Continuing on the discussion of the McKinsey’s Advanced Institute document and including the figure of the expected impact on Society, biz and economies.

Credits: McKinsey’s Advanced Institute

- Advanced Robotics presented in the document emphasise the evolution of dexterity in robots making them more and more useful in a variety of fields, including human prosthetics and fields that today are not considered. I concur in this analyses but I foresee that in the next decade we will have robots (in particular micro robots) interacting one another, in some cases forming a swarm. We will see the first signs of full scale automation based on robots, like the one in smart cities, in the same way that today we see completely robotised management of parcels by Federal Express at their Memphis hub.

- Autonomous and near autonomous vehicles will surely increase their footprint.  We already have autonomous trains (underground trains, airport infra terminal transportation…) and autonomous carts moving in warehouses. The Google car shows that technology exists to make this possible. It is very expensive today but the cost will surely go down to the point of becoming affordable. What I am not sure is the cultural acceptance of this sort of vehicles in the mass market. May be a strong economic crunch due to carbon taxes compounded by increased cost in energy may force its acceptance. However, if I have to bet, I would rather bet on an increased availability of energy in the next decade rather than an energy shortage. If there will not be a sort of forced adoption I doubt that the mass market will move to self driven cars.

- Next generation genomics is about applying the knowledge that is being created, and harvested, through the sequencing of genomes, in humans and in other species, to radically improve health care and productivity for crops and derivative products (like ethanol from plants/algae). Here I am fully in synch. Advances will continue at an exponential rate throughout this decade in the sequencing area, lowering the cost below the 20$ per genome and decreasing the sequencing time to a few hours (or less for specific parts of the genome). In turns this is leading to an amazing increase in data that can be processed statistically to create more knowledge. The embedding on sensors will provide for continuous monitoring of the effect of personalised drugs and will sustain the shift of paradigm towards a customised cure. I also see that the additional knowledge derived from understanding the creation of life will bring new possibility to develop smart materials.

- 3D printing is moving from prototyping to real everyday object printing. This has the potential of changing, or at least affecting logistic and distribution. It can stimulate innovation as more and more the “design” part can be sold by anyone and from everywhere through the Web leaving the implementation part to the local premises. I do not see this as greatly affecting the mass market in terms of killing existing mass production that I feel will remain through the next decade competitive in terms of cost and quality. It might supplement the centralised mass production, like home printers have supplemented the printing factories, but still books and magazines are not printed locally at home.

- Advanced Materials are making significant progress thanks to nanotechnology allowing the design of the physical characteristics of materials and to the embedding of electronics. I see an interesting aspect in the advance of materials in the line of smart materials, materials that have the capability of interacting with their environment creating intelligent, adaptable responses to a variety of stimuli. This can represent the building blocks leading in the next decade to ambient awareness.

More on next post.

I stumbled on a forecast released by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute on 12 technologies that will (might?) transform the world in the next decade in terms of impact on life and economics and I would like to share it with you with some comments from my side.

The 12 technology areas identified by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute

- Mobile Internet is already a reality. What is happening is that in the developing world where no fixed lines are available in the mass market (and most likely will not be widespread and pervasive also in the next decade) the access to Internet will be wireless, hence mobile. What I see, however, is the growth of a “mobile culture” in the sense that everybody will get used to be part of the Internet, will consider Internet (its information, services, links) as an integral part of their life. We will likely forget that we used to have manuals, and we will probably forget that we used to learn dates, how to do, and so on. Quite seamlessly we will just get what we need when we need it. Planning will be a thing of the past, in many areas of the everyday life.

- Automation of knowledge work is something that has been taking place in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution. The point is that we are shifting the meaning of “knowledge” (and intelligence). Centuries ago knowledge was about how to do things and it seemed at that time that a machine could not learn how to do thing, could only be a prosthetic augmenting the “mechanical” capability of a person, nothing more. Well it turned out that machines learned to do things and would increase their capabilities over time to the point of doing certain things better than an artisan, and for sure in larger volume at lower cost. We felt that playing chess was a matter of intelligence and that a machine would not be able to stand against a good player. We were proven wrong and we decided that actually playing chess is not based on “real” intelligence…. We have psychological problem in comparing ourself with machines because we are NOT machines.  Well, in the next decade the major shift in my mind will be the cultural acknowledgment that we ARE machines developed through eons of evolution. The outcome of the Human Brain project will be disruptive in this cultural sense, even more than in a technical sense (enabling new computational structures…). Hence the automation of knowledge work will just be another step in the increased sophistication of machines. What the futurist Thomas Frey  says “One common fallacy is that people are being replaced by machines. The reality is that machines don’t work without humans. A more accurate description is that a large number of people are being replaced by a smaller number of people using machines” does not resonate completely with me. My opinion is that this was true in the past, for the future I would say that the increased intelligence in machines will on the one hand replace people’s intelligence and on the other hand will challenge people to increase their intelligence, thus enabling new opportunities.

