American Monkeys Should Look to Taller Trees

American monkeys are under stress from other countries’ monkeys in regards to less complex, easier-to-make products. So the U.S. [monkeys] should look to the taller trees. The tallest trees in product space are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and machinery. It’s very hard to get into those. Very few countries are in that game.

That is why I say the really long-term play is for the U.S. to be the source of the machinery that will power the coming global manufacturing revolution. The U.S. can grow by using capabilities that few others have.

...I think 3-D printing could change the dynamics. I use 3-D printing as shorthand for shorter production runs, more design, and much closer to the market. It’s a paradigmatic shift in what manufacturing is going to look like. _Ricardo Hausman on Future Manufacturing in Technology Review

Hausman is one of several economists who are beginning to look at how a resurgence in manufacturing might boost US and other western economies back into a competitive position -- or at least into a position where they could imagine a longer term, livable future. He mentions 3-D printing, which is likely to develop into many significant niche markets, but how long will it be before molecular nano-manufacturing steps in to take over all of the niches?

The shale gas fracking boom has helped to trigger a US resurgence in manufacturing related to chemicals and other industries that rely on cheap natural gas and cheap electricity. But there are a number of other ways to make new-generation manufacturing more viable for advanced western nations.

The strategy adopted by many multinational conglomerates, whether based in the U.S. or in Europe, was simple: substitute inexpensive labor for capital. Why invest in a machine to assemble iPhones when Chinese companies could throw half a million workers at the problem? The Internet, telephones, and affordable air travel and sea shipping made it easier than ever to coördinate labor from far away.

Partly as a result, the U.S. lost about six million manufacturing jobs—33 percent of the total—between 2000 and 2010, and China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest producer of manufactured goods. But the impact extends beyond macroeconomic statistics.

...Lately, however, economic trends have been turning. Wages in China’s southern cities have been rising fast and may soon reach $6 an hour, about what they are in Mexico. Boston Consulting Group—the same consulting firm that told clients to run, not walk, overseas—now says it’s time to “reassess” China and estimates that for some products, that country’s overall cost advantage could disappear by 2015.

The vanishing comparative advantage of Asian cheap labor isn’t the only reason for companies to question offshore manufacturing. Natural catastrophes can occur anywhere, but the risks of long supply lines became apparent in 2011, when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami interrupted shipments of computer chips and floods in Thailand left disk-drive factories under 10 feet of water. Meanwhile, higher oil prices have quietly raised the cost of shipping goods. And a bonanza of cheap natural gas has made the U.S. a relatively cheap place to manufacture many basic chemicals and is providing industries with an inexpensive source of power.

...The U.S. holds advantages in many advanced technologies, such as simulation and digital design, the use of “big data,” and nanotechnology. All of these can play a valuable role in creating innovative new manufacturing processes (and not just products). Andrew McAfee, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, says it’s also hard to ignore coming changes like robots in warehouses, trucks that drive themselves, and additive manufacturing technologies that can create a complex airplane part for the price of a simple one. The greater the capital investment in automation, the less labor costs may matter. _Antonio Regalado in TechnologyReview

Manufacturing that relates to agriculture -- and how to get the most sustainable production out of one's growing area -- is another promising area for US manufacturing. Producing agricultural machines which run on cheap natural gas would be one good idea. Producing robotic agricultural machines which free up farmers from labour limitations is another good idea for manufacturing in the agricultural field. There are many others that could help transform US agriculture into an even mightier economic powerhouse.

Advanced genetic engineering will impact all aspects of our lives, from the food that we eat, to the fuels we put in our fuel tanks, to the biomedical products that will presumably help us to live longer, healthier, more satisfied and productive lives. New machines that facilitate automated research, discovery, design, and production in genetic engineering will help to push that area of industry into the forefront -- for any nation that promotes their development.

US technology has been bogged down on smart phones, pad computers, and other devices primarily devoted to trivial pursuits. There is nothing wrong with that, but those are not the transformative or disruptive technologies we are looking for. Weigh each new technology announcement on the scale of transformativeness or disruptiveness.

The ideal disruptive technologies are the ones which help to liberate families and smaller communities from the tyranny of the mob, the tyranny of government. Think of all the things which government claims to provide to individuals, families, and communities -- and then think of ways to provide those things with advanced, new generation technologies. That is the direction we should be heading.

