of an inventor and the entrepreneurial skills of a C.E.O.
In a 1972 profile in The New York Times, the business writer Leonard Sloane wrote: “Miss Berezin, a serious, soft-spoken individual, nevertheless talks at times like a systems engineer (which she is), a sales executive (which she is) and a proponent of a sophisticated product (which she is). She is also obviously a woman on the senior level of a field where her sex are still a rarity at any level.”
Early in her career, Ms. Berezin designed numerous single-purpose computer systems. They calculated the firing ranges of big guns, controlled the distribution of magazines, kept accounts for corporations and automated banking transactions. She also claimed credit for the world’s first computerized airline reservations system.
“Why is this woman not famous?” the British writer and entrepreneur Gwyn Headley asked in a 2010 blog post.
“Without Ms. Berezin,” he added enthusiastically, “there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century.”
Credit for her early achievements does appear to have faded with time, perhaps under the obliterating speed of technological change, the greater notice paid to her corporate competitors, and the tendency of the tech world to diminish the accomplishments of women.

For the full obituary, see:
Robert D. McFadden. “Evelyn Berezin, Computer Pioneer Who Built First Word Processor, Dies at 93.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018): A25.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Dec. 10, 2018, an has the title “Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor.”)

The book mentioned as a source above, is:
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016.

Technologies That Enable Driverless Cars May Also Enable Virtual Experiences That Reduce Desire to Drive

(p. A13) Audi, at the 2013 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, unveiled a self-driving vehicle, supposedly soon to be available to the public, which would handle highway driving until it didn’t, at which point a passenger would be expected to take over within seconds. Elon Musk seemingly promised every year that a completely capable self-driving car was just a year away. . . .
Toyota, at the same time, was routinely ignored for saying the new technology would compensate for a driver’s errors long before it was ready to accommodate his desire to be doing something else.
. . .
Toyota was right. For the foreseeable future, autonomous features will mainly serve to stop us from screwing up. And yet what’s being cooked up today may prove more transformative in the long run than even the hype-mongers predicted.
Take the machine vision, 3-D mapping and ubiquitous low-latency broadband networks needed to make driverless cars possible. These technologies will also make many trips superfluous. They will bring us not just convincing simulations but improvements: If a rain is falling the day you want to visit Venice, punch in better weather. And why drive to a mall when a virtual store can bring you a selection of items designed to your tastes, which you can even sample virtually?
The signs are already visible. On average, each of us drives less per year than we did in 2004. More Americans work at home, watch Netflix instead of venturing to the movies, and rely on Peapod and Amazon to save them trips to the grocer. For all the blue-sky thinking about how self-driving cars might change vehicle-ownership patterns and urban planning, it’s always assumed people crave to be more mobile. Like many technological forecasts, these visions may be slightly off-kilter from the future that actually unfolds.

For the full commentary, see:
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “BUSINESS WORLD; Self-Driving Car Returns to Earth.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 30, 2018.”)

“Advanced” Russian Robot Praised on Russian Government TV Had Human Inside

(p. A11) MOSCOW — Russian state television hailed it as “one of the most advanced robots,” showing a tall, white android dancing clumsily to a catchy tune. It seemed so human.
There was a good reason:It was just a man in a robot costume.
In the television report, the robot, called Boris, spoke slowly with a very synthetic voice.
“I know mathematics well, but I also want to know how to draw and write music!” Boris said in a report broadcast on Tuesday [December 11, 2018] by the state-owned Rossiya-24 news channel. His eyes flashed mysteriously.
Boris danced in front of a crowd of children, who had gathered at a youth forum designed to help them choose their future professions.
“It is quite possible one of them could dedicate their lives to robotics,” the journalist Arseny Kondratiev said in his report. “At the forum, they had the opportunity to see one of the most advanced robots.”

For the full story, see:

Ivan Nechepurenko. “‘Look, Kids: It’s a Robot. But Wait! It’s Alive!.” The New York Times (Friday, Dec. 14, 2018): A11.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 13, 2018, and has the title “A Talking, Dancing Robot? No, It Was Just a Man in a Suit.”)

