Will Silicon Valley's digerati "solve" healthcare?

Light Holiday reading. I'm hotspotting off my iPhone from my Mother in Law's farm in northern Alabama.

I've cited/reviewed Peter Thiel's book "Zero to One" before. Here, here, and here.

apropos, excerpt from the current issue of Harper's:

Come With Us If You Want to Live
Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley
By Sam Frank

… I came across the Tumblr of Blake Masters, who was then a Stanford law student and tech entrepreneur in training. His motto — “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.” — was taken from a science-fiction role-playing game. Masters was posting rough transcripts of Peter Thiel’s Stanford lectures on the founding of tech start-ups. I had read about Thiel, a billionaire who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk and invested early in Facebook. His companies Palantir Technologies and Mithril Capital Management had borrowed their names from Tolkien. Thiel was a heterodox contrarian, a Manichaean libertarian, a reactionary futurist.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. Freedom might be possible, he imagined, in cyberspace, in outer space, or on high-seas homesteads, where individualists could escape the “terrible arc of the political.”…

Blake Masters — the name was too perfect — had, obviously, dedicated himself to the command of self and universe. He did CrossFit and ate Bulletproof, a tech-world variant of the paleo diet. On his Tumblr’s About page, since rewritten, the anti-belief belief systems multiplied, hyperlinked to Wikipedia pages or to the confoundingly scholastic website Less Wrong: “Libertarian (and not convinced there’s irreconcilable fissure between deontological and consequentialist camps). Aspiring rationalist/Bayesian. Secularist/agnostic/ignostic . . . Hayekian. As important as what we know is what we don’t. Admittedly eccentric.” Then: “Really, really excited to be in Silicon Valley right now, working on fascinating stuff with an amazing team.”

I was startled that all these negative ideologies could be condensed so easily into a positive worldview. Thiel’s lectures posited a world in which democratic universalism had failed, and all that was left was a heroic, particularist, benevolent libertarianism. I found the rhetoric repellent but couldn’t look away; I wanted to refute it but only fell further in. I saw the utopianism latent in capitalism — that, as Bernard Mandeville had it three centuries ago, it is a system that manufactures public benefit from private vice. I started CrossFit and began tinkering with my diet. I browsed venal tech-trade publications, and tried and failed to read Less Wrong, which was written as if for aliens.

Then, in June 2013, I attended the Global Future 2045 International Congress at Lincoln Center. The gathering’s theme was “Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution.” It was being funded by a Russian new-money type who wanted to accelerate “the realization of cybernetic immortality”; its keynote would be delivered by Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering. Kurzweil had popularized the idea of the singularity. Circa 2045, he predicts, we will blend with our machines; we will upload our consciousnesses into them. Technological development will then come entirely from artificial intelligences, beginning something new and wonderful.

After sitting through an hour of “The Transformation of Humankind — Extreme Paradigm Shifts Are Ahead of Us,” I left the auditorium of Alice Tully Hall. Bleary beside the silver coffee urn in the nearly empty lobby, I was buttonholed by a man whose name tag read MICHAEL VASSAR, METAMED RESEARCH. He wore a black-and-white paisley shirt and a jacket that was slightly too big for him. “What did you think of that talk?” he asked, without introducing himself. “Disorganized, wasn’t it?” A theory of everything followed. Heroes like Elon and Peter (did I have to ask? Musk and Thiel). The relative abilities of physicists and biologists, their standard deviations calculated out loud. How exactly Vassar would save the world. His left eyelid twitched, his full face winced with effort as he told me about his “personal war against the universe.” My brain hurt. I backed away and headed home.

But Vassar had spoken like no one I had ever met, and after Kurzweil’s keynote the next morning, I sought him out. He continued as if uninterrupted. Among the acolytes of eternal life, Vassar was an eschatologist. “There are all of these different countdowns going on,” he said. “There’s the countdown to the broad postmodern memeplex undermining our civilization and causing everything to break down, there’s the countdown to the broad modernist memeplex destroying our environment or killing everyone in a nuclear war, and there’s the countdown to the modernist civilization learning to critique itself fully and creating an artificial intelligence that it can’t control. There are so many different — on different timescales — ways in which the self- modifying intelligent processes that we are embedded in undermine themselves. I’m trying to figure out ways of disentangling all of that. . . .

“I’m not sure that what I’m trying to do is as hard as founding the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or something. But it’s harder than people’s normal big-picture ambitions, like making a billion dollars.”

Vassar was thirty-four, one year older than I was. He had gone to college at seventeen, and had worked as an actuary, as a teacher, in nanotech, and in the Peace Corps. He’d founded a music- licensing start-up called Sir Groovy. Early in 2012, he had stepped down as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which was created by an autodidact named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also started Less Wrong. Vassar had left to found MetaMed, a personalized-medicine company, with Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa, $500,000 from Peter Thiel, and a staff that included young rationalists who had cut their teeth arguing on Yudkowsky’s website. The idea behind MetaMed was to apply rationality to medicine — “rationality” here defined as the ability to properly research, weight, and synthesize the flawed medical information that exists in the world. Prices ranged from $25,000 for a literature review to a few hundred thousand for a personalized study. “We can save lots and lots and lots of lives,” Vassar said (if mostly moneyed ones at first). “But it’s the signal — it’s the ‘Hey! Reason works!’ — that matters. . . . It’s not really about medicine.” Our whole society was sick — root, branch, and memeplex — and rationality was the only cure.

In the auditorium, two neuroscientists had spoken about engineering the brain, and a molecular geneticist had discussed engineering the genome. A coffee break began, and a jazz trio struck up Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” Nearby, church bells rang noon. I asked Vassar about his friend Yudkowsky. “He has worse aesthetics than I do,” he replied, “and is actually incomprehensibly smart.” We agreed to stay in touch...

The entire (subscriber paywalled) article is a hoot. These people are at once incredibly intelligent and utterly, mind-rollingly naive. Lots of Silicon Valley VC money is being thrown at health care these days. Most of it will come to naught.

Another morsel:

Michael Vassar had predicted a “fairly total” cultural transition beginning within the next decade. This might sound insane, unless you buy into the near-term futurology emerging from outlets like TechCrunch and Wired, and from venture capitalists like Palihapitiya, Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen.