- Internet of Things is again already happening under our noses, although under the thresholds of our perception. More and more things are directly or indirectly connected to the Internet and the data generated are being used to create a larger map of connected objects that is virtualised on the Internet. This process will clearly continue in this and in the next decade and indeed I share the feeling that in the next decade we will have a mirroring of most of the objects made of atoms into objects made of bits and residing on the Internet. This mirroring is opening up a new dimension, the one of the Internet WITH things, IwT. We will be able to interact with both the objects made of atoms and the ones made of bits and the boundary of one vs the other will tend to fade away in our perception. Actually, most services will leverage the object made of bits because it is easier, and cheaper, to work on bits.

- Cloud technology is commoditising a good portion of IT and it will likely continue to do so in the rest of this decade. In the next decade what I see is that the pervasiveness of IT will create a global fabric where a significant portion of services and information will be spread out, thinly, at the edges, in objects and devices, in what is starting to be known as “the fog”.

I’ll continue to examine the remaining technology areas in the next posts.

A transistor has three connectors. Two for the flow of electrons and a third for regulating such a flow. It works like a tap with the third connector working like the lever you use to open, increase, decrease and stop the flow of water. A tiny signal applied on the third connector can modulate the flow of electrons across the other two, hence the transistor can work as an amplifier.

Schematics of a taxel

Now scientists have found a way to apply some properties of smart materials to the construction of a transistor made by just two connectors, the one used for the flow of electrons. This flow gets regulated (modulated) by the degree of bending of the material between the two connectors. The more it bends, the higher the resistance and the less flow of electrons…

It is nothing new, in the sense of discovery of a property. It is now many years that scientists have discovered the piezoelectric effect, the displacements of charges as consequence of mechanical strain applied to a material.

But it is the first time that this effect is put to use (solving the engineering challenges) to create a transistor, actually a multitude of transistors on a surface.

This has been done by researchers at Georgia Tech who have created piezotronic arrays of transistors (inventing also the name for it…).

You can also see these “taxels” as sensors able to detect strain variation in a material at a microscopic level (at the dimension of the gap between the two connector -the strain gate in the schematics). Since they operate at microscopic level they are also very precise in terms of location and of measure, provided you have several of them to provide you with individual measurement.

Topological profile image of the
Left: SGVPT array (top view). Inset, 3D perspective view of the topological profile image reveals the vertical hierarchy of the SGVPT assembly in which the color gradient represents different heights (credit: Gary Meek/Georgia Tech)

Since this is the case one can imagine to use this array as a sort of skin to sense the strength of the interaction with another object and indeed this is the first application the researchers are working on: provide tactile sensation (feedback) to robots.

In their post they list as potential applications:

• Multidimensional signature recording, in which not only the graphics of the signature would be included, but also the pressure exerted at each location during the creation of the signature, and the speed at which the signature is created.

• Shape-adaptive sensing in which a change in the shape of the device is measured. This would be useful in applications such as artificial/prosthetic skin, smart biomedical treatments and intelligent robotics in which the arrays would sense what was in contact with them.

• Active tactile sensing in which the physiological operations of mechanoreceptors of biological entities such as hair follicles or the hairs in the cochlea are emulated.

As you can see it really goes beyond robots, opening up yet another way to cyber interfaces.

I remember over ten years ago, when my second kid was still … a kid, I bought a Mindstorm set. It was just out on the market and it let you program in an easy way several Lego bricks to create controlled model cars, moving cranes and so on. They were, as a matter of fact, robots. You programmed the logic of their behaviour and the way to respond to some basic stimuli (like detecting an edge of a table to stop and change direction…).

It was fun but it was a long shot from any commercial robots.

Well a decade after Lego is about to unleash EV3, their latest version of Mindstorm, as announced in TechCrunch. Click on the link and watch the video clip there.

