Tag Archives: technological progress

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker

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Something called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute tracks and forecasts which countries in the world are leading on what it considers the most critical technologies. Their definition of critical seems to be mostly technologies with military applications: “defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas”. And their metrics seem to be based largely on number of scientific publications and patents. This approach can be critiqued, but nonetheless the results are interesting and striking.

These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies…

China’s new gains have occurred in quantum sensors, high-performance computing, gravitational sensors, space launch and advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication (semiconductor chip making). The US leads in quantum computing, vaccines and medical countermeasures, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, small satellites, atomic clocks, genetic engineering and natural language processing.

Building technological capability requires a sustained investment in, and an accumulation of, scientific knowledge, talent and high-performing institutions that can’t be acquired through only short-term or ad hoc investments.8 Reactive policies by new governments and the sugar hit of immediate budget savings must be balanced against the cost of losing the advantage gained from decades of investment and strategic planning. While China continues to extend its lead, it’s important for other states to take stock of their historical, combined and complementary strengths in all key critical technology areas.

I suppose the not-so-hidden agenda here is to get the Australian and other “western” governments to invest more in R&D long-term. That is something I would support. I would like to think that technological progress is not just a competition between nation-states but a shared project of our species and civilization. Utopian, I suppose.

Anyway – scientific publications and patents. I don’t think these are perfect measures of scientific or technological progress. Doubling these metrics will not mean that progress has doubled, but rather there must be some diminishing return. Once metrics like these are established, people are going to game the metrics to some extent rather than try to measure the underlying thing, which in this case is scientific and technological progress.

Do I have a better suggestion? Not really – well, I suppose total factor productivity is the most accepted metric of technological progress as far as I know. The holy grail would be to understand exactly how much and what types of R&D investments will maximize it over long periods of time. I am sure there are past and future Nobel laureates working on this problem, but if they have solved in conclusively I have not heard about it.

All that said, there is no excuse for the U.S. to be failing to invest in R&D. We need to ramp it up, and keep it up long term. But there is also an opportunity cost when the fire hose is focused on the military-industrial complex (not to mention the existential risks created for us and all humanity – do these alone outweigh the idea of ever winning the “competition” for dominance in horrible weapons?). Peaceful technologies that could improve human lives and our shared environment will not develop as fast as they could. And finally, to be a broken record, if we ever figure out the secret sauce to ramp up scientific and technological progress, the right thing to do is capture that value added to the economy and redirect it to improve the vast majority of human lives, protect the environment, and manage the risks we face, including risks created by the technologies themselves.

high, high, highway construction costs

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U.S. infrastructure construction cost woes stem largely from lack of competition in the construction industry and diseconomies of scale among public agencies procuring the work. I think I am using the latter term right. Very large agencies and projects are going to get better deals than smaller ones. This is somewhat of an iron law of economics, but you might be able to get around it somewhat by bundling smaller projects into larger packages and by getting larger agencies (like the federal government) more directly involved.

The former (lack of competition) is tricky. Architecture, engineering, and construction is generally not a high-profit industry, and it is a pretty high-risk industry. This all pushes towards a few large firms bidding on large projects where they can make a few pennies on a large volume. The construction industry just hasn’t made much in the way of productivity gains in the last half century either, while labor costs have been rising.

You could help solve the competition problem by allowing foreign firms in, and you could help solve the labor cost problem (from the contractors’ point of view) by letting foreign workers in. Both of these things are politically tough in the U.S.

This article in the blog Boondoggle does a pretty good job of summarizing the report in an understandable way, but it also attacks “high price consultants”. Being part of the engineering consultant industry for many years, I feel a need to push back on this a bit. Labor costs at these firms are high too, profit margins are also pretty slim, and there actually is a lot a competition in this industry. When public agencies hire a consulting firm, the price they see includes everything – the actual product of course and the employees’ salaries, but also all the employee benefits, project management, administrative, financial, and legal costs the firm has to bear, plus the taxes it has to pay. Finally, yes, a few pennies of profit on top of all that, and some money spent on marketing to the next batch of customers. When portions of a project are subcontracted, all those administrative costs get repeated at each level of the food chain. So yes, this adds of to a lot of administrative costs, and it would be great to trim them (maybe some hope for AI on this one longer term?), but the fact is that if the public agency tries to do the work with their own staff, they have almost all of these same costs, and they are typically going to be significantly higher. But people often compare only the labor and construction cost borne by the public agency to the entire cost of business borne by the private firm, which is not a fair comparison. And especially at smaller public agencies, they just aren’t going to have the capacity or expertise to do all the work in-house, which is exactly the gap the consulting industry has sprung up to fill.

