Artifi cial muscles Brainwave control: Marc Andreessen’s challenge motors sci-fi no longer second act TechnologyQuarterly September 3rd 2011
Changes in the air The emerging technologies that will defi ne the future of fl ight
TQCOV-September4-2011.indd 1 22/08/2011 15:42 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
Contents
On the cover From lightweight components and drag-reducing paint today, to holographic entertainment systems and hypersonic aircraft tomorrow, researchers are devising the emerging technologies that will de ne the future of ight. What can tomorrow’s Cameras get cleverer travellers expect? Page 10 Monitor 2 Computational photography, a new approach to desalination, monitoring yacht performance, spotting fakes with lasers, guiding nanoparticles to ght Consumer electronics: New approaches to photography treat it as a branch of cancer, mopping up oil with wool, smaller military drones, computing as well as optics, making possible a range of new tricks keeping barnacles at bay and HOTOGRAPHY can trace its roots to di erent exposures, into one picture of the religious overtones of Pthe camera obscura, the optical princi- superior quality. Where a single snap may computing programming ples of which were understood as early as miss out on detail in the lightest and dar- the 5th century BC. Latin for a darkened kest areas, an HDR image of the same Di erence engine chamber, it was just that: a shrouded box scene looks preternaturally well lit (see 9 Worrying about wireless or room with a pinhole at one end above). HDR used to be a specialised Concerns about the health risks through which light from the outside was technique employed mostly by profes- of mobile phones are misplaced projected onto a screen inside, displaying sionals. That changed when Apple added an inverted image. This, you might think, it as an option in the iPhone 4. (Previous The future of ight is a world away from modern digital iPhones lacked the oomph to crunch 10 Changes in the air cameras, brimming with fancy electronics relevant data quickly enough to be practi- The technologies that will de ne which capture the wavelengths and inten- cal.) Other examples include cameras and the development of aviation sity of light to produce high-resolution apps that stitch together panoramas from digital les. But the basic idea of focusing overlapping images shot in an arc around Modelling behaviour rays through an aperture onto a two- a single point or as a moving sequence. dimensional surface remains the same. But HDR and panoramas are just two 13 Game theory in practice Now a novel approach to photographic ways to splice together images of the same How software can make forecasts imaging is making its way into cameras subject, says Marc Levoy of Stanford and transform negotiations and smartphones. Computational photo- University, who kickstarted computation- graphy, a subdiscipline of computer al photography in a paper he wrote in 1996 Inside story graphics, does not simply capture single with his colleague Pat Hanrahan. Since 15 Muscling in on motors images. The basic premise is to use mul- then aspects of the eld have moved from Arti cial muscles could give tiple exposures, or multiple lenses, to academia into commercial products. This, motors a run for their money capture information from which photo- Dr Levoy explains, is mainly down to the graphs may be derived. These data con- processing power of devices, such as Brainwave controllers tain myriad potential pictures which camera-equipped smartphones, growing 17 Put your thinking cap on software then converts into what looks faster than the capacity of sensors which Controlling things with thought like a conventional photo. More computer record light data. You are getting more is no longer science ction animation than pinhole camera, in other computing power per pixel, he says. words, though using real light refracted To show o the potential of some new Brain scan through a lens rather than the virtual sort. techniques, Dr Levoy created the Synth- 19 Disrupting the disrupters The best known example of computa- Cam app for the iPhone and other Apple tional photography is high-dynamic-range devices. The app takes a number of suc- A pro le of Marc Andreessen, HDR programmer turned investor ( ) imaging, which combines multiple cessive video frames and processes them photos shot in rapid succession, and at into a single, static image that improves on 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Monitor 3
2 the original in a variety of ways. He and which rays passing through a lens are which works perfectly well online, but his colleagues have also built several captured. In traditional cameras the focal will not pass muster in print. This might models of Frankencamera, using bits of kit plane was a piece of lm; modern ones not matter, though. Nowadays people found in commercially available devices use arrays of digital sensors. In Lytro’s make fewer photographic prints, especial- both low-end, like inexpensive cell case, however, a light ray passes through ly large-format ones where resolution phones, and high-end, such as pricey the main lens which uses a wide aper- counts. By contrast, billions of photo- single-lens re ex cameras. The Franken- ture and then through one of the micro- graphs are shared online each year. Profes- cameras use a host of clever algorithms to lenses. Only then does it hit a sensor. By sional photographers may still seek higher capture sequences of images and turn calculating the path between the micro- pixel counts, but there is no reason why them into better photos. SynthCam and lens and the sensor, the precise direction future versions of the device could not Frankencameras can improve the quality of a light ray can be reconstructed. That in o er more microlenses. of pictures taken in low-light conditions, turn means it is possible to determine For now, though, Lytro is targeting which are usually quite grainy. They can where the ray would have struck if the internet photo-sharers. It will let owners also create an arti cial focus that is absent focal plane had