There has been some talk of the traditional Detroit car companies competing with Google (aka Alphabet, aka Waymo?) head to head in the development and commercialization of self-driving cars. But according to Bloomberg, that isn’t going to happen. Losers.
Farm machinery is getting more high-tech and more automated all the time, due in part ot climate change.
Technological improvements from boosting crop yields to data-tracking systems will be required in coming decades as companies adapt to shifts in weather patterns, according to BMI Research. That may increasingly push agribusiness companies, especially grain handlers and input firms, into acquiring agritech startups.
“The rise of agtech use and ‘precision agriculture’ will benefit or disrupt a number of operations and businesses in the process,” the company said in a report Tuesday.
Farmers and businesses around the world are poised to feel the impact of climate change as supplies get disrupted and farmland and yields come under pressure. At the same time, agriculture, one of the largest sources of gas emissions, will face action from regulators targeting livestock and soil management.
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These things look more like horizontal elevators than cars.
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I’ll keep this on the short side. Here are a few trends I see:
Risk of War. I think I said about a year ago that if we could through the next four years without a world war or nuclear detonation, we will be doing well. Well, one year down and three to go. That’s the bright side. The dark side is that it is time to acknowledge there is a regional war going on in the Middle East. It could escalate, it could go nuclear, and it could result in military confrontation between the United States and Russia. Likewise, the situation in North Korea could turn into a regional conflict, could go nuclear, and could lead to military confrontation between the United States and China.
Decline…and Fall? A question on my mind is whether the United States is a nation in decline, and I think the surprisingly obvious answer is yes. The more important question is whether it is a temporary dip, or the beginning of a decline and fall.
Risk of Financial Crisis. The risk of another serious financial crisis is even scarier that war in some ways, at least a limited, non-nuclear war. Surprisingly, the economic effects can be more severe, more widespread and longer lasting. We are seeing the continued weakening of regulations attempting to limit systemic risk-taking for short-term gain. Without a pickup in long-term productivity growth and with the demographic and ecological headwinds that we face, another crisis equal to or worse than the 2007 one could be the one that we don’t recover from.
Ecological Collapse? The story about vanishing insects was eye-opening to me. Could global ecosystems go into a freefall? Could populous regions of the world face a catastrophic food shortage? It is hard to imagine these things coming to a head in the near term, but the world needs to take these risks seriously since the consequences would be so great.
Technology. With everything else going on, technology just marches forward, of course. One technology I find particularly interesting is new approaches to research that mine and attempt to synthesize large bodies of scientific research.
Can the human species implement good ideas? Solutions exist. I would love to end on a positive note, but at the moment I find myself questioning whether our particular species of hairless ape can implement them.
But – how’s this for ending on a positive note – like I said at the beginning, the one thing about 2017 that definitely didn’t suck was that we didn’t get blown up!
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I’ve been reading a little about Socrates lately. There was a debate in ancient Athens, during its radical experiments with direct democracy and free speech, that a smooth-talking rhetorical style could tend to carry the day over solidly argued logic and facts. So these concerns are not new, and there probably was no golden age when groups of Americans or other human beings were a lot better at logic-based decision making than we are now. Still, what is frustrating is that any individual human being clearly is capable of logic-based decision making, and yet we are repeatedly swayed and misled by faulty logic in groups.
The insect thing is really wild. I just spent three weeks in tropical Asia and was struck by how un-buggy it was compared to past trips. Which probably has absolutely nothing to do with the peer-reviewed journal article mentioned above. My garden in Philadelphia actually was quite buggy this summer, somewhat ironically with the striped mosquito varieties that have drained significant quantities of my blood on past trips to tropical Asia.
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If you want to know if robots will take your job, you can go to willrobotstakemyjob.com. It turns out my job (“environmental engineer” is the closest match) is particularly hard to automate at just a 1.8% chance robots will take my job, so I’ve got that going for me. I typed in ten other other career choices to see what I would get, then ranked them from most to least at risk.
I won’t bother typing in the obvious ones like taxi driver (89%) or court reporter (50%). Okay, I did and that last one surprised me a little. The ten I picked weren’t random, they were ones I thought would be safe, and it turns out I was right except for auto mechanic. I’m a little surprised at that. Vehicles are merging with computers and getting more complex all the time, which means they are going to require more troubleshooting, updating, and will become obsolete faster than the past. I would also think a car mechanic could cross-train as a robot mechanic pretty easily. So the mechanics of the future will have to be equal parts grease monkey and tech support. Maybe they won’t be called mechanics, but the complicated systems we are creating are going to break in unpredictable ways and skilled troubleshooters are going to be in demand.
Anyway, the bottom line is that most types of engineering, and research positions related to genetics and/or materials, are pretty safe. Nursing is a field where supply just never seems to catch up to demand, and medical technology (and spending) just keep marching forward as the population ages and lives longer. You can still make a living as an electrician or a plumber.
I also learned something about the Standard Occupational Classification system used by the U.S. Department of Labor.
The 2010 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system is used by Federal statistical agencies to classify workers into occupational categories for the purpose of collecting, calculating, or disseminating data. All workers are classified into one of 840 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition. To facilitate classification, detailed occupations are combined to form 461 broad occupations, 97 minor groups, and 23 major groups. Detailed occupations in the SOC with similar job duties, and in some cases skills, education, and/or training, are grouped together.
Facebook let two chat bots talk to each other and they invented a new language, one seemingly nonsense to humans but apparently they understood it.
…this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.
This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.