Crutcher's post about unsourcing reminded me of some conversations I once had. So, let's continue in this vein for a bit.

First, let's think of an actual example of where unsourcing could affect a fairly large number of people: fast food. Like the auto-industry of the past, fast food workers could be replaced en masse by mechanical counterparts. But, before we even worry about this, is it even feasible to replace cheap labor with a machine?

Let's take some hypothetical burger joint. This one is particularly efficient and needs only 5 workers present at any given time. Also, this franchise pays its workers extremely well (compared to the minimum wage of many) at $10/hour. So, how much is this store's payroll each year?

5 * $10/hour * 24 hours/ day * 365 days/ year = $438000 per year.

So, this hypothetical store pays out almost half a million a year not including other costs such as training, managers, shrinkage, safety equipment, et cetera.

So, if a burger making machine is $2 million, it would only take 4 years for any given franchise to pay it off. After that, the store is 'saving' $438,000/year.

So, this raises some very interesting questions:

• Why isn't McDonald's hiring MIT-trained roboticists


• What would this do to the market/ how would it affect competition amongst fast food companies?


• What do we do with this large number of displaced workers (2 million according to Wikipedia)?

Per #1, they might be, I just don't know. #2, we can only hope that it leads to a price war which heralds back the days of the $0.10 burger. Let's also hope that this is accompanied by some major medical advances to deal with all the new cases of diabetes and coronary illness.

It's the last question that I'm really interested in. Crutcher states that his job is to kill your job. Somehow this seems almost ok when we're talking about software companies, because it means that there's a better product being produced and also that you can just go to a new software job. But what happens when the jobs of unskilled labor become unsourced? This has happened many times before, with mechanized farming and the like, but what do we do when almost all unskilled labor can be mechanized away? There are several possibilities. One of the easiest would be to just give them a government stipend every month to let them buy things like the (now) cheap hamburgers. However, our good-ole-American hard-working attitude certainly feels cheated by people getting things for free. We could work on training them to become skilled in some task. But what skills will be unsourced next? Another possibility is that we just put our fingers in our ears and pretend that this kind of technology does not, and will not, exist and continue to pay the pittance to the unskilled labor we have.

I'm not sure how this will be resolved, but I certainly think it's a very interesting point of discussion. We should probably talk about it now before the Burger-o-matic 1.0 is released.

Labels: unsourcing

There's a lot of argument about "Outsourcing", the process of farming out work to other providers, frequently in other countries. There's a lot of blame tossed around about this. But I want to suggest that not all of those jobs arrive. Some of them are Unsourced, and simply don't need to be done any more.

I'm very interested in productivity. Not in achieving it, but in the consequences. Suppose you and 100 other people have a given job, and by various tricks, your industry (of 100 people) figures out how to save 5% of its time. If demand doesn't go up, congratulations, 5 people are gonna lose their jobs after the market consolidates.

I like to call this Unsourcing. No one's getting the job, it just doesn't exist anymore. This is what productivity is all about - not hiring people, and firing them if you can get away with it.

This brings me to a recent TechCrunch article:

Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!

As an engineer, I get paid to increase productivity for some group of people. Sometimes those people are engineers as well. My job is killing your job.

Thus far, things have generally worked out; and new labor replaces old labor. But robots throw a wrinkle into blue collar jobs, and software reduces the need for white collar jobs. I don't know where this is going, but I'm pretty worried about it.

Edit: Looks like ComputerWeekly.com beat me to this term in 2001. I think they were somewhat uncritical of the terminology at the time, which as stated was essentially a euphemism for "firing people". I stick by my usage here.

Labels: unsourcing

Today I'd like to talk about two papers of moderate length on the subject of Engineered Intelligence. Reading both of them should take you an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Both are frequently cited, both discuss the relationship between intelligence and computation. And both are in the canon of the future.

