200k

Hit that minor milestone on the road to my mother's small horse farm out in the country yesterday morning. Since Cheryl's digital camera has been sitting broken in my trunk for the year or so while I've been procrastinating about getting it fixed (or buying a new one), I took the photo above with a $20 digital camera I picked up at the drug story before I hit the road.

Ten years ago, I won a digital camera in some sales contest. Actually, it was a voucher for a $350 camera, but I paid another couple hundred dollars out of pocket to upgrade to a Sony Mavica, which saved photos on a 3.5 inch floppy. New reader and old friend TheRivers/Y. remembers what that dinosaur looked like. I still have it, I'm pretty sure.

37 Signals Satirizes Freeconomics

37 Signals founder Jason Fried's take on the current wave of venture capital interest in Internet-based companies that aren't making money, "PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT". Excerpts:

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money.

[...]

A $100 billion value for 37signals is “not outlandish,” says Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, a finance professor and valuation guru at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business. Bhatnagar points to a leaked, confidential corporate strategy plan that projects 37signals will attract twelve billion users by the end of 2013.

How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion people alive today? “Why limit users to people?” said Bhatnagar.

In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (RSS subscribers + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)2 and then doubles if it they use Ruby on Rails^[1] or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.

I wonder if Fred Wilson, venture capitalist investor in Twitter, among other Internet businesses, will respond to this on his blog. If so, it should lead to a spirited discussion in the comments.

^[1]Ruby on Rails, the web framework my developers use, was created by one of the partners in 37 Signals. My web developers mentioned this to me when I asked them if they had read the book Getting Real by 37 Signals, which I had first heard about from this video blog post from Tim Ferriss's site.

Life Imitates Science Fiction, Part II

In a previous post ("Life Imitates Science Fiction"), I mentioned hearing about a new gadget that was similar to a futuristic device imagined by the science fiction writer Michael Swanwick. Today I found out about something like another one of the machines mentioned in a Swanwick book.

Swanwick's novel Stations of the Tide mentioned machines called "surrogates" -- robots, essentially, that a person could animate and control remotely. An image of the person's face would appear on the video screen the surrogate apparently had in place of a head; the person could speak, see, hear through the surrogate, and move it around as well. The link above goes to an excerpt from the beginning of the novel, where surrogates are first mentioned. In keeping with his typical M.O., Swanwick doesn't waste much exposition describing the technology, he just mentions it and lets you fill in the details on your own from the context.

See the video below, for something similar to Swanwick's surrogate: the "Chungbot", named after U.S. Army Major Kevin Chung, a physician specializing in the treatment of burns. As he explains in the video clip below (which includes some graphic footage of recovering burn victims), the robot enabled him to check in on -- and assist in the treatment of -- patients stateside while he was deployed in Iraq.

Life imitates Science Fiction

Not quite, but close: The Atlantic's James Fallows blogged recently about the Livescribe Pulse Pen pictured above. His description of it reminding me of a futuristic pen described in the science fiction short story Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick. First, here's Fallows describing the Pulse Pen:

Here's how it works: The somewhat plump looking, cigar-sized item, propped on a pack of special notebooks above and below, is both a ballpoint pen -- and a very sensitive, high-quality, high-capacity tape recorder.

[...]

The pen I have holds up to 2GB worth of recordings -- many many many hours' worth.

But in addition to recording sound, the pen also includes a very small camera at its tip, which many times per second takes pictures of whatever you are writing in the special notebooks.

[...]

[T]he pen registers exactly what sound you were hearing at exactly the moment you are writing a certain word, letter, or doodle. Then when you want to hear the recording, you can point the pen to that word and hear what was being said at the time. More on how it works here.

What does this mean in practice? Suppose you're having an hour-long interview, in my case -- or listening to an hour-long lecture as a student, or sitting through an hour-long business meeting. When something comes up that you want to remember, you can write a note at just that point ("Interesting point about Poland") and later go back to get just that part of the conversation. You do so by touching the pen's tip to the relevant phrase in the notebook, or moving your cursor to it on a stored online image of the page. No searching through the whole hour's recording; no need to make sure you write down every detail in real time.

Now here's a brief excerpt from the Swanwick story that features a pen from the future that performs a similar function. The premise of the story is that refugees from the future start appearing through "radiant doors", and governments have set up refugee camps for them. In this excerpt, the speaker/protagonist is interrogating a refugee about future technology:

I sat interviewing a woman whose face was a mask etched with the aftermath of horror. She was absolutely cooperative. They all were.

[...]

"What do you know about midpoint-based engineering? Gnat relays? Sub-local mathematics?"

Down this week's checklist I went, and with each item she shook her head. "Prigogine engines? SVAT trance status? Lepton soliloquies?" Nothing, nothing, nothing. "Phlenaria? The Toledo incident? 'Third Martyr' theory? Science Investigatory Group G?"

"They took my daughter," she said to this last. "They did things to her."

"I didn't ask you that. If you know anything about their organization, their machines, their drugs, their research techniques -- fine. But I don't want to hear about people."

"They did things." Her dead eyes bored into mine. "They --"

"Don't tell me."

"--returned her to us midway through. They said they were understaffed. They sterilized our kitchen and gave us a list of more things to do to her. Terrible things. And a checklist like yours to write down her reactions."