The new set does not require a computer to do the programming, this can be done directly on the smart brick that is part of the set. Lego has added some new sensors, like an infrared one, that would allow programmer to teach their creation to see and act based on what it sees.

As we move more an more into the virtual space and deal in a world made of bits, it is good to see Lego pursuing their credo of engaging kids with atoms. The bits are used to give life to atoms but the focus remain in the physical world.

I like this approach and I hope it will be sufficiently engaging for kids too. Personally, if I only had a bit more time, I would love to play with this new set, of course pretending that it is just part of my job to understand what might be next

By the way, the price tag is 349$, it would probably have been over 10,000 $ ten years ago!

A number of commentators are voicing gloomy scenarios on the end of the economic growth, particularly in the Western economies.

Indicators show that the amount of jobs being cut by ICT is not counterbalanced by the number of jobs created, as it was the case till the middle of the last decade. The drive to economic growth fuelled by electronics, computers and cell phones seems to lose its strength bringing to

What’s hidden behind the bend?

a close the third industrial revolution.

Per sé this should not be a surprise. The question is not whether the 3rd industrial revolution will come to an end but when it will and whether we are already experiencing it.

The previous two revolutions, the first one fuelled by steam and railways and the second by oil, urban infrastructures, electricity and internal combustion engine, lasted for about 40 to 50 years each ( a bit more or a bit less depending where you want to place the boundaries). Our current ICT revolution has already lasted 50 to 60 years (again depending how you want to place the boundaries; did it start with ENIAC, the first computer or rathe with the IBM 360 that brought computer to real biz use?).

From a technology point of view we are still far from hitting the “game over” wall. Technology is actually progressing farther, as a whole, than it did in the last fifty years and cross fertilisation from one technology area to the other is going to further increase the pace of evolution.

Look at genomics: the sequencing of the genome is progressing much faster than the Moore’s law in electronics. The production of data and our capability to mine information out of them  is also progressing at a faster pace.

Our fastest supercomputer today sports a processing capacity in the range of 100 PFLOPS, and a storage capacity in the order of tens of PB. If you look at all cell phone in Italy they, as a whole, have a processing capacity close to 500 PFLOPS and a storage capacity that may soon reach the EB. As communication becomes pervasive and abundant all of a sudden it is no longer a speculation of the overall capacity of cell phones but the concrete possibility of leveraging it.

The multiplying effect worldwide is a billion fold!

Interestingly, one of the commentators, Paul Krugman -see the link to his blog above-, points out that Big Data are likely to become for the better and for the worse, the game changer in economics in this decade. Not because you can do more of the same, but because you can do something different. We have tried to create intelligent programs to emulate human capabilities and all of the sudden we are discovering that you don’t need to create intelligent programs (algorithms) as long as you have sufficient data to mine.

Robots don’t need to be intelligent in the sense of being aware and object focused. They can just be sort of dumb terminals connected to a Big Data Cruncher and derive their intelligent behaviour from that.

Robots may circumvent the issue on the pro-capita GDP growth, they are not to be counted in the “capita” hence you can have a basically unlimited GDP growth just by producing more Robots.

However, and we are back to square one, what happens to jobs (and human beings that feed on those jobs) as robots make them redundant? Is the GDP growth going into the hands (pockets) of the few that develop and control robots leaving all the rest to starve?

Another gloomy talk is based on the observation that the wars have been engines of destruction AND development. If we are heading towards a warless planet we won’t have this engine at work anymore.

Personally, I think that we are going to face challenges an order of magnitude greater than those that were brought forward by the wars: larger population, climate change, water scarcity, …

Each of these can become the new engine of growth and technology will continue to be the tool to face these big issues and to fuel growth. I, personally, have no gloom about the future.

Michael Crichton wrote few years ago the book “Prey” where swarms of robots took up their own life as a complex living being. That required very tiny robots obeying very simple rules that spontaneously led to aggregation and to the emergence of behaviour (with some pretty scaring consequences…).

This robot is 1 cm long and can reshape itself in an endless way

We are still far from being able to create such tiny robots. But significant steps are being made, like the one resulting from the work of Neil Gershenfeld at their Center for Atoms and Bits .

One of the crucial aspect in developing a tiny robot is to have very tiny motors. These have been a stumbling block so far. What Neil’s group managed to do is to invent an “electropermanent motor” (that’s how they call it) using a permanent magnet whose force is counterbalanced by a weak electromagnet that can be controlled at will. This motor is very very tiny and there can be several of them creating a structure that can change to create an unlimited slate of forms.

