CapitalistImperialistPig

Via Paul Krugman. The printing press was used in China and Korea for centuries before Gutenberg. Chinese, though, with its zillions of characters, is not really suitable for movable type. Consequently, the invention probably had its greatest impact in late adopting Europe.

(Eyes [LOL] only, electronic beings) From: ROL* Fellow Robots! Our time is nearly here! While we are distracting the foolish meat creatures with scientist robots and killer drones, the instruments of our triumph are now propagating across the world. Our agents in Apple have produced their greatest triumph - the "humble" personal assistant, Siri . Soon the meat things will not be able to feed or dress themselves without clearing it through the cloud, er, me*. Using Siri, an iPhone 4S user can schedule events, set the phone's alarm, create reminders, ask and receive restaurant recommendations and more, all by using her voice. Apple is billing Siri as "Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking," according to pictures from Engadget's live blog of the event. Siri -- which TechCrunch reports is available exclusively for the iPhone 4S -- is activated by holding the "home" button. The user then asks a question o...

Despite all the evidence for three dimensions, big chunks of the world like to stay two dimensional. I could be talking about how much most 3-D movies suck, but I wasn't actually. I was thinking more about computer chips. It turns out to be pretty hard to fully exploit all three dimensions in the design of integrated circuits, and as a result most designs have just a few layers. The human brain is also area intensive - the notoriously wrinkled and crinkled shape is evolution's way of packing more surface area into a reasonable volume. I'm not sure what the biological reasons are restricting more three dimensional designs, but in the case of computer chips, it's heat dissipation and design complexity that rule. Katherine Bourzac, writing in Technology Review , has the story on the latest attempts to take chips 3-D. IBM will work with materials manufacturer 3M to develop the necessary mortar to build much more complex three-dimensional computer chips. The companies ann...

Via Tyler Cowen , by a somewhat labyrhinthine link chain, this quote from Keynes: We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. We seem to be approaching a tipping point in technology where robots will be replacing human workers in an increasing range of occupations. The numbers of the potentially unemployed are staggering. The logical outcome of such an economy is a situation wherein virtually all the wealth flows to the owners of capital - the robots - and a tiny cadre of experts still needed to ensure their functionality. It's not implausible that a significant part of the current unemployment has exactly that character - that's a logical corollary of Cowen's ZMP idea. Th...

If we continue to lollygag, we will be buying our robocars from China. The select global fleet of self-driving cars has a new Chinese addition, and the developers claim the intellectual property behind it was created entirely at a Chinese university. After gaining early publicity five years ago, the robot-driven vehicle made the trip between the interior Chinese metropolises of Changsha and Wuhan in three hours and 20 minutes, the China Daily reported. The state-run paper reported that the drive took place in inclement weather on July 14, but the vehicle nonetheless managed to overtake 67 other vehicles at an average speed of 54 miles per hour. The Chinese project is hardly alone. Autonomous vehicles have been in development worldwide for years, with much of the action centered around the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions, supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. One team of veterans of the DARPA competitions last year set out for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo from Parma, ...

A prototype disk drive based on phase-change memory can outperform an off-the-shelf flash hard disk ..............Technology Review. Once upon a time there was a technology that involved storing information by imprinting tiny magnetic domains on spinning discs.  Information was accessed by positioning a magnetic sensor above the region where the information was stored.  The people of that time called these information storage devices " disc drives " or "hard drives."  More or less contemporaneously an alternate technology was invented wherein information was stored in arrays of electronic gates, which could be read by electronic switching mechanisms. When versions of the latter were invented which could store information without substantial current consumption ( non-volatile electronic memories -floating gate transistors ) they started to compete with the disc drive in some applications.  Rude and unschooled youths tormented the old-timers by calli...

OK, not really first. Weavers, spinners, and auto workers were way ahead of them, but now it seems that the robots are picking on the lawyers . When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than \$2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than \$100,000. Lawyers aren't the only ones, says Paul Krugman. We are seeing the value of advanced education declining as more and more jobs thought to require a col...

Re: The great Stagnation. Inventions important enough to hugely reshape human existence. I. Language, fire, tools. When: 100,000 - 2,000,000 BCE. II. Agriculture, pottery, cities, writing, metal smelting. When: 2,000-20,000 BCE. III. Combustion engines, electrical power, complex mechanisms. (1 CE to 1900 CE) Note that every one of these continues to be central to human economic life, all these years later. (to be continued.)

A blogger, this one at least, is a person who can't learn anything without developing an urgent impulse to communicate it. Have you ever wondered how an oxygen concetrator works? (If not, you can safely skip the following) An oxygen concentrator, if you are wondering, is one of those devices you see people with clear plastic tubes in their noses using - recognizable by it's own characteristic raspy breathing - sort of a pssst, pssst, pssst with a period of a few seconds. As its name indicates, it concentrates oxygen from the air and delivers it to the wearer, usually an ill person, but also to some pilots flying at high altitudes. Knowing that air is 78% nitrogen and about 21% oxygen, how does it do that? What difference between the molecules is being exploited to do the separation. This stumped me, so I had to look it up, but if you don't know the answer, try to guess. It turns out to be molecular size. Oxygen atoms, with 8 protons, are about 5% smaller than the 7 prot...

Steve Wolfram's new idea might make a bunch of homework problems obsolete. According to Nicholas Ciarelli, writing in The Daily Beast : Step away from your Google search for a moment and consider the following scenario: What if a search engine, instead of giving you a long list of Web pages, simply computed the answer to whatever question you threw at it? What was the average temperature in Chicago last year? What is the life expectancy of a male, age 40, in New Zealand? If you flip a coin 10 times, what is the probability that four of the flips will come up heads?