Economics of Technology – Page 63

Ways Technology May Decrease Inequality

(p. 7) As the previous generation retires from the work force, many more people will have grown up with intimate knowledge of computers. And over time, it may become easier to work with computers just by talking to them. As computer-human interfaces become simpler and easier to manage, that may raise the relative return to less-skilled labor.
The future may also extend a growing category of employment, namely workers who team up with smart robots that require human assistance. Perhaps a smart robot will perform some of the current functions of a factory worker, while the human companion will do what the robot cannot, such as deal with a system breakdown or call a supervisor. Such jobs would require versatility and flexible reasoning, a bit like some of the old manufacturing jobs, but not necessarily a lot of high-powered technical training, again because of the greater ease of the human-computer interface. That too could raise the returns to many relatively unskilled workers.

For the full commentary, see:
TYLER COWEN “TheUpshot; Economic View; The Technological Fix to Inequality.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., DEC. 7, 2014): 7.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 6, 2014, and has the title “TheUpshot; Economic View; How Technology Could Help Fight Income Inequality.” )

The “Miracle Machines” of Farming

(p. 75) Nobody had washing machines, vacuum cleaners, or incandescent light bulbs. But the farmers did have their miracle machines. In fifteen years, the Lucas family had gone from a walking plow pulled along behind a mule, to a riding plow, in which horses carried the blade through the soil, to a fine-tuned internal combustion plow.
“Machinery is the new Messiah,” said Henry Ford, and though that sounded blasphemous to a devout sodbuster, there was something to it. Every ten seconds a new car came off Ford’s factory line, and some of them were now parked next to dugouts in No Man’s Land.

Source:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

As with Airplanes, Lives Must Be Risked to Achieve Routine Safety in Spaceships

(p. A21) SEATTLE — ONE clear winter day in 1909, in Hampshire, England, a young man named Geoffrey de Havilland took off in a twin-propeller motorized flying machine of his own design, built of wood, piano wire and stiff linen hand-stitched by his wife. The launch was flawless, and soon he had an exhilarating sensation of climbing almost straight upward toward the brilliant blue sky. But he soon realized he was in terrible trouble.
The angle of ascent was unsustainable, and moments later de Havilland’s experimental plane crashed, breaking apart into a tangled mass of shards, splinters and torn fabric, lethal detritus that could easily have killed him even if the impact of smashing into the ground did not. Somehow, he survived and Sir Geoffrey — he was ultimately knighted as one of the world’s great aviation pioneers — went on to build an astonishing array of military and civilian aircraft, including the world’s first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet.
I thought immediately of de Havilland on Friday when I heard that Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, a rocket-powered vehicle designed to take well-heeled tourists to the edge of space, had crashed on a flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring the other.
. . .
Certainly the Wright brothers and others like de Havilland were involved in what we now view as an epic quest, but many experts of the day were certain that flight, however interesting, was destined to be not much more than a rich man’s hobby with no practical value.
“The public has greatly over-estimated the possibilities of the aeroplane, imagining that in another generation they will be able to fly over to London in a day,” said a Harvard expert in 1908. “This is manifestly impossible.” Two other professors patiently explained that while laymen might think that “because a machine will carry two people another may be constructed that will carry a dozen,” in fact “those who make this contention do not understand the theory of weight sustentation in the air.”
. . .
There will be tragedies like the crash of SpaceShipTwo and nonlethal setbacks such as the fiery explosion, also last week, of a remote-controlled rocket intended for a resupply mission to the International Space Station. There will be debates about how to improve regulation without stifling innovation. Some will say private industry can’t do the job — though it’s not as if the NASA-sponsored Apollo or space shuttle missions went off without a hitch (far from it, sadly).
But at the heart of the enterprise there will always be obsessives like Sir Geoffrey, who forged ahead with his life’s work of building airplanes despite his own crash and, incredibly, the deaths of two of his three sons while piloting de Havilland aircraft, one in an attempt to break the sound barrier. Getting to routine safety aloft claimed many lives along the way, and a hundred years from now people will agree that in that regard, at least, spaceships are no different from airplanes.

For the full commentary, see:
SAM HOWE VERHOVEK. “Not a Flight of Fancy.” The New York Times (Tues., NOV. 4, 2014): A21.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 3, 2014.)

Leading Computability Expert Says Humans Can Do What Computers Cannot

(p. B4) What does Turing’s research tell us?
“There is some scientific basis for the view that humans are doing something that a machine isn’t doing–and that we don’t even want our machine to do,” says S. Barry Cooper, a mathematician at Leeds and the foremost scholar of Turing’s work.
The math behind this is deep, but here’s the short version: Humans seem to be able to decide the validity of statements that should stump us, were we strictly computers as Turing described them. And since all modern computers are of the sort Turing described, well, it seems that we’ve won the race against the machines before it’s even begun.
. . .
The future of technology isn’t about replacing humans with machines, says Prof. Cooper–it’s about figuring out the most productive way for the two to collaborate. In a real and inescapable way, our machines need us just as much as we need them.

