Tag Archives: technology

Notes from 2017 – A Funeral in India

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Friends, family, and Indian government ministers at funeral rites for Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Hyderabad, India

Friends, family, and Indian government ministers at funeral rites for Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Hyderabad, India

Yesterday, hundreds of mourners held funeral rites for Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32 year old Indian software engineer who had called the United States home for ten years. A week ago, a man with with a history of alchohol problems yelled, “Get out of my country,” then shot Kuchibhotla as he watched a basketball game in a crowded bar in Kansas City. The shooter then wounded Kuchibhotla’s friend and a bystander who tried to disarm him. He reportedly told the bartender, “I killed two Arabs.”

In our recent presidential election, we didn’t just vote for candidates, we voted for their stories – both the stories they told and the stories told about them. The winning story played on our fears: the world is a dangerous place. Murderers, rapists, and terrorists are coming to get us. Other countries are “stealing our jobs.” We must close our borders, expel foreigners, hunker down, look after number one, and trust “a strong man.”

Stories can kill. People kill each other and go to war over stories. The narrative of hate that infected this country during last years election continues to grow and appears to have been a factor the Kansas City shooting.

The shooter didn’t just rob a family of their son. He didn’t just arouse the wrath of one of our key allies against us. He helped sink our nation’s prospects in the new century. He hammered a big nail into America’s rapidly fading greatness, both humanitarian and economic.

More than thirty years ago, in the right place at the right time, I joined Intel just before the tech boom really took off. The company, and its peers were oceans of diversity. The “best and brightest” from all over the world came to study at our universities and then go to work for the companies that sparked the revolution that changed our world. Indian engineers were probably the largest contingent at Intel and the other tech companies.

No longer. Srinivas’ brother also lives in American, but his mother said, “I will not allow him to go back. I don’t want to lose another son,” His father told the nation not to let their children come to this country. I wouldn’t if I was an Indian parent – would you? The president’s smooth sentence, read from a teleprompter last night, after a week of silence, will not convince a nation in morning that all is well in America. Indian politicians at the funeral held signs reading “Down with Trump,” and “Down with Racism.” The real message has been received.

Creativity is fueled by divergent viewpoints – it’s a heterogeneous soup from which marvelous things appear when the circumstances are right. The right circumstances are rapidly disappearing from an America that disavows science and cowers in fear of strangers.

The next big thing – clean energy, bio-technology, revolutions in food production, cures for epidemic diseases won’t happen here behind our walls, both visible and invisible. History tells us the fall of empires isn’t pretty, and they do not rise again.

Virtual dreams

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A few nights ago I had a 21st century dream in which the key event was losing my cell phone.  In days of yore – say five or ten years ago – losing a wallet was the common dream image for a disruption to one’s persona.  Now my smart phone probably tells me more about my public life than a wallet.  It shows me where I am, where I’m going, when I need to be there, how to find my way, and it gives me multiple ways to connect with people I need to see when I arrive.  In a few years time, I’m sure we’ll all have digital ID’s and credit cards.

Though I still think of dreams in terms of archaic elements, clearly the psyche will use whatever it needs to make a point.  As technology is part of our lives now, it is also part of our dreams.  All of which leads me to the heart of this post:  we ain’t seen nothin’ yet! 

Last Wednesday, I caught an amazing segment on virtual reality on the PBS Newshour.  I didn’t expect to be interested.  Since I don’t play video games or World of Warcraft, VR seems like just one more distraction in an ADHD world.  It may well be, but the Newshour piece demonstrates the power of this technology, beyond anything I’d imagined.  I instantly thought of the “Feelies” – multi-sensory movies in Huxley’s Brave New World.  We aren’t there yet, but it would be foolish to rule out the possibility.  Watch the clip and see what you think.

