Will the torch be passed?

3/31/2009 4:13 PM EDT

I wonder if concerns about how the US is doing technologically compared to other countries will someday sound as odd as “It’s long distance!” or as odds as grave concerns that North Carolina locations hire engineers cheaper than in California.

There would be a lot of good to this. The very idea of nation states is supported by it being difficult to move people, goods, and information long distances and across geographic barriers. We can expect the nation state to get weaker as technology to move things gets better.

I hope to see the world come together and push for the kind of changes that led to creation of a large middle class in the post-WWII era in the US. I hope they also push for democratic reforms. If the borders diminish in importance, as I’m suggesting, I don’t see how open societies can coexist with societies like China that imprison people for calling for democracy.

We don’t have the option of going back to post-WWII America. We have to manage the inevitable homogenization such that the whole world economically looks more like post-WWII America and less like the wealthy cities of India surrounded by slums.

3/31/2009 4:16 PM EDT

This time with just 7-bit ASCII:

I wonder if concerns about how the US is doing technologically compared to other countries will someday sound as odd as "It's long distance!" or as odds as grave concerns that North Carolina locations hire engineers cheaper than in California.

There would be a lot of good to this. The very idea of nation states is supported by it being difficult to move people, goods, and information long distances and across geographic barriers. We can expect the nation state to get weaker as technology to move things gets better.

I hope to see the world come together and push for the kind of changes that led to creation of a large middle class in the post-WWII era in the US. I hope they also push for democratic reforms. If the borders diminish in importance, as I'm suggesting, I don't see how open societies can coexist with societies like China that imprison people for calling for democracy.

We don't have the option of going back to post-WWII America. We have to manage the inevitable homogenization such that the whole world economically looks more like post-WWII America and less like the wealthy cities of India surrounded by slums.

4/1/2009 7:33 AM EDT

I believe I'm close to Jack's age. Our generation, and certainly the one behind it, suffers to a large degree from a lack of real commitment to anything. In the interest of "keeping our options open" we ultimately commit to nothing and nobody. As a result our families, our friends, our neighbors, our society, our nation, even our God are all disposable, and we never really get to know or value any of them. That's not life--that's death in slow motion.

Before we can pass the torch--of our nation, our profession, the things we say we believe in--the torch has to be LIT with our commitment. Who's ready to be really committed?

4/1/2009 8:16 AM EDT

India has made impressive strides in attracting their home talent into an impressive technical force. We must also remember that, going as far back as the 1950's, Indian students arrived in the US to complete engineering and science graduate degress, stayed on, and have been making positive contributions to the tech base here in the US.

Having said that though, our challenge is to motivate our own youth to engineering and science careers because technology today is defining the future wealth of provinces, regions and nations. As a proud systems engineer, I plan to expose my grandchildren to the wonders and excitement that is engineering and science, as well as enterprenurial skills to help envision and enable future products and discoveries.

Whatever their choice in a career,we should make young children aware that engineering and science can be fun and profitable. Their future well-being may well depend on it.

4/7/2009 12:59 PM EDT

I was watching the John Adams HBO miniseries the other day and heard Adams say the following: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study
mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children
a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

In the US, the time has come when a significant part of the current generation has its basic needs fulfilled with relatively little effort (even in this recession) relative to other places in the globe, and can now put an overwhelming importance on arts and entertainment, as opposed to previous generations who saw progress in commercial and technical endeavors.

Thus, I think that the United States has finally fulfilled the wishes of the Founding Fathers and it's only natural that it enter into a period of leveling off as a country (just like throughout European history Greece, Rome, Austria/Germany, Spain/Holland, France and England did in their time). These places are still beautiful, modern and innovative, but are far from the "glorious" entities they used to be.

The countries that are now slowly taking up the attitude of educating the masses so that years from now most of their great-great-grandchildren can be worry-free artists will be those that shine the brightest for the next couple of centuries.