In five years, an estimated 5.9 billion people will own smartphones. Anyone who can code, or who has something to sell, can be a free agent on the global marketplace. You can work from anywhere on your laptop and talk to anyone in the world; you can receive goods anywhere via drone and pay for them with bitcoins — that is, if you can’t 3-D print them at home. As software eats everything, prices will plunge. You won’t need much money to live like a king; it won’t be a big deal if your job is made obsolete by code or a robot. The rich will enjoy bespoke luxury goods and be first in line for new experiences, but otherwise there will be no differences among people; inequality will increase but cease to matter. Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today. Google and Facebook, for instance, will be bigger and better than ever: highly functional, monopolistic technocracies that will build out the world’s infrastructure. Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere; Google will automate everything.

Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance. Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.” ...

It's a long article. Worth the price of subscribing. I had some great, head-shaking laughs.

UPDATE

Is 2015 the Year We All Sequence Our Microbiomes?
Intriguing inventions for a healthier New Year

This is the era of an app for everything and everything in its app, and health is no exception. It makes sense: When you can try to monitor or improve anything with technology, why not use your devices to better yourself? 'Tis the season of resolutions after all. And while a lot of new health technology is silly, frivolous, or just plain doesn't work, there's some fun and useful stuff out there too...

Full Atlantic article here.

OK, WE GOTTA GO BACK TO SOME MOROZOV

The Perils of Willpower
 At great risk of oversimplifying things, we can say that one way to make design more self-conscious and more sensitive to critiques of solutionism is to replace its fetish for psychology (and, increasingly, neuroscience) with a fetish for philosophy—both moral and political. Worrying about usability— the chief concern of many designers today— is like counting calories on the sinking Titanic. This obsession with usability, with making technology invisible and unobtrusive, has created a world where we are hardly aware of how much energy our households consume. It won’t take long until we discover that our smartphones, in their quest for usability, also hide an equally disturbing reality : that massive toxic dumps of electronic waste usually find their way to cash-strapped developing countries.

The triumph of psychology over philosophy is not limited to industrial design; policy designers and social engineers have succumbed to this trend as well— all in the name of science, for psychology and neuroscience are presumed to be more scientific than philosophy simply because they run experiments and tests. But the fact that matters of morality do not lend themselves to easy measurement does not mean we should disregard such concerns and recast them in neuroscientific and psychological terms. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in discussions of willpower, in which once highly complex and painful decisions about right and wrong are now recast as instances of strong or weak will— which we can address by managing our willpower reserves carefully, much as we do our bank accounts. 

The very idea of willpower is enjoying a renaissance in psychology departments and partially explains the recent fascination with nudges and gamification. The basic idea is this: we have a fixed amount of willpower to spend on our decisions, so using it to pursue one course of action might make it harder for us to pursue another. Thus, if we convince ourselves not to have this delicious but high-fat cookie now, we won’t be strong enough to choose walking over driving an hour later. We can’t decline the cookie and the car simultaneously.

John Tierney and Roy Baumeister assert in their recent book about willpower that “decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions...”

Morozov, Evgeny (2013-03-05). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (pp. 313-314, 338-339). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

Yevgeny's book is a blast. I've cited it before.

DEC 29TH UPDATE

I finished the Yevgeny Morozov book. A wonderful read.

Mad Men, Faded Denims, and Real Phonies 
All these attempts to fix the human condition— to reduce our biases by quantifying everything, to circumvent the frailties of our memory by recording everything, to rid us of our lowly, provincial interests by getting technology companies to serve us a more nutritious information diet, to get us to do the right thing by turning everything in life into a game— are indicative of Silicon Valley’s unease with imperfection as well as its glorification of the powerful tools at its disposal. Our geek kings do not realize that inefficiency is precisely what shelters us from the inhumanity of Taylorism and market fundamentalism . When inefficiency is the result of a deliberative commitment by a democratically run community, there is no need to eliminate it, even if the latest technologies can accomplish that in no time. 

Silicon Valley’s greatest ambition, though, is to ensure that all our social interactions —and even ourselves— exist under the yoke of authenticity. The fear of appearing inauthentic, of being a fake, has propelled nearly as much technological innovation as pornography. As already noted , the quantifying urge of self-trackers, especially their desire to publish these numbers, should be seen as part of this quest to ensure— once and for all— that they are not just authentic but also original. We might all be thinking the same thoughts, using the same apps, and wearing the same T-shirts, but it’s quite reassuring to know that at least our DNA, daily caloric intake, sleeping patterns are different. 

But— and this is the implicit promise of self-tracking —perhaps if you track all those physical things long enough, you’ll uncover some deeper numerical pattern, something that will allow you to discover who you really are. As Gary Wolf notes, “Behind the allure of the quantified self is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are. Our memories are poor; we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time.” And what will it take to discover “who we are”? Well, says Wolf, a bunch of self-tracking gadgets— reporting to the health -care industry or marketers on Madison Avenue— would do the job . “We don’t have a pedometer in our feet, or a breathalyzer in our lungs, or a glucose monitor installed into our veins. We lack both the physical and the mental apparatus to take stock of ourselves. We need help from machines.” Had Sigmund Freud lived long enough, he would have probably been replaced by a pedometer: in this brave new world , who needs psychoanalysis— the obsolete practice of narrative imagination —to “take stock of ourselves,” when the algorithmic option looks so tempting? ... Morozov, op cit (pp. 313-314).

Below: a Facebook friend hipped me to this.

Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of corporate kiss-assery, which, on one level, it probably was. But Tunney happened to be serious. “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America,” she wrote. “The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”...

If the Koch brothers have proved anything, it’s that no matter how crazy your ideas are, if you put serious money behind those ideas, you can seize key positions of authority and power and eventually bring large numbers of people around to your way of thinking. Moreover, the radicalism may intensify with each generation. Yesterday’s Republicans and Independents are today’s Libertarians. Today’s Libertarians may be tomorrow’s neoreactionaries, whose views flatter the prejudices of the new Silicon Valley elite...

California libertarian software developers inhabit a small and shallow world. It should be no surprise then, that, although [Peter] Thiel has never publicly endorsed Yarvin’s side project specifically, or the neoreactionary program in general, there is definitely a whiff of something Moldbuggy in Thiel’s own writing. For instance, Thiel echoed Moldbug in an infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute in which he explained that he had moved beyond libertarianism. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote...