The power of imagined experience has long been established.  In the early 20th century, Jung developed a technique he called “active imagination” and used it in therapy.  In the 50’s, research proved that imagined practice was as useful as “real” practice for improving basketball free throws.  In reference to meditation, Lama Thubten Yeshe, a prominent 20th century Tibetan teacher, said, “What we have to learn is that the experiences we have through imagination and those we have through our senses are actually the same.”

All of these applications involve self-generated imagery, but if and when VR comes into our living rooms, it will come through the same corporate interests that flood us with adds already.  Do we want them reaching even farther into the deep psyche?

We’ll be clamoring for it!  If you have any doubt, check out Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality by Neal Gabler.  In terms of an obvious metaphor, The Matrix, once we have the ability turn our living rooms into personal holodecks, that blue pill of restless sleep will surge in popularity.

MorpheusWarning

To paint a huge subject in simple terms, over time, our race has transferred successive parts of our brain functions to technology.  Printed books marked the end of bards who could recite epic poems.  We don’t find the griots of Alex Haley’s Roots in literate cultures.  The imaginations of my parents’ generation got a better workout listening to The Lone Ranger on radio than mine did watching the masked man on TV.

I love technology, but I’m wary of it too, and not just the obvious stuff like the NSA.  I’m wary of all the ways we can use it to foster oblivion until, as T.S. Eliot put it, “Human voices wake us and we drown.”

Robots ‘R Us, installment 2

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The Steam Man of the Prairies, 1868. Public Domain.

The Steam Man of the Prairies, 1868. Public Domain.

An obscure author, Edward S. Ellis, who published a dime novel called The Steam Man of the Prairies 145 years ago, may prove to have been a visionary according to two recent news articles.

The first, in the New York Times, reports that Google quietly acquired seven robotics companies over the last six months (Google Puts Money on Robots).  The scale of the investment is huge and appears to be aimed at automating manufacturing processes.  “The opportunity is massive,” chirped Andrew McAfee, an M.I.T. research scientist.  “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

The second article I noticed bears an uncanny relation to the cover of  The Steam Man.  The California DMV has set rules for companies aiming to test automated cars (Driverless Cars Could be Cruising California Roads by Spring).  To put it in the terms of the M.I.T scientist, we may soon be able to robotize trucks and remove even more inefficient humans from the workforce.

The problem with this manufacturer’s wet dream should be obvious.  Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton puts it simply: “the economy remains lousy for most people. It will likely remain that way: As technology and globalization take over the economy, the U.S. has no national strategy for creating more good jobs in America.” (The True Price of Great Holiday Deals).

Economic discussion, with few exceptions, focuses on how to get back to the good old days of (relatively) full employment and opportunity for those who work hard.  Politicians bicker over which levers to pull, but no one dares to ask the fundamental question: has the structure of the world economy changed too much to recapture that particular sort of past “good times?”

A few years ago, news got out of worker mistreatment at Foxconn, the huge Chinese assembly plant where much of our high-tech gear is assembled.  Foxconn agreed to reforms, and the CEO announced plans to deploy a million robots.  By December 2011, robotic arms had reduced the number of workers on certain assembly lines from “20 or 30 down to 5.”  As we argue over fair wages for fast food workers, it’s a good bet their employers are working on ways to automate the task of making a burger, which can’t be harder than plugging components into a motherboard.

The problem, of course, is that downsized workers will not be buying either Happy Meals or iPhones.

Last March, in a post called Robots ‘R Us (?), a first look at such issues, I quoted a blogger named Orkinpod who was already considering them in depth.  On Feb. 27 he said:  “When the future arrives (and I believe that it is very, very close), and machines can supply all the things that humans could possibly ever want, what is everybody going to do?”

One thing many may wind up doing is working on food production.  Last summer I wrote of a compelling PBS NewsHour series, “Food for 9 Billion” (1).  That’s the total number of hungry humans who will occupy the planet in 2050 as the amount of arable land continues to shrink.  One of several examples given of coming change was Singapore, where five million people live on an island with only 240 acres of undeveloped land.  A 50 year old Singapore engineer developed a revolutionary type of vertical greenhouse that prompted the Directer of the National Institute of Education to say, “I think, eventually, urban factories for vegetable production will take the place of electronic factories in Singapore.”