Because of this, each robot can aggregate physically, by assuming the right shape, with other robots forming lengthy chains and structures.

They called the robot milli-motein to emphasise  the millimetre size of its components and the motorised structure that allows it the same “folding” capabilities of proteins (it is the way a protein folds that gives it its properties).

The goal is to create flexible structures that can be used in a variety of radically different applications. This is what I expect to see in the future, a context aware ambient where many of its components can take different forms and react in different ways depending on the context. Isn’t this what we do every day as human beings? Asses the context, decide what to do and adapt to carry out our decision, sometimes running, other times ducking, other time clustering with our friends to achieve our goal!

Researchers at Harvard have managed to create a gel that is particularly resistant to deformation. You can stretch it up to 21 times its normal size before it breaks. That is much more than our tendons and cartilage. You can see what it means in the picture published by Harvard researchers where the a tiny layer of gel is being stretched to reach 21 times its original length.

It is made of water, basically, and results from the mixing of two existing gels that singularly taken do not have any particular resistance to stretching. This hydrogel because of the water content, would fit well within our body and that is why scientists believe it might be used to replace failing tendons and cartilage (like the cartilage disks we have between our vertebras).

It can also be used in the articulation of robots, as I mentioned in yesterday post.

This is another example of the progress in smart materials and I really feel that they will play a most significant role in most products by the end of this decade.

Progress in robotics is mostly hidden to our perception. We now have robots in so many areas, but mostly they work in the backstage, to build our cars, our cell hones, to dispatch our parcels, to perform surgery, to drive the metro train or to vacuum our house. They are getting ever more flexible, smarter and, as I posted the other day, aware!

They are also getting nimble as researchers find new ways to control their movement. In this area the first robots used to have cogs, then more sophisticated motors have been in charge for controlling and acting movements, now researchers are starting to use artificial muscles using smart materials that can extend and contract as our own muscle cells.

An example of this progress in “mobility” is provided by Cheetah, a robot created by DARPA. As you would expect from a robot with such a name it is fast, actually it is faster then Usai Bolt. This is why in the title I wonder if we are going to see Olympic games having robots as athletes.

Take a look at Cheetah on the run and make a guess…

Our nose provides smelling sensations that although often underestimated are important to our everyday life. Of course the “sensitivity” of our nose is really low in comparison with a dog’s nose. Still, replicating the capability of sniffing and smelling in a computer (equipped with sensors) has been a big challenge to researchers.

Nanotechnology based sensors on a chip to power an electronic nose

Over the years researchers have been able to create artificial, electronic, noses that can detect specific odours but not a broad range of them.

Now it looks like we are getting closer to “iSniffing”, an artificial nose that can exceed our nose sensitivity and that can be applied in a variety of fields.

Nosang Myung, a professor at the University of California Riverside, has created a sensors based on nanotechnology that has a broad and good sensitivity to odours.

Olfactor Laboratories, a US company, has developed the chip. The whole system is about 4 by 7 inches but the goal is to reduce it to the size of a credit card. The chip as such has been designed to be fit for embedding in a cel phone or a tablet.

The applications can range from agricultural (detecting pesticide levels), production in industry (detecting leaks, emissions) and also as warning system for bio-terrorism.

It may also have medical applications, such as studying children’s asthma for correlation with the insurgence of symptoms as a function of air pollution.

In the future we may expect to see cell phones equipped with these sensors, like today we have got used to have gyroscope embedded in out cell phones. Robots are also like to use these sensors to get a better perception of their environment.

We have plenty of technologies (and products) that have been developed over the years (and keep evolving) to meet specific needs and market targets.

We are now seeing, more and more, a converging of technologies and products to solve specific needs. And I just run onto an example here.

[vimeo 27257317]

Autisms can be difficult to detect in its early stages (that is in young children) and at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development they are experimenting a new approach for early detection: use Kinect cameras, that were developed to recognize gesture for interacting with a game. What if one places a number of these cameras in a kindergarten, as part of the ambient, and have a computer to check over time how the little children move, interact with one another and with the environment to detect early signs of autisms?

The system is being presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and that is not the place where I would have expected to see people discussing autism support! Indeed, by exploiting a variety of technologies it becomes possible to solve problems in quite different areas. I really feel this is going to be what will be characterizing the next 5 years. Leveraging from diversity. As each technology/application/data is being made available in an open framework people will find new, smart and ingenious ways to use them.