Read the entire piece.

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Let that sink in for a moment.

Recall the recent unsuccessful ballot effort by one of these billionaire Silicon Valley dudes to break California up into six new states, carving out the "best" for himself and his digerati brethren.

"iState" was to be simply known as "Silicon Valley," and I have no doubt that these people envisioned eventually moving the nation's capital from DC to it. (I now live in east bay Contra Cost County "Western Merlot.")

More Yevgeny:

Katie Stanton, a former Google executive who briefly worked for the Obama administration and currently works for Twitter, compared her experience in Washington to that of “a vegetarian trapped inside the sausage factory.” Her ex-boss, Google’s Eric Schmidt, lambasts Washington as “an incumbent protection machine [in which] the laws are written by lobbyists” (this antilobbyist sentiment has somehow never prevented Google from rapidly expanding its own lobbying operation in Washington, DC). 

So many geeks are impatient with politics because they think that it involves nothing but talk. For them, deliberation is the cancer in the body of modern democracy, and it would be so much more productive to replace talk with action, with doing things, for all this chatter is of little to no use. After all, no great apps have ever come out of a committee meeting. So Beth Noveck, the open-government advocate and author of Wiki Government, tells us— in the kind of language beloved by administrators— that “it is overdue to rethink the legitimacy of attenuated participation in a small number of representative institutions.” Got it? [Morozov, op cit, p. 133.]

__

Critics have maligned the plan as a naked attempt by Draper and his elitist Silicon Valley buddies to cut the riffraff moochers out of their tax base (the new Silicon Valley state would have the highest per capita income in the nation), while sending 10 new U.S. senators — as many as eight of them Republicans — to Washington. Some have called it “radical-right libertarianism.” 

- 6 Californias? How about 7 Rhode Islands?

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More to come...

More on healthcare data quality

Healthcare organizations struggle with data quality – from serious issues involving fraud, bad debt, billing inefficiencies – to life-threatening issues involving diagnosis and prescribing care and real-time analytics.

As healthcare organizations try to handle increasing amounts of data – coming from disparate entry points with inconsistent data standards, to siloed and/or legacy data – all while working to transition from paper to electronic health records (EHR) – many healthcare organizations are choosing a data warehousing solution that integrates data quality into all of their applications to maintain the accuracy and value of business and critical-care operational information...

The adage “garbage in, garbage out” applies more today than ever before as data-centric systems play an increasing role in supporting healthcare decision making. Data quality issues involving deduplication, incompleteness, and inconsistencies all play a part in undermining the effectiveness of operations…

Today’s healthcare industry is complex, data-driven, and tightly regulated. It’s essential to identify your organization’s data issues and determine the most effective approach to cleaning and updating your data…

Invalid or inaccurate contact data can also enter systems when data entry personnel makes a typo or misspelling during the admission process. And, patients are also responsible for erroneous or even false information entering systems when they fill out registration forms, which leave healthcare organizations susceptible to insurance fraud and bad debt. Sometimes, patients might not provide their most current contact information – either intentionally or unwittingly. Other patients might not give their first name, preferring to list only their nickname or middle name. The most common types of fraud involve false statements or deliberate omissions that are critical to determine healthcare eligibility or for billing purposes...

Duplicate medical records are an alarming and costly threat to the healthcare industry as they can negatively impact patient safety, hospital liability, reimbursement, and administrative efficiencies. Duplicate records can also undermine the integrity of a data warehouse. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) cited a report by Fox and Sheridan that stated an average organization’s duplicate rate is between 5 to 10 percent for a single hospital...

The report also estimates that a duplicate pair of records creates $50 in hidden operational costs, so a hospital that generates five duplicates a day could end up spending as much as $78,000 per year as a result of duplicate records. If the hospital is open seven days a week, costs rise to over $91,000 per year according to the AMIA.

Duplicates are Dangerous
Not only are duplicates costly, they can be harmful to patients. A provider could mistake one patient for another patient with a similar name, especially if there are duplicate records of the patient in the system. For example, a “Beth Smith” might be recorded as “Smith, Elizabeth” in another database, but both names are the same person. Or, the provider might associate “Beth Smith” and a “Beth Smithe” as the same patient, but they are actually two different people...

Not bad. Highly artsy rendering. Free, with registration.

I searched for "interoperability."

Pretty severe oversight, in my view, given the broad heterogeneity of healthcare data sources and widely variant attention to data quality. Two words "Error Propagation."

The entire point of searching, locating, linking, retrieving, merging, reordering, indexing, and analyzing data originating in various data repositories (digital or otherwise) is to reduce uncertainty in order to make accurate, value-adding decisions. To the extent that data are "dirty" (riddled with errors), this objective is thwarted. Worse, the resulting datasets borne of such problematic inquiry then themselves frequently become source data for subsequent query, iteratively, recursively. Should you be on the receiving end of bad data manipulation, the consequences can range from the irritatingly trivial to the catastrophic. We all have our hair-pulling stories regarding the mistakes bequeathed us by those who sloppily muck about in our information and misinformation.

PETER THIEL UPDATE

From The Daily Beast:

Peter Thiel’s Radical Political Vision
The right-leaning tech billionaire offers a look into how Silicon Valley could transform the way we think about politics.

...First and foremost, Thiel thinks innovation is the key to mankind’s ills—and he isn’t happy with Washington’s apparent lack of interest in technological progress.

“I don’t think we can solve any of our problems without technological progress,” said Thiel. “That is, in my mind, the single most important issue. It’s one that’s not particularly high on the political agenda of any of our leaders in Washington, most of whom are fairly scientifically illiterate and an uninterested or hostile to technology.”...

Much of Thiel’s startup-advice book makes the case that capitalism is a game of Monopoly. He advises young entrepreneurs that the entire goal of any good businessman is to completely own their market. Google, he claims, is a “good monopoly” because it keeps pumping out fresh ideas. But were it to sit idle, and prevent a new crop of entrepreneurs from innovating, it would be acceptable for the government to step in and break it up.

From this vantage point, government is not so much the harbinger of evil as an ineffective nuisance, only to be invoked when businesses lose their way in advancing society...

Having now closely studied his book, I don't find him "right leaning" at all. I find him an eclectic, clear thinker, one with socially beneficent motives. His debunking of myriad sacred cows was a joy to read.

