Economics of Technology – Page 51

Dubai Central Planners Subsidize Driverless Drones

(p. A7) Like a scene from “The Jetsons,” commuters in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, may soon climb aboard automated flying taxis, soaring over busy streets and past the desert city’s gleaming skyscrapers, all — quite literally — at the push of a button.
Passenger drones, capable of carrying a single rider and a small suitcase, will begin buzzing above the emirate as early as July [2017], according to the director of the city’s transportation authority, part of an ambitious plan to increase driverless technology.
Already, the eight-rotor drone, made by the Chinese firm Ehang, has flown test runs past the Burj Al Arab, Dubai’s iconic, sail-shaped skyscraper.
The drone “is not just a model but it has really flown in Dubai skies,” Mattar Al Tayer, the director general of Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority, said on Monday [Feb. 13, 2017], adding that the emirate would “spare no effort to launch” autonomous aerial vehicles by July.

For the full story, see:
RUSSELL GOLDMAN. “Dubai Plans Drone Taxis That Skip Drivers and Roads.” The New York Times (Weds., FEB. 15, 2017): A7.
(Note: bracketed dates added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Dubai Plans a Taxi That Skips the Driver, and the Roads.”)

Simple App Takes Entrepreneur from Rags to Riches

(p. B1) When Facebook bought WhatsApp for more than $19 billion in 2014, Jan Koum, a founder of the messaging company, arranged to sign a part of the deal outside the suburban social services center where he had once waited in line to collect food stamps.
Mr. Koum, like many in the tech industry, is an immigrant. He was a teenager when he and his mother moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s, in part to escape the anti-Semitic tide then sweeping his native Ukraine. As Mr. Koum later told Forbes, his mother worked as a babysitter and swept floors at a grocery store to survive in the new country; when she was found to have cancer, the family lived off her disability payments.
Tales of immigrant woe are not unusual in Silicon Valley. But Mr. Koum’s story carries greater resonance because his app has quietly become a mainstay of immigrant life. More than a billion people regularly use WhatsApp, which lets users send text messages and make phone calls free over the internet. The app is particularly popular in India, where it has more than 160 million users, as well as in Europe, South America and Africa.
. . .
(p. B7) One of the secrets to WhatsApp’s growth has been a focus on simplicity. The app is purposefully unflashy, and it does just a few things — texts, voice calls and video calls. As a result, it is supremely easy to use even for people who are neophytes to digital technology. This is one reason immigrants find it so powerful; it has given them access to a wider set of relatives who might have shunned the social networks that came before.
Adoption of WhatsApp often follows a curious pattern — older relatives often suggest it to younger ones, rather than the other way around.
“My aunt, who’s in her late 70s, was the one who really pushed me to get on it,” Ms. Reef said. Now, she said, she uses it nearly every day; lately she’s even gotten her children to use it.

For the full commentary, see:
Manjoo, Farhad. “STATE OF THE ART; A Shared Lifeline for Millions of Migrants.” The New York Times (Thurs., DEC. 22, 2016): B1 & B7.
(Note: eilipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 21, 2016, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; For Millions of Immigrants, a Common Language: WhatsApp.”)

Factory Workers Collaborate with Robots

(p. B1) MARION, Ohio–A new worker is charming the staff at Whirlpool Corp.’s plant here: a robot called Chappy.
Employees at the dryer factory say they have taken a shine to one-armed, programmable robots that have assumed some repetitive tasks, working in concert with their human colleagues. One, nicknamed after a worker whose rote duties it has inherited, snaps photographs to scan for defects.
“If I can get some help doing my job, I’m all for that,” said Karen “Chappy” Beidler, who is now free to focus on checking and fixing wiring connections. “It’s technology helping manpower–you can’t beat it.”

For the full story, see:
Andrew Tangel. “Latest Robots Lend an Arm.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Nov. 9, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 8, 2016, and has the title “Latest Robots Lend a Helping Arm at Factories.”)