But we will see some difficult times -- some very irrational times -- between now and then. Hope for the best. But prepare for the worst.

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It

...The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything... _Alan Kay... 1971

Modern humans living in the advanced world, stand at a crossroads. They can choose to continue down a frightened green collectivist road of stasis and stagnation, or they can choose to invent a bold and abundant future for themselves. The difference in mental and emotional outlook is crucial, making all the difference in the choices that such people will make.

A powerful surge of technological development during the 1980s and 1990s spurred a fabulous global economic boom and expansion. It was natural that politicians, global investors, and bankers would turn such a boom into a bubble, and that the bubble would eventually burst -- as it did in 2008.

The bursting of financial bubbles is a common event that should have led into the next round of technological advance and economic expansion. Instead, we are seeing a "great reversal and retreat" being led by the EU, Barack Obama, and assorted green collectivists in governments, intergovernments, and NGOs around the globe. Still, academics and the skankstream aside, is that truly the road that most people want to choose?

Scientists and technologists are producing a huge deluge of data that could be used to build a new era of economic expansion. But the mechanism for moving from ideas and concepts to fully realised enterprises has become glommed up by unlimited government mandate, regulation, code, and prohibition.

Opportunity evaporates as government grows. The best way to grow opportunity is to limit government.

Perhaps history could be a guide:

That long, post-1980 run of “irrational exuberance” happened because of an underlying technological revolution: The advent of distributed computing and the Internet. Technological innovation is pivotal to whether the American economy will experience prosperity growth again. In a world with a growing population but a tepidly expanding economic pie, we see shrunken expectations and a reversion to fighting over how to get one’s “fair share.” People lose faith that the pie will ever grow again; in essence, they lose faith in the future itself. Certainly there’s limited optimism today about technology’s future and what that might mean for the economy, jobs, debt, taxation, and fairness.

We’ve been here before. Back in 1980, America was deep in the mire of the Carter recession with a wounded economy barely limping along. The real estate and the job markets were in a shambles. Boomers faced dim prospects as they poured out of colleges in record numbers. Then as now, the Middle East was in turmoil, and energy entered center stage for the first time as a subject for national debate. And most people thought the big innovations that transformed the world during the preceding three decades were essentially played out.

The big worry of the day was that Japan, having launched a national effort to leapfrog America’s mighty computer industry, was about to overtake our economy. The Japanese juggernaut seemed unstoppable. The journalism and headlines of that era are eerily similar to those today bemoaning China’s ascendance and America’s lethargy.

Then came the post-1980 boom arising from the confluence of two great forces. There was a government that, through three successive administrations, held a favorable attitude toward the private sector. And that private sector was unleashed at the right moment in history, just when the next cycle of information industries began to emerge. _American.com

When Ronald Reagan was elected president the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovered around 1,000 (less than 2,800 inflation adjusted) — and had dipped, under President Carter, as low as 759. Unemployment stood at an unacceptable 7+%. The Soviet Union was aggressive, bellicose, and, in the eyes of the Western policy elite, could be but contained, not challenged. At the end of Reagan’s eight years in office, the Dow had tripled in value, on its way much higher. Job growth was vibrant. The USSR was well on its way to dissolution. _Forbes

Wall Street Journal

The current road being traveled is a road to stagnation. When government is the driving force in society, opportunities are rare, and almost always involve crony connections of a corrupt nature.

If the government can be turned away from its current path to unlimited tyranny, the natural human tendency to improve their lot can be unleashed.

"Have You Always Wanted to Change the World?"

The world has produced a handful of truly disruptive individuals for the current generation of change. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Burt Rutan, and Ray Kurzweil immediately come to mind. Many others who belong in that category prefer to remain out of the limelight. Others, such as Craig Venter and Dean Kamen, are on the brink of membership.

But one who is often overlooked -- but shouldn't be -- is Peter Diamandis, of X Prize fame. Here are excerpts from an interview with Diamandis, published in Wired.com:

Ted Greenwald: Have you always wanted to change the world?

Peter Diamandis: No. My first ambition was to get off the world. My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species. I believe we have a moral obligation to back up the biosphere, take it off-planet, and give ourselves the safety of ubiquity. Ultimately it’s what we do. We have the exploration gene.