been moved. Moving the of its camera upload the image data and from the original images, or render a focal plane is equivalent to refocusing the the processing tools to Facebook and other foreground gure in crisp focus against a lens, so any point in the light eld can social networks. The rm has reportedly blurred backdrop. then, in e ect, be brought into sharp focus. already raised $50m. Investors must be In other words, images can be refocused hoping that consumers nd all the irri- Point and shoot after they have been taken (see below). tants that Lytro’s camera removes, like Still, for all the superior results that com- It is also possible to ddle with an blurred or dim pictures, niggling enough putational photography o ers, Dr Levoy image’s depth of eld photographic to want them eliminated once and for all laments, camera-makers have been loth to jargon for the space between the closest from their holiday snaps. 7 embrace its potential. This is about to and most distant points in an image that change. In June this year Ren Ng, a former are in focus or even create an image in student of Dr Levoy’s at Stanford, which every point is in focus. And the launched a new company called Lytro, light- eld approach can produce a com- promising to start selling an a ordable pelling simulation of a stereoscopic im- Drops to drink snapshot camera later this year. age. Lytro’s website lets visitors ddle with Rather than use conventional tech- existing images to see how some of these nology, as the Frankencamera does, to features will work. meld successive exposures, Dr Ng has Unlike the information it records, the gured out a way to capture lots of images camera itself is simple. The main lens is simultaneously. This approach is known xed in place; there is no auto-focus, auto- Desalination: A technique called as light- eld photography, and Lytro’s aperture, or other machinery which needs electrodialysis may provide a camera will be its rst commercial in- to be activated every time a photo is taken. cheaper way to freshen seawater for carnation. In physics, a light eld de- Such adjustments take time, causing a lag human consumption scribes the direction of all the idealised between pressing the shutter-release light rays passing through an area. Dr button and actually capturing the image. INGAPORE’S average annual rainfall is Levoy’s and Dr Hanrahan’s seminal paper Lytro’s snaps, by contrast, will be truly Smore than double that of notoriously described a new way to model this eld instantaneous, just as they were in old soggy Britain, so the casual observer might mathematically. Now, 15 years later, Dr Ng snapshot cameras. And, since the lens is be surprised to learn that the place has a has worked out how to implement the preset always to capture the greatest shortage of drinking water. Yet with technique using o -the-shelf chips. amount of light possible, exposure time around 7,000 people per square kilo- Dr Ng’s camera uses an array of several can be short, even in poorly lit conditions. metre, Singapore is the third most densely hundred thousand microlenses inserted One potential downside is the cam- populated country in the world. Its land between an ordinary camera lens and era’s low resolution, which is de ned by mass is not large enough to supply its 5m digital image sensor. Each microlens func- the number of microlenses, because the inhabitants with water. tions as a kind of superpixel. A typical processing software treats each microlens One answer is to desalinate seawater. camera works by recording where light as a single pixel. The sample images on That, though, is expensive, so the Singa- strikes the focal plane the area onto Lytro’s website measure 525 by 525 pixels, porean government is keen to nd cheap- er ways of doing it. And, in collaboration with Siemens, a German engineering conglomerate, it may have done so, for Siemens says its demonstration electro- chemical desalination plant on the island can turn seawater into drinking water using less than half the energy required by the most e cient previous method. To make seawater t for human con- sumption its salt content of approximate- ly 3.5% must be cut to 0.5% or less. Existing desalination plants do this in one of two ways. Some employ distillation, which needs about 10 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per cubic metre of seawater pro- cessed. Brine is heated, and the resulting water vapour is condensed. Other plants employ reverse osmosis. This uses molec- Shoot rst, refocus later ular sieves that pass water molecules 1 4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
engines, but which also provides many of the Formula 1teams with their data-acqui- sition and analysis equipment. Their Formula 1 goes marine systems work in much the same way as they do on racing cars. But instead sailing of measuring cornering forces and sus- pension movement, they look at wind speed, yaw, rudder angles and sundry Performance analysis: Technology other factors that e ect the performance used to assess and improve the of a racing yacht or dinghy. Some sailing performance of racing cars is now teams training for the Olympics have adopted the technology, as have several taking to the water competitors in the America’s Cup, sail- URING the European Grand Prix in ing’s most prestigious event. DValencia on June 26th, Lewis Hamil- As with motor racing, a reliable gauge ton discovered that his tyres were over- is needed to ensure that successful heating. It was not, however, a whi of manoeuvres are repeated consistently. The burning rubber that gave it away. Instead, heart of Cosworth’s Pi Garda is a black the news came from the pits, where a box that logs data from sensors inside it, group of engineers spend the entire race such as accelerometers to measure g- glued to a bank of monitors replete with forces and a satellite positioning system to numbers and graphs streaming in from determine position and speed. It also takes their teams’ cars. Every second, sensors on information from sensors which measure 2 while holding back the ions, such as sodi- the vehicles take hundreds