Warren Buffett: High-Tech Especially Hard to Predict

(p. 1D) Turns out that Warren Buffett spoke out in IBM’s favor, sort of, 37 years ago when the government accused “Big Blue” of illegal anti-competitive practices.
. . .
But Buffett was one of 87 witnesses who testified on behalf of the International Business Machines Corp. during the federal government’s antitrust trial.
. . .
In his testimony, Buffett said he asked the Price, Waterhouse accounting firm to calculate the debt levels of 104 other computer-oriented companies that, according to federal prosecutors, were harmed by IBM’s low prices and other alleged anti-competitive actions.
Buffett said his hypothesis was that the competing companies had trouble raising money to finance their growth because they had too much debt. The accounting analy-(p. 2D)sis, Buffett said in court, “bore that hypothesis out in a very conclusive manner.”
So why didn’t he buy IBM stock in 1980?
Because, he told the court, with high-tech companies it’s “particularly difficult to have a clear view of a long-term future. … High-technology companies are ones where both the product and the customer’s use of it are (areas in which) I don’t feel I have a full understanding.”

For the full commentary, see:
Steve Jordon. “WARREN WATCH; What Buffett said in court about IBM in 1980.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., Jan 22, 2017): 1D-2D.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the title “WARREN WATCH; What Warren Buffett said in court about IBM in 1980.”)

More Workers Benefit from Driverless Cars, Than Are Hurt

(p. A2) Self-driving vehicles have the potential to reshape a wide range of occupations held by roughly one in nine American workers, according to a new U.S. government report.
About 3.8 million people drive taxis, trucks, ambulances and other vehicles for a living. An additional 11.7 million workers drive as part of their work, including personal care aides, police officers, real-estate agents and plumbers. In all, that’s roughly 11.3% of total U.S. employment based on 2015 occupational data, according to the analysis by three Commerce Department economists.
If businesses embrace autonomous vehicles on a large scale, workers in the first category are “more likely to be displaced” from their jobs, while workers in the latter group “may be more likely to benefit from greater productivity and better working conditions,” wrote David Beede, Regina Powers and Cassandra Ingram in the report, released Friday.

For the full story, see:
Ben Leubsdorf. “Driverless Cars May Alter 1 in 9 Jobs.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Aug 15, 2017): A2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug 14, 2017, and has the title “Self-Driving Cars Could Transform Jobs Held by 1 in 9 U.S. Workers.”)

The report summarized in the passages quoted above, is:
Beede, David, Regina Powers, and Cassandra Ingram. “The Employment Impact of Autonomous Vehicles.” ESA Issue Brief, #05-17, Aug. 11, 2017.

3-D Printing Promises Goods Quicker, Cheaper, More Local, and More Customized

(p. B3) With the rise of new technologies like smartphones and 3-D printers, fashion start-ups like Feetz are changing the ways goods are ordered, made and sold.
Like Ms. Beard, several founders of these companies don’t have fashion backgrounds. Instead, they consider technology the answer to off-the rack, mass-produced goods, which are increasingly shunned by millennials. Consumers with hard-to-find sizes — like petite, or big and tall — will find shopping simpler.
Traditionally, manufacturing is the most expensive part of the retail supply chain. Creating goods in small batches is difficult and costly. Most are manufactured overseas, and shipping goods to the United States adds time and cost to the process. So even “fast fashion” can take about six weeks to hit store shelves.
The beauty of instant, customized fashion, experts say, is that goods can be made at a lower cost and more quickly — yet in a personalized style.
. . .
These are still early days for 3-D printing, said Uli Becker, the former chief executive of Reebok and an investor in Feetz. The offerings are not very diversified, and they are limited to basic goods. And fabric cannot yet be printed.
But he sees great potential for 3-D printing. “You can start producing in America, for America,” he said. “Production facilities can be in the same place where you sell products, which creates jobs.”
. . .
“We’re a technology company that creates T-shirts,” said Walker Williams, 27, chief executive of Teespring, who started the company with Evan Stites-Clayton, a friend from Brown University. “The future of fashion is in smaller brands that have relationships with customers.”