...A child of the Apollo era, Diamandis grew up expecting the US government to colonize outer space. But decades of NASA timidity eventually convinced him that the only way to get off the planet was to build a private space industry. His breakthrough idea was to resurrect a brilliant notion from the early 20th century: Offer substantial cash prizes for achieving milestones of flight. Civilian aerospace would grow contest by contest, innovation by innovation.

It worked. The $10 million Ansari X Prize resulted in the first repeatable private flight to the edge of space and became the first in a slew of aerospace competitions. Diamandis then applied the same method to other issues like fuel efficiency, oil spill remediation, and health care costs. The upshot was a series of breakthroughs and a mini-boom in innovation-spurring competitions.

Greenwald: When did you give up on the government’s ability to open the space frontier?

Diamandis: I can pinpoint the moment. The 500th anniversary of Columbus was in 1992. The first Bush administration was supposed to start a massive effort to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. It fizzled. That’s when I got it: This was never going to happen. Any time a new Congress came in, it would cut NASA’s budget. Commercial industry was the only way to generate long-term funding for bold, risky projects. I thought, how can I create the economic engine that will open space regardless of the government’s ups and downs? That’s when I cofounded Zero Gravity, which let customers experience weightlessness on parabolic airplane flights.

Greenwald: How does experiencing weightlessness drive space exploration?

Diamandis: Two forces have opened most frontiers: tourism and resources. People go for the experience or for the gold, spices, and tobacco. I had tried to get on NASA’s zero-g plane and couldn’t. I thought there must be a market for this, so in May 1993 I partnered with NASA engineer Ray Cronise and Byron Lichtenberg, a friend who had flown two Space Shuttle missions, and we raised $500,000. We walked into Federal Aviation Administration’s office and pitched the idea. They said the regulations wouldn’t allow an airplane to do parabolic flight and with passengers whose seat belts were unstrapped. I said that’s bullshit. I proceeded on an 11-year effort to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration. We finally became operational in October 2004, and today we’ve flown 300 flights for 12,000 customers, most famously Stephen Hawking.

Greenwald: Where did the idea of incentive prizes come from?

Diamandis: It came from Charles Lindbergh’s memoir, The Spirit of St. Louis. In 1919 a hotel owner named Raymond Orteig put up a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 to try to win. Lindbergh had the least experience. He was called the flying fool. But he won, and within three years there was a 30-fold increase in passenger air traffic. Aviation didn’t get easier, but his flight changed people’s belief in what was possible. I thought, this is how I’m going to get my butt into space! How many things don’t happen because people don’t believe they can? Getting the public to change its beliefs is the underpinning of an X Prize: demonstration leading to paradigm change.

Greenwald: What contests do you now have in development?

Diamandis: Perhaps the most audacious and important one is the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. It’s a $10 million challenge aimed at developing version 0.9 of the Star Trek tricorder, the medical device that allowed Dr. McCoy to assess someone’s health status. By 2020 the US will be short 91,000 doctors. There’s no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off. You’ll talk to this device, cough on it or do a skin prick, and it’ll diagnose 15 disease states more accurately than a board-certified doctor.

Greenwald: What persuaded you that the world is headed toward an era of unprecedented abundance?

Diamandis: As I watched what small teams could accomplish with powerful, change-the-world technology, it struck me that the world’s biggest challenges are also its biggest market opportunities. Multi-hundred-billion-dollar industries will form at the leading edge of exponentially developing technologies. Think about AI and robotics. Each one of these fields will displace and reinvent existing billion-dollar industries. We’re on the verge of reinventing life. In the next five years, people will program living systems the way we program computers today. I became utterly convinced that abundance is where we’re going to end up. That’s the direction we’ve been heading for 100 or 200 years. A Maasai tribesman in Kenya today has better mobile communications than President Reagan had 25 years ago. If they’re on a smartphone, they have access to more information than President Clinton did 15 years ago. Their Google is as good as Larry Page’s.

Greenwald: Could anything derail us from this path?

Diamandis: Yes: the risk aversion we’ve developed as a society. Lawyers have ubiquitous power. If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. I got this from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain: We’ve gone from a society where if something wasn’t prohibited then it was legal to a society where if something isn’t explicitly permitted it’s illegal. In the early days of aviation, you could do anything you wanted as long as it wasn’t illegal. Now the laws are so extensive that they say, “Show me where it’s allowed.” _Peter Diamandis in Wired

Read the entire interview at the link above.