of di erent how the boat is behaving on the water, as um and chloride, that make water salty. measurements the engine, suspension, well as standard marine instruments, such Generating the pressure needed to do this or the drivers’ well-being and relay them as a wind wand on the mast that measures sieving consumes about 4kWh per cubic to the pits. Besides highlighting problems, wind speed and direction. metre. The Siemens system, by contrast, this stream of data lets team strategists Some sensors are copied straight from consumes 1.8kWh per cubic metre, and advise Mr Hamilton and his rivals on the racetrack. A small laser sensor, for the rm hopes to get that down to 1.5kWh. tactics and on how to optimise vehicle instance, is mounted underneath a racing It works using a process called electro- settings with the help of the dozen or car’s chassis to bounce a beam o the dialysis, in which the seawater is pumped more switches on the steering wheel. track surface in order to calculate the into a series of channels walled by mem- Such data logging and telemetry have down-force being exerted on the vehicle. It branes that have slightly di erent proper- made what used to be more of an art into is accurate to within 0.03mm. The same ties from those used in reverse osmosis. an exact science. As a result, drivers are sensor is used on a boat to shine a beam Instead of passing water molecules, these able to shave fractions of a second o o the tiller bar, using the re ection to membranes pass ions. Moreover, the their lap times. These, aggregated over a measure the angle of the rudder. Other membranes employed in electrodialysis typical Formula 1race’s 50 or so laps, can sensors are more bespoke. For instance, are of two types. One passes positively make the di erence between winning and strain gauges calculate the stretch in the charged ions and the other passes nega- losing. Now the technology, pioneered in wires or ropes in the rigging and sails. tively charged ones. The two types al- motor racing, is being applied in another The information can be displayed to ternate, so that each channel has one wall discipline where split seconds provide an the crew on the yacht or transmitted to of each type. Two electrodes anking the edge: sailing. coaches on a chase boat, or to a support system of channels then create a voltage Leading the way is Cosworth, a British team on shore. Crunching the numbers that pulls positively charged ions such as company best known for making racing allows accurate predictions of when the 1 sodium in one direction and negatively charged ions such as chloride in the other. The result is that the ions concentrate in half of the channels, creating a strong brine, while fresher water accumulates in the other half. As the brine emerges, it is thrown away. The fresher water is put through the same process twice more and eventually has its salt concentration re- duced to 1%. That is not bad, but is still double what is potable. There is therefore one further step. This is to employ an ion-exchange resin in addition to the membranes. Such resins increase the electrical conductivity of the system and allow one more passage, bringing the salt concentration below 0.5%. A demonstration plant has been oper- ating since December, and a full-scale pilot plant should be completed by 2013. If all goes well, then, Singapore’s inhabitants will soon no longer feel like Coleridge’s ancient mariner that there is water, wa- ter, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. 7 It says the tyres are overheating, captain! The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Monitor 5
2 yacht will get to the next buoy, how many possible to chart the texture of the surface. tacks it will require to get there and how Ingenia’s machines use a scanning best to tackle the necessary turns, says head consisting of three small lasers and Simon Holloway of Cosworth’s marine six detectors to examine part of an object. division. A similar system might ease the The strip that is scanned is predetermined; pressure on the solitary round-the-world the top left-hand corner of a credit card, yachtsmen, he adds. for instance. Variations in the speckle are In some competitions, including the then digitised to produce a code that is Olympics, such equipment is not allowed unique to the scanned item. This code is during the event itself. Nevertheless, it logged in a database, along with the pro- remains a valuable training aid. Smaller, duct’s serial number or bar code. It can self-contained systems have also been also be encrypted into the bar code. When developed for enthusiastic amateurs, even what purports to be the same item is windsurfers. This echoes what has hap- re-scanned at some later date, it should pened to motor-racing telemetry. Many show the same pattern of speckle. modern cars now employ devices rst According to Andrew Gilbert, one of used in Formula 1to let the driver know Ingenia’s directors, the probability of two how the vehicle is faring. It remains to be surfaces generating the same code is less seen whether the Oxford punt will get a than one in a million trillion trillion. That similar makeover. 7 is far more accurate than ngerprints, for example. Nor is the system easy to fool. A piece of paper such as a banknote can be crumpled, soaked in water, scorched and scribbled on but will still be readable. Zapping fakes Even torn, scratched and partially missing surfaces can be read. This is because, with lasers during the original scan, the detectors pick up such a large amount of information Particle physic that a re-scan need provide only part of the speckle pattern for a reliable compari- Security technology: Microscopic son to be made. Too much damage to or surface features can provide proof of tinkering with an item would, of course, identity, allowing counterfeit goods raise suspicions anyway. to be identi ed more easily With scan times of less than a second, Medicine: Taking advantage of a the system is fast enough to be used on a natural signalling system enables ROM banknotes to bottles of Bordeaux production line. Nor does