Rick's Short Circuit: tech news from around the Web

LEDs, robots, AI, and job loss take center stage in the weekend press.

In a story with the kicker “Pink Slip 2.0,” Patrick May in the Mercury News says the current recession is much scarier than the one in 2000, “when Internet fantasies and runaway stock prices began to turn much of Silicon Valley’s job market into a toxic waste site.” The article explains, “In March, a record 102,600 people were unemployed in the valley…At the height of the dot-com bust, in January 2003, 81,900 people were looking for work….” The article quotes Stanford University economist Ward Hanson as saying the “tech-bubble burst of 2001-02 was concentrated in an industrial sector, driven by the decline in the IPO market and online-marketing spending. But most of the rest of the economy was doing well…Structurally, there were very different safety valves in place at the time—you could literally leave Silicon Valley and move to a place where the economy was doing just fine. Not now.” That mirrors what Penny Herscher reported in the Huffington Post last week.

Cities are shifting to LEDs, the New York Times reports: “Toronto, Raleigh, Ann Arbor and Anchorage—not to mention Tianjin, China, and Torraca, Italy—have adopted LEDs for street and parking garage lighting, forsaking the yellow glow of traditional high-pressure sodium lamps. Three major California cities—Los Angeles (140,000 streetlights), San Jose (62,000) and San Francisco (30,000)—have embarked on some LED conversions.”

The article notes that Ann Arbor has been working with Relume Technologies to design LEDs that would fit the globes of its downtown fixtures, adding that the “$515 cost of installing each light will be paid back in reduced maintenance and electrical costs in four years and four months, said Mike Bergren, the city’s field-operations manager.”

Interesting fact: because LEDs “do not emit ultraviolet light, they attract no bugs.”

The article offers a word of caution: “…in the rush to make cheaper LED lights, poorly made products could erase the technology’s natural advantage, experts warn.”

Robert Reich in Salon says “…it doesn’t make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the US were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad—something I don’t recommend—we’d still be losing manufacturing jobs. That’s mainly because of technology.”

He says factory jobs are disappearing worldwide—even in China, as that country shutters old state-run factories and adopts automation.

He adds, “We should stop pining after the days when millions of Americans stood along assembly lines and continuously bolted, fit, soldered, or clamped what went by. Those days are over.”

So what should people do? “A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate, and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design, and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising….”

He says he calls this type of work “symbolic analytic work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas,” with rote, repetitive work left to robots.

However, commenter Yminale isn’t buying the robot story, writing, “Robot workers are like fusion, a Mars expedition, flying cars, and jetpacks. They’re just around the corner until they aren’t. As Japan has shown, cheap workers in China/Vietnam/wherever are a lot cheaper than robots over the 10 year life span of a factory. If Chinese workers are losing jobs, it’s to cheaper wage slaves somewhere else, not Terminators.”

From a week ago, spurred on by the release of the new Terminator movie with its malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet, John Markoff in the New York Times takes a look at AI and the prospects for self-aware computing systems. The article interweaves real-life AI advances (for instance, the coining of “artificial intelligence” by the Stanford University computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956 and his establishment of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1964) with science-fiction treatments (for instance, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1961 short story “Dial F for Frankenstein”). The article recounts the A.I. winter of 1984 and cites renewed attention to the field from NASA and Silicon Valley companies like Google.

The article presents various views on the “great dawn” or singularity”—the emergence of self-ware, smarter-than-human computers expected by visionaries such as Ray Kurzweil. The Markoff’s conclusion: “Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland’s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley’s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity.” He quotes Silicon Valley roboticist Gary Bradski, as saying, “Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn. Life’s not fair.”

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Previous Short Circuit: The US prepares for cyberwar while Microsoft Bings and Google Waves. Meanwhile, streaming content and PC sales come up short, and illegal file sharing continues unabated.