So to summarize, here are some ideas:

  • Allow foreign firms and foreign workers to participate, especially in industries where it is clear competition is limited and skilled labor supply is tight. You could also try to train and equip more Americans with the skills needed and encourage formation of more firms, in theory.
  • Aggregate smaller projects and public agencies into larger ones to make them more attractive for firms to bid on. Get larger state and federal agencies involved in the procurement process where possible.
  • Turn on the research and development funding fire hose to make progress on the construction productivity problem. AI, materials science, and prefabrication of more components are all ideas being bandied about. This also gets money into the academic and research institutions which creates skills and capacity for our society.
  • Do I even need to say this? Have government provide health care and other benefits other countries are providing their citizens, and relieve this burden on our private firms so they can focus on doing whatever it is they are in business to do.

August 2024

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Obviously, there were plenty of goings-on in the U.S. presidential election campaign in August. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, and everybody else is talking about it, so I’ll give it a rest here.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?

Most hopeful story: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.

those lagging electric vehicle sales

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Since I happen to be in Thailand, here are a couple excerpts from an article about lower than expected electric vehicle sales in Thailand. I am not trying to pick on Thailand or even comment on Thai government policy, but merely give a local example of what seems to be a global trend.

Thailand on Friday signalled it was hedging its bets over its previous all-out commitment to EV cars. Instead, in a new policy announcement, the kingdom is focusing on hybrid vehicle production or HEVs…

…there is a growing realisation that the EV industry, which is capital-intensive and does not support the country’s critical automotive parts industry, has been a mixed blessing.

“We are experiencing an EV oversupply as plenty of EVs imported from China over the past two years inventories,” he explained. At the same time, he confirmed that there are presently 490,000 unsold EV cars in storage. That is 63% of all vehicles produced in Thailand over the last 12 months. In the meantime, EV vehicle sales remain a relatively small percentage of overall car sales in the kingdom. In June, vehicles for the domestic market produced in Thailand were only 34,522 units. A huge drop of 43.08%. This is a catastrophic outcome by all accounts.

Anecdotally, just from moving about the country a bit, I don’t see charging infrastructure. And this echoes what I see in (my small corner of) the United States. We haven’t built the infrastructure to support electric vehicles, and we haven’t made the policy changes like adjustments to the gas tax which funds much of our highway maintenance. So we blame problems caused by a lack of planning and implementation on the technology itself.

But there is something else here. There are winners and losers with electric vehicles. The winners are all of us and our children’s lungs, plus our water and air. But these are diffuse benefits, and politically speaking it is concentrated interests that move the political system. Big business interests like the oil and automotive industries. The reference to “car parts” is telling here. Electric vehicles are superior because they have fewer complex parts and require less maintenance and service. Just like shutting down any sprawling, inefficient, polluting Soviet industry, what is good for society means some loss of jobs and profits for a minority, and that minority has some political clout. So when we hear that electric vehicles are “not catching on”, we can ask how much of this is propaganda driven by big business interests who will lose money if they do catch on.

Nonetheless, I think the hype bubble may have burst but the technology is here and here to stay. It may take a decade or two to really take over rather than exploding onto the scene the way some expected.

AI and protein research

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Here is a story in MIT News about AI doing experiments on proteins, with drug development and gene therapy implications. This seems like the clearest application of AI at the moment – anything where there is a formula to be figured out and a large number of combinations to be tried. I can definitely see this accelerating scientific and technological progress, although the efficiency to me seems to be more in the “automation” part than the “intelligence” part.

what’s new with super-sonic flight

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NASA and Lockheed Martin claim to have a prototype supersonic jet whose sonic boom sounds “like a car door slamming heard from inside”. This could open the door to commercial supersonic flight over populated areas. Well, we don’t even have commercial super-sonic flight over the oceans at the moment, which would be helpful to long-haul travelers. The article doesn’t say when this might happen, but it doesn’t sounds soon. The article does mention that there is at least one other company working on a supersonic passenger jet which “it hopes” could be “in the air” (for testing presumably?) “later this year”.

AI “coscientist”

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The idea of computers and robots greatly accelerating the rate of progress in chemical and drug research is not science fiction.

Autonomous chemical research with large language models

Transformer-based large language models are making significant strides in various fields, such as natural language processing1,2,3,4,5, biology6,7, chemistry8,9,10 and computer programming11,12. Here, we show the development and capabilities of Coscientist, an artificial intelligence system driven by GPT-4 that autonomously designs, plans and performs complex experiments by incorporating large language models empowered by tools such as internet and documentation search, code execution and experimental automation. Coscientist showcases its potential for accelerating research across six diverse tasks, including the successful reaction optimization of palladium-catalysed cross-couplings, while exhibiting advanced capabilities for (semi-)autonomous experimental design and execution. Our findings demonstrate the versatility, efficacy and explainability of artificial intelligence systems like Coscientist in advancing research.