it involve hav- nanoparticles to deliver cancer drugs Fand Vans shoes to Viagra, good forger- ing to make changes to a product or its far more accurately ies can be hard to detect even for experts. packaging to incorporate security features, Yet if you look closely enough with a such as adding watermarks, tting holo- OR decades doctors have attacked microscope, the surface of almost any grams or implanting microchips. Ingenia Fcancer with drugs that kill malignant material shows a naturally occurring has tested the system on the packaging cells. Unfortunately, such chemotherapy randomness. The wood bres in a piece of used for various luxury goods, along with kills a lot of healthy cells as well. In recent paper look like a layer of noodles; smooth the security seals used on dangerous or years, the use of drug-carrying particles a plastic resembles a mountain range. The valuable substances, and on passports, few nanometres across has improved details of these patterns are unique to postage stamps and documents such as matters. Such particles can be tailored to each item and thus could be used like a nancial instruments. Indeed, should a release their payloads only when the ngerprint, to provide an almost foolproof bank want to, it could match every note it surrounding environment indicates that means of identi cation. issued against its printed serial number. they are near a tumour, thus reducing The trouble is that employing a micro- However clever a counterfeiter was, forg- collateral damage. Even that, however, has scope powerful enough to record surface ery would then be all but impossible. 7 not proved perfect. Typically, only about features at the required level of detail (a 1% of the drugs packaged up in nanoparti- few microns) would be an expensive and cles this way make it to their destination. cumbersome business, and not at all Sangeeta Bhatia and Geo rey von practical on a production line. But if you Maltzahn of the Massachusetts Institute of shine a laser at the surface of an object, the Technology, however, hope to change that. characteristic way in which the light is As they report in Nature Materials, they re ected back can be used to gather infor- believe that by granting nanoparticles the mation about the same features. And a ability to communicate with one another, fast, low-cost way of doing just that has the success of drug delivery can be in- now been commercialised by Ingenia creased 40-fold. They were inspired by Technology, a company based in London, one of the body’s natural communica- to provide what it calls a tamper-proof tions systems: the way that injured tissue method of laser surface authentication . calls for help to stem bleeding. They won- The process was developed initially at dered if they might be able to piggyback Imperial College, London, and is based on on this system to deliver drugs to tu- a phenomenon known as laser speckle mours and they found that they could. the scattering of light caused by micron- When the body sustains an injury, sized ridges and grooves on an object’s molecules called noti cation proteins are surface. By analysing this speckle, it is Is it real or fake? produced at the site. These proteins com- 1 6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
2 municate with clotting agents in the ling nanoparticles would function like mour. Once the rods were in place, the blood. They round up cellular fragments noti cation proteins, marking the spot team red a burst of laser light in the known as platelets, along with molecules where action was required. Receiving general location of the tumour. This light of a soluble protein called brinogen, nanoparticles would then be recruited as was tuned to be absorbed by gold and was both of which circulate in the blood- platelets, but instead of stanching a thus converted into heat only in places stream. The brinogen turns into brin, an wound they would deliver the drugs. where the rods had accumulated. That insoluble, lamentous protein which For the signalling nanoparticles the damaged the surrounding tissue enough traps the platelets and causes them to link team used tiny golden rods. These tend to to activate the coagulation system. up into a quilt that helps stop bleeding. collect at the locations of tumours be- The clever bit was that the receiving The two researchers wondered if they cause the blood vessels which serve tu- nanoparticles, which carried the pharma- could subvert this system to gather drug- mours often have unusual pores in them. ceutical payload, were doped with protein carrying nanoparticles into the right place. These pores are between 100 and 200 fragments that bind to brin and thus to To do so, they realised that they would nanometres in diameter perfect for trap- the wound-stanching quilts that form need two types of nanoparticles. Signal- ping the rods and thus marking the tu- when the heat from the gold nanorods does its work. Only then do the nanoparti- cles release their cargo. The result, Dr Bhatia and Dr von Maltzahn report, is a delivery system that is 40 times more A golden eece? e ective than using nanoparticles by themselves. Moreover, in mice at least, this approach shrinks cancers more e ectively than other nanoparticle-based treatments. Environmental technology: It sounds low-tech, but wool could provide an Work to evaluate the treatment in human e ective way of mopping up oil spills at sea patients should follow soon. 7 IELLA, in north-west Italy, is the booms running parallel with the ves- B centre of a cluster of wool manufac- sel’s sides to channel oil onto wool that turers and the home of Ermenegildo has been spread over the surface of the Zegna, a luxury clothing brand. A group sea. As the ship moves through a spill, Joining the of the town’s businessmen have, how- the oil-impregnated wool will be gath- ever, come up with a scheme far from ered mechanically up ramps and taken drones club the catwalks and seasonal collections. into the ship. As the wool is transported They plan to use wool, which is good at up these ramps any droplets of water repelling water and absorbing oil, to attached