INB 201Global Business Technology

Business is always about the future

Perspective for those born on the web

What is technology? FireAgricultureDomesticated horsesBusiness organization

Why does technology matter?What we can doHow much it costs to do itWhat more we can do

Technology and capitalism

Steam engine and spinning loomRailroads, speed and goods100 pounds of cotton into thread – cost drops by 90%, time falls by 95%

1840 – 10000 British sailors could be moved 10,000 miles to China with large guns and defeat 400 million Chinese

1880 – Illinois, to Chicago, to new York and Boston, to Europe

Migration – 26 million people move from Europe to the US in the 19th century

EXPLAIN:The first machine age is the most important event in human history

Explain what this means.

What evidence for this? See page 7

The second machine age could be even bigger

We are at an inflection point that began about 10 years ago

We have already seen very dramatic changes

Digital technologies are about to produce dramatic changes in economic and social development

These changes will create new products, new production processes, new human capabilities, new prices, new businesses, and eliminate many businesses

These changes will come at an exponential pace

Pattern recognitionComplex communicationCombining pattern recognition with complex communicationComputers are still poor at physically maneuvering themselves – walking and climbing

Revolution in the past 10 years has been:ExponentialDigitalCombinatorial

How does the self-driving car, Watson and robots suggest that a second machine age is coming?

What has happened to make this possible?

Gradual change and inflection points

What is an algorithm? Making a loan

What is DARPA?

What is Morovec’s paradox?“discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to

traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”

What are the implications of Morovec’s paradox?1) “As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock

analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”

2) “Automating a single activity, like soldering a wire onto a circuit board or fastening two parts together with screws, is pretty easy, but that task must remain constant over time and take place in a ‘regular’ environment. For example, the circuit board must show up in exactly the same orientation every time. Companies buy specialized machines for tasks like these, have their engineers program and test them, then add them to their assembly lines. Each time the task changes— each time the

location of the screw holes move, for example— production must stop until the machinery is reprogrammed. Today’s factories, especially large ones in high-wage countries, are highly automated, but they’re not full of general-purpose robots. They’re full of dedicated, specialized machinery that’s expensive to buy, configure, and reconfigure.”

Baxter – what makes Baxter different? http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/what-makes-baxter-different/

“To train Baxter, you grab it by the wrist and guide the arm through the motions you want it to carry out. As you do this, the arm seems weightless; its motors are working so you don’t have to. The robot also maintains safety; the two arms can’t collide (the motors resist you if you try to make this happen) and they automatically slow down if Baxter senses a person within their range. These and many other design features make working with this automaton a natural, intuitive, and nonthreatening experience.”

“Baxter takes a revolutionary approach to programming, with an entirely manual training process that non-technical, in-house staff can master in very little time.  With Baxter, the robot is the interface, with a sophisticated yet simple GUI that empowers employees to train or modify the automation themselves.”

“showed us several Baxters at work in the company’s demo area. They were blowing past Moravec’s paradox— sensing and manipulating lots of different objects with ‘hands’ ranging from grips to suction cups. The robots aren’t as fast or fluid as a well-trained human worker at full speed, but they might not need to be. Most conveyor belts and assembly lines do not operate at full human speed; they would tire people out if they did. Baxter has a few obvious advantages over human workers. It can work all day every day without needing sleep, lunch, or coffee breaks. It also won’t demand healthcare from its employer or add to the payroll tax burden. And it can do two completely unrelated things at once; its two arms are capable of operating independently.”

What is Amazon Robotics? (hint: Kiva)https://www.amazonrobotics.com/#/

“Traditionally, goods are moved around a distribution centre using a conveyor system or by human operated machines (such as forklifts). In Kiva’s approach, items are stored on portable storage units. When an order is entered into the Kiva database system, the software locates the closest automated guided vehicle (bot) to the item and directs it retrieve it. The mobile robots navigate around the warehouse by following a series of computerized barcode stickers on the floor. Each drive unit has a sensor, which prevents it from colliding with each other. When the drive unit reaches the target location, it slides underneath the pod and lifts it off the ground through a corkscrew action. The robot then carries the pod to the specified human operator to pick the items.”

What is Boston Dynamics?

http://www.bostondynamics.com/

“Boston Dynamics builds advanced robots with remarkable behavior: mobility, agility, dexterity and speed. We use sensor-based controls and computation to unlock the capabilities of complex mechanisms. Our world-class development teams take projects from initial concept to proof-of-principle prototyping to build-test-build engineering, to field testing and low-rate production.”