If you are interested in Artificial Intelligence, or Augmented Intelligence, or Machine Learning, or even The Singularity; you need to read these two papers. They are short, well written, and accessible. Both papers are frequently cited, so many people feel that they are "familiar" with the papers. I'd like to convince you that these are both well worth your time, and I guarantee you'll learn a thing or two.

The first paper is "Computing machinery and intelligence", by Alan Turing. It was published in the journal Mind in 1950, but there are many copies of it bouncing around the net. Here are a few links:

• A PDF Scan of the Original Paper
• An HTML Translation on a tacky website with tables from the paper
• An HTML Translation with no tables
  

Alan Turing was a researcher in computation. He was involved in a great deal of the early work on what it meant to compute things, and what was and wasn't possible.The British government forced him to take hormones (in the 50's!) to make him more "manly", in the hopes they could turn him straight, and it seems likely that this was a major cause of his suicide. We'll never know how much more we missed because of this government sanctioned homophobia.

"Computing machinery and intelligence" is a wonderfully written and well articulated work on what we mean when we say "intelligence", and what it would mean for a computer to be "intelligent". It is also the source for the silly game called the "Turing test", which Turing himself only introduced to make a rather nice point about personal bias. Most of this paper is devoted to the arugments against engineered intelligence, and the various flaws in those arguments.

The second paper for today is "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" by Vernor Vinge in 1993. This paper is much easier to track down, being a product of the web era:

• Vinge's official copy
• A copy with a nicer font
  

Vernor Vinge is a professor of computer science and mathematics who decided to pursue science fiction. He's got a good deal of work out now, I highly recommend his novel "Rainbow's End".

Vinge was one of the first author of the modern era to tie the old thoughts about machine intelligence with modern observations on acceleration. Unlike Ray Kurzweil, he isn't a shameless self promoter, so Ray gets more press. But I think Vinge is much more reasonable.

In "The Coming Technological Singularity", Vinge lays out the case for the inevitability of massively disruptive change brought on by engineered intelligence. Like Turing's paper, Vinge devotes most of this article to examining the arguments against engineered intelligence, and the problems with those articles.

Labels: faster is different, things worth reading

The people on this planet use a lot of energy. A lot. Like 500 exajules in 2005. However, more than three quarters comes from fossil fuels. It would be a very safe projection to say that the world's energy demands are only going to increase over time (save the aporkolypse). Here's a graph of the rate of the world's energy usage in terawatts (per Wikipedia):




Kurzweil speculates that most of the world's energy will be produced by cheap solar in the next twenty years. I hope he's right because it'll be awful hard to have a Dyson sphere without the tech to harness all that power. However, in the mean time, it seems that wind power might just serve our current needs.


The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) published an article in April of 2009 that states that wind may produce more than enough electricity to sate the world's hunger. The article (Global potential for wind-generated electricity by Xi Lua, Michael B. McElroya, and Juha Kiviluomac) has the following abstract:

The potential of wind power as a global source of electricity is assessed by using winds derived through assimilation of data from a variety of meteorological sources. The analysis indicates that a network of land-based 2.5-megawatt (MW) turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity could supply >40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms. Resources in the contiguous United States, specifically in the central plains states, could accommodate as much as 16 times total current demand for electricity in the United States. Estimates are also given for quantities of electricity that could be obtained by using a network of 3.6-MW turbines deployed in ocean waters with depths <200m within 50 nautical miles (92.6 km) of closest coastlines.

We definitely need to pursue renewable forms of power, be it solar, wave, geothermal, nuclear, or in this case wind. I think that this result is very, very heartening. Maybe, just maybe, we'll be ok.

Labels: power

This is a post about how Faster is Different. This is a topic I'll return to frequently, but I want to make a point about it up front. Programmers think about the resources available to them in terms of space/time. This isn't the Physicist's space/time; this is about computers.

Computers process stuff (in time), and they store stuff (in space). So, roughly, processors = time, and memory/disk = space. Processors come at different speeds (operations per second), and with different numbers of cores. More of either gives you more time, so much that you can have more than 1second per second of time if you have more than one processor. More memory gives you more space.

