Thats it, IBM?

So, Watson wins at Jeopardy. Now what to do with Mr. Watson?

The last time IBM did something truly stunning,  “Deep Blue” defeated Russian Grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1996. To celebrate its victory, IBM dumped the machine in the trash and went forward in its quest to sell large blocks of time to Fortune 500 companies.

In all fairness, IBM just does not know how to compete with products. The products it now sells are difficult to replicate platforms like mainframes, servers, esoteric software. To its credit, IBM at least knows this and has dumped mass market products to which it lost bruising battles to Microsoft and hardware manufacturers.

So, it comes as no surprise to me to see IBM pitching “Health care applications” and other arcane uses for its incredible achievement. The people in that ivory tower just have no idea how people use computers these days.

How about a search engine for Watson?

Google’s natural language processing sucks. Nobody else even comes close to Watson’s ability. The keyword + hyperlink “votes” model just does not cut it when it comes time to answer natural language questions. There is just too much garbage out there with almost everyone trying to manipulate search results for their commercial gain.

A search engine that allows people to get answers quickly will get immediate market share with a giant advertising bounty to boot. If there was ever a Google killer, this would be it. If executed well, Google’s primary business could be easily leapfrogged in no time. Clearly a lot of work would have to be done to make it all work, but the upside is so huge, it is almost a sin not to do it. Why not setup a funded independent unit that is partially venture funded with a world class management team?

But, visionaries, these people at IBM are not. They have become a giant Body Shop (aka “services”). It amazes me, that they have an R&D budget focused on Artificial Intelligence. They know nothing about  commercializing these advances.

I never understood why the Chess grandmaster was not put on the web during its early days. It would have more than paid its way at $10 per game. You would have had people like me lining up all day to play against a grandmaster. Where on earth do you get that opportunity? It would have given IBM a connection with end users during the early days, and a way to pitch its platforms – if not make money on Chess. Instead, “Deep Blue” made it into the dumpster. 

I don’t have much hope for Watson. There are just too many bodies to sell at IBM.

America Loves Socialism

This blog is not about the recent bailouts, even though they make for a good headline with the S-word on it. It’s not even about the health care plan.

It is about big business’s tendency to suddenly develop amnesia when they happily receive handouts, welfare payments and subsidies at taxpayer expense.

Take the pharmaceutical business. A large chunk of drug and other medical device discoveries are funded entirely by the National Institute of Health (NIH). The discovery work happens for years on end in a myriad series of mundane labs in Universities across the national. Researchers apply for and receive numerous grants to study the minutia of the human body. In rare cases, they stumble onto something useful. Sometimes, that useful discovery can be turned into something really useful that is worth hundreds of millions and in many cases billions of dollars in revenue.

While this is an excellent example of American ingenuity at work, except for one thing. The highest risk capital used to fund this discovery comes from the taxpayer. Unfortunately for us taxpayers, Uncle Sam is not allowed to own any patents. So, the intellectual property then falls into the hands of the University and the researcher combined. A venture capitalist that funds a high-risk early stage discovery worth something would get 90% ownership. The Federal Government gets nothing.

The researcher and the University start a company, financed by venture and public funding and eventually a drug or device gets to market. And that is when the” free market talk” begins. The company charges the same taxpayers a $1,000 a day for this drug and tells us all that free market principles ought to apply here.

Correct, except someone needs to account for the dollars the sucker paying $1,000 per day paid to develop this drug in the first place. And that is when these companies become amnesiacs. The classic example is Amgen, which was founded on a set of discoveries related to erythropoietin at University of Chicago and Columbia University, both NIH funded labs. Amgen now generates over $2 billion a year by selling this discovery back to the people who funded it in the first place – all under the guise of “free market”. The taxpayer who paid to discover it, gets zilch.

Next, consider the oil business. Let’s forget the hundreds of millions the feds pay the oil companies as “incentives” to find oil – even though it reached a record around $140 a barrel. These leaches take the money while preaching “free market” and fight like cats and dogs to keep the subsidy.

Let’s instead focus on the $700 billion defense budget. We would not require this outlandish budget if it were not for oil imports. We could simply abandon the Middle East and it would return to the desert complete with camels and Bedouins in less than 20 years.

Taking a rough approximation that the oil protection racket costs us roughly $500 BILLION in defense spending per year, and dividing it by the roughly 2 billion barrels per year imported from OPEC works out to $200+ subsidy PER BARREL of oil imported from OPEC. Given that oil prices reached a record around $140 per barrel, it’s easy to see what a giant subsidy we give Exxon and every damn fool who wants to drive a giant SUV. In a “free market”, this would get charged to oil consumers in the form of a tax to help pay for obtaining this gunk bought from people who want nothing better than to blow us up. The unsubsidized price works out to roughly $7-9 per gallon of gas (depending on taxes) during a period when it is now selling at the pump for roughly $2.50.