...[B]oth George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton preached the gospel of free trade: since every person has a relative strength at some particular job, in theory the economy maximizes wealth when people specialize according to their advantages and then trade with each other. In practice, it’s not unambiguously clear how well free trade has worked, for many workers at least. Gains from trade are greatest when there’s a big discrepancy in comparative advantage, but the global supply of workers willing to do repetitive tasks for an extremely small wage is extremely large...

Now think about the prospect of competition from computers instead of competition from human workers. On the supply side, computers are far more different from people than any two people are different from each other: men and machines are good at fundamentally different things. People have intentionality— we form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We’re less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing, but they struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

The stark differences between man and machine mean that gains from working with computers are much higher than gains from trade with other people. We don’t trade with computers any more than we trade with livestock or lamps. And that’s the point: computers are tools, not rivals.

The differences are even deeper on the demand side. Unlike people in industrializing countries, computers don’t yearn for more luxurious foods or beachfront villas in Cap Ferrat; all they require is a nominal amount of electricity, which they’re not even smart enough to want. When we design new computer technology to help solve problems, we get all the efficiency gains of a hyperspecialized trading partner without having to compete with it for resources. Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements...

The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).

We have let ourselves become enchanted by big data only because we exoticize technology. We’re impressed with small feats accomplished by computers alone, but we ignore big achievements from complementarity because the human contribution makes them less uncanny . Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?

Thiel, Peter; Masters, Blake (2014-09-16). Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Kindle Locations 1641-1736). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

If you are considering doing a tech startup, particularly in the Health 2.0 arena, this book is a must-read.

AS MATURE INDUSTRIES stagnate, information technology has advanced so rapidly that it has now become synonymous with “technology” itself. [ibid, location 1616]

Nothwithstanding all of this effusive optimism, a bit of cautionary leavening is always prudent.

Silicon Valley is guilty of many sins, but lack of ambition is not one of them. If you listen to its loudest apostles, Silicon Valley is all about solving problems that someone else—perhaps the greedy bankers on Wall Street or the lazy know-nothings in Washington—have created.

“Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, told an audience of MIT students in 2011. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who argues that his company’s mission is to “make the world more open and connected,” concurs . “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” he proclaimed just a few months before his company’s rapidly plummeting stock convinced all but its most die-hard fans that Facebook and making money had parted ways long ago. What, then, gets Mr. Zuckerberg out of bed? As he told the audience of the South by Southwest festival in 2008, it’s the desire to solve global problems. “There are a lot of really big issues for the world to get solved and, as a company, what we are trying to do is to build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these problems,” announced Zuckerberg.

In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has quietly changed from “Innovate or Die!” to “Ameliorate or Die!” In the grand scheme of things, what exactly is being improved is not very important; being able to change things, to get humans to behave in more responsible and sustainable ways, to maximize efficiency, is all that matters. Half-baked ideas that might seem too big even for the naïfs at TED Conferences —that Woodstock of the intellectual effete— sit rather comfortably on Silicon Valley’s business plans. “Fitter, happier, more productive”— the refreshingly depressive motto of the popular Radiohead song from the mid-1990s— would make for an apt welcome sign in the corporate headquarters of its many digital mavens. Technology can make us better—and technology will make us better. Or, as the geeks would say, given enough apps, all of humanity’s bugs are shallow.

California, of course, has never suffered from a deficit of optimism or bluster. And yet, the possibilities opened up by latest innovations make even the most pragmatic and down-to-earth venture capitalists reach for their wallets. After all, when else will they get a chance to get rich by saving the world? What else would give them the thrill of working in a humanitarian agency (minus all the bureaucracy and hectic travel, plus a much better compensation package)?

How will this amelioration orgy end? Will it actually accomplish anything? One way to find out is to push some of these nascent improvement efforts to their ultimate conclusions. If Silicon Valley had a designated futurist, her bright vision of the near future— say, around 2020 or so— would itself be easy to predict. It would go something like this: Humanity, equipped with powerful self-tracking devices, finally conquers obesity, insomnia, and global warming as everyone eats less, sleeps better, and emits more appropriately. The fallibility of human memory is conquered too, as the very same tracking devices record and store everything we do. Car keys, faces, factoids: we will never forget them again. No need to feel nostalgic, Proust-style, about the petite madeleines you devoured as a child; since that moment is surely stored somewhere in your smartphone— or, more likely, your smart, all-recording glasses— you can stop fantasizing and simply rewind to it directly. In any event, you can count on Siri, Apple’s trusted voice assistant, to tell you the truth you never wanted to face back then: all those madeleines dramatically raise your blood glucose levels and ought to be avoided. Sorry, Marcel!

Morozov, Evgeny (2013-03-05). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Locations 85 - 101. Public Affairs. Kindle Edition.

Yet another worthy read.
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More to come...

Theranos quote of the day

Ouch. From a comment left under a Gizmodo article regarding the latest woes of the likely soon-to-be-defunct Theranos and its woefully in-over-her-head CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

As reported by noted Silicon Valley observer/writer/consultant Steve Tobak:

Theranos Debacle Triggers an Avalanche of Lawsuits by Investors Who Should Have Known Better
Very wealthy people dazzled by founder Elizabeth Holmes stampeded to invest huge sums. Now they want their money back.

As the facts in the Theranos mess come to light in one damning report after another, and the lawsuits begin to pile up, you’ve got to wonder how so many investors -- who should have known better -- got mixed up in what may very well turn out to be a wipeout of nearly $1 billion in capital. It’s a fair question to ask...

If any other VC firm lining Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road was sought by Theranos, they didn’t bite. Nor did any venture capitalists that specialize in life sciences. According to Google Ventures partner Bill Maris, Holmes’ claims of revolutionary technology that remained shrouded in secrecy and had never been vetted raised “red flags.” I’m sure he wasn’t alone in that assessment.

...The Theranos situation is no different than when your wantrepreneur neighbor, shyster accountant or overzealous investment advisor comes to you with a sure thing that can’t lose. Take it from me: It isn’t, it can, and it usually does...

No matter how you spin it, it’s gambling, plain and simple. Remember the golden rule: Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. Most startups go under. So before you pull the trigger, make believe you’ve lost it all, and see how it makes you feel. If it makes you feel even a little bit queasy, don’t do it...