For the full commentary, see:
Mims, Christopher. “KEYWORDS; Why Humans Needn’t Fear the Machines All Around Us; Turing’s Heirs Realize a Basic Truth: The Machines We Create Are Not, Indeed Cannot Be, Replacements for Humans.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., DEC. 1, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 30, 2014, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Why We Needn’t Fear the Machines; A Basic Truth: Computers Can’t Be Replacements for Humans.”)

One of the major books by the Turing and computability expert quoted in the passages above, is:
Cooper, S. Barry. Computability Theory, Chapman Hall/CRC Mathematics Series. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC Mathematics, 2003.

Bezos Devices Aim to Create a Virtuous Cycle ‘Flywheel’

(p. B1) Amazon now makes four different kinds of devices. There are dedicated e-readers, multipurpose tablets and, starting this year, a TV streaming device and a smartphone, the Fire Phone. Just this week, Amazon introduced another streaming machine, the Fire TV Stick, a $39 gadget that is the size of a USB stick and promises to turn your television into an Amazon-powered video service.
. . .
(p. B9) What is Amazon’s endgame with all these devices? Mr. Bezos has always said that his mission, with hardware, is to delight users with devices that are priced fairly. The devices also contribute to Mr. Bezos’s famous “flywheel,” the virtuous cycle by which greater customer satisfaction leads to more sellers in his store, which leads to more products, greater efficiencies, lower prices and, in turn, more customers.
“Everything is about getting that flywheel spinning, and it isn’t necessarily about building a big and successful tablet business of their own,” said Benedict Evans, an analyst who works at the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz and has studied Amazon closely. “Whether they actually drive meaningful commerce isn’t entirely clear, but Amazon is rigorously focused on data, so if they’re doing it, you can trust that there must be data that justifies it.”
And if this year’s devices don’t take off, you can bet that Mr. Bezos will try a slightly different tack next year.

For the full commentary, see:
Farhad Manjoo. “STATE OF THE ART; Amazon’s Grand Design for Devices.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 30, 2014): B1 & B9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 29, 2014, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; Amazon’s Grand Design in Devices.”)

Bezos’s enthusiasm for Jim Collins’s “flywheel” idea is discussed in:
Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Pentagon Bureaucracy “Hindered Progress” on Drones

(p. A13) Compared with, say, a B-2 Bomber, drones are simple things. An empty B-2 weighs 158,000 pounds. The largest version of the Predator–the unmanned aerial vehicle now playing a critical role in every theater where the American military is engaged–weighs just under 5,000. Yet these small aircraft are revolutionizing warfare. Given the simplicity of drones, why did it take so long to put them into operation?
. . .
The most alarming take-away from Mr. Whittle’s history is the persistent opposition of officials in the Pentagon who, for bureaucratic reasons, hindered progress at every step of the way.
A case in point: Two months after 9/11, the Predator was employed to incinerate one of al Qaeda’s senior operatives, Mohammed Atef. The same blast also incinerated–metaphorically–a study released two weeks earlier by the Pentagon’s office of operational testing and evaluation. The study had declared Predator “not operationally effective or suitable” for combat. If one seeks to understand why the drone revolution was late in coming–too late to help avert 9/11–the hidebound mentality behind that Pentagon document is one place to start.

For the full review, see:
Gabriel Schoenfeld. “BOOKSHELF; Building Birds of Prey; Red tape at the Pentagon prevented the development of a drone that could have helped avert the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Sept. 16, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 15, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Predator’ by Richard Whittle; Red tape at the Pentagon prevented the development of a drone that could have helped avert the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”)

The book under review is:
Whittle, Richard. Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2014.

Netflix Proved TV Programs Can Be Delivered on Web

(p. B1) Netflix pointed a way forward by not only establishing that programming could be reliably delivered over the web, but showing that consumers were more than ready to make the leap. The reaction of the incumbents has been fascinating to behold.
As a reporter, I watched as newspapers, books and music all got hammered after refusing to acknowledge new competition and new consumption habits. They fortified their defenses, doubled down on legacy approaches and covered their eyes, hoping the barbarians would recede. That didn’t end up being a good idea.
Television, partly because its files are so much larger and tougher to download, was insulated for a time, and had the benefit of having seen what happens when you sit still — you get run over.
. . .
For any legacy business under threat of disruption, the challenge is to get from one room — the one with the tried and true profitable approach — to another, (p. B5) where consumers are headed and innovators are setting up shop. To get there, you have to enter a long, dark hallway, a scary place.

