Sunday, February 23, 2014

Microbots: Automation Revolution Continues with Miniaturized Electronics

Ratcheting down technology’s price-performance improvement curve, we have seen the evolution of computers from the size of a room to a PC to a smartphone to a credit-card-sized micro-controller to a smartwatch to now finally the point where they are almost invisible (Figure 1).

It is not likely to be the big robots of automotive factories that ‘take over the world’ or at least continue to take over labor, but rather microbots.

A recent trend in scientific advance has been microbots such as termite robots that build houses, nanomotors being controlled for the first time in living cells, Google’s electronic contact lenses, blood tests 2.0 (finally! more immediate and orders of magnitude cheaper, though still via physician hegemony), and personalized drone delivery services.

This all points to the ongoing miniaturization of computing, including new use cases and interesting philosophical and ethical problems that could arise when technology is invisible. We are generally aware of technology in our environment now, think of the UK’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras, or the trackability of web-surfing history, but a new conceptual adjustment may be required when technology is more pervasively integrated and invisible.

Figure 1:  Miniaturization Trend, Next Node: Microbots (Source)

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Personalized Drone Delivery: the new Personal Computer?

Miniaturization, robotics, and the hastening automation economy are coming together in interesting new ways. Personal drone delivery services could be a fast-arriving concept. Amazon announced PrimeAir in November 2013, to possibly be ready for launch in 2015 pending US FAA regulations of personal drone airspace. In the ideal case, the service would deliver ordered items within 30-60 minutes. Similarly, Dubai and the UAE announced a personalized drone delivery service including eye-scanning verification for government documents. Personalized or at least targeted micro-delivery via drones is not a new idea. One obvious use is delivering aid, medicine, and other supplies to remote, war-torn, economically-strapped, crisis-based, or other remote or sensitive geographic areas (Singularity University example: Matternet). As is the case with many newtech ideas, a modern version of personal remote delivery was conceptualized in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End (2006).

The potential cost savings, convenience, and efficiency gains make a strong argument in favor of personalized drone delivery. Immediately many human-based delivery and courier services could be put out of business. Supply chains could be reinvented to support services that still need both a human and drone aspect (such as court filings and within office building deliveries), although amphibious drones could be just around the corner: robotic-on-land and flying-in-air for urban office and apartment building deliveries. Hiro Protagonist is out of a job not due to landing in a swimming pool but due to personalized drone pizza delivery services!

Longer-term implications could include a redesign of how space is used. Personal drone delivery services could become like the pneumatic tubes or dumbwaiters of the past, including the secure vestibule area already envisioned for delivery at home and office entry areas. Downtown traffic and congestion could be significantly reduced. An obvious challenge is quality of life degradation due to noise and the visual detritus of drones. Are human civilizations relegated to becoming the hive substrate for the incessant and pervasive buzzing of personal drones circling as they conduct their business? Hopefully the 'Prius drone' (e.g.; quiet) and pleasing visual design will be part of the modernization. Personal drone delivery could be an important intermediary step on the way to the 3D home printing of all desired objects.

Figure 1: Let them Eat Drones (photography drone at Versailles). Image Credit

Sunday, February 09, 2014

MOOCs The Platform: Education, Vocational Training, and More

MOOCs (massive online open courses) reinvented education in the mode of global accessibility, even faster than blogs and ebooks reshaped the publishing industry. Now in place as a concept and an infrastructure, ‘MOOCs as a platform’ can be used for other purposes, most proximately vocation and training. Already much of MOOC content is an educational-vocational hybrid of learning new things like knowledge and skills for the digital economy in the form of bootcamps and code academies for software programming, web services, mobile applications, and big data science.

MOOCs are a resilience tool for being able to quickly retrain large numbers of individuals that may be displaced in economic shifts such as the increasing automation of the economy (i.e.; self-driving vehicles, machine intelligence supplanting knowledge-worker jobs). More generally MOOCS as a concept category are concerned with ‘in-habbing’ - habilitating anyone into any situation - and ultimately the next-generation of the Internet that facilitates massive online collaboration and social connectivity.

A fun science fiction idea could be artificial intelligence waking up grâce à contemporary digital environments like MOOCs, YouTube (image recognition), and high-frequency trading networks. As a MOOC instructor, the new Turing Test would be determining if your online student is a machine or a person; that is to the degree this question still matters.

Sunday, February 02, 2014

Turning Big Data into Smart Data

A key contemporary trend is big data - the creation and manipulation of large complex data sets that must be stored and managed in the cloud as they are too unwieldy for local computers. Big data creation is currently on the order of zettabytes (10007 bytes) per year, in roughly equal amounts by four segments: individuals (photos, video), companies (transaction monitoring), governments (surveillance (e.g.; the new Utah Data Center)), and scientific research (astronomical observations).

Big data fanfare abounds, we continuously hear announcements like more data was created last year than in the entire history of humanity, and that data creation is on a two year-doubling cycle. Better cheap fast storage has been the historical answer to supporting the ever-growing capacity to generate data, however this is not necessarily the best solution. Already much collected data is thrown away (e.g.; CCTV footage, real-time surgery video, and genome sequencing data) without saving anything. Much of stored data remains unused, and not cleaned up into a form that is human-usable since this is costly and challenging (de-duplication a primary example).

Turning big data into smart data means moving away from data fundamentalism, the idea that data must be collected, and that data collection in itself is an ends rather than a means. Advancement comes from smart data, not more data; being able to cleanly extract and use salient aspects of data (e.g.; the ‘diffs,’ for example identifying relevant genomic polymorphisms from the whole genome sequence), not just generate and discard or mindlessly store.