I've had my recurrent say regarding Theranos on this blog before, and will have new thoughts forthcoming soon. What a mess.

Some scathing reporting back in May on the site ZeroHedge.com

Elizabeth Holmes Admits Theranos' "Technology" Is A Fraud: Restates, Voids Years Of Test Results

The billion dollar baby has now, officially, gone bye bye.

Just when you thought that the biggest ever "multi-billion" private company that also happens to be an utter fraud, would quietly disappear before it risked attracting even more unwarranted attention from regulators, enforcers, and criminal investigators which could potentially lead to prison time for "billionaire" Elizabeth Holmes, here she comes again reminding everyone of her fallen from grace presence, in this case with what should be the terminal news for this company, namely that as the WSJ reports (and as the company confirms) Theranos has told federal health regulators that the company voided and revised two years of results from its Edison blood-testing devices and has issued tens of thousands of corrected reports to doctors and patients.

As a reminder, the basis for Theranos ludicrous $9 billion valuation which it appears was achieved without anyone doing any actual due diligence, were the "Edison" machines which were touted as revolutionary - not just by Holmes but by the fawning media and even the Clintons. Theranos has now told regulators that it threw out all Edison test results from 2014 and 2015, effectively confirming it has no proprietary technology, and also validating that its valuation should be zero.

Worse, Theranos has told regulators that it used the Edison for 12 types of tests out of more than 200 offered to consumers and stopped using the devices altogether in late June 2015. In other words, Theranos' insane "valuation" was achieved on the basis of doing only 6% of blood tests in house (all of them erroneously we now learn), and outsourcing 94% to companies whose products actually worked and many of whom likely had a far lower valuation than the one at which a bunch of idiot billionaires "valued" Holmes' worthless company.

In the process of committing fraud and building up her valuation, Holmes repeatedly gambled with people's lives, sending them clearly wrong results. As a result some patients have received erroneous results that might have thrown off health decisions made with their doctors, the WSJ reports. All this is needed is one death and there is a criminal case...

More recent news. From The Wall Street Journal: Gen. James Mattis Has Ties to Theranos. After retiring, Gen. Mattis took seat on board. General "Mad Dog" Mattis, recall, is Donald Trump's pick to head the Defense Department beginning in 2017.

In 2012, Gen. Mattis, then leading the military’s Central Command, pressed for the U.S. Army to procure Theranos lab equipment and deploy it in the battlefield, according to senior military officials involved in Army medical research. The officials said officers and civilian personnel involved in a review of the technology were told Gen. Mattis sought the procurement.

A Fort Detrick, Md.-based Army unit that oversees health-care regulatory matters, however, found Theranos wasn’t prepared to meet requirements and halted the procurement, the officials said. The concern, one of the officials said, was that some components of Theranos’s lab-testing equipment required U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, which the company hadn’t obtained. In 2015, the FDA warned Theranos it was using an uncleared blood-collection device.

Theranos and a representative for Gen. Mattis didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the matter...

Nothing improper here, folks? No coercive, conflict-of-interest pulling of rank?

More. From WSJ:

Theranos Foresaw Huge Growth in Revenue and Profits
Blood-testing startup projected that 2016 revenue could hit nearly $2 billion; a surprising email

While soliciting investors in 2014 and 2015, Theranos Inc. predicted revenue of nearly $2 billion and net income of about $505 million this year, according to investor materials from the blood-testing startup.

The projections help show how Theranos and founder Elizabeth Holmes attracted more than $632 million in its latest funding round, which included the period when the investor materials were distributed. The Wall Street Journal reviewed a copy of the documents.

Theranos also said it expected 2015 revenue of nearly $1 billion and net income of about $330 million, suggesting the company would roughly double in size in 2016, the documents show. Theranos envisioned fast-growing partnerships with drugstores, hospitals, doctors and drugmakers...

Ugh. Wonder whether any Theranos talk will come up during WinterTech 2017 next month?

I will be there. Register here.

UPDATE: from ArsTechnica, "Trump’s “Mad Dog” stays as Theranos cuts figureheads and outs investors. Disgraced biotech holds on to defense secretary pick and forgets how to email."

...On Thursday, the disgraced blood testing company announced that members of its distinguished yet puzzling "board of counselors" would be stepping down January 1. Those members include former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary William Perry, and former senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist. Also going is Riley Bechtel, chairman of the country’s largest construction and civil engineering company, who served on Theranos’ board of directors.

Notably absent from the list of high-profile departures is retired Marine Corps Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis. The four-star general, who joined Theranos’ board of directors in 2013, just so happens to also be President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. Trump formally announced the nomination Tuesday evening...

Also just in: "Lawsuit for Investors in Theranos, Inc Alleges Securities Laws Violations"

...On December 27, 2015, it was reported that two former employees are accusing Theranos Inc. of deleting the quality control data of its proprietary machines and cherry-picking data when comparing those machines with traditional lab machines.

On January 27, 2016, it was reported that "Federal inspectors found 'deficient practices' at a Theranos, Inc. laboratory that 'pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.'"

On March 8, 2016, it was reported that a "federal inspection report said a Theranos, Inc. laboratory ran an important blood test on 81 patients in a six-month period despite erratic results from quality-control checks meant to ensure the test's accuracy," and that "[i]naccurate results from the test can be especially serious for patients."...

 As an old-school former lab QA/QC guy, I would love to get a look at their QC data.

UPDATE

apropos of Silicon Valley broadly,

The Year Silicon Valley Went Morally Bankrupt
Tech moguls want to remake the world, but in 2016 they behaved as if they owe us no explanation for their decisions.
BY SARAH JONES

Peter Thiel has had a very good year. He vanquished Gawker, rode out Trumpism to its triumphant conclusion, and is now poised to influence the incoming administration to his advantage. The president-elect, Thiel said in October, “gets the big things right.” It’s still not clear what exactly those “things” are—Thiel has been publicly vague about the specific policy alignments he shares with Donald Trump—but the two share a certain grandiosity and a disdain for the government, as well as a warped view of what it means to be a good and decent human being.

In Silicon Valley, Thiel has long been a critic of democracy, political correctness, and women who have suffered sexual assault. As the Guardian reported in October, Thiel co-authored a 1995 book that derided Stanford University’s “multiculturalism,” accused the rape crisis movement of “vilifying men,” and referred to date rape as “belated regret.” (He’s since apologized for his “crudely argued statements,” but that’s difficult to believe now thanks to his enthusiastic support for Trump.) “Real diversity requires a diversity of ideas,” he wrote, “not simply a bunch of like-minded activists who resemble the bar scene from Star Wars.”...

