Economics of Technology – Page 51

Workers Are Empowered, Not Threatened, by Robots

(p. A15) Most computer scientists agree that predictions about robots stealing jobs are greatly exaggerated. Rather than worrying about an impending Singularity, consider instead what we might call Multiplicity: diverse groups of people and machines working together to solve problems.
Multiplicity is not science fiction. A combination of machine learning, the wisdom of crowds, and cloud computing already underlies tasks Americans perform every day: searching for documents, filtering spam emails, translating between languages, finding news and movies, navigating maps, and organizing photos and videos.
Consider Google’s search engine. It runs on a set of algorithms with input from a large number of human users who share valuable feedback every time they click on or skip over a link. The same is true for spam filters. Every time someone marks an email as spam or overrides a filter, it helps fine-tune the system for determining what is relevant.
. . .
Multiplicity is collaborative instead of combative. Rather than discourage the human workers of the world, this new frontier has the potential to empower them.

For the full commentary, see:
Ken Goldberg. “The Robot-Human Alliance; Call it Multiplicity: diverse groups of people and machines working together.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 12, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 11, 2017.)

Small, Obscure Firm Innovates to Keep Moore’s Law Alive

(p. B1) VELDHOVEN, the Netherlands– ASML Holding NV, a little-known company based next to corn fields here, may hold the answer to a question hanging over the global semiconductor industry: how to make chips do more while keeping them the same, compact size.
The industry’s past prowess has been codified into what’s been called Moore’s Law, named after an observation Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore first made in 1965. He postulated that chip makers could double the number of transistors in–and boost the performance of–a typical microprocessor every two years.
Last year, though, Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich warned that after decades of incredible leaps, that timeline was slipping closer to every 2.5 years. Some in the industry feared the eventual death of Moore’s Law, a rule of thumb underpinning modern computing.
ASML believes its breakthrough technology can postpone the demise. “I’m not concerned yet about the next 10-plus years,” said Hans Meiling, who oversees ASML’s effort trying to solve this problem.
Many in the industry, including big backers like Intel itself and Samsung Electronics Co. , are hoping ASML can quicken the pace of innovation once again. With around 15,000 employees and €6.3 billion ($7.05 billion) in revenue last year, the company manufactures equipment that makes chips–specializing in a field called photolithography. Specifically, ASML uses light rays to essentially lay out billions of transistors–the brain cells of a chip–in a microprocessor.

For the full story, see:
Stu Woo and Maarten van Tartwijk. “Dutch Company Aims to Make Chips Do More.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 3, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Can This Little-Known Chip Company Preserve Moore’s Law?”)

Level 3 Failed, In Spite of a Well-Executed, Plausible Business Plan

Source of graph: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1D) Thomas Dowd and hundreds of other Omahans soon will be digging out their Level 3 Communications Inc. stock records. • The reason: This week, Level 3 shareholders are voting to sell the company to Century Link Communications. • The sale marks the end of an investment saga that began 20 years ago with hopes of riches but ended with big losses for most shareholders, despite the efforts of some of Omaha’s biggest names in business. • “It was a very bad experience,” said Dowd, a retired attorney and former director of the Metropolitan Utilities District. “It’s just one purchase at a time, and you think everything’s going good and then, bam! Anyway, lesson learned.” • Although his loss was “substantial,” he said, it didn’t disrupt his lifestyle, and he figures he’s better off than shareholders who lost their retirement savings or other vital funds. He’s still a Level 3 shareholder and will get some cash and Century Link shares in the sale, which is scheduled for September [2017].

(p. 4D) But it works out to about $4.43 for shares he bought years ago, some of them costing more than $100.
. . .
On March 20, 2000, someone sold and someone bought Level 3 shares for $132.25, a price that made the company’s publicly traded stock worth nearly $20 billion. By 2002, the price had nearly collapsed, putting most shareholders into the red.
Level 3 might have an information highway, but its toll system wasn’t collecting enough to earn a profit. It was clear that the nation had a “bandwidth glut,” a huge overcapacity of fiber networks.
Level 3 had installed its network, at an eventual cost of $14 billion, and could cheaply add more lines by stringing extra cable through its conduits.
But others had built networks, too, and the demand for bandwidth wasn’t growing as Crowe had hoped. Researchers also found ways to send more data along existing fibers, meaning greater capacity along existing lines.
Most of the new fiber networks were unused, or “dark.” Only a fraction of fibers in the buried bundles were “lit” by the light waves that carried digital communications and brought in revenue for companies like Level 3.
The supply of fiber far outran the demand, and Level 3’s losses mounted, along with its stock price. Investors lost confidence that the company would begin making profits anytime soon. In fact, that didn’t happen until 2014.
. . .
Dowd, the retired attorney, said he held onto the shares because it didn’t seem worthwhile to sell at the lower prices and he figured someone would buy the company and he would get some of his money back.
“I always thought Walter Scott was going to pull a rabbit out of the hat,” he said. “He never did.”

