George Rebane
• Artificial life created from scratch.
• Moving by thought – brain/machine interfaces.
• Hi-tech hiring, youth matters – ‘up or out’.
• Swarm computing – how do ants know what to do?
• 'guaranteed' gadget buyback service for frequent upgraders.
• Artificial life created from scratch. From the Venter Institute comes word that the first real living critters (bacteria) can be created now from bottom up by artificially building its genome in a building block fashion. The first applications will likely be in the manufacture of biofuels by having brand new bacteria do some of the critical digestion processes required in the sequence to go from, say, switch grass to ethanol. Read more here.
• Moving by thought – brain/machine interfaces. A big breakthrough in being able to make things move in a complex way was just demonstrated by scientist at Duke University. See the nearby figure. Now imagine how long it will be before a household robot can be made to do useful work by a disabled person, or an industrial/military robot can be made to operate in remote/dangerous environments controlled by a technician sitting comfortably in an office a half a world away. Read more here and here.
• Hi-tech hiring, youth matters – ‘up or out’. As a young engineer in the 1960s I quickly learned that what kept my pay raises/advancements coming was that I knew new stuff. And the successful practicing older engineers also knew new stuff. It was the engineering managers who didn’t have to stay as current as those of us did who were inventing new things every week. This was a scary concept because the only way to continue knowing that was to keep studying and going to school. My older mentors and professional heroes just smiled and said, “You chose this career, you know that the only alternatives are up or out, so suck it up and get used to it.” I chose ‘up’ and wound up being a lifelong student who finally got out at as a 62-year-old. But now we are in an age of even higher acceleration of technology, and only a few of our smarter kids are willing to get into such a high-pressure careers. This puts even more pressure on the engineers who want to continue practicing as they get older. The alternative is for companies to ‘out’ (fire) their overpaid senior engineers even if they can keep up and go overseas for such talent at a much more reasonable cost. Read more here.
• Swarm computing – how do ants know what to do? Computer scientists have discovered that some very complex problems can be solved by a distributed collective of agents (like an ant colony), each agent having a relatively simple set of rules to follow that prescribes how he acts and communicates. This was known by systems scientists for some decades – how does a tree survive when one busy leaf doesn’t ‘know’ about other leaves - but it was hard to put into practice on large scale problems due to the cost of putting in place hundreds/thousands of such computing agents. The downward spiral of computing costs has now made swarm computing possible and previously hard problems are now yielding to this new approach. Pretty soon we may even be able to design a protein that folds into a specific shape to help the body perform functions (e.g. regrow hair, kill a cancer cell, stop diabetes before it starts, …) that evolution has not been able to teach it. Watch this short video for more.
• Companies launches 'guaranteed' gadget buyback service for frequent upgraders. Talk about accelerating technology; how often have you bought a cell phone or a laptop to find that about a year or so later it is not doing what the newest models are now doing? And, of course, you have to have one so need to upgrade. But that’s a pain in the keester – the old one still has value and you don’t want to throw that value away. To get you past such thinking and reduce the pain, companies are now offering a new kind of buyback service for your old gizmos. Look for more of such services coming up. Read more here.
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