“Boston Dynamics is wholly owned subsidiary of Google, Inc. We began as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where National Academy of Engineering member Marc Raibert and his colleagues first developed robots that ran and maneuvered like animals.They founded the company in 1992, and their ground-breaking work continues to inspire much of our work.”

What is innovation?

Recombinant innovation?

How does innovations happen?

Innovation ecosystem

DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicleshttp://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/03/13.aspx *

DARPA Robotics Challenge: http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/

PBS/NOVA on DARPAhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/what-future-be-like.html

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEViTWHbdUhrYAlwElnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBsa3ZzMnBvBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw--?p=darpa+robotics+challenge&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001

https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A0LEVj9YILdUG9AA_dolnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBsa3ZzMnBvBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw--?p=darpa+robotics+challenge+winner&tnr=21&vid=4EC43B56C6B409D8EBC44EC43B56C6B409D8EBC4&l=138&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DUN.607992310973075336%26pid%3D15.1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dw222KFAiMQc&sigr=11brifgrt&tt=b&tit=DARPA+Robotics+Challenge+2013%3A+A+Woodstock+for+Robots+...&sigt=11phpkgf9&back=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Ddarpa%2Brobotics%2Bchallenge%2Bwinner%26ei%3DUTF-8%26hsimp%3Dyhs-001%26hspart%3Dmozilla&sigb=13bpkjmvj&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001 ***

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/schaft-robot-company-bought-by-google-darpa-robotics-challenge-winner

Although it isn’t easy to quantify the effects of these DARPA challenges on the development and deployment of autonomous vehicle technology, ten years later defense and commercial applications are proliferating. The rapid evolution of the technology and rules for how to deploy it are being driven by the information technology and automotive industries, academic and research institutions, the Defense Department and its contractors, and federal and state transportation agencies. Within DoD, some of the efforts to improve upon and deploy autonomous ground vehicle technology include:

Oshkosh Defense developed the TerraMax unmanned ground vehicle for the Marine Corps;

TORC Robotics, one of six finishers of the Urban Challenge, continues to develop utility-vehicle-scale autonomous capabilities for Marine Corps platforms;

Google self driving car

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVimLI7dU4owAtKwlnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBsa3ZzMnBvBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw--?p=google%27s+self-driving+cars&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001

http://recode.net/2014/05/27/googles-new-self-driving-car-ditches-the-steering-wheel/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car

How has this happened?

DARPA wants to focus and direct the distributed knowledge

Processing power

Artificial Intelligence software

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/189486-how-googles-self-driving-cars-detect-and-avoid-obstacles

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188482-google-has-built-a-matrix-like-simulation-of-california-to-test-its-self-driving-cars ***

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181982-googles-chance-to-dominate-the-robo-car-market-is-quickly-slipping-away

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

Moore’s Law and Transistor

What does exponential growth mean?

Chessboards and rice?

Second half of the chessboard?

Second half technologies

Supercomputers and Sony Playstation 3

ASCI Red$ 55 million

Supercomputers and iPad2How can iPad be better than a supercomputer?

GPSCamerasGyroscopeWiFiCellphoneMicrophone

SLAM and Kinect – 3D sensing

Processing power?

Personal Computer 1982 iPhone 6 2014 Ratio

Cost $2500 $600 4.18:1Processor speed 4MHz 1.4GHz 350:1Weight 25lbs 4oz 100:1Storage 30 mb 32gb 1000:1iPhone: camera, HD video, global phone, internet, verbal commands

Three main chips in computers, tablets, phones

Microprocessor

Memory

Graphics/Video

All are composed of transistors

What is a transistor?What is an integrated circuit?

Moore’s Law is about the number of transistors on a chip

1971 First Microprocessor = 2,300 transistors

2014 A8 – 3,000,000,000

Sparc – 10,000,000,000

Xbox – 5,000,000,000

Suppose the processing power you need requires 1,000,000,000 transistors.

What options do you have at what cost?

Future Technologies

Same size with massive increases in processing power

Smaller size with existing processing power

http://itechfuture.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXkfrBJqVcQ cognitive computing

http://futuristicnews.com/the-age-of-artificial-intelligence-george-john-at-tedxlondonbusinessschool-2013/

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/future-tech/10-futurist-predictions-in-the-world-of-technology.htm#page=0