A very good read.

"If Zuckerberg is living on another moral planet, then Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes inhabits her own universe. This year, she starred in a peculiar and very public morality play when her revolutionary blood-testing technology company virtually collapsed."

__

BTW, after citing Steve Tobak above, I investigated his new book.

 
"Leadership," 'eh? I've had a run at that topic before. See, e.g., my September, 2015 post "What is 'Leadership,' anyway?"

Based on a couple of negative amazon reviews, I waffled at first on buying Steve's book. But, then I went to his website, read some of his blog posts, and signed up to receive the comp excerpt Chapter 13 pdf, "Startup 101: Think like a VC."

Loved it. A quick sample:

...Regardless of how you fund your company, it pays to think like a VC. The problem is, if you ask ten of them how they pick winners, evaluate business opportunities, and avoid the most treacherous pitfalls, you’ll get ten different answers. But I’ve been around so long and worked with so many accomplished venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that I’ve boiled it down to four key questions you have to answer.

WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU SOLVING?
An employee of a company I was working with once approached me about an invention he had no idea how to market. This man had invented the perfect paper clip. No, I’m not kidding. He had analyzed all the different styles of paper clips, found that each one was flawed, and come up with a clever new design.

I checked it out. Sure enough, this had to be the most perfect paper clip in the world.

Unfortunately, I was pretty sure there were no office workers sitting at their desks cursing their paper clips because they didn’t work well enough. Nobody on earth saw this as a problem that needed to be solved. That’s the problem with inventors: They come up with brilliant concepts that nobody needs or even wants. They devise elegant solutions to nonexistent problems. And they think that if they build it, customers will come...

HOW WILL YOU BEAT THE COMPETITION?
I’m always hearing from people who want to be entrepreneurs so badly that they rack their brains trying to come up with ideas for services and products. Besides not having a clear problem statement, they can never tell me why their solution, whatever it is, is going to beat the competition. The really sad thing is that they don’t seem to think it matters.

If all you can come up with is a me-too product or service that’s been done to death, you’re just going to end up slugging it out with everyone and his brother on price. That’s no way to make a living unless you don’t mind eating out of dumpsters for the rest of your life...

DO YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TEAM?
You may have heard that the most important thing VCs look at when they evaluate a startup is the team. That’s true, but the reasons may not be as obvious as you’d think.

Business is all about people. I could say business is about understanding what motivates people and building lasting relationships with them, but that’s like saying art is about paint and a canvas. There’s a bit more to it than that.

If they’re going to get in bed with you, so to speak, investors want to dig pretty deep to find out what really makes you tick. They don’t just want to know your capabilities. They want to know who you are, how adaptable you are, what motivates you, and how you’ll act in a crisis. They want to know your true colors before they write you a check.

VCs will never admit to this, but that’s one of the reasons it takes so long to get funded. Time may not be on your side, but it’s on theirs. Obviously they don’t want to risk losing anything critical, like your market window, but the longer they observe you under different conditions, the better.

Of course, they want to know you’re a strong leader with a solid team that can do the job. They want to know all about your team, their background, and why they’re uniquely qualified to run your venture and deliver its solution to market…

DO YOU HAVE A CREDIBLE BUSINESS PLAN?
Would you like to know a little secret of the business world? Very few people are born business wizards. No, I’m not trying to be funny. I know nobody’s actually born that way. What I mean is, I don’t know too many people who actually get excited about income statements, balance sheets, and capitalization plans. And I’m no exception.

While I may have an aptitude for math and a head for numbers, my great love growing up was science, and later, technology. And yet that wasn’t enough to make it in the startup world…

The point is, if you want to run a business, you’ve got to understand how a business works. It has to be about more than just your great idea or product. Finance, raising capital, marketing, operations, they all go hand in hand. So when I say the words business plan, I don’t want you to roll your eyes or get scared. It doesn’t have to be 20 pages of spreadsheets. You just need a reasonable idea of how to get your business to the point where its growth is somewhat self-sustaining. And to do that, you have to make sure you always have enough money in the bank. You’ve got to do the math...

Nice. Looks like my skepticism may have been unfounded. I just popped the clutch and downloaded the Kindle edition, and have started by first roaming around in it, sampling some of it randomly (starting with the Epilogue after reading the beginning material). Gonna recommend it to my niece April and her husband Jeff Nyquist, who are now in the full throes of high-tech startup world with their "NeuroTrainer" company. I first cited it here, during my WinterTech 2016 coverage last January.

UPDATE: Finished the Steve Tobak book. Definitely worth your time. I'd make it required reading by VCs for all startup funding candidates. Will have more to say and cite. Stay tuned.

ON DECK

Michael Lewis' new book is out. I just downloaded it.

I've been reading Kahneman and Tversky (and Michael Lewis) for decades. I'm sure this will be a fine biographical book recounting their lives' important work.

...Where do the biases come from? Why do people have them? I’d set out to tell a story about the way markets worked, or failed to work, especially when they were valuing people. But buried somewhere inside it was another story, one that I’d left unexplored and untold, about the way the human mind worked, or failed to work, when it was forming judgments and making decisions. When faced with uncertainty— about investments or people or anything else— how did it arrive at its conclusions? How did it process evidence— from a baseball game, an earnings report, a trial, a medical examination, or a speed date? What were people’s minds doing— even the minds of supposed experts— that led them to the misjudgments that could be exploited for profit by others, who ignored the experts and relied on data? 

And how did a pair of Israeli psychologists come to have so much to say about these matters that they more or less anticipated a book about American baseball written decades in the future? What possessed two guys in the Middle East to sit down and figure out what the mind was doing when it tried to judge a baseball player, or an investment, or a presidential candidate? And how on earth does a psychologist win a Nobel Prize in economics? In the answers to those questions, it emerged, there was another story to tell. Here it is.

Lewis, Michael (2016-12-06). The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (Kindle Locations 88-98). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

__

INTERESTING THERANOS-RELATED UPDATE

Tangentially, that is.