to it will be shaken o . Once soak up oil spills. They had the idea after on board the wool will be pressed to Military technology: When it comes the Deepwater Horizon disaster and it recover the oil and then reused. to unmanned aircraft, lots of small would, they reckon, have worked better Mr Ploner estimates it would cost drones are cheaper, and in some ways than the containment booms, chemical about 1m ($1.4m) to equip a 50-metre better, than a few big ones dispersants and other methods de- vessel to carry ten tonnes of wool. That ployed last year in the Gulf of Mexico. would be su cient, in optimum circum- HE future of air power is likely to be Earlier this year, Tecnomeccanica stances, to recover more than 1,000 Tunmanned. It may also be surprisingly Biellese, an engineering rm that makes tonnes of oil. In practice, he reckons, small. Reapers and Predators grab the machinery for the woollens industry, cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill headlines, but such big, well-known carried out experiments using greasy of almost 5m barrels would have need- drones are already outnumbered by small, wool to see how good the eece was at ed around 7,000 tonnes of wool. At a cheap and capable aircraft. gathering oil. It turned out to be very current market price of less than $1a One good example is the RQ-11B Raven, good. Coarse wool (the cheapest sort, kilo, that does not add up to a huge sum made by AeroVironment of Monrovia, with a bre diameter of between 25 and for an industry as big as Big Oil. It California, and widely used by America’s 40 microns) was able to absorb ten would, on the other hand, be a nice little armed forces. It looks like a model aircraft. times its own weight of heavy fuel oil, a earner for sheep shearers. When disassembled it ts into a backpack. re nery product similar to crude. More- Launching it is a matter of snapping the over, the oil could be squeezed out and parts together and throwing it into the air, the wool reused. Indeed, even after a whence it is carried aloft by an electric dozen immersions in oil, for between 15 propeller. It weighs two kilograms. The and 20 seconds each time, the wool’s American army’s entire annual purchase absorptive capacity did not decline. of almost 1,300 Ravens is thus lighter than Moving out of the laboratory and a single fully armed Reaper. Pilots might onto the water, with a working oil- dismiss Ravens as radio-controlled toys, collection system, is the next step. In but they are popular with soldiers. More March the businessmen, who have are being rushed to Afghanistan. called their project Wool Recycle Eco At its simplest, a Raven acts as a ying System, obtained patents for a contain- pair of binoculars that can look over the erised kit that can be set up in boats to next hill, or escort a convoy from above. deal with small spills, and for a bigger Being small and quiet, it can get close to ship-based system to tackle large ones. targets unobserved, for a good look. Un- Mario Ploner, the managing director like bigger drones, whose limited num- of Tecnomeccanica Biellese, says the bers mean that o cers in the eld are in ship-based system will use external constant competition for their services, Ravens are abundant and thus generally 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Monitor 7
a surface, this arrangement forces them into a kind of checkerboard pattern which makes it much harder for barnacles and Reducing the mussels to stick, according to David Wil- liams, who is in charge of commercialising barnacle bill the idea at AkzoNobel, a multinational chemical company. If checkerboarding does not work out, Anti-fouling technology: Ships’ hulls AkzoNobel has an alternative: create a are kept clean using poisonous surface so smooth that barnacles cannot chemicals, but a number of cleaner hold on to it. This is done with a uoro- polymer a chemical similar in structure alternatives are being pursued to Te on. The paint does not stop the N THE decades-long battle for naval animals attaching themselves to a hull in Isupremacy that was fought between the rst place, but once the vessel is mov- Britain and France at the end of the 18th ing faster than ten knots, the water sweeps century, the British eet had a secret weap- them away. That is no problem for com- on. It was, as secret weapons often are, mercial vessels, which are always on the hugely expensive. But it paid o , giving go. But for pleasure boats, which may British ships more speed, manoeuvrabil- spend a lot of time idle, Dr Williams’s ity and staying power than their French team is trying to improve the formula so rivals. It was copper. that a boat need not be moving so fast By covering the underwater parts of before the paint does its job. It’s certainly not a toy their ships’ hulls with copper plates Small boats, particularly on inland which slowly dissolved, releasing toxic waterways, are also the focus of work by 2 available to provide instant video imagery, copper ions as they did so the British John Schetz of the University of North day or night. Special display software admirals stopped barnacles, mussels and Texas and Robert McMahon of the Univer- overlays the images they send back on a burrowing clams from taking up resi- sity of Texas. They have been experi- map to produce a moving picture of what dence. In eets that were otherwise well- menting with a mixture containing a is going on on the ground. An operator can matched the result was decisive. France molecule similar to capsaicin (the active thus call down artillery re with lethal lost. The British empire became the global ingredient of hot peppers) and another precision without having to see the target superpower of the 19th century. And the similar to THC (the active ingredient of directly. For extra accuracy, Raven can also world speaks English, not French. cannabis). Fouling is less of a problem for mark targets with a laser illuminator. Ship-fouling, then, can have rather boats in fresh water, as barnacles are Another reason for Raven’s popularity far-reaching consequences. Even now, purely marine. But recently the inland