Humans Need Not Apply

I just finished reading Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence a fascinating book, written in a very lively manner.  It raises some issues that we will likely face in the near future (and some potential solutions).  An excellent review is available in the Economist.

Then I saw this CES2015 demonstration where a mass-market manufacturer is approaching robotic vision and scene modeling, using a Tegra K1’s 192-core GPU.  What was really striking was that at the same CES show, NVIDIA announced their Tegra X1 mobile chip which achieves 1 Teraflop performance.  It was compared to the ASCI Red, the world's fastest supercomputer until late 2000. Excluding the many issues of 16 vs 64 bit FP, architecture and memory, what is fascinating is that the ASCI Red consumed 850 kW and occupied 150 m2 of space, versus the 10W, thumbnail size of the X1.

The pieces keep falling ... maybe they will self-assemble into place.

Photon Wi-Fi dev kit startup

I recently went to run my Photon Wi-Fi dev kit and ran into a couple of issues that I thought I would share.

1. I could not get the Photon to connect to my Open-Mesh network, using either the Android app or Node CLI (more on that in a moment).  Reading the online doc under WiFi Network Requirements, I noticed "The Core is 802.11b/g. Most 802.11n networks are backwards compatible with 802.11b/g, but if yours is not, the device will not connect."  I had a Netgear WGR614 available, so setup up a dedicated WPA2 network.
2. As of this posting, there are some version compatibility issues around Node.js and serialport, which precluded me from using the Node CLI to configure the Photon network settings.  I still could not get the Android app to work.  Fortunately as described in this support issue,  you can use Putty to connect to the Photon via USB.  Enter "i" for device ID (needed to claim your device) and "w" to setup the Wi-Fi.  This just worked, no muss, no fuss.
3. When I tried to compile the "Blink an LED" sample app, I got a useless error message.  It was late and maybe they were doing server maintenance (the compiler runs in the cloud), because a day later it compiled just fine, as expected.

Not being able to connect to the Open-Mesh network on the property is really a show stopper, as my son's Li-Po powered Slash 4x4 short course truck would only take a few seconds to exceed the WRG614 range/coverage.

Banana Republic ... revisited

Nearly thirty years ago, Paul Keating said Australia was in danger of becoming a banana republic.  Now, those worries are re-surfacing, as resource prices plunge.  "Even some low-income countries like Nepal, Kenya, and Tanzania have greater export diversity than Australia.''  I used to work in engineering in Sydney and ran overseas 28 years ago.  I feel bad about that.

Never thought about that ....

A fascinating article The animals and plants that can live forever at the BBC.  I had never considered the necessity for our egg and sperm cells to stay forever young.

Encouraging news on Electricity, until Item 6 ...

I was quite encouraged as I read the article The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change Forever that things might be ok for my kids.

It was consistent with my own first look at the near term availability of products like the Powerwall .  These would mean that I could soon do something (for my business), that given my demand charge made financial sense, and was good for the environment.  All without having to make any "soft" corrections to the payback calculation.

Then I read Item 6, that even with these projected improvements in power generation, that we would likely go through the 2 degree "point of no return".  Take a look at Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet for what that could mean.

The future of jobs, The onrushing wave

A very thoughtful article in the Economist on the consequences of automation to employment and some attempt to view the future in terms of the past.

"The state of the union is .... "

Makes you wonder how long the music can keep playing when you read an article like this.

Maybe Illinois will tell us ....