Dana Blankenhorn

Tech Demands Freedom

America dominates the global tech economy because freedom.

The freedom to think what you want, and be who you want, is now the key to economic growth.

This is a point that’s widely ignored by American elites today. Americans love to talk about what’s wrong and have overestimated our global adversaries since 1776.

It’s most obvious now in our economic competition with China.

China is a great manufacturing power. But it continues to trail in software and science. It deliberately put down its Cloud Emperors for threatening the state. It can’t deliver the latest semiconductor technology.

Software is the product of hands and minds. You can’t automate its production, the way you can a car. You can improve productivity with better tools. But organizing a team requires that coaches listen as well as speak. Man management, they call it.

The best scientists, coders, and writers are all motivated by something inside. We’re not doing it for the money, we’re not doing it for an ideology. We each have our own reasons. In my case, it’s a desire I’ve had all my life to be heard, to be seen, to be part of the conversation. If you want to get the most out of us, you must respect that. China’s government doesn’t respect that.

The Decade of Immersive Technology

Back in 2019, while at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I wrote about three key trends that would define the 2020s.

They were the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language .

Since then, there has been progress in all three areas. The pandemic, and resulting parts shortages, have delayed but won’t prevent the end of oil. You can see the Machine Internet in all the hype over 5G. The Moderna vaccine is indeed using DNA as a programming language.

Turns out there’s a 4^th trend, and there may be more.

Joseph Sifakis: No Time for Standards

One of the great talks at the second day of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, September 24,was delivered by Joseph Sifakis, a Greek computer scientist with French citizenship who helped found the Verimag Lab in Grenoble and won the Turing Prize in 2007 for his work in model checking and verification.

Sifakis, who once sported a great mustache but is now 72 and clean-shaven, mainly spoke about autonomous cars. He has great theory and deep thought to bring to the topic. Unfortunately he’s trying to set rules on a race that is already underway. 

This is common in the world of Moore’s Law, where change happens faster than people can adapt to it. The press office here, for instance, has very nice networking cables, but all the reporters are using WiFi.

Sifakis’ work asks if we should trust self-driving cars.. Views vary. Some people distrust Tesla cars so much they block the chargers with giant pick-up trucks. Others go to sleep while rolling along freeways at 70 mph, with the autopilot on.

“Once you certify an aircraft as a product, you can’t update it,” Sifakis noted. It’s a key point. Boeing must have software fixes for the 737-Max plane run through testing and standards approvals before the plane returns to the air, because we must have absolute trust in those fixes before they go in.

For self-driving cars, the regulatory model is more lax. “Public authorities allow self-certification,” software is updated monthly, and manufacturers apply statistics to prove their designs work. It hasn’t caused a crash yet, thus it must not be capable of causing a crash.

 

Nature of Money, Nature of Man

When I wrote my “anti-Trump polemic” early this year I thought I was writing about politics.

It turns out I was writing an economics book.

I learned this while reading a biography of the late Jane Jacobs, best known for her fight against the “urban renewal” of Robert Moses. After that fight Jacobs moved to Toronto, becoming one of Canada’s most beloved intellectuals, and there she wrote an economics history book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 

In this book Jacobs identified cities, rather than farms, as the original source of wealth. It was cities that turned wheat into bread and beer. It is cities that transform everything.

True, as far as it goes. But how and why remained a mystery to Jacobs. The nature of money eluded her. It’s something my recent book explains by looking at American history and seeking what I first saw as political patterns in our national life, and later concluded were economic patterns.

The answers, in our time, strike at the nature of money, the nature of man, and why, even after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, there remain people like John Stossel who continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change. 

Wealth, it turns out, is entirely man-made. This is more controversial than it seems. Politicians have always believed wealth to be a product of holding land, or of exploiting it. They see history as great men moving lesser men around like pawns on a chessboard. Social historians, by contrast, focus on the real lives of ordinary people. These are important, but they are no more relevant to economic history than land is.

Biology is The Next Wave

The next few years will see technology, the industrial wave of the present, fighting to take back power (permanently) from the resource industries which seized it in 2016.

Technology will succeed. The future can’t be put back into the bottle. If it can’t succeed here, it will go elsewhere, leaving America to become just another Latin American dictatorship.

But there’s another wave following technology. Just as technology followed resources, resources followed manufacturing, and manufacturing followed utilities, railroads, and agriculture to the center of the U.S. economy, and thus its politics, so biology is following technology.

Time Traveling

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I was brought up short this summer by a family project.

My wife wanted me to scan our old photos into the computer, so they would be part of the screensaver that plays over our family dinners.

Suddenly I was brought back into another time. There was a rugged Texas clan holding a reception for the kid who'd stolen their youngest daughter. Here was a California family welcoming that daughter as an in-law.

Makers Define the Next Boom

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One striking aspect of all recoveries I have witnessed is how you never know where you're going when you start the journey.

Instead, analysts look for the next boom in the embers of the last one, much as at present everyone talks about the housing market.

Forget housing – that was the last boom. (Picture from LiveScience.)

Similarly, early in the last decade, I don't recall many people talking about housing or deficit finance as being the keys to growth. Everyone was stirring the embers of the tech bubble, hoping for a rebirth. Google's IPO was celebrated in part because everyone saw it as organic growth, rather than as a replacement for many, larger, more unfocused efforts that had failed.