is that it is easy to use. The controlling when naval supremacy is less of an issue, waterways, docks and fresh-water intakes hardware is a tablet computer with but- the problem is rife. The drag imposed by a of North America have been overrun by tons on the side, rather like a portable heavy infestation of barnacles may push a zebra and quagga mussels species that games console, and most people can get ship’s fuel consumption up by as much as originate from the area around the Black the hang of it in a couple of days. Preda- 40%. The solution usually adopted is Sea. The mixture Dr Schetz and Dr McMa- tors, by contrast, were originally own by similar to the Royal Navy’s: poison. Cop- hon have come up with seems particular- real, albeit ground-based, pilots and, per is still used, though in the form of ly e ective against these animals, though though high demand for operators has led copper-laced paint. Another popular they have yet to commercialise it. to a new rapid-training course for ground- chemical is tri-butyl tin. But releasing toxic Their aim is not just to help boat own- lings, it still takes 22 weeks to complete. heavy metals into the sea is frowned upon ers, but also to stop them unwittingly Ravens are now being upgraded to use a these days indeed, tri-butyl tin is now spreading the mussels still further. Accord- communications system that provides illegal in many parts of the world so the ing to Dr McMahon, a big part of the pro- enough bandwidth for 40 of them to y in search is on for alternatives. blem is that both species can survive out the same area, instead of the current four. One possibility is to use one of a group of the water for several days, so transport- The American army has experimented of chemicals called avermectins. These ing a boat overland from one river basin to with turning the drones into miniature are antiparasite agents (the most familiar another, a common practice in North bombers, capable of delivering a grenade- of which is called ivermectin) that are America, will not necessarily kill them. sized weapon, to destroy a small vehicle widely used against eas and gut worms. Also, boat owners are not always as dili- or take out the occupants of a particular They also, according to Hans Elwing of the gent as they might be when it comes to room with high precision and little collat- University of Gothenburg, prevent barna- inspecting their vessels for signs of in- eral damage. For greater punch, Aero- cle colonies from taking hold by stunting festation. And even if they do look, the Vironment has a prototype version of a their growth. A barnacle that runs into the mussels can be hard to see, especially lethal drone called Switchblade. This chemical nds it cannot bind as strongly when they are young and therefore small. resembles Raven, but is a ying bomb, to the surface. Only a tiny amount, about There is thus a lot to play for. Reducing packed with explosives. Its guidance one part in a thousand of the paint by fouling will save fuel, in turn saving mon- software enables it to lock on to and fol- weight, is needed, and other marine spe- ey, as well as cutting shipping’s contribu- low a rapidly moving target. cies are not, as far as can be ascertained, tion to greenhouse-gas emissions. And At the moment, Ravens cost around a ected by it. stopping the spread of invasive mussels $56,000 each, and economies of scale Another way to discourage barnacles is will make life easier for those who navi- should bring this down. By contrast, ma- to confuse them. A formula developed by gate the waterways of America and Cana- chines like the Predator cost at least $5m, Giancarlo Galli of the University of Pisa da. The prize may not, this time round, be and another $5,000 an hour to y. From uses polymer molecules that are water- world domination. But whoever comes the army’s point of view, small is de - attracting on one side and water-repellent up with the winning formula is likely to nitely beautiful. 7 on the other. When they are painted onto make a fortune. 7 8 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
vertical, centralising religious edi ces imbued with a tradition of authoritar- ianism and ‘revealed truth’ are the polar What would Jesus hack? opposite of the healthy, sceptical, anti- authoritarian nous at the heart of the hacker culture, Mr Raymond declared. As for Mr Spadaro’s ideas, they possessed a special, almost unique looniness . Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with But Mr Spadaro is merely the latest to link coding with Christian attitudes to- the open-source software movement? wards creativity and sharing. Don Parris, a HE kingdom of heaven belongs to advocates the use of open-source software North Carolina pastor, wrote an article in Tsuch as these, Jesus said of little instead, because he doesn’t want people Linux Journal in 2004 in which he argued children. But computer hackers might give to violate a law without any real reason, that proprietary software limits my abili- the kids some competition, according to just to open a church document . ty to help my neighbour, one of the cor- Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest. Although the Vatican has yet to encour- nerstones of the Christian faith. Larry In an article published earlier this year in age the faithful to live like hackers, it has Wall, the creator of Perl, an open-source La Civiltà Cattolica, a fortnightly magazine praised the internet as truly blessed for programming language, said in an in- backed by the Vatican, entitled Hacker its ability to connect people and share terview a decade ago that God expects ethics and Christian vision , he did not information. The pope has even joined humans to create and to help others do merely praise hackers, but held up their Twitter. But praise has always been tem- so. Mr Wall said he saw his popular lan- approach to life as in some ways divine. pered by warnings. As early as 2002, for guage as just such a prod to creation, say- Mr Spadaro argued that hacking is a form instance, the Vatican’s Church and In- ing, In my little way, I’m sneakily