Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Smart technology’s seen and unseen

by on February 23, 2013 · 0 comments

Evgeny Morozov in the WSJ is afraid that ‘smart technology’ might make us a bit unthinking:

The problem with many smart technologies is that their designers, in the quest to root out the imperfections of the human condition, seldom stop to ask how much frustration, failure and regret is required for happiness and achievement to retain any meaning.

It’s great when the things around us run smoothly, but it’s even better when they don’t do so by default. That, after all, is how we gain the space to make decisions—many of them undoubtedly wrongheaded—and, through trial and error, to mature into responsible adults, tolerant of compromise and complexity.

I think he overestimates how successfully engineers will eliminate friction. Even as new technologies solve some problems, they introduce new ones. He also overestimates how accepting people will be of these technologies. I know several persons with WiThings scales, but none of them tweet their weight. And Google Glass’s official unveiling has been met mostly with derision. I agree with Morozov that preserving experimentation and serendipity are important for human flourishing, but we should be careful not to forgo technologies that might unlock our curiosity and humanity in ways we can’t now predict.

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What “Big Bang Disruption” Says About Technology Policy

by on February 18, 2013 · 3 comments

In the upcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, my colleague Paul Nunes at Accenture’s Institute for High Performance and I are publishing the first of many articles from an on-going research project on what we are calling “Big Bang Disruption.”

The project is looking at the emerging ecosystem for innovation based on disruptive technologies.  It expands on work we have done separately and now together over the last fifteen years.

Our chief finding is that the nature of innovation has changed dramatically, calling into question much of the conventional wisdom on business strategy and competition, especially in information-intensive industries–which is to say, these days, every industry.

The drivers of this new ecosystem are ever-cheaper, faster, and smaller computing devices, cloud-based virtualization, crowdsourced financing, collaborative development and marketing, and the proliferation of mobile everything.  There will soon be more smartphones sold than there are people in the world.  And before long, each of over one trillion items in commerce will be added to the network.

The result is that new innovations now enter the market cheaper, better, and more customizable than products and services they challenge.  (For example, smartphone-based navigation apps versus standalone GPS devices.)  In the strategy literature, such innovation would be characterized as thoroughly “undiscplined.”  It shouldn’t succeed.  But it does. Continue reading →

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The Brookings Patent Report is Bogus

by on February 8, 2013 · 0 comments

Brookings has a new report out by Jonathan Rothwell, José Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, and Mark Muro that “examines the importance of patents as a measure of invention to economic growth and explores why some areas are more inventive than others.” (p. 4) Since I doubt that non-molecule patents have a substantial effect on growth, I was curious to examine the paper’s methodology. So I skimmed through the study, which referred me to a technical appendix, which referred me to the authors’ working paper on SSRN.

The authors are basically regressing log output per worker on 10-year-lagged measures of patenting in a fixed effects model using metropolitan areas in the United States.

Continue reading →

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Toward a Technology “Watchful Waiting” Principle

by on January 17, 2013 · 2 comments

When the smoke cleared and I found myself half caught-up on sleep, the information and sensory overload that was CES 2013 had ended.

There was a kind of split-personality to how I approached the event this year. Monday through Wednesday was spent in conference tracks, most of all the excellent Innovation Policy Summit put together by the Consumer Electronics Association. (Kudos again to Gary Shapiro, Michael Petricone and their team of logistics judo masters.)

The Summit has become an important annual event bringing together legislators, regulators, industry and advocates to help solidify the technology policy agenda for the coming year and, in this case, a new Congress.

I spent Thursday and Friday on the show floor, looking in particular for technologies that satisfy what I coined the The Law of Disruption: social, political, and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.

What I found, as I wrote in a long post-mortem for Forbes, is that such technologies are well-represented at CES, but are mostly found at the edges of the show–literally. Continue reading →

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Gabriella Coleman on the ethics of free software

by on January 8, 2013 · 0 comments

Gabriella Coleman

Gabriella Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University, discusses her new book, “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking,” which has been released under a Creative Commons license.

Coleman, whose background is in anthropology, shares the results of her cultural survey of free and open source software (F/OSS) developers, the majority of whom, she found, shared similar backgrounds and world views. Among these similarities were an early introduction to technology and a passion for civil liberties, specifically free speech.

Coleman explains the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. She also discusses the tension between the overtly political free software movement and the “politically agnostic” open source movement, as well as what the future of the hacker movement may look like.

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Wendell Wallach on robot ethics

by on December 18, 2012 · 0 comments

Wendell Wallach

Wendell Wallach, lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, co-author of “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong,” and contributor to the new book, “Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics,” discusses robot morality.