For the full story, see:
STEVE JORDON. “END OF THE LINE FOR LEVEL 3; Omaha-born company, which laid fiber-optic cable, will cease to exist.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., March 12, 2017): 1D & 4D.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Equal Opportunity Gene Innovation

(p. R4) Kian Sadeghi has postponed homework assignments, sports practice and all the other demands of being a 17-year-old high-school junior for today. On a Saturday afternoon, he is in a lab learning how to use Crispr-Cas9, a gene-editing technique that has electrified scientists around the world–. . .
. . .
Crispr-Cas9 is easier, faster and cheaper than previous gene-editing techniques.
. . .
A do-it-yourself Crispr kit with enough material to perform five experiments gene-editing the bacteria included in the package is available online for $150. Genspace, the Brooklyn, N.Y., community lab where Mr. Sadeghi is learning how to use Crispr to edit a gene in brewer’s yeast, charges $400 for four intensive sessions. More than 80 people have taken the classes since the lab started offering them last year.
. . .
In the workshop, if the participants correctly edit the gene in brewer’s yeast, the cells will turn red. In between the prep work, the classmates swap stories on why they are there. Many have personal Crispr projects in mind and want to learn the technique.
Kevin Wallenstein, a chemical engineer, takes a two-hour train ride to the lab from his home in Princeton, N.J. Crispr is a hobby for him, he says. He wants to eventually use it to edit a gene in an edible fruit that he prefers not to name, to restore it to its historical color. “I always wondered what it would look like,” he says.
At the workshop, Mr. Wallenstein shares his Crispr goal with Will Shindel, Genspace’s lab director. Mr. Shindel is enthusiastic; he has started his own Crispr project, a longtime dream to make a spicy tomato. Both men say they aren’t looking to commercialize their ideas–but they would like to eat what they create someday, if they get permission from the lab. “I’m doing it for fun,” Mr. Shindel says.
When Mr. Sadeghi first wanted to try Crispr, the teenager emailed 20 scientists asking if they would be willing to let him learn Crispr in their labs. Most didn’t respond; those that did turned him down. So he did a Google search and stumbled upon Genspace. When he shared the lead with his science teacher at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, Essy Levy Sefchovich, she agreed to take the course with him.
When Mr. Shindel describes the steps of the experiment, Ms. Sefchovich takes notes. She is hoping to create a modified version of the yeast experiment so all her students can try Crispr in class.
Later, Mr. Sadeghi recounts that the hardest part of the day was handling the micropipette, the lab tool he used to mix small amounts of liquid. He says he still feels clumsy. Ms. Sefchovich reassures him he’ll get the hang of it; he just needs to practice.
“It’s like driving,” she tells him. “You learn the right feel.” Mr. Sadeghi doesn’t have his driver’s license yet. He figures he’ll do Crispr first.

For the full story, see:
Marcus, Amy Dockser. “JOURNAL REPORTS: HEALTH CARE; DIY Gene Editing: Fast, Cheap–and Worrisome; The Crispr technique lets amateurs enter a world that has been the exclusive domain of scientists.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Feb. 27, 2017): R4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 26, 2017.)