It’s a grand irony to reflect that industrialism, which began by channeling people out of agriculture, may have succeeded too well; its end game my involve shifting some of them back into food production again.  But what about everyone else?  What happens as robotics and marvels like 3D printers leave ever more people idle?  Insiders aren’t even asking the question, though science fiction writers have since the mid 20th century.

robot3

Unfortunately, in stories where humans go up against robots, the outcomes are usually not the ones we would like to see.

Big news for online education

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In mathematics, an inflection point is the place on a curve where the curvature changes from concave upward (positive) to concave downward (negative) or vice versa.

point_of_inflection

Andy Grove, former Intel CEO, gave the term a new relevance.  In his management book, Only the Paranoid Survive, he wrote:  “A strategic inflection point is the time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.  That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights.  But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.”

Grove borrowed a parallel term, “disruptive technology,” from business writer, Clayton Christensen.  A disruptive technology is an innovation, very often appearing crude at inception, that can change or eliminate entire industries.  The first horseless carriage must have seemed silly to buggy makers, just as the first kindle looked like a toy to brick-and-mortar bookstores.

A week after my first post on free online college classes, an article in Sunday’s Sacramento Bee, An elite school offers master’s degree online, suggests that we’ve already  passed an inflection point and that online coursework is a “disruptive technology” that is destined to change higher education in ways we cannot yet grasp.

Online classes are nothing new; I took an early online programming class in 1998, with mixed results.  Online graduate degree programs in business as well as software exist, many offered by private colleges.  What’s different now is the scale.

Beginning in January, Georgia Tech will offer online master’s degrees in computer science at a cost of $6,600, compared to the $45,000 price tag for the same courses taken on campus.  Some of the funding comes from AT&T which “will use the program to train employees and find potential hires.”  Estimates of future interest in this degree run as high as 10,000 students a year, including international participants.

Because of Georgia Tech’s prestige and the ambitious nature of this undertaking, educators are watching closely.  There is no guarantee of success for this particular program, but from the perspective of student loans alone, there is a huge need for innovation of this sort.  The first producers of new technologies are not always the ones who succeed, but like the first makers of personal computers and ebooks, they define inflection points that change the world.  Georgia Tech may well be doing the same thing.

MIT Open Courseware

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Open: characterized by ready accessibility and usually generous attitude: as (1) : generous in giving  – Webster’s Online Dictionary

“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.” – Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering

Between 1968 and 1972, an idealistic Stanford educated biologist named Stuart Brand published an amazing compendium of ideas called, The Whole Earth Catalog:  Access to Tools.  The title came from photos of our planet taken from space – appropriate, since it was Brand who launched a public campaign in 1966 to get NASA to release the pictures.

In his 2005 Stanford graduation speech, Steve Jobs said, “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation…. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

One of the great notions that inspired Jobs and other idealists was the thought of putting computing power into the hands of “the people.”  That much has been accomplished.  Every kid with a smartphone holds more computing power in the palm of one hand than NASA had when they made those pictures in space.  Now, off course, we see plenty of less-than-ideal side effect of the digital age – unintended consequences that dreamers like Brand did not imagine.  I won’t repeat the headlines – if you’re reading this blog, you’ve seen them.

That is all the more reason why it’s a pleasure to learn how one of our finest universities has embodied the best of the information age dream in order to benefit people all over the world.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has freely posted class materials from every one of its courses online – MIT Open Courseware.

Sign on Canal Street, New Orleans, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Sign on Canal Street, New Orleans, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Under the “Courses” button, you can see class offerings by department.  I invite everyone to look at some of the courses.  The technical classes are vast and impressive, as one would expect, but they aren’t the only ones.  I saw more than one syllabus in the Literature section I plan to check out.  This is attractive enough, but I think the importance of MIT’s move goes beyond personal enrichment.