Disruptive individuals are generally driven to bring important change to the world. This drive is not necessarily something that they have ever thought through, nor have they necessarily come to understand it clearly. And without that drive, it is unlikely that they would have accomplished even a fraction of what they have done.

The intelligence was always there, as was the executive function and future orientation. The persistence and grit was there. But the importance of a focused drive cannot be overstated.

Diamandis has functioned more as a facilitator than as an inventor or discoverer. In this complex age, truly skilled facilitators are extremely valuable -- and are well compensated in the corporate arena.

Freelance facilitators can have a tough go of it at times, but if the grit and drive are there, they are likely to find their way into a generative -- if not outright disruptive -- niche.

Gee Whiz, the Future!

Al Fin jokes frequently about "Gee Whiz! Futurism", but it cannot be denied that significant breakthroughs are waiting to be made in several different areas. Just because our politicians are total idiots and psychopaths is no reason to be totally pessimistic. The new tools of the future will be extremely powerful. Those who can take them and use them constructively and imaginatively should be able to do okay.

The first junctionless transister. Shrinking electronics devices even smaller.

First magnetic monopole? The potential for opening entire new fields of materials and technology.

Nano-desalination breakthrough. If this device can be scaled up, it will change the future.

Diamond nanowire photo-quantum device. Early glimpses of the potential of quantum diamond electronics and photonics.

Nano-superconducting wires for super-efficient nanoelectronics. More advanced quantum effects on the way.

Electronically switchable adhesion device for walking on walls and ceilings. May be particularly useful in weightless environments and for robots.

Automated rainwater catchment and irrigation system. Making desert homesteading more workable.

High altitude blimps that create their own hydrogen from water using photovoltaics -- stay perpetually high! Living and working between Earth and space. Good training for long-term astronauts -- also great launching platforms for ultra high skydives!

Woven high pressure air tank "flatpacks" for firefighters and other interesting uses. These "deflatable" pressure tanks can be stored flat when empty, then inflated to high pressures in designed shapes -- to avoid getting "hung up" in tight spaces. Besides uses in firefighting, should be useful for underwater uses, possibly outer space. Also possibly useful for gaseous fuels.

"Silver bullet" antiviral that works against multiple deadly viruses. May be useful in bio-warfare situations as well as emerging epidemics of lipid enveloped viruses.

Fascinating and semi-fascinating questions about brain and mind.

H/T Keelynet and Brian Wang

The problem with most futurists is that they know very little about nitty-gritty survival. The problem with most survivalists is that they know very little about the future. The problem with most government officials who have authority over the public is that they not only know very little about either the future or survival -- they truly do not give a damn beyond their own power structures, and their own pensions and benefits.

You have to do it yourself, don't count on government. Don't count on talking heads on television or pundits on the internet. It's all on you.

Microid Robots Meant to Act in Colony Swarms

The world belongs to the very small -- insects, microbes, molecules . . . It is past time that humans learned to use the power of "small squared" in the real world. Lots and lots of very small agents working together to manipulate real world objects. The possibilities are endless.

"The microids would be able to walk, run, jump, and pick up and move objects many times their own weight," Clark said. "A microid can also do what no insect or other microrobot can do, which is continue walking if flipped on its back. Who knows, maybe flight is next."

He also envisions the possibility of hordes of microids working in unison and communicating with each other to perform a complex task.

"You can't underestimate the power of having thousands of microids working together, much like ant colonies," he said.

The microids could be mass-produced using manufacturing technologies that are common to the semiconductor industry.

Purdue has filed a patent application on the concept.

The microids are designed to have the "tripod gait" for walking used by most insects - only three of six legs are on the ground at a time - which enables bugs to remain stable while traversing uneven terrain.

Each leg or mandible comprises a bundled triad of slender beams made of piezoelectric material, which generates electricity when compressed. This feature could enable the microids to harvest energy by taking advantage of vibration in the environment to recharge. _Physorg

Imagine planting and harvesting many acres of food crops and biomass crops using self-powered micro- and nano- robots. Powered by vibrational energy, solar energy, from heat or chemicals in the environment . . . Imagine using such robots to assemble homes and meeting places.

The military, espionage, and sabotage applications should be obvious without dwelling on them. Al Fin Futurologists take note of the negative applications, but prefer to spend most of their time developing positive uses for new technologies.