Nature

It seems to me that the speed limit here is not anything imposed by the computers and robots, but your ability to measure progress and give the computers and robots feedback. With chemicals, you could tell the robots to find a combination of compounds that will do XYZ, where XYZ is something you can measure like an amount of energy or a color. With drugs, your issue could be how to test the results to see if they are working. If you test them on a computer model, your ability to measure depends on how good the computer model is. Let’s say you wanted to breed a super-intelligent mouse. There should be ways to measure the intelligence of a mouse. So you could take 100 mice test them all, find the two smartest and create a new batch of 100 embryos from the smartest male and female (or maybe at some point gender is no longer a limitation?). Now you have to wait for those 100 embryos to grow up to the point you can repeat the process. The limiting step here would be how long it takes the mice to develop to the point they can be tested. If they could somehow be tested at the embyro stage, maybe you could create a thousand generations of mouse directed mouse evolution in a matter of hours or days? Well, then, you can let the super-intelligent mice design the next round of robots.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution horizon scan

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This journal does an annual “horizon scan” of of emerging topics and issues. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • “bio-batteries” – “DNA-enabled biobattery technology uses a set of enzymes coupled to DNA to degrade organic compounds, releasing electrons and generating electricity…Such batteries could theoretically supply power densities in orders of magnitude greater than widely used lithium-ion batteries”. There are also new processes for extracting lithium more sustainably from waste materials. So there is some hope that the resource and waste limitations to scaling up renewable energy can be solved. Thermophotovoltaic cells are a third energy storage technology mentioned.
  • more practical methods of converting human urine to fertilizer – This might not sound like a big deal, but our coastal waters are being choked by nutrients both from treated wastewater and from farm runoff, while the nutrients in the farm runoff are derived from fossil fuels in the case of nitrogen or a mined from finite geological resources in the case of phosphate. Reprocessing urine into fertilizer is almost a no-brainer. And the technology has been known for awhile. The problem has been waste taboos which seem to be extremely ingrained in our psyches. I really want this one to be overcome, but as a wastewater industry insider I have become more cynical about this one over time. Genetic engineering of crops to help them take up nitrogen directly from the atmosphere (which peas and beans can do naturally, but most crops can’t) is also mentioned.
  • A particular pathogen that infects amphibians may be spreading to new areas.
  • European countries are considering new policy/legal frameworks for biodiversity reporting and conservation. This might sound boring, but we have gotten there with conventional pollution and we are getting there with greenhouse gases and renewable energy, while land use and conversation have mostly been left out to date.
  • Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to try to accelerate drug, chemical, and pesticide research.
  • trash reefs – New ecosystems may actually develop and adapt around ocean garbage patches.

ESA getting serious about space-based solar

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The idea of space-based solar has been around for awhile, but the European Space Agency appears to be getting more serious about it.

The Sun’s energy can be collected much more efficiently in space because there is neither night nor clouds. The idea has been around for more than 50 years, but it has been too difficult and too expensive to implement, until maybe now.

The game-changer has been the plummeting cost of launches, thanks to reusable rockets and other innovations developed by the private sector. But there have also been advances in robotic construction in space and the development of technology to wirelessly beam electricity from space to Earth.

BBC

Different sources say this could be commercially valuable in around a decade to maybe 2040. Even sooner with massive public investment, say companies who are hoping for massive public investment in their companies. Obvious Bond villain Elon Musk could not be reached for comment.

you can charge electric vehicles while they are driving

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As the title of the post says, you can charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.

The solar panels are on one side of the facility’s service road and will ship power up the hill to the maintenance and trades area. That pad also has the generator; a system for converting direct current from the solar panels to alternating current for the buildings and street lights; a system for capturing radiant heat from the generator; and an IT setup to keep everything running…

Utah State’s ASPIRE center will begin installing a 50-meter demonstration section at its Logan, Utah, test track in the next two weeks, said Tallis Blalack, the center’s director. Working with California wireless provider Electreon, the center intends to install a one-mile electrified section of road surface in central Detroit next year in conjunction with the University of Michigan.

The center also is working with another provider to design a segment of electrified highway for Disney World in Florida over the next four years. 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I like this idea because there is a lot of real estate out there along highways, and installing solar panels that can charge vehicles as they go by would seem to make a lot of sense. Maybe this could also replace some or all of the gas tax revenue we are going to lose as we convert to solar. The money could be plowed back in to road maintenance and safety upgrades.