4/8/2009 4:57 PM EDT

Perhaps the East Indians and the Chinese can write code, but could they devise a scenario in which code is no longer needed? Could they invent a modern control system that, in the main, has no run-time software? Could anyone, in this day and age?

In the field we doublespeak about “real-time software” that isn’t instantaneous but always responds much after-the-fact, and “parallel processing” that takes place on strictly linear-sequential machines. Buzz words of imprecise labels and titles may sound great for marketing, but become embedded in the jargon and tend to confuse and stultify thought processes. Note also that higher degrees are now granted for “complexity” because those granting authorities haven’t been able to realize and implement certain simplicities that underlie machine intelligence (and our own).

Software “engineering” for large systems is about 50% efficient, with as much time spent finding and fixing bugs before shipment as was used to create the systems in the first place.* (Don’t you find it odd that the biggest techno-commercial enterprise on the planet is only 50% efficient?) This factor helps keep some folks employed in pushing and patching a decidedly “non-green” technology. Software is a blight affecting the cost of “smart” tools, appliances, and consumer electronics. It wastes valuable resources and human labor, and leaves less time for creative pursuits. It is also necessary, if we continue to rely upon the Turing paradigm.

Why would we continue to use a system that is so complex, error-prone, and costly—unless we have come to believe there is no other way? I questioned that petrification of thought and means. Working alone at the forefront of technology I have invented and developed, to demonstrated proof of concept, a Superior System of Reckoning (SSR).

SSR is an alternative hardware technology, as compared to the conventional combination of Turing machine, shared-resource architecture, and software that is commonly used to provide computational faculties applied to reckoning for process control. SSR is a method of logical reckoning that avoids computation (as being overly complex) whenever possible. SSR identifies and describes electronic logic functions for the native space, time, and space-time domains. Dynamic physical-process control systems are easily and simply specified, configured, and operated in SSR that are naturally parallel-concurrent and can provide fail-safe operation and true real-time response. A system designed in SSR can meet current benchmarks with generations-ago device technology, all with less process-management hardware and software, and at less cost.

A SSR control system’s specification, functionality and behavior, and hardware implementation descriptions are very similar to each other and all are expressed in a common natural language. SSR design methods can generate safer, more flexible, and simpler dynamic control systems for automotive applications, appliances, factory automation, and consumer electronics. (These embedded systems employ 98% of the estimated ten billion per year of currently-manufactured microprocessors and derivatives.) In most of such SSR applications, no operating system or run-time software would be necessary, thus saving development labor, component costs, and electrical power.

I have the alternative method, but need help building an organization that has the resources to grow SSR into the first choice for every dynamic physical-process control system.

Best regards,
C. Moeller, Senior Engineer (electromechanical systems)
cmoel888@aol.com
c.moeller@ieee.org

* “Intelligent Systems and Formal Methods in Software Engineering” by
Bernhard Beckert in IEEE Intelligent Systems, November/December 2006

4/17/2009 3:06 AM EDT

Dear Jack,
Are you concerned about lesser number of U.S citizens innovating and doing research in technology or moving of jobs and outsourcing.
The happy case is when the number of technical innovations and business applications is more than the amount of jobs/work moved/outsourced. Typically business upswing. Downside is just the reverse..recession. But the rate of development of technical innovations depends might not depend directly on business.
In my opinion,there is no owner of technology, there are only developers/innovators of technologies and users who benefit from it(The business application or the end user).
The only way out is to develop and innovate, both the business application and the core technology in a faster and more efficient manner, and put in a process that enables you to do so, more often.
The above is process (Educational and research systems etc) is currently quite weak in countries like India (Though fast improving) as compared to the U.S, and so you see students coming to the U.S for the same. As long as you create such processes and investment mechanisms, I reckon, it'll be quite a far fetched thought that 'you are passing the torch'
Summing up, there's no torch, just light for all! (I'm sure Thomas Edison would agree!!)