This is interesting, because we (programmers) measure how expensive a given algorithm is in terms of space/time; and we measure how hard a given problem is in terms of space/time as well. It might seem strange to make the distinction between algorithms and problems, but sometimes you don't use the "best" algorithm to solve a problem. Generally, a problem is defined to be as hard as the absolute best algorithm that will solve it. If you don't have enough space/time to solve a problem, then you can't. This is the basis for cryptography, very hard problems.

Anyway, back to the main point: Faster is Different.

More space/time doesn't just make your existing stuff faster, it sometimes changes a problem with no solution (because it was too expensive) into a problem with a wildly expensive solution. And problems which are wildly expensive today will be very expensive a year from now, quite expensive 3 years from now, and sorta cheap in 5 years. 10 years from now, they'll be free. All thanks to Moore's Law, and its impact on our future supply on space/time, assuming it doesn't stop. Now, there's reasons to question Moore's Law, but that's for another post.

In this installment of Faster is Different, I want to talk to you about The Swarm. The Swarm is, roughly, everybody and their computers. The Swarm can do a lot of interesting things, and the Swarm is always watching you. Right now, that doesn't really matter, because it doesn't have a lot of space/time available to it. But that's gonna change.

My employer, Google, just posted some interesting research results in computer vision. I wasn't involved in any way, but its germane to the topic of this post:

Official Google Blog: A new landmark in computer vision
Our research builds on the vast number of images on the web, the ability to search those images, and advances in object recognition and clustering techniques. First, we generated a list of landmarks relying on two sources: 40 million GPS-tagged photos (from Picasa and Panoramio) and online tour guide webpages. Next, we found candidate images for each landmark using these sources and Google Image Search, which we then "pruned" using efficient image matching and unsupervised clustering techniques. Finally, we developed a highly efficient indexing system for fast image recognition.

While we've gone a long way towards unlocking the information stored in text on the web, there's still much work to be done unlocking the information stored in pixels. This research demonstrates the feasibility of efficient computer vision techniques based on large, noisy datasets. We expect the insights we've gained will lay a useful foundation for future research in computer vision.

If you're interested to learn more about this research, check out the paper.

Now first, I want to say that this is really neat research. And the math is cool. And the people involved have every reason to be proud of themselves.

Microsoft has an image group which regularly produces equally cool results. A while back, they came up with an application that was so popular, they made it a publicly accessible toy:

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth
You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark. With nothing more than a digital camera and some inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your synth is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

So, what properties would we expect from the composition of these services? It would find images of commonly photographed sites, and would then abstract them into 3d models of the space, with textures. All of this without sending anyone out to scan or photograph the site. Now, add a few computational generations to this, say 5 years; and people will be doing this for video.

And if you'll recall, pretty much everyone's launched facial recognition software in the past year. Apple did it, Google did it, I lose track. It still isn't great, but its pretty good, and more space/time and samples can only make it better.

But because Faster is Different, what Google and Microsoft can do today, pretty much any company can do in 3-5 years, and small organizations will be able to do in 7-8 years.

So I want you to forget about Big Brother, or Evil Corporations, or The Bad Guys. Over the next 10 years, The Swarm is gonna map the entire world, and it is going to be able to tell, from the pixels alone, who's in any photo on the web, and where it was taken, and probably to some extent, when it was taken. You cannot stop this from happening, because as it gets cheaper, more and more organizations will independently do this themselves. This is inevitable and implied, because:

• People want to know,
• People profit from knowing, and
  
• Faster is Different.

Labels: faster is different, surveillance

This evening I heard a radio DJ (it's like Pandora but a person and not necessarily on the internets) play a song by a band called We Were Promised Jetpacks. Two things: first, I recommend this band; second, here are your damned jetpacks:

Ok, so it's not actually a jetpack, but rather a personal helicopter from Martin Jetpack of New Zealand. There's a nice Wikipedia writeup about them and their product. It seems that the 'jetpack' has a flying time of about 30 minutes and a maximum speed of 60mph. Not too bad, although I wouldn't plan on replacing your Vespa with it just yet, as the price tag is currently around $100,000.