helping of participation in God’s work of creation. ternet document cautioned that there people understand a bit more about the (He uses the word hacking in its tradition- are no sacraments on the internet and sort of people God likes. al, noble sense within computing circles, worried about the solipsistic appeal of More recently Kevin Kelly, co-founder to refer to building or tinkering with code, technology. Moreover, hackers in partic- of Wired magazine and author of What rather than breaking into websites. Such ular have problematic traits from the Technology Wants , published last year, nefarious activities are instead known as perspective of the Catholic church, such has argued that creation can go further in malicious hacking or cracking .) as a distrust of authorities and scepticism code. Whereas a novelist can craft a new Mr Spadaro says he became interested toward received wisdom. And the idea of world, coders can build worlds complete in the subject when he noticed that hack- tweaking source materials to t one’s with arti cial agents that exist and evolve ers and students of hacker culture used needs doesn’t mesh well with the Catho- outside the creator’s mind. Mr Kelly takes the language of theological value when lic emphasis on authority and tradition. literally the words of his friend Stewart writing about creativity and coding, so he Brand, whose Whole Earth Catalog decided to examine the idea more deeply. Cathedrals and bazaars quipped, We are as gods and might as The hacker ethic forged on America’s west Mr Spadaro recognises these tensions but well get good at it. Mr Kelly, a Christian, coast in the 1970s and 1980s was playful, nds them manageable. Not everyone says the ability to create arti cial life will open to sharing, and ready to challenge agrees. Eric Raymond, author of a classic come with great parental responsibility models of proprietary control, competi- essay on open-source software, The and suggests that arti cial worlds will tion and even private property. Hackers Cathedral and the Bazaar , nds it hard to need to be imbued with moral value. were the origin of the open source believe that some Christians want to This causes a kind of revival of religion, movement which creates and distributes canonise the hacker mindset. After being he says, because religion has been think- software that is free in two senses: it costs quoted in Mr Spadaro’s paper, Mr Ray- ing about this issue. nothing and its underlying code can be mond took to his own website to note that From the outside, hacking computer modi ed by anyone to t their needs. In a he had deliberately equated cathedrals code has largely been viewed as a tech- world devoted to the logic of pro t, with proprietary, closed-source software nical discipline, not as a theologically rich wrote Mr Spadaro, hackers and Christians directed from above, by contrast with the vision of how to live. But some see a have much to give each other as they more chaotic bazaar of equals which divine aspect to programming at least promote a more positive vision of work, produces open-source code. Cathedrals when looking with the eye of faith. 7 sharing and creativity. He is not the only person to see an a nity between the open-source hacker ethos and Christianity. Catholic open- source advocates have founded a group called Elèutheros to encourage the church to endorse such software. Its manifesto refers to strong ideal a nities between Christianity, the philosophy of free soft- ware, and the adoption of open formats and protocols . Marco Fioretti, co-founder of the group, says open-source software teaches the practical dimension of com- munity and service to others that is al- ready in the church message . There are also legal motivations. Commercial soft- ware such as Microsoft Word is widely pirated in many parts of the world, by Catholics as well as others. Mr Fioretti The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Di erence engine 9 Di erence engine l Worrying about wireless
Technology and society: Concerns about the danger posed to human health by radio waves are misplaced and increasingly irrelevant. The use of phones while driving is far more likely to cause harm
LTHOUGH the myth that mobile increase in temperature of the skin caused Actually, smart meters are just about Aphones cause cancer has been laid to by holding a phone close to the ear was the last thing that people need worry rest, an implacable minority remains found to be an order of magnitude less about. In an independent study released convinced of the connection. Their fears than that caused by direct sunlight. in April, the California Council on Science have been aggravated of late by bureau- The Group 2B classi cation the IARC and Technology, an advisory arm of the cratic bickering at the World Health Orga- has now adopted for mobile phones state legislature, concluded that wireless nisation (WHO). Let it be said, once and designates them as possible , rather than smart meters produce much lower levels for all, that no matter how powerful a probable (Group 2A) or proven of radio-frequency exposure than many radio transmitter whether an over-the- (Group 1) carcinogens. This rates the existing household devices especially horizon radar station or a microwave health hazard posed by mobile phones as microwave ovens. The council noted that, tower radio waves simply cannot pro- similar to the chance of getting cancer to date, it had not been possible to identify duce ionising radiation. The only possible from co ee, petrol fumes and false teeth. any health problems resulting from poten- e ect they can have on human tissue is to That has not stopped the tinfoil-hat tial non-thermal e ects of radio waves raise its temperature slightly. (should such e ects exist). But nor had it In the real world, the only sources of been possible to show categorically that ionising radiation are gamma rays, X-rays there weren’t any. and extreme ultra-violet waves, at the far (ie, high-frequency) end of the electromag- You can’t prove a negative netic spectrum along with ssion frag- The latter is next to impossible. Indeed, by