Australian Government’s Centrally Planned “Costly Internet Bungle”

(p. A6) BRISBANE, Australia — Fed up with Australian internet speeds that trail those in most of the developed world, Morgan Jaffit turned to a more reliable method of data transfer: the postal system.
Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have downloaded Hand of Fate, an action video game made by his studio in Brisbane, Defiant Development. But when Defiant worked with an audio designer in Melbourne, more than 1,000 miles away, Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days.
“It’s really the big file sizes that kill us,” said Mr. Jaffit, the company’s co-founder and creative director. “When we release an update and there’s a small bug, that can kill us by three or four days.”
Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya.
. . .
The story of Australia’s costly internet bungle illustrates the hazards of mingling telecommunication infrastructure with the impatience of modern politics. The internet modernization plan has been hobbled by cost overruns, partisan maneuvering and a major technical compromise that put 19th-century technology between the country’s 21st-century digital backbone and many of its homes and businesses.
The government-led push to modernize its telecommunications system was unprecedented, experts say — and provides a cautionary tale for others who might like to try something similar.
“Australia was the first country where a totally national plan to cover every house or business was considered,” said Rod Tucker, a University of Melbourne professor and a member of the expert panel that advised on the effort.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW McMILLEN. “How Australia Bungled Internet Modernization.” The New York Times (Fri., MAY 12, 2017): A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 11, 2017, and has the title “How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout.”)

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Cannot Automate All Legal Tasks

(p. B1) “There is this popular view that if you can automate one piece of the work, the rest of the job is toast,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s just not true, or only rarely the case.”
An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, for example. Yet other lawyers’ tasks, like advising clients, writing legal briefs, negotiating and appearing in court, seem beyond the reach of computerization, for a while.
. . .
(p. B3) Dana Remus, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and Mr. Levy studied the automation threat to the work of lawyers at large law firms. Their paper concluded that putting all new legal technology in place immediately would result in an estimated 13 percent decline in lawyers’ hours.
A more realistic adoption rate would cut hours worked by lawyers by 2.5 percent annually over five years, the paper said. The research also suggests that basic document review has already been outsourced or automated at large law firms, with only 4 percent of lawyers’ time now spent on that task.
Their gradualist conclusion is echoed in broader research on jobs and technology. In January, the McKinsey Global Institute found that while nearly half of all tasks could be automated with current technology, only 5 percent of jobs could be entirely automated. Applying its definition of current technology — widely available or at least being tested in a lab — McKinsey estimates that 23 percent of a lawyer’s job can be automated.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “A.I. Is Doing Legal Work. But It Won’t Replace Lawyers, Yet..” The New York Times (Mon., MARCH 20, 2017): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 19, 2017, and has the title “A.I. Is Doing Legal Work. But It Won’t Replace Lawyers, Yet.”)

The Remus and Levy article, mentioned above, is:
Remus, Dana, and Frank S. Levy. “Can Robots Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law.” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics (forthcoming).

Apple Hits Record Market Capitalization for Any U.S. Company in History

(p. B20) The world’s most valuable listed company just got even more valuable.
Shares of Apple rose 0.6% to an all-time high of $153.99 Tuesday [May 9, 2017], sending its market capitalization above $800 billion, a first for any U.S. company. That level, the latest evidence of how much the stock has risen this year, is a milestone sure to stoke speculation about whether it will be the first public company to be worth $1 trillion.

For the full story, see:

BEN EISEN AND CHRIS DIETERICH. “Apple’s Latest Record: An $800 Billion Market Cap.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 10, 2017): B20.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 9, 2017, and has the title “Twitch Entices Video Creators With More Revenue Sharing.”)

Amazon Increases Rewards to Live-Video-Content-Creators

(p. B4) Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch is allowing more broadcasters to make money on its platform, a move that could help the live-streaming business seize on challenges facing bigger rivals YouTube and Facebook Inc.
On Friday, Twitch said it will open up its revenue-sharing program next week for more broadcasters to get paid whenever they receive “bits”–custom, animated emoticons that act as an online currency for viewers to tip them. Twitch says bits are a way for those in the broadcasters’ channels to cheer them on.
Twitch will add more money-making opportunities to its new “affiliate program” in the future, the company said. Currently, only the top 1% of the 2.2 million people who stream on Twitch at least once a month–members of its so-called “partner program”–can generate revenue on the platform.
. . .
Twitch said its top earners in the partner program, who are its most popular broadcasters, make more than $100,000 a year. Under the new affiliate program, creators with fewer fans must meet certain criteria to demonstrate their commitment to streaming, such as a minimum number of hours spent on the air, to earn revenue. The amount of money the platform shares with its broadcasters varies depending on how it is earned.
Twitch sells bits to viewers in bundles ranging from $1.40 for 100 to $308 for 25,000. Broadcasters then earn one cent every time a viewer uses one.