This brings us in much closer to the European price of gas. Turns out, the Europeans are pricing oil much closer to the real cost of obtaining it, and us Americans the ones subsidizing it.

Meanwhile, the free marketers at Exxon lobby against solar panels, calling the 30% tax credit a subsidy. In fact, this is a great deal when compared to the subsidy for oil. Let’s not forget nobody has to die to put those solar panels up.

Were we not to subsidize oil to this extent, our consumption would be dramatically lower, our production substantially higher and a thriving market in alternatives – which would now be viable without any government subsidies.

Like a wise man once said, it’s only socialism when you and I get a benefit. When Exxon, Amgen and Citicorp get something, it’s called the free market.

Disclosure: This blog was first written in Dec 2009 and was on the www.chinetworks.com website briefly

Resistance is futile

I finally saw “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. Its yet another move about Aliens plundering mother earth and wiping out the natives in order to obtain (fill in the blank) _____________, written by some screenwriters with clearly a lot of dollar signs in mind and not a lot of fact.

Only this time, the screenwriters seem to have a recent prediction by the venerable physicist Stephen Hawking and noted astronomer Marek Kukula, around why these (presumably illegal) Aliens want to “conquer and colonize” everything in their path. In Earth Stood Still, it was because humans were ruining the place and there were very few habitable planets in the cosmos.

Balderash.

Perhaps, the problem is that we as a species like to project our experiences into what we believe is the next big thing. Because Columbus and his ilk plundered the big empty space between China and Europe, and wiped out the natives (as Dr. Hawking predicts will happen with Earth), perhaps the next guy is going to smear us out. Why else would they spend so much “money” to get here?

Dr. Hawking ignored some important facts. Just to get to Earth, from many light years away, you need mastery over time, space, energy and matter. More specifically the conversion of matter into energy and more critically, energy into matter.

There is no chemical formulation possible that allows propulsion and life sustenance for inter planetary travel, leave alone intergalactic travel. If aliens do exist, and its physically possible for them to get to Earth, they must have absolute engineering mastery over the mass/energy conversions – essentially nuclear reactions. Without it, it is entirely impossible to move across millions of light years.

Basically, the alien speicies must have the capability to take any object, convert it completely into (huge amounts!) energy without blowing up their spaceship, their planet or anything else. And then, they must be able to take that huge amount of energy and use it to create some other object or use it in a propulsion system of some sort to help you them millions of light years – quickly.

If you can generate infinite amounts of energy and convert it back to mass in an easy way, you can literally have anything you want. The concept of a rich/poor divide goes away, since anyone can make anything they want. This is what is absolutely needed for unlimited space travel and this is what any civilization must have BEFORE they can even get to Earth.

And if they have the technology to make anything they want, well why on earth would you need Earth? If you were an alien being in an infinite universe full of infinite planets that can be traversed in short time periods, what could you possibly want from the 3rd rock by some average star in mid-life.

Well, for one, you may want to check out the buzz in interplanetary circles about some kind of creepy crawly creatures with ancient transport and incessant quarrels. You may even want to write a research paper and collect a 3D scan of one for a catalog. Maybe even an actual sample.

What else? Coal? Oil? Unobtainium? Unpredictable weather by a supposedly sunny beach? The latest Xeon processor?

Ludicrous.

The universe if full of every kind of element on the periodic table. There is nothing an alien civilization needs from us. Definitely not oil, and most certainly nothing that Intel can even imagine leave alone produce. As for the sunny beach, I am willing to wager that a civilization that has engineered a matter energy conversion can create a pretty nice beach on a spaceship, without the weather headaches. Assuming, of course, that is their definition of “nice”.

If an alien civilization wanted this planet, they would have taken it a long time ago. And, no, our computer viruses do not work on their spaceships and our bacteria would not kill them and no, our pop guns and water pistols just won’t work.

So, why don’t they contact us? It’s the same reason why you don’t disturb the animals on a wilderness tour. You are there to observe, not alter their lifestyles. On Star Trek, it was known as the Prime Directive – “no Starfleet personnel may interfere with  … alien life and culture” as long as they do not have the ability to travel at “warp” speeds. And that was interpreted as a “Do Not Contact” order.

So, quit worrying. You will not be assimilated.