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Boxy is evidence of how well the 'SYSTEM' 'CREATES' it's society!!

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"Don’t trust anything unless you can prove it with your own research."

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DIAMANDIS: TRICORDER X PRIZE OFFERS $10 MILLION TO BUILD STAR TREK INSPIRED HEALTH SCANNER



It’s hard to imagine a Star Trek away team without their tricorders waving back and forth, scanning for life forms. Was there anything those things couldn’t do, and might we primitive 21st century humans develop a similarly powerful handheld diagnostic technology? The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, announced in 2012, officially opened registration in early 2013 to find out.

Computers and sensors are smaller, lighter, and more powerful than ever. A creative pairing of the two, with AI onboard, and a cloud connection could change the way we do healthcare forever. Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, told Singularity Hub the winning devices will be like “OnStar for the body.”



Tricorder X was first conceived during the X Prize Foundation’s annual three day Visioneering summit back in 2010. In fact, the prize began life as two prizes—Artificial Intelligence (AI) Physician and Lab-on-a-Chip. These two ideas were soon combined, and seeing the Tricorder-like potential of such a device, mobile communications firm, Qualcomm, signed on as sponsor.

Tricorder X offers $10 million in prizes to the top three teams who develop a “tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases.” The device must measure heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, temperature, and oxygen saturation. Meanwhile, the onboard AI should be able to diagnose thirteen core conditions (eg., stroke, diabetes, anemia) and three of twelve elective conditions (eg., strep throat, melanoma, HIV).

The required specifications are otherwise intentionally vague to inspire creative problem solving. In terms of design, devices must be five pounds or less; customer experience is a key metric in the judging; and the device must upload data to the cloud a minimum of every 12 hours.

Today, most folks who feel healthy may record health data once every few years. Truth is, we don’t know what’s going on with our bodies until something major goes wrong. Tricorder X aims to give patients a history of daily data, the ability to track changes and patterns, and the comfort they might catch potentially hazardous conditions early.

This Tricorder X infographic frames the problem perfectly. Have you ever wondered whether you need to see a doctor—but the only way to know if you need to see a doctor is by seeing a doctor. On average, patients wait 21 days to get an appointment and spend two hours at the doctor’s office. And if it’s night or the weekend—it’ll be the emergency room or nothing. Worse? After all that, it’s a coin flip whether you get the right diagnosis or treatment.

Having a reliable set of sensors at home coupled with a reliable diagnostic tool would answer that first question: Do I need to see a doctor? And if the answer is yes, odds are the doctor can double check the data and prescribe treatment online or over the phone—limiting visits to those times they are truly needed, and freeing physicians to dedicate the time, care, and attention patients want and deserve.

Registration for the Tricorder X Prize is set to run through August 2013. A qualification round in 2014 will pare over 250 teams down to ten or fewer. Finalists will design and build their technology in the second half of 2014 and run consumer tests in early 2015. The prize will be awarded no later than June 2015.

It’s an aggressive schedule and an ambitious goal—but that’s what the X Prize is all about. And if all goes to plan, in two and a half years we’ll have a piece of 23rd century tech destined for our homes and pockets.

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US UNEMPLOYMENT IS 7.9%—ARE ROBOTS TO BLAME?


Honda’s humanoid robot, Asimo.

Robots want to invade your home, take your job, and steal your wife. Maybe not that last one (yet). But as unemployment remains stubbornly elevated (7.9%) people are searching for answers. Among the usual suspects—foreign competition, too much regulation, too little spending, banks—technology is increasingly bearing the blame.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes (watch below), aired January 13, Steve Kroft notes “one of the hallmarks of the 21st century is we are all having more and more interactions with machines and fewer with human beings.” And as robots march “out of the realm of science fiction and into the mainstream” the result is “technological unemployment.” According to Kroft, “There is a lot of it going around with more to come.”



At this point we could level all the usual defenses—that automation has been happening for a few centuries. That there are now, and have always been, periods of discomfort as some jobs disappear and others are created. That for those taking part in technology’s rapid march, the last few hundred years have shortened the work day and week, witnessed the advent of retirement and vacation, increased income, added years to the human lifespan, and improved overall living conditions.

That while unemployment is stubbornly above average right now, it’s nowhere near the levels experienced for over a decade during the Great Depression. And as George Mason’s Don Boudreaux points out, that was before “the Internet, the microchip, and even the solid-state transistor.” To imply the latest round of technologically-driven productivity gains are fundamentally new is misleading.

Which is why one of Kroft’s guests, Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, clarifies, “Technology is always creating jobs. It’s always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.”

In the context of exponential technology, Brynjolfsson’s statement rings true. Maybe we’ve reached the knee of the curve, where the rate of progress turns up toward the vertical, and workers are no longer able to keep pace. We might be there. But as Sir John Templeton said, “The four most dangerous words in investing are ‘this time it’s different.’”

We can make statements about the pace of information technology over the last half century. But beyond the anecdotal, there is no good way of measuring technology’s broader speed or aggregate effects on the economy. And it’s even harder to compare this period to periods past. A dirty economic secret is the data gets spottier and spottier—strung together with shoelaces and duct tape—the further back you go.

Boudreaux notes (in direct response to the 60 Minutes piece), “Are robots in 2013, for example, replacing factory workers faster than motorized farm equipment in 1913 replaced farmhands? Maybe; maybe not. The answer isn’t obvious.”

But whether this time is different may be beside the point. There will always be a degree of uneasiness as new technology replaces human workers. The question is, “What can you do about it?” Or as it was posed in a recent members discussion thread, “What’s worth studying?” How can you predict what skills will be valued in the future?

The answer now, as ever, is you can’t. We may value learning new languages as business goes global. But soon real-time universal translators will do the job better. Today, doctors strive for an encyclopedic knowledge of medicine. But AIs like Watson may soon make rote learning less useful and analysis more so. Which is probably a good guide in general—you can’t predict exactly what will be needed, but you can hone universal skills. Learn how to be a good learner.

Ultimately, technology frees us from one task so we can focus on another. Boudreaux again, “As was true 200 years ago, the falling costs of satisfying some wants (such as those for food and clothing) enable us to turn our attention to satisfying other wants, many of which today were unimaginable to our 19th-century ancestors.”

No job is secure from the coming robot invasion—not even the writing of news stories. But if robots taking over for humans in some realms allows us to pursue multitudes of new, creative, and as yet inconceivable paths…then long live the bots.