This Blood-Testing Company Could Be the New Theranos
by  Jen Wieczner  @jenwieczner

It also has parallels to Valeant—and not in a good way.

Here’s the story of a a former darling biotech company, which was once worth as much as $4.5 billion. It has a technology that allows it to do a variety of diagnostic tests on just a few drops of blood. And this year it’s run into a world of trouble.

The company has become the subject of multiple investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the SEC, including two criminal probes and another inquiry into the accuracy and reliability of some of its blood-testing devices. Now, patients and investors have sued the company left and right, and the Fortune 500 firm with which it had struck a major deal is now scrambling to call it off.

Sound familiar?

No, it’s not Theranos—a Silicon Valley blood-testing startup run by CEO Elizabeth Holmes with a similar downward spiral.

Rather, the company is Alere  ALR -0.51% , a publicly-traded company based in Waltham, Mass. not far from Boston. Alere was founded (under a different name) in 1981, before Holmes was even born. It makes a number of diagnostic products and doesn’t necessarily directly compete with Theranos (which was once worth $9 billion, twice as much as Alere at its peak). But while Theranos’s scandals have been mostly concentrated in its laboratories, where accuracy and quality-control problems led the U.S. health department to revoke its lab license, Alere’s difficulties run the gamut...

Lordy.

DECEMBER 14TH UPDATE

By Maya Kosoff

THERANOS ADDS ANOTHER ACTUAL DOCTOR TO ITS BOARD
That brings the total number of board members with scientific or medical experience to ten.

 "Pivot" window dressing at this point?
____________

More to come...

His Serene Highness Trumplethinskin Summons Silicon Valley Technocracy Titans to Trump Tower

Props to Recode wag Kara Swisher for the "Trumplethinskin" moniker heads-up.

The Trump Tower High Tech Summit, December 14th, 2016. Summonees:

Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel
Oracle CEO Safra Catz
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
Apple CEO Tim Cook
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
Google co-founder Larry Page
Former Google CEO and executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. Eric Schmidt
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
IBM CEO Ginni Rommety
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadell
Palantir CEO Alex Karp

The combined Google search net worth estimate of the foregoing Summonees is roughly $72 billion. Wonder what the #BiglyFakeBillionaire thinks about that? Probably thoroughly enjoying Lording over them.

“I’m here to help you folks do well,” Mr. Trump told 13 tech executives, seated with about a dozen Trump team and family members around a large rectangular table.

Okee-Dokee, then. News to me that they've not been doing well of late.

Not attending, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (net worth $6 billion). Notably not invited? Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (net worth $2.2B). LOL. From the L.A. Times:

...Trump’s favorite social media platform, Twitter, was absent, for example. Politico attributed it to retribution for the company refusing during the campaign to abide Trump’s request to generate a #CrookedHillary emoji.

Twitter’s refusal to create a digital running stick figure holding a money bag is a grievance that his director of digital advertising aired on Medium a few weeks ago.

Trump representatives denied that was why Twitter was left out of the high-tech confab. They said Twitter didn’t make the cut because it wasn’t a big enough company. It has a market capitalization of about $13.8 billion, less than half that of Tesla, which was included in the meeting.

 Trump himself boasted at the top of the meeting about the deluge of requests to attend.

“I won't tell you the hundreds of calls we've had, asking to come to this meeting,” Trump said. He looked to Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, an eccentric billionaire who was among the lone tech giants to back Trump’s campaign — and who now is seen by many tech executives as a potential lifeline in the new administration — as he sent out invitations.

“Peter would sort of say, ‘You know, that company's too small.’”

Those executives that did make the cut, Trump declared, led “monster companies.” They included Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

“I'm here to help you folks do well,” Trump said, before taking credit for the bump in the stock market that followed his election. “And you're doing well right now and I'm very honored by the bounce. They're all talking about the bounce. So right now everybody in this room has to like me — at least a little bit.”

It was the get-along side of Trump on full display. The meeting was to be a symbol of an administration that would not hew to ideology but the best ideas.

Trump’s representatives spent the hours leading up to the meeting talking to the press about how good Trump is at listening, even to the people who despise him.

Plenty of folks back in Silicon Valley weren’t buying it. The executives who flew to New York found themselves confronted with letters, petitions and public scoldings from colleagues who reminded them that Trump has yet to disavow any parts of his agenda that most appalled Silicon Valley during the election.

“Now, more than ever, tech leaders must stand up for human dignity, and examine their role in public discourse,” EBay founder Pierre Omidyar wrote as he retweeted an article that pilloried tech leaders for going to Trump Tower...

Trump support among top digerati execs begins and ends with the name Peter Thiel. I doubt much of substance will come from this Technocracy Celebrity Apprentice photo-op. Beyond nil federal regulation in general, Silicon Valley wants the continuation of unfettered outsourcing of manufacturing (principally to China), ongoing "insourcing" of high tech (H-1B visa) immigrant talent, and the sheltering of profits overseas. Trump nominally opposes all of that (though he's voiced the usual platitudes about summarily and unilaterally striking down regulations), but it's hard to divine exactly what he truly believes or will try to act upon as Presidential priorities.

This was interesting, too:

Look who’s sitting at the head of the table in Trump’s official meeting with tech CEO’s: Don Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump. pic.twitter.com/xUYo3QL0g7

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) December 14, 2016

The Royal Family.
 __

Speaking of tech (and the future of employment), just in my inbox from The New Yorker:

OUR AUTOMATED FUTURE
How long will it be before you lose your job to a robot?
by Elizabeth Kolbert

...How long will it be before you, too, lose your job to a computer? This question is taken up by a number of recent books, with titles that read like variations on a theme: “The Industries of the Future,” “The Future of the Professions,” “Inventing the Future.” Although the authors of these works are employed in disparate fields—law, finance, political theory—they arrive at more or less the same conclusion. How long? Not long.

“Could another person learn to do your job by studying a detailed record of everything you’ve done in the past?” Martin Ford, a software developer, asks early on in “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (Basic Books). “Or could someone become proficient by repeating the tasks you’ve already completed, in the way that a student might take practice tests to prepare for an exam? If so, then there’s a good chance that an algorithm may someday be able to learn to do much, or all, of your job.”