Our system of higher education is floundering; while technical jobs go unfilled for lack of qualified applicants, tens of thousands of students who thought a college degree was the door to a better life find themselves saddled with debts that amount to 21st century indentured servitude.  The recent congressional “fix” will make few besides college administrators and bank loan officers happy over the long run.  I saw a different model in play during earlier days of the tech boom.

The best boss I ever had, now an industry expert in semiconductor design rules, went to work with a two year degree in drafting.  A friend who was a senior systems analyst studied math in college for three years and then dropped out.  After that, he went to work in a hospital that wanted to computerize; when no one else knew what to do, he gave it a shot.  My own experience was similar.  Clearly this doesn’t apply to every field – you don’t want your doctor learning by trial and error – but inventiveness, ability, and the ability to learn are not guaranteed by a formal degree.  The lack of a degree does not proves those qualities are missing.

As I noted in my review of The Unwinding by George Packer, Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and co-founder of Paypal believes that education is America’s “latest bubble.”  He offers grants to people under the age of 20 with ideas that “could make the world a better place,” if they are willing to leave school for two years to strike out on their own.  I see parallels between education now and traditional publishing at the start of the ebook era.

The digital world we now inhabit brings multiple ways of doing more and more things.  The good people at MIT, who live at the proverbial cutting edge of technology, should be applauded for their decision to share their vast resources with anyone, anywhere.  Good dreams change, but they survive.  Forty-five years after the first Whole Earth Catalog, “Access to Tools” has a whole new shape.  I hope we see much more of the same.

Data-mining for Screenplays

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the-history-of-3d-cinema-0

‘“It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.” – Andy Warhol

I had planned to continue discussing the story of Jorinda and Joringel from the Brothers Grimm, but a pair of articles I saw on successive days suggested a compelling interlude.  We’ll return to the forest shortly.

The first article, “Big data,” outlines ways that new software and methods can identify structures in parts of the oceans of data that retailers and governments have not been able to access before.  Everyone knows that advertisers target us based on our Facebook likes.  Now there are ways to do the same with the photographs we post and other aspects of our online behavior.  New algorithms find new patterns in all our activities, online and off.  This includes the movies we pay to watch.

The second article appeared in the May 5 New York Times, “Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data.” In it, Brooks Barnes writes about Vinny Bruzzese, a highly paid script consultant, who charges up to $20,000 for a sophisticated analysis of a screenplay in terms of past box office performance.  Bruzzese, a former statistics professor, can tell you which sort of demons do best in horror films and warn you that bowling alley scenes are a hallmark of low-grossing movies.

Though Bruzzese’s services are still too taboo for most movie people to cop to, Barnes says studios have hired him to analyze at least 100 scripts, including an early version of Oz the Great and Powerful.  Meanwhile, Scott Steindorff, who produced The Lincoln Lawyer said, “Everyone is going to be doing this soon.  The only people who are resistant are the writers.”

“This is my worst nightmare,” says Ol Parker, who wrote the script for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  “It’s the enemy of creativity…It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

I wonder if there is a greater nightmare lurking for writers like Parker – not just computer driven analysis, but computer driven generation of screenplays?  I’m certain it’s possible.

First of all, interactive online books have been around for some time.  Secondly, I’ve seen how this works in the field of computer graphics.  My day job involved microchip design automation, starting over 15 years ago – chips helping to draw the next generation of chips.  But what really convinces me that elements of screenplays could be synthesized is a computer generated astrological profile I ordered on whim last winter.

I plugged in my birthdate, place, time and, paid $50.  Sixty seconds later, I was reading a 20 page, Jungian-style analysis of my natal chart, that was uncanny in describing my relationship with parents, among other things.  It’s not that hard to understand how it is possible.  The Sun in Aquarius, at one degree, forty-four minutes, in the second house, has a defined meaning.  Assemble text to match the possibilities, and the rest is just number crunching.  A literary outline would have fewer data points.