Big Data Crushes “Intuition, Skill and Experience”

(p. 14) Drawing on an eclectic bunch of anecdotes and studies, Tenner makes his way through four sectors in which “intuition, skill and experience” have been effectively crushed by “big data, algorithms and efficiency”: media and culture, education, transportation and medicine.
A few of his examples:
Search algorithms have extended the ability to find scientific journal articles and books dating to the 19th century. In principle, this means scholars may encounter a broad range of research and discovery, dredge up forgotten work and possibly connect important dots. But in reality, as one sociologist found after studying citations in 35 million scientific journal articles from before and after the invention of the internet, researchers, beholden to search algorithms’ tendency to generate self-reinforcing feedback loops, are now paying more attention to fewer papers, and in general to the more recent and popular ones — actually strengthening rather than bucking prevailing trends.
GPS is great for getting from one point to another, but if you need more context for understanding your surroundings, it’s fairly useless. We’ve all had experiences in which the shortest distance, as calculated by the app, can also be the most dangerous or traffic-clogged. Compare the efficiency of GPS with the three years aspiring London cabdrivers typically spend preparing for the arduous examination they must pass in order to receive their license. They learn to build a mental map of the entire city, to navigate under any circumstance, to find shortcuts and avoid risky situations — all without any external, possibly fallible, help. Which is the more efficient, ultimately, the cabby or Google Maps?
In the early 2000s, electronic medical records and electronic prescribing appeared to solve the lethal problem of sloppy handwriting. The United States Institute of Medicine estimated in 1999 that 7,000 patients in the United States were dying annually because of errors in reading prescriptions. But the electronic record that has emerged to answer this problem, and to help insurers manage payments, is full of detailed codes and seemingly endless categories and subcategories. Doctors now have to spend an inordinate amount of time on data entry. One 2016 study found that for every hour doctors spent with patients, two hours were given over to filling out paperwork, leaving much less time to listen to patients, arguably the best way to avoid misdiagnoses.
Faced with all these “inefficiently efficient” technologies, what should we do? Tenner wants more balance.

For the full review, see:
Gal Beckerman. ” Kicking the Geeks Where It Hurts.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, June 30, 2018): 14.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 4, 2018, and has the title “What Silicon Valley Could Use More Of: Inefficiency.”)

The book under review, is:
Tenner, Edward. The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

“The Tightest Labor Market Since 1969”

(p. B6) Crystal Romans, a recruiter in North Carolina, set up a face-to-face interview with a job candidate for a position at a large bank. She confirmed the time, 8:30 a.m., the night before and had a colleague stationed to walk the candidate into the room. When morning came, the candidate never showed.
Panicked, Ms. Romans sent text messages. She called. She left the applicant a voice mail. Silence.
“It’s a running joke here of the level of audacity,” Ms. Romans said of job candidates’ escalating bad behavior, which frequently includes “ghosting,” or vanishing without a trace on the people trying to hire them.
. . .
These are trying times for the nation’s recruiters. Once as popular as prom kings and queens–and often overrun with hundreds of qualified job applications for an open position–recruiters find their standing has shifted in the booming economy. Instead of vying for their attention, would-be workers blow off recruiters’ calls and ignore their emails.
Recruiters report they are stood up, kept waiting for appointments and regularly ridiculed online. That’s because in the tightest labor market since 1969, job seekers have the upper hand, and they know it.

For the full story, see:
Chip Cutter. “For Job Recruiters, these Are Trying Times.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2018): B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 19, 2018, and has the title “The Loneliest Job in a Tight Labor Market.”)

Berezin Saw Entrepreneurship as Path for Women to Advance in “Male-Dominated Field”

(p. A5) By the time she reached her early 40s, Ms. Berezin was a veteran computer designer who had created an automated reservation system for United Air Lines. Even so, as an extremely rare woman in a male-dominated field, she saw little chance of reaching senior management.
Her only route to the top, Ms. Berezin concluded, was to start a company. In 1969, with two colleagues, she founded Redactron Corp. to design and make computerized typewriters, a category that became known as word processors before being subsumed into today’s more versatile desktop computers.
Ms. Berezin, who died Dec. 8 [2018] at the age of 93, served as president of Redactron, whose sales pitch was “Free the secretary,” suggesting an escape from drudgery into more challenging work. Initially lacking screens, the devices featured IBM Selectric typewriters hooked up to boxy computers allowing texts to be edited, stored and printed.
Based in Hauppauge, N.Y., the company sold machines as far afield as Australia and had more than 500 employees by 1975. A recession and high interest rates created a financial crisis that forced Ms. Berezin to sell Redactron to Burroughs Corp. in January 1976.
Once Burroughs acquired Redactron, she lost control of product development and watched as others made decisions that she said doomed her word processor.

For the full obituary, see:
James R. Hagerty. “Butting Heads With Men Suited Computer Pioneer.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018): A5.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Dec. 14, 2018, and has the title “Evelyn Berezin Pioneered Word Processors and Butted Heads With Men.”)