For the full commentary, see:
David Carr. “The Stream Finally Cracks the Dam of Cable TV.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 20, 2014): B1 & B5.
(Note: bolded words, and last ellipsis, in original; other ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 19, 2014.)

Somewhere in a Garage Is the Next Google

(p. B6) . . . Monday [Oct. 13, 2014] Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman used a speech in Berlin to talk about Amazon’s success in search, how Facebook crushed Google on social networking and his conviction that somewhere in the world there is a garage-based company that will take out Google.
. . .
Here are some excerpts from Mr. Schmidt’s speech:
. . .
THE NEXT GOOGLE: “But more important, someone, somewhere in a garage is gunning for us. I know, because not long ago we were in that garage. … The next Google won’t do what Google does, just as Google didn’t do what AOL did.”

For the full story, see:
CONOR DOUGHERTY. “Google Chairman on Competition.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 20, 2014): B6.
(Note: bolded words, and last ellipsis, in original; other ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 14, 2014, and has the title “Google Executive Chairman: Amazon Is a Lovely Place to Shop and Search.” There are minor differences between the print and online versions. In the passages quoted above, where the two differ, I follow the print version.)

FAA Requires Drones to Carry Onboard Manuals

(p. B1) BERLIN–In four years, Service-drone.de GmbH has emerged as a promising player here in the rapidly expanding commercial-drone industry. The 20-employee startup has sold more than 400 unmanned aircraft to private-sector companies and now is pitching its fourth-generation device.
Over the same period, Seattle-based Applewhite Aero has struggled to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration just to fly its drones, which are designed for crop monitoring. The company, founded the same year as Service-drone, has test-flown only one of its four aircraft, and is now moving some operations to Canada, where getting flight clearance is easier.
“We had to petition the FAA to not carry the aircraft manual onboard,” said Applewhite founder Paul Applewhite. “I mean, who’s supposed to read it?” Mr. Applewhite, like many of his U.S. peers, fears the drone industry “is moving past the U.S., and we’re just getting left behind.”

For the full story, see:
JACK NICAS. “U.S. Rules Clips Drone Makers’ Wings.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 6, 2014): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 5, 2014, and has the title “Regulation Clips Wings of U.S. Drone Makers.”)

U.S. Patents and Start-Ups Fall When We Exclude Tech Immigrants

(p. A19) The process of bringing skilled immigrants to the U.S. via H-1B visas and putting them on the path to eventual citizenship has been a political football for at least a decade. It has long been bad news for those immigrants trapped in this callous process. Now the U.S. economy is beginning to suffer, too.
Every year, tens of thousands of disappointed tech workers and other professionals give up while waiting for a resident visa or green card, and go home–having learned enough to start companies that compete with their former U.S. employers. The recent historic success of China’s Alibaba IPO is a reminder that a new breed of companies is being founded, and important innovation taking place, in other parts of the world. More than a quarter of all patents filed today in the U.S. bear the name of at least one foreign national residing here.
The U.S. no longer has a monopoly on great startups. In the past, the best and brightest people would come to the U.S., but now they are staying home. In Silicon Valley, according to a 2012 survey by Duke and Stanford Universities and the University of California at Berkeley, the percentage of new companies started by foreign-born entrepreneurs has begun to slide for the first time–down to 43.9% during 2006-12, from 52.4% during 1995-2005.

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL S. MALONE. “OPINION; The Self-Inflicted U.S. Brain Drain; Up to 1.5 million skilled workers are stuck in immigration limbo. Many give up and go home.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., OCT. 16, 2014): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 15, 2014.)

The 2012 survey is discussed further in:
Wadhwa, Vivek, AnnaLee Saxenian, and F. Daniel Siciliano. “Then and Now: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part VII.” Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, October 2012.

An in-depth discussion of the issues raised by Malone can be found in:
Wadhwa, Vivek. The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent. pb ed. Philadelphia, PA: Wharton Digital Press, 2012.

How Creative Destruction Reuses Capital

(p. B1) The Internet is moving to a shopping center near you.
In Fort Wayne, Ind., a vacated Target store is about to be home to rows of computer servers, network routers and Ethernet cables courtesy of a local data-center operator. In Jackson, Miss., a former McRae’s department store will get the same treatment next year. And one quadrant of the Marley Station Mall south of Baltimore is already occupied by a data-center company that last year offered to buy out the rest of the building.
As America’s retailers struggle to keep up with online shopping, the Internet is starting to settle into some of the very spaces where brick-and-mortar customers used to shop.

For the full story, see:
DREW FITZGERALD and PAUL ZIOBRO. “This Used to Be a Shopping Mall.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., NOV. 4, 2014): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 3, 2014, and has the title “Malls Fill Vacant Stores With Server Rooms.”)