Though many of those interested in the ethical implications of artificial intelligence focus largely on the ethical implications of humanoid robots in the (potentially distant) future, Wallach’s studies look at moral decisions made by the technology we have now.

According to Wallach, contemporary robotic hardware and software bots routinely make decisions based upon criteria that might be differently weighted if decided by a human actor working on a case-by-case basis. The sensitivity these computers have to human factors is a vital to ensuring they make ethically sound decisions.

In order to build a more ethically robust AI, Wallach and his peers work with those in the field to increase the sensitivity displayed by the machines making the routine calculations that affect our daily lives.

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Why Sell Phones With Subscriptions?

by on December 14, 2012 · 0 comments

Why do mobile carriers sell phones with a subscription?  My roommate and I were debating this the other night.  Most other popular electronics devices aren’t sold this way.  Cable and satellite companies don’t sell televisions with their video service.  ISPs don’t sell laptops and desktops with their Internet service.  Bundling phones with mobile service subscriptions is pretty unique.  (The only mass-market analogs I can think of are satellite radio and GPS service.)

Why might this be?   Continue reading →

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CFTC Targets Prediction Markets; Hits First Amendment

by on December 12, 2012 · 0 comments

Would you pay good money for accurate predictions about important events, such as election results or military campaigns? Not if the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has its way. It recently took enforcement action against overseas prediction markets run by InTrade and TEN. The alleged offense? Allowing Americans to trade on claims about future events.

The blunt version: If you want to put your money where your mouth is, the CFTC wants to shut you up.

A prediction market allows its participants to buy and sell claims payable upon the occurrence of some future event, such as an election or Supreme Court opinion. Because they align incentives with accuracy and tap the wisdom of crowds, prediction markets offer useful information about future events. InTrade, for instance, accurately called the recent U.S. presidential vote in all but one state.

As far as the CFTC is concerned, people buying and selling claims about political futures deserve the same treatment as people buying and selling claims about pork futures: Heavy regulations, enforcement actions, and bans. Co-authors Josh Blackman, Miriam A. Cherry, and I described in this recent op-ed why the CFTC’s animosity to prediction markets threatens the First Amendment.

The CFTC has already managed to scare would-be entrepreneurs away from trying to run real-money prediction markets in the U.S. Now it threatens overseas markets. With luck, the Internet will render the CFTC’s censorship futile, saving the marketplace in ideas from the politics of ignorance.

Why take chances, though? I suggest two policies to protect prediction markets and the honest talk they host. First, the CFTC should implement the policies described in the jointly authored Comment on CFTC Concept Release on the Appropriate Regulatory Treatment of Event Contracts, July 6, 2008. (Aside to CFTC: Your web-based copy appears to have disappeared. Ask me for a copy.)

Second, real-money public prediction markets should make clear that they fall outside the CFTC’s jurisdiction by deploying notices, setting up independent contractor relations with traders, and dealing in negotiable conditional notes. For details, see these papers starting with this one.

[Aside to Jerry and Adam: per my promise.]

[Crossposted at Technology Liberation Front, and Agoraphilia.]

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Chris Anderson on 3D Printing and the Maker Movement

by on November 6, 2012 · 0 comments

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson, former Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, describes what he calls the maker movement.

According to Anderson, modern technologies, such as 3D printing and open source design, are democratizing manufacturing. The same disruption that digital technologies brought to information goods like music, movies and publishing will soon make its way to the world of physical goods, he says.

Anderson tells the story of his grandfather, who designed the first automatic sprinkler system in the 60s, and how different such an invention story would be today. He also discusses his own firm, 3D Robotics, and policy challenges to emerging manufacturing technology.

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The Precautionary Principle Meets Driverless Cars in DC

by on November 4, 2012 · 2 comments

The precautionary principle generally states that new technologies should be restricted or heavily regulated until they are proven absolutely safe. In other words, out of an abundance of caution, the precautionary principle holds that it is “better to be safe than sorry,” regardless of the costs or consequences. The problem with that, as Kevin Kelly reminded us in his 2010 book, What Technology Wants, is that because “every good produces harm somewhere… by the strict logic of an absolute Precautionary Principle no technologies would be permitted.” The precautionary principle is, in essence, the arch-enemy of progress and innovation. Progress becomes impossible when experimentation and trade-offs are considered unacceptable.

I was reminded of that fact while reading this recent piece by Marc Scribner in the Washington Post, “Driverless Cars Are on the Way. Here’s How Not to Regulate Them.” Scribner highlights the efforts of the D.C. Council to regulate autonomous vehicles. A new bill introduced by Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) proposes several preemptive regulations before driverless autos would be allowed on the streets of Washington. Scribner summarizes the provisions of the bill and their impact: Continue reading →

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