Idyllic Golden-Age Hunter-Gatherers

(p. A8) Before he was killed by an isolated tribe on a remote Indian Ocean island, John Allen Chau, a young American on a self-propelled mission to spread Christianity, revealed two things: that he was willing to die, and that he was scared.
. . .
He tried to give gifts. A boy shot an arrow at him. He expressed fear, fatalism, frustration and some humor.
The people Mr. Chau chose for his mission are among the most impenetrable communities in the world, known for their intense hostility to outsiders. They have killed or tried to kill many outsiders who attempted to step on their rugged island 700 miles off India’s mainland, where they are one of the last undiluted hunter and gatherer societies.
. . .
Mr. Chau was trying to accomplish the impossible. The people on North Sentinel have not accepted anyone outside their society. Anthropologists, filmmakers and government officials have tried to approach them. Just about all have been driven back by bows and arrows.
. . .
The fishermen said he had told them to give the letter to a friend, in case he did not come back.
In one passage, he asked God if North Sentinel was “Satan’s last stronghold.” In another: “What makes them become this defensive and hostile?”
“It’s weird — actually no, it’s natural: I’m scared,” Mr. Chau wrote. “There, I said it. Also frustrated and uncertain — is it worth me going a foot to meet them?”
He added, “I don’t want to die!”
Still, he went back.
On the afternoon of Nov. 16, the fishermen told police officers, Mr. Chau reassured them that he would be fine staying on the island overnight and that the fishermen could go. They motored out, leaving Mr. Chau alone for the first time.
When they passed by the island the next morning, they saw the islanders dragging his body on the beach with a rope.
No one knows what exactly happened. Police officials said the islanders most likely killed him with bows and arrows.
Mr. Chau’s body is still on the island, but several police officers said they were worried about retrieving it, lest the same thing happen to them.

For the full story, see:
Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar and Kai Schultz. “American’s Last Letter Before Being Killed by Tribe on a Remote Indian Island.” The New York Times (Saturday, Nov. 24, 2018): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 23, 2018, and has the title “A Man’s Last Letter Before Being Killed on a Forbidden Island.”)

Humans Turn Raw Data into Fuel for A.I.

(p. B1) Some of the most critical work in advancing China’s technology goals takes place in a former cement factory in the middle of the country’s heartland, far from the aspiring Silicon Valleys of Beijing and Shenzhen. An idled concrete mixer still stands in the middle of the courtyard. Boxes of melamine dinnerware are stacked in a warehouse next door.
Inside, Hou Xiameng runs a company that helps artificial intelligence make sense of the world. Two dozen young people go through photos and videos, labeling just about everything they see. That’s a car. That’s a traffic light. That’s bread, that’s milk, that’s chocolate. That’s what it looks like when a person walks.
“I used to think the machines are geniuses,” Ms. Hou, 24, said. “Now I know we’re the reason for their genius.”
In China, long the world’s factory floor, a new generation of low-wage workers is assembling the foundations of the future. Start-ups in smaller, cheaper cities have sprung up to apply labels to China’s huge trove of images and surveillance footage. If China is the Saudi Arabia of data, as one expert says, these businesses are the refineries, turning raw data into the fuel that can power China’s A.I. ambitions.

For the full story, see:
Li Yuan. “THE NEW NEW WORLD; Doing Time on the A.I. Assembly Line.”) The New York Times (Monday, Nov. 26 2018): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 25, 2018, and has the title “THE NEW NEW WORLD; How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions.”)

Robots Help Montoya Fulfill His Father’s Wish for Him to Avoid Manual Labor

(p. A15) SALINAS, Calif. — As a boy, Abel Montoya remembers his father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, the picture of exhaustion, mud caked knee-high on his trousers. “Dad wanted me to stay away from manual labor. He was keen for me to stick to the books,” Mr. Montoya said. So he did, and went to college.
Yet Mr. Montoya, a 28-year-old immigrant’s son, recently took a job at a lettuce-packing facility, where it is wet, loud, freezing — and much of the work is physically taxing, even mind-numbing.
Now, though, he can delegate some of the worst work to robots.
Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor.
The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.
Enlisting robots made sound economic sense, Taylor Farms officials said, for a company seeking to capitalize on Americans’ insatiable appetite for healthy fare at a time when it cannot recruit enough people to work in the fields or the factory.

For the full story, see:
Miriam Jordan. “Farms Turn to Robots as Labor Pool Shrinks.”The New York Times (Saturday, Nov. 24, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 20, 2018, and has the title “As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots Replace Humans.”)