For the full story, see:
CONSTANCE GUSTKE. “ENTREPRENEURSHIP; With Analytics and 3-D Printers, a Faster Fashion Just for You.” The New York Times (Thurs., SEPT. 15, 2016): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 14, 2016, and has the title “ENTREPRENEURSHIP; Your Next Pair of Shoes Could Come From a 3-D Printer.”)

“Splendid Tutorial” of Bitcoin, Distributed Ledgers, and Smart Contracts

(p. A13) ‘The future is already here–it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The aphorism coined by novelist William Gibson explains why Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s tour of the technologies that are shaping the future of business, “Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,” contains sights that are already familiar and others that are not. This is a book for managers whose companies sit well back from the edge and who would like a digestible introduction to technology trends that may not have reached their doorstep–yet.
. . .
In the penultimate chapter, the authors present a splendid tutorial on things that are too new for most civilians to have gained a good understanding of–cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. The authors present the theoretical possibility that conventional contracts and the human handling of disputes could be rendered obsolete by dense networks of sensors in the physical world and extremely detailed contracts anticipating all contingencies so that machines alone can handle enforcement. But they show that computing power, however much it grows, seems unlikely to replace the human component for dispute resolution.

For the full review, see:
Randall Stross. “BOOKSHELF; The Future On Fast Forward; GE used ‘crowdfunding’ to gauge interest in a new ice maker. McDonald’s has begun adding self-service ordering in all its U.S. locations..” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 6, 2017): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 5, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson. Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

A.I. “Continues to Struggle in the Real World”

The passages quoted below are authored by an NYU professor of psychology and neural science.

(p. 6) Artificial Intelligence is colossally hyped these days, but the dirty little secret is that it still has a long, long way to go. Sure, A.I. systems have mastered an array of games, from chess and Go to “Jeopardy” and poker, but the technology continues to struggle in the real world. Robots fall over while opening doors, prototype driverless cars frequently need human intervention, and nobody has yet designed a machine that can read reliably at the level of a sixth grader, let alone a college student. Computers that can educate themselves — a mark of true intelligence — remain a dream.

Even the trendy technique of “deep learning,” which uses artificial neural networks to discern complex statistical correlations in huge amounts of data, often comes up short. Some of the best image-recognition systems, for example, can successfully distinguish dog breeds, yet remain capable of major blunders, like mistaking a simple pattern of yellow and black stripes for a school bus. Such systems can neither comprehend what is going on in complex visual scenes (“Who is chasing whom and why?”) nor follow simple instructions (“Read this story and summarize what it means”).
Although the field of A.I. is exploding with microdiscoveries, progress toward the robustness and flexibility of human cognition remains elusive. Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled data.
Presumably, my daughter relied on an implicit theory of how her body moves, along with an implicit theory of physics — how one complex object travels through the aperture of another. I challenge any robot to do the same. A.I. systems tend to be passive vessels, dredging through data in search of statistical correlations; humans are active engines for discovering how things work.

For the full commentary, see:
GARY MARCUS. “Gray Matter; A.I. Is Stuck. Let’s Unstick It.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JULY 30, 2017): 6.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 29, 2017, and has the title “Gray Matter; Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck. Here’s How to Move It Forward.”)

Inventor Haber and Entrepreneur Bosch Created “an Inflection Point in History”

(p. C7) . . . , Mr. Kean’s narrative of scientific discovery jumps back and forth. The first episode narrated in detail is Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’s conversion of nitrogen into ammonia, the crucial step in producing artificial fertilizer, which Mr. Kean characterizes as “an inflection point in history” that in the 20th century “transformed the very air into bread.” The process consumes 1% of the global energy supply, producing 175 million tons of ammonia fertilizer a year and generating half the world’s food. Haber and Bosch both won Nobel Prizes but were subsequently tainted by their involvement in developing chlorine gas for the German military.
The book’s middle section turns back the clock to steam power, the technology that launched the Industrial Revolution. James Watt was its master craftsman, though Mr. Kean confesses that, as “a sucker for mechanical simplicity,” he regards Watt’s pioneering engine, with its separate condenser, as “a bunch of crap cobbled together.” A more elegant application of gases was Henry Bessemer’s process for making steel, which used blasts of compressed air to make obsolete the laborious and energy-hungry mixing of liquid cast iron and carbon.