Later, Ford notes, “A computer doesn’t need to replicate the entire spectrum of your intellectual capability in order to displace you from your job; it only needs to do the specific things you are paid to do.” He cites a 2013 study by researchers at Oxford, which concluded that nearly half of all occupations in the United States are “potentially automatable,” perhaps within “a decade or two.” (“Even the work of software engineers may soon largely be computerisable,” the study observed.)...

Imagine a matrix with two axes, manual versus cognitive and routine versus nonroutine. Jobs can then be arranged into four boxes: manual routine, manual nonroutine, and so on. (Two of Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s colleagues at M.I.T., Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, performed a formal version of this analysis in 2010.) Jobs on an assembly line fall into the manual-routine box, jobs in home health care into the manual-nonroutine box. Keeping track of inventory is in the cognitive-routine box; dreaming up an ad campaign is cognitive nonroutine.

The highest-paid jobs are clustered in the last box; managing a hedge fund, litigating a bankruptcy, and producing a TV show are all cognitive and nonroutine. Manual, nonroutine jobs, meanwhile, tend to be among the lowest paid—emptying bedpans, bussing tables, cleaning hotel rooms (and folding towels). Routine jobs on the factory floor or in payroll or accounting departments tend to fall in between. And it’s these middle-class jobs that robots have the easiest time laying their grippers on.

During the recent Presidential campaign, much was said—most of it critical—about trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The argument, made by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, was that these deals have shafted middle-class workers by encouraging companies to move jobs to countries like China and Mexico, where wages are lower. Trump has vowed to renegotiate nafta and to withdraw from the T.P.P., and has threatened to slap tariffs on goods manufactured by American companies overseas. “Under a Trump Presidency, the American worker will finally have a President who will protect them and fight for them,” he has declared.

According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, such talk misses the point: trying to save jobs by tearing up trade deals is like applying leeches to a head wound. Industries in China are being automated just as fast as, if not faster than, those in the U.S. Foxconn, the world’s largest contract-electronics company, which has become famous for its city-size factories and grim working conditions, plans to automate a third of its positions out of existence by 2020.The South China Morning Post recently reported that, thanks to a significant investment in robots, the company already has succeeded in reducing the workforce at its plant in Kunshan, near Shanghai, from a hundred and ten thousand people to fifty thousand. “More companies are likely to follow suit,” a Kunshan official told the newspaper.

“If you look at the types of tasks that have been offshored in the past twenty years, you see that they tend to be relatively routine,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write. “These are precisely the tasks that are easiest to automate.” Off-shoring jobs, they argue, is often just a “way station” on the road to eliminating them entirely.

In “Rise of the Robots,” Ford takes this argument one step further. He notes that a “significant ‘reshoring’ trend” is now under way. Reshoring reduces transportation costs and cuts down on the time required to bring new designs to market. But it doesn’t do much for employment, because the operations that are moving back to the U.S. are largely automated. This is the major reason that there is a reshoring trend; salaries are no longer an issue once you get rid of the salaried. Ford cites the example of a factory in Gaffney, South Carolina, that produces 2.5 million pounds of cotton yarn a week with fewer than a hundred and fifty workers. A story about the Gaffney factory in the Times ran under the headline “u.s. textile plants return, with floors largely empty of people.”...

How much technology has contributed to the widening income gap in the U.S. is a matter of debate; some economists treat it as just one factor, others treat it as the determining factor. In either case, the trend line is ominous. Facebook is worth two hundred and seventy billion dollars and employs just thirteen thousand people. In 2014, Facebook acquired Whatsapp for twenty-two billion dollars. At that point, the messaging firm had a grand total of fifty-five employees. When a twenty-two-billion-dollar company can fit its entire workforce into a Greyhound bus, the concept of surplus labor would seem to have run its course. [emphasis mine - BG]

Ford worries that we are headed toward an era of “techno-feudalism.” He imagines a plutocracy shut away “in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones.” Under the old feudalism, the peasants were exploited; under the new arrangement, they’ll merely be superfluous...

Yeah. I've had a good run at these AI/Robotics issues before. See, e.g., my recent post "What might Artificial Intelligence bring to humanity?" and the recursive links therein (pay particular attention to "Four Futures"). I've studied and cited many of the books mentioned in Elizabeth Kolbert's article, along with related others she did not reference.

Interesting how one thing leads to another. Reading more on Elizabeth Kolbert led me to her recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which I bought and have begun.

Doesn't nominally have anything to do with health care and health InfoTech, but it certainly goes to the fundamental "upstream" issue of human survival.

PROLOGUE
Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name— nothing does— but it has the capacity to name things. 

As with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again— some would claim nearly fatally— to just a few thousand pairs. 

The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish; farther inland, they hunt mammals. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off. 

The end of this affair will turn out to be exemplary. As the species expands its range, it crosses paths with animals twice, ten, and even twenty times its size: huge cats, towering bears, turtles as big as elephants, sloths that stand fifteen feet tall. These species are more powerful and often fiercer. But they are slow to breed and are wiped out. 

Although a land animal, our species— ever inventive— crosses the sea. It reaches islands inhabited by evolution’s outliers: birds that lay foot-long eggs, pig-sized hippos, giant skinks. Accustomed to isolation, these creatures are ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers or their fellow travelers (mostly rats). Many of them, too, succumb. 

The process continues, in fits and starts, for thousands of years, until the species, no longer so new, has spread to practically every corner of the globe. At this point, several things happen more or less at once that allow Homo sapiens, as it has come to call itself, to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. In a single century the population doubles; then it doubles again, and then again. Vast forests are razed. Humans do this deliberately, in order to feed themselves. Less deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another, reassembling the biosphere.

Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere. This, in turn, alters the climate and the chemistry of the oceans. Some plants and animals adjust by moving. They climb mountains and migrate toward the poles. But a great many— at first hundreds, then thousands, and finally perhaps millions— find themselves marooned. Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes. No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. When it is still too early to say whether it will reach the proportions of the Big Five, it becomes known as the Sixth Extinction...

Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014-02-11). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (pp. 1-3). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

On a brighter note, the Bald Eagle McNuggets one day soon to be available at the President Donald J. Trump® Yellowstone National Golf Resort and Spa are gonna be pretty yummie. And the Point Barrow Alaskan North Slope Pinot Noir will no doubt be delicious.

BTW: You might find my 2008 post "0.0143%" of interest.

UPDATE

Elizabeth Kolbert NPR interview.

____________

More to come...