Charles Stross, one of my favorite authors, made an excellent keynote about the future of technology at the LOGIN 2009 conference. Keep in mind, Stross is openly taking a deliberately conservative view, assuming essentially no disruptive technologies.

Key points:

• Expect only one to two orders of magnitude (10x to 100x) improvement in processing power and power consumption.
• Expect ~ 1tb/s wireless data, but no more.
• Expect your mobile phone/computer/thingy to be as powerful as your current desktop.
  

I strongly recommend you read the whole thing:

LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030

"Let me give you a handle on this device, the gadget, circa 2020, which has replaced our mobile phones. It's handheld, but about as powerful as a fully loaded workstation today. At it's heart is a multicore CPU delivering probably about the same performance as a quad-core Nehalem, but on under one percent of the power. It'll have several gigabytes of RAM and somewhere between 256Gb and 2Tb of Flash SSD storage. It'll be coupled to a very smart radio chipset: probably a true software-directed radio stack, where encoding and decoding is basically done in real time by a very fast digital signal processor, and it can switch radio protocols entirely in software. It'll be a GPS and digital terrestrial radio receiver and digital TV receiver as well as doing 802.whatever and whatever 4G standard emerges as victor in the upcoming war for WWAN preeminance."

Labels: faster is different

Let's assume that someday, we find some compound which does for cognitive development what steroids do for muscles. For our purposes, it doesn't need to be side effect-free, steroids aren't. Just assume that it exists, call it X.

Now, what does a world with X in it look like?

Do we outlaw it in academia? Do we outlaw it in the workforce?

Suppose we did. There'd still be an underground market in College (if you can't find drugs at your college, you are taking courses online), so students in high-stress fields (or ones that are just real lazy) would use X to get better grades. Once they knew it worked, a very large number of them would, because they'd be competing with other students who were users.

The same way that steroids spread, because if you don't and everyone else does, you're out of the game.

And once this generation of X using students heads to the workplace, where doing better than your peers amounts to $$, they are not going to stop, so you get X showing up more and more in the workplace. And just like sports teams, companies say they want to fight it, but what they mean is they don't want to get caught allowing it, because the benefits to them are enormous.

None of this is as scary as when people who run Gold Farms in the 3rd world discover X, and start dosing their $1/day workers, and then lining up outsourced work. Call them Brain Farms. They won't stop with a little X, they will push deep into cognitive enhancement drugs, and they won't care about the side effects, and neither will their workers, who will be rich compared to their neighbors.

By the way, this has already started. The drug's name is Adderall, and it is already on the upswing in college. The business world isn't far behind, because those kids are graduating.

Labels: cognition, drugs, productivity

This first came to my attention last year from a BBC article (The man who grew back his finger tip). It seems that this has even caught the attention of Oprah:


Basically, Lee Spievack is accidentally sliced his fingertip off. Instead of having a skin-graft he called his brother, who just so happens to be a doctor who studies tissue regeneration. Long story short, by sprinkling the cells from a pig bladder an extracellular matrix was formed and his fingertip regrew.



Now, it must be added that Ben Goldacre who writes the Bad Science column of The Guardian and also Bad Science the book, says that this was no miracle, but was basically just the way the body normally heals itself. The full article is: The amazing disappearing reappearing finger.

I'm not a medical doctor, so I cannot offer an opinion. All I can say, really, is that it would be super-freaking-awesome if Mr. Goldacre was wrong.

Labels: biochem

Festo produced the robotic penguins. One model flies, the other swims. In addition to this, they've built the robotic jellyfish and robotic ray.

I don't know about you, but this makes me want to get a couple roles of mylar and build my own flying robotic animals.

Also, if you're interested, Festo has US operations:

Labels: robots