Will technological growth lead to job crisis?

Gregory Clark has written an article in Washington Post in which he has claimed that in future we would not have any job as people would be replaced by machines to do those jobs.

I recently carried out a complicated phone transaction with United Airlines but never once spoke to a human; my mechanical interlocutor seemed no less capable than the Indian call-center operatives it replaced. Outsourcing to India and China may be only a brief historical interlude before the great outsourcing yet to come -- to machines. And as machines expand their domain, basic wages could easily fall so low that families cannot support themselves without public assistance.

Interesting. But this is not something that I hear for the first time. As an engineer, I was in the receiving side of this blame, during several instances when I met some old bank employees and typewriter mechanics who were pushed to the verge of fear of loosing jobs when computers were introduced.

So does the innovation lead to crisis? If so, why were we not happy being cavemen; hunting rabbits and hunted by saber-tooths? So is the evolution of mankind as an intellectual animal actually a negative thing?

I disagree with Gregory Clark and this is my perspective. There is a strange feature about technology growth - that it never stops. In a competitive environment, people always want to make their product better in the market and faster to reach the market. Only way of doing it is through technology. So every technical innovation has a lifetime, which ends when something better is invented.

When cavemen invented wheels, many people who used to push big blocks of stones might have lost their jobs. But their kids might have got jobs as wheel-makers. The important part is that even the son of the jobless caveman should have access to the school of wheel-making. Once that is assured, this cycle would continue endlessly. So the unskilled workers just need the pay to keep up themselves and provide education for their kids to become a skilled worker. Governmental intervention must ensure that this happens through several means like minimum wage policy, inflation control, subsidy on education, etc.

Bokode - the barcode killer and much more

In SIGGRAPH 2009 conference, the MIT media labs is going to present a paper titled, Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera Based Interaction from a Distance. Here is the abstract of the paper:

We show a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. This bokeh-code or Bokode is a barcode design with a simple lenslet over the pattern. We show that an off-the-shelf camera can capture Bokode features of 2.5 microns from a distance of over 4 meters. We use intelligent binary coding to estimate the relative distance and angle to the camera, and show potential for applications in augmented reality and motion capture. We analyze the constraints and performance of the optical system, and discuss several plausible application scenarios.

I did not read the full paper, but those interested can find it here(5.5 MB) and here is the news release. This paper might change the way in which the future looks. This Bokode is a kind of barcode design that could be detected by ordinary camera. The most obvious usage of this is in retail industry in place of barcode. Bokode has several advantages that the ordinary barcode lacks. It can be read by an out of focus cellphone camera. It has usage in machine vision and in a normal scenario to identify the locations of different objects in a plane, their positions and angles. I am not an imaging expert, but I think that Bokode may be the starting point for many new imaging devices. MIT has also released some cool sketches with projected future scenarios.

Weighing Scale for Molecules

A group of physicists headed by Dr. Michael Roukes have developed a nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) based mass spectrometer, which can measure the mass of things as small as a single molecule. The professor and his group has been working on this for the past 10 years in Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute.

In laymen terms, it is a NEMS resonator which keeps oscillating at a particular frequency. You drop a molecule on it, now because of the force excerted by this molecule, the standing wave frequency of the resonator changes. The change in the frequency is mapped to the mass of the molecule. Well, as you could imagine, the frequency could change depending upon where on the resonator the molecule has fallen. In order to avoid this, the molecule has to be dropped several times and the arithmetic mean of all measurement would give the mass. Here is the complete press release. [Image Credit: Caltech/Akshay Naik, Selim Hanay]

Now a curious question. Do they have a nanometric tuning fork to measure the change in standing wave frequency of this nanometric resonator?