"Please."

"We didn't want to, but they left a device so we'd obey. Her father killed himself. He wanted to kill her too, but the device wouldn't let him. After he died, they changed the settings so I couldn't kill myself too. I tried."

[...] This was something new. I tapped my pen twice, activating its piezochronic function, so that it began recording fifteen seconds earlier.

"Radiant Doors" was one of the stories in Swanwick's Tales of Old Earth collection.

FT Letter Writer Seconds Commenter J.K.

In the comment thread of a recent post ("Singularity U."), commenter J.K. took the editors of the Financial Times to task for their dismissive editorial about Ray Kurzweil’s "Singularity" concept. In today's FT, letter writer David Crooks offers similar sentiments:

From Mr David Crookes.

Sir, You say: “And even if researchers do endow machines with real intelligence ... why should it suddenly grow exponentially ... ?” (“Singular fantasies”, editorial, February 7).

You’ve not been paying attention in class, since this is Ray Kurzweil’s key point (and that of others, for example Vernor Vinge).

The substrate of future machine intelligence is expected to be computation, which is increasing in power exponentially thanks to Moore’s Law. The year we get a silicon FT editor for the price of a laptop, the next year we get two for the price of one. How long before the entire FT staff can be replaced by one laptop?

David Crookes,
Inverness, UK

Singularity U.

From yesterday's Financial Times, "Google and Nasa back new school for futurists". Excerpt:

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

So much for the good news. The article continues:

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

After numerous sci-fi movies and TV shows have dramatized this scenario, from 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project (the subject of the movie poster above) to current TV shows Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles^1,2 and Battlestar Galactica¹, we won't be able to say that we weren't warned.

The image of the movie poster above is from Rodney-Martin.com


¹Critically acclaimed.
²Consistently entertaining.

Iraq, the Automakers, and the Limitations of Technology

As the security situation in Iraq has stabilized, and economic issues have dominated the news, Iraq has gotten less attention recently in the media. Yesterday was an exception, as the New York Times reported that the Iraqi government's cabinet had approved a status of forces agreement with the U.S. ("Pact, Approved in Iraq, Sets Time for U.S. Pullout"). The photo above, of Iraqi policemen celebrating with an American soldier, is from the article. According to iCasualties.org, U.S. military casualties, Iraqi security force casualties, and Iraqi civilian casualties have all dropped significantly over the last year.

Before the security situation in Iraq had stabilized to this level, casualties across the board were much higher and most of the U.S. casualties were caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The Defense Department formed an anti-IED task force and threw money, resources, and personnel into it to deal with the problem. Last year, the Washington Post published an excellent four-part series on this effort ("Left of Boom: The Struggle to Defeat Roadside Bombs"). The phrase "Left of the boom" refers to efforts to disrupt the IED enterprise before the bombs were planted -- tracking down IED makers, ambushing IED planters, etc. No short summary will do that series justice, but one point it made dealt with the limitations of technology in dealing the problem. New technologies did help ameliorate the situation, but there were no panaceas, and many of the more effective approaches weren't technological in nature. For example, the last article in the series noted,

The "Mark 1 Human Eyeball," as troops sardonically call it, is more adept at finding IEDs than any machine. Studies to determine which soldiers made the best bomb spotters found that "it's those who hunted and fished and were much closer to their environment," an Army scientist reported.

[...]

Other unconventional initiatives include "human terrain teams," made up of anthropologists, social scientists and sundry experts who advise brigade commanders on tribal structure, local customs and cultural nuances. A preliminary assessment last month of an HTT in eastern Afghanistan concluded that the team had "a profound effect" in reducing "kinetic operations" -- gunplay -- and had even discerned that a local village would help stop Taliban rocket attacks against U.S. troops in exchange for a volleyball net.

More broadly, the successful (so far) counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq, although aided by technology (e.g., hand held fingerprint scanners, reconnaissance drones, etc.) have relied more on 'left of boom' approaches that are attuned to local politics (for detail and insight on this, see, for example, David Kilcullen's posts on the Small Wars Journal blog. Dr. Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer and counterinsurgency scholar, has served as a counterinsurgency adviser to the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan).

What brought this to mind recently -- the frequent lack of technological panaceas to complex real world problems -- was a column by Thomas Friedman last week about Detroit in the New York Times ("How to Fix a Flat"). In that column, Friedman wrote,

Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

Friedman, before he became sought after as an expert on energy policy, was better known as an expert on the Middle East (he was for the war in Iraq before he was against it). Here though he seems to underestimate the technological challenges in designing an innovative new car (see, for example, "Tesla's Wild Ride"), and not acknowledge the extent to which Detroit's problems are political and not technological, i.e., being trapped between the Scylla of UAW labor costs of $73 per hour and the Charybdis of federal CAFE regulations that require automakers to build small cars that don't have the profit margins to make up for the high labor costs¹.

¹Friedman does note in passing the Big Three's high labor and health care costs but quotes an environmental lobbyist asking why GM didn't lobby for Hillary Clinton's proposal for nationalized health care. How that would have assuaged GM's retirees, who were already eligible for a national health program (Medicare) when they reached age 65, but preferred the more generous plan their union had negotiated, he doesn't ask.