Colonel Mustard in the library with a wrench, for those who remember Clue.

Or this.  Pick your genre – teenage slasher movie.  Choose setting (urban, suburban, rural).  Choose decade.  Chose your villain (insane human, mutant, supernatural creature).  Choose your hero (I’ll go with brainy nerd who has a congenital limp and can’t get a date for the prom).  Choose the hair color of a cheerleader he will rescue.  Finally, pick a screenplay structure (Save the Cat), add any notes, and hit send.  A few minutes later, you’ve got your outline and pitch, with no hint of a bowling scene.

Oh brave new world!  Andy Warhol saw it coming 50 years ago when he said, “Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.” 

The alternative is simple too – we keep our day jobs and write all the damn bowling scenes we want to.  Life is to short to let someone else dictate our demons.  As my computer generated horoscope said: “You need to face your fear of the world’s criticism, and your tendency to sabotage your creative efforts out of a deep need to be approved of by society.”

Feel free to borrow that bit of advice whenever you want to.

More on Robot Surgery

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In a strange synchronicity after my robot post yesterday, our Sunday paper business section carried an article called “Robot surgery faces lawsuits.”

The source for the piece is listed as Bloomberg News, and this appears to be original story, posted on their website March 5.  No cute robot pictures this time, and no comments from me except to suggest everyone read this: Robosurgery Suits Detail Injuries as Death Reports Rise

Outsourcing yourself for fun and profit

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At least a decade ago, when I worked in IT, I read a story online that I treasured like those special Dilbert clips everyone posts in their cubicle.  Supposedly, a software engineer making $90,000 a year outsourced his job to India, paying an engineer there about 20% of his salary (a handsome wage in India at the time) so he could split his workdays between online courses and video games.  As the story went, the code he got back from the Indian engineer was so good that he had to introduce bugs now and then to maintain credibility.

I loved telling the tale, though I figured it was probably just a nerd urban legend.  Today I found an identical case that is documented.  Well, identical except for location and inflation:  the country is China, and the US engineer’s salary is given as “six-figure.”

A “critical infrastructure company” in the US contacted Verizon security services to see why there were so many network logins originating in Shenyang, China.  At first the company thought they’d been hacked.  Later it turned out the VPN token had been supplied to the Chinese firm by an employee the Verizon report names as “Bob.”  Bob was described as:

“mid-40′s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the company, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator.”

Bob showed up every day at the office.  Here is Verizon’s report on how he spent his days ( http://tinyurl.com/ajm7oan ):

  • 9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
  • 11:30 a.m. – Take lunch.
  • 1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.
  • 2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
  • 4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
  • 5:00 p.m. – Go home.

NPR’s coverage of this story contains a link to the Verizon report, which notes that Bob had a reputation as the best developer in the company http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web

***

What’s just as interesting as Bob’s story is my reaction to it (and probably yours).  First, I assume that if Bob had the smarts to engineer this deal, he got a non-disclosure agreement from the Chinese company.  Such documents, to protect business secrets, are routine in all sub-contracting operations.

Beyond that, I found that along with humorous admiration for Bob’s escapade, I felt critical because he wasn’t “playing by the rules” – even though in the course of my own career, I watched all the rules change.

When I finally “settled down” and got a “real job,” I joined a technology company that boasted of never having a layoff.  The first one came about 18 months later, and before I left, I saw scores of empty cubicles of people whose jobs had been sent overseas.  These days we all know people who played by the rules and got screwed.

In the end, I wouldn’t want Bob’s karma, but his story illustrates something we hear again and again:  nowadays workers are on their own.  Company loyalty in response to employee loyalty is largely a thing of the past, and everyone has to take responsibility for their own careers, including use of the tools of the digital age.  For anyone reading this post in a cubicle and thinking of Bob and tropical islands, here is some recreational reading, referenced in the NPR story – The Four Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.

As the sergeant used to say in the classic cop show, Hill Street Blues, “Be careful out there!”