For the full story, see:
Sarah E. Needleman. “Twitch Entices Video Creators With More Revenue Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 22, 2017): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 21, 2017, and has the title “Twitch Entices Video Creators With More Revenue Sharing.”)

Dynamism Dying from Bad Attitudes or Bad Policies?

I agree with Tyler that the U.S. is less dynamic than it once was. But I mainly blame our bad government policies, while he mainly blames our own bad attitudes.

(p. A15) Is the “land of opportunity,” with dynamic labor markets and fresh sources of renewal, a thing of the past?

That’s the fear of Tyler Cowen, who argues in “The Complacent Class” that America is increasingly defined by an aversion to risk as well as to anything that is unfamiliar or different. He sees a broad swath of the American population losing “the capacity to imagine or embrace a world where things do change rapidly for most if not all people.” This mind-set, he says, has “sapped us of the pioneer spirit that made America the world’s most productive and innovative economy.”
. . .
To make his case, Mr. Cowen draws a contrast between the changes that Americans experienced in the first half of the 20th century and the changes of the past 50 years. The earlier period saw dramatic improvements in health and education as well as a proliferation of automobiles, airplanes and telephones. By comparison, the changes since 1965 have been modest. “A lot of our technological world seems to have stood pretty much still,” he writes, “albeit with a variety of quality improvements along the way.” He even notes that, while popular narcotics in the past were mind-altering (LSD) or activity-inciting (cocaine), today’s drugs of choice, such as heroin and opioids, “induce a dreamlike stupor and passivity.”
. . .
Given Mr. Cowen’s own innovative thinking, it’s disappointing that he does not focus more on potential remedies to the torpor he describes.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; How American Workers Got Lazy.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 28, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 27, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Cowen, Tyler. The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

“Hubs of Genius Do Not Arise from Government Planning”

(p. 13) In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union tried to make a version of Silicon Valley from scratch. A city called Zelenograd came to life on the outskirts of Moscow and was populated with all manner of brainy Soviet engineers. The hope — naturally — was that a concentration of clever minds coupled with ample funding would result in a wellspring of innovation and help Russia keep pace with California’s electronics boom. The experiment worked as well as one might expect. Few people will read this on a Mayakovsky-branded tablet or smartphone.
Many similar attempts have been made in the subsequent decades to replicate Silicon Valley and its abundance of creativity and ingenuity. Such efforts have largely failed. It seems near impossible to will an exceptional place into being or to manufacture the conditions that lead to an outpouring of genius.
. . .
As in the case of Zelenograd, hubs of genius do not arise from government planning or by acting on the observations of a traveler. They’re happy accidents. To attempt to clone such things or pinpoint their characteristics is futile.

For the full review, see:
ASHLEE VANCE. “Smart Sites.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., JAN. 10, 2016): 13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JAN. 8, 2016, and has the title “”The Geography of Genius,’ by Eric Weiner.”)

The book under review, is:
Weiner, Eric. The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Self-Driving Cars Would Help Older Adults Continue to Live at Home

(p. B4) Single, childless and 68, Steven Gold has begun to think about future mobility and independence. Although in good health, he can foresee a time when he won’t be a confident driver, if he can drive at all. While he hopes to continue to live in his suburban Detroit home, he wonders how he will be able to get to places like his doctor’s office and the supermarket if his driving becomes impaired.
For Mr. Gold and other older adults, self-driving cars might be a solution.
The number of United States residents age 70 and older is projected to increase to 53.7 million in 2030, from 30.9 million in 2014, according to the Institute for Highway Safety. Nearly 16 million people 65 and older live in communities where public transportation is poor or nonexistent. That number is expected to grow rapidly as baby boomers remain outside of cities.
“The aging of the population converging with autonomous vehicles might close the coming mobility gap for an aging society,” said Joseph Coughlin, the director of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology AgeLab in Cambridge.
He said that 70 percent of those over age 50 live in the suburbs, a figure he expects to remain steady despite a recent rise in moves to urban centers. Further, 92 percent of older people want to age in place, he said.

For the full story, see:
MARY M. CHAPMAN. “Wheels; For the Aged, Self-Driving Cars Could Bridge a Mobility Gap.” The New York Times (Fri., March 24, 2017): B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 23, 2017, and has the title “Wheels; Self-Driving Cars Could Be Boon for Aged, After Initial Hurdles.”)