Same thing in the 1990s. We spent three years talking about multimedia when the Internet was on our doorstep. And the 1980s – everyone talked about the PC rather than the secular change in enterprise computing, toward client server, that was the real economic driver.

Point is we should not be surprised at the current mistakes. But we shouldn't be fooled by them either.

The next boom has begun, but it's not about housing, nor is it about the Internet.

It's about making stuff.

The Many Markets of Robotics

What's intriguing about robotics, as a market, is that it's not one market.

Robotics consists of many markets – toy markets, industrial markets, military markets, scientific markets, education markets. Which means all the trends currently taking place in computing and education can be brought to bear, profitably.

For example. Cloud computing gives robots a common platform in which to expand their internal knowledge. Social computing gives them a means with which to use all this, a way to self-program. A cloud database can give a robot artificial experience, and social computing algorithms let them share it.  The result is that computing intelligence quickly becomes something that passes for real intelligence as robots “learn” and “program themselves” based on other robots' experience.

This can be important when robots go into the field, literally. Japan wants to use robots to grow crops in the tsunami area, given the lack of young people in that country. and the high radioactivity in the area.

Industrial robots also benefit from what's happening in the renewable energy space. Microbial fuel cells could produce the low-power necessary to keep robots going on distant planets or in space.  We're talking tiny robots, and tiny robots could clear blood vessels of plaque from the inside.  Or reverse it, use robots to move a sail about the ocean that can make biodiesel out of algae blooms. 

Of course, what this whole thing really needs is a generation of young minds, like those who powered the PC revolution in the 1970s. We don't just have to reproduce MIT. We need kids playing with robots the way those in my generation played with electrical breadboards. This is what makes kits like Cubelets (above) so important. Like Little Bits these kits make the transition between playing and learning, the next step being doing.

So what you've got is a thriving industry, and a huge culture growing up into it. The real Susan Calvin may be attending an elementary school near you right now.

 

 

The Next Revolution

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 1 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It may seem strange, at a time of chronically high unemployment, for me to write about a coming labor shortage.

But that's how I roll. I see around the next corner, or try to. Sometimes, as in the late 1990s, this can leave me depressed in a happy time. Sometimes, as in my posts this last year, it leaves me happy in a time of depression.

What I've seen over the last year, however, makes me confident that labor shortages are indeed in our future. Even if the scare-mongers are right and “peak oil” is just around the corner, I'm now convinced that's more of an economic event than a real one. The amount of new energy being created through efficiency, as well as through renewable technologies like solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and biofuel power, is going to be enough to see us through.

The benefits of this are many-fold. First, there's the economic benefit of having a thum b down on energy prices, a thumb that's only going to grow in strength as the cost of producing solar power (to take one example) falls below that of oil, then natural gas, then coal, over the next few years. There's the environmental benefit, the start of replacing our current carbon economy with one based on hydrogen. There's the social benefit, in which wars over resources are no longer necessary, because the Sun shines everywhere, and the winds blow, the tides roll, and we live on a molten rock.

Of course, these power sources have different sets of economics. For one thing, they create more jobs than what came before. Once you have an oil well drilled, once you have a field in production, the incremental labor required to keep the fuel flowing isn't great. The same is true for a solar panel. But solar panels are tiny units of power. They must be researched, they must be manufactured, they must be tested and they must be installed to deliver an economic impact.

This takes people.

So, as my late journalism professor Elizabeth Yamashita told me, back in 1978, when we sat down to our first business journalism class at Northwestern University's Medill School, I have good news for you. You're all going to have jobs.

There will not only be a lot of jobs in the new energy sector, but there will be new wealth, that must be spent on something. And those somethings will include lots of new jobs in every area of endeavor. So even if you're into video games or studies of urban predation, this applies to you. There will be money to hire you.

But there's another important trend. I, and my lovely wife, and the rest of the baby boom, and everyone in the western world is getting older. I turn 57 next week. There are days, even now, when I feel, like Bilbo Baggins, “thin, like butter spread over too much bread.” Friends are retiring now, and when I look in my loved one's eyes I see someone looking forward to a restful time, a time to read and relax and let the world drift by.

My generation will soon need to be cared for. And there won't be enough people to do the job. The immigration debate is going to shift a decade from now, and we'll be worrying about how we can attract people, not repel them.

Still, this is a tech column, and all this discussion really leads to a single, one-word description of our future, which I hope gives hope, but (as usual) also brings challenges.

Robotics.

I Robot

I am not giving up on the War Against Oil. Far from it. I will continue following its progress, here and elsewhere, through 2012 and beyond crossover.

But I've learned something about myself. I live for the bleeding edge, for the technology frontier. Once things seem set, once the byways are established, I tend to lit out for the undiscovered country.

As a journalist, that's my “thing.” Always has been. I sought out the Internet starting in 1983, got into e-commerce in the early 1990s, covered the Internet of Things as early as 2002, and became an open source reporter in 2005, before moving to The War Against Oil a few years ago.

Each has represented a sea change in how we look at life and technology. The Internet is the biggest story of our time, by far, and e-commerce is a big part of it. The War Against Oil will be the biggest story of this decade, returning us all to prosperity and turning today's unemployment problem into tomorrow's labor shortage.

But what comes after that? What comes after is something I've dreamed of since I was a kid. Useful, commercial, consumer robots. Thus I call this section of the blog Asimov Ville. (Asimov wrote his short story The Last Question, in which the universe was created by a robot, in 1964.