For the full review, see:
Mike Jay. “Adventures in the Atmosphere.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 22, 2017): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 21, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Kean, Sam. Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

Russian Regulators Jail Entrepreneur for Innovating “Too Fast and Too Freely”

(p. A1) AKADEMGORODOK, Russia — Dmitri Trubitsyn is a young physicist-entrepreneur with a patriotic reputation, seen in this part of Siberia as an exemplar of the talents, dedication and enterprise that President Vladimir V. Putin has hailed as vital for Russia’s future economic health.
Yet Mr. Trubitsyn faces up to eight years in jail after a recent raid on his home and office here in Akademgorodok, a Soviet-era sanctuary of scientific research that was supposed to showcase how Mr. Putin’s Russia can harness its abundance of talent to create a modern economy.
A court last Thursday [August 3, 2017] extended Mr. Trubitsyn’s house arrest until at least October, which bars him from leaving his apartment or communicating with anyone other than his immediate family. Mr. Trubitsyn, 36, whose company, Tion, manufactures high-tech air-purification systems for homes and hospitals, is accused of risking the lives of hospital patients, and trying to lift profits, by upgrading the purifiers so they would consume less electricity.
Most important, he is accused of doing this without state regulators certifying the changes.
It is a case that highlights the tensions between Mr. Putin’s aspirations for a dynamic private sector and his determination to enhance the powers of Russia’s security apparatus. Using a 2014 law meant to protect Russians from counterfeit medicine, investigators from the Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet KGB, and other agencies have accused Mr. Trubitsyn of leading a criminal conspiracy to, essentially, innovate too fast and too freely.
. . .
(p. A9) Irina Travina, the founder of a software start-up and head of the local technology-business association, said Akademgorodok was “the best place in Russia,” with “outstanding schools, low crime and a high concentration of very smart people.”
But she said Mr. Trubitsyn’s arrest had delivered a grave blow to the community’s sense of security.
“In principle, anyone can fall into this situation,” Ms. Travina said, praising Mr. Trubitsyn as a patriot because he had not moved abroad and had invested time and money in science education for local children. “It can happen to anybody,” she added. “Everyone has some sort of skeleton in their closet. Maybe nothing big, but they can always find something to throw you in jail for.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW HIGGINS. “Russia Wants Innovation, but Jails Innovators.” The New York Times (Thurs., AUG. 10, 2017): A1 & A9.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 9, 2017, and has the title “Russia Wants Innovation, but It’s Arresting Its Innovators.”)

“Shannon’s Principles of Redundancy and Error Correction”

(p. C7) There were four essential prophets whose mathematics brought us into the Information Age: Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. In “A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age,” Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman make a convincing case for their subtitle while reminding us that Shannon never made this claim himself.
. . .
The only one of the four Information Age pioneers who was also an electrical engineer, Shannon was practical as well as brilliant.
. . .
Wiener’s theory of information, drawing on his own background in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and the study of random processes, was cloaked in opaque mathematics that was impenetrable to most working engineers.
. . .
“Before Shannon,” Messrs. Soni and Goodman write, “information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted.” He derived explicit formulas for rates of transmission, the capacity of an ideal channel, ability to correct errors and coding efficiency that could be understood by anyone familiar with logarithms to the base 2.
Mathematicians use mathematics to understand things. Engineers use mathematics to build things. Engineers love logarithms as a carpenter loves a familiar tool. The electronic engineers who flooded into civilian life in the aftermath of World War II adopted Shannon’s theory as passionately as they had avoided Wiener’s, bringing us the age of digital machines.
. . .
Despite the progress of technology, we still have no clear understanding of how memories are stored in our own brains: Shannon’s principles of redundancy and error correction are no doubt involved in preserving memory, but how does the process work and why does it sometimes fail? Shannon died of Alzheimer’s disease in February 2001. The mind that gave us the collective memory we now so depend on had its own memory taken away.

For the full review, see:
George Dyson. “The Elegance of Ones and Zeroes.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 22, 2017): C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 21, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Soni, Jimmy, and Rob Goodman. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.