ments and other particles from within an classifying mobile phones as a Group 2B atom, plus cosmic rays from outer space. risk, what the IARC was e ectively saying These are the sole sources energetic (and the California Council on Science enough to knock electrons out of atoms and Technology implying) was that, even breaking chemical bonds and producing if such a health risk exists, there is no way dangerous free radicals in the process. It is of ever ruling out bias, chance or other highly reactive free radicals that can dam- confounding circumstance with any age a person’s DNA and cause mutation, reasonable degree of con dence. So, to radiation sickness, cancer and even death. hedge bets, protect careers and guarantee By contrast, at their much lower fre- future funding, the obvious thing to sug- quencies, radio waves do not pack any- gest is yet more research on the long-term, where near enough energy to produce free heavy use of mobile phones. The most radicals. The quanta of energy (ie, pho- likely result is that the results will be tons) carried by radio waves in, say, the equally inconclusive. UHF band used by television, Wi-Fi, Blue- And equally irrelevant. The Twitter tooth, cordless phones, mobile phones, generation tweets and texts rather than microwave ovens, garage remotes and brigade from continuing to believe that talking. Older people are catching up fast. many other household devices have deadly waves in the ether are frying their According to Nielsen, a market-research energy levels of a few millionths of an brains. Lately the paranoia has spread to rm, the number of text messages sent electron-volt. That is less than a millionth the smart meters being introduced by and received by Americans aged between of the energy needed to cause ionisation. electrical utilities in various parts of the 45 and 54 rose by 75% in the year to the All of which leaves doctors more than world. Smart meters are designed to relay second quarter of 2010. Over the same a little puzzled as to why the WHO should wireless messages to the power company period, the number of phone calls made recently have reversed itself on the ques- about a household’s pattern of electricity and received by adults of all ages fell by tion of mobile phones. In May the organi- use. Such real-time data could help util- 25%. Meanwhile, for those who still insist sation’s International Agency for Research ities manage their generating capacity on yakking, hands-free is fast becoming on Cancer (IARC) voted to classify radio- more intelligently. the norm, thanks to sti er penalties for frequency electromagnetic elds (ie, radio But a backlash among homeowners in using handsets while driving and the waves) as a possible carcinogenic to northern California, who fear they are spread of Bluetooth headsets. humans based on a perceived risk of about to be drenched in dangerous radio The whole brouhaha over mobile glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer. waves, has forced a handful of municipal- phones causing brain cancer is a monu- A year earlier, after a landmark, de- ities to slap moratoriums on the smart mental irrelevance compared with sco - cade-long study undertaken by teams in 13 meters being introduced by Paci c Gas & laws who insist on using their handsets to countries, the IARC had reported that no Electric. Customers will be given the text or talk while driving. Regretfully, that adverse health e ects associated with the option to keep their old analogue meters, is a far more likely cause of death or dis g- use of mobile phones could be found. As but will be charged for having someone urement than some inexplicable form of for the heating e ects of radio waves, the come to read them every month. radio-induced glioma. 7 10 The future of ight The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
Changes in the air
Authority. Today’s airliners would glide forts to save jet fuel. Having more than about 25% farther, he says, and the next doubled in price in recent years, it now ac- Aviation: Emerging technologies are generation promises additional gains. counts for about half of airlines’ operating ushering in more fuel-e cient, Gliding distance is an imperfect mea- costs. Even slight gains in e ciency quick- comfortable and exotic aircraft. Get sure of an airliner’s aerodynamic e cien- ly pay o as a rule of thumb, a 1% im- ready for the future of ight cy, since it is not designed for gliding. But provement knocks more than $1m o a air- the Gimli Glider incident, as it became liner’s fuel bill over its lifetime of roughly N THE evening of July 23rd 1983, Air known, helps illustrate the magnitude of 20 years, says Ihssane Mounir, Boeing’s OCanada Flight 143 ran out of fuel after advances in aviation technology. Im- vice-president of sales for China. These a series of human errors. The new Boeing proved e ciency means that Boeing’s new savings snowball. Fuel-sipping planes are 767, lightly loaded with 61 passengers and 787 airliner consumes about 40% less fuel more pro table, so banks will nance eight crew, became a glider with only 8,686 per passenger than its 1970s aircraft. Airbus them at lower interest rates. metres (28,500 feet) of altitude to reach the and other manufacturers have achieved nearest airport at Winnipeg, around similar results. Time to lose weight 120km (75 miles) away. Ten minutes later it Not all improvements in aircraft tech- In the push to improve e ciency, wing became clear that the plane was losing alti- nology are incremental. As myriad tech- aps are now operated with lightweight tude too fast to make it. nologies mature, new sorts of aircraft be- electrical systems instead of hydraulics. At The pilots changed course, hoping to come possible. Unmanned aircraft have least one airline, Australia’s Jetstar Air- reach a former air-force base near the town own at more than ve times the speed of ways, is replacing in- ight entertainment of Gimli. They were unaware that its run- sound. Last year a lightweight, piloted kit with Apple iPads, which are much ways had been converted into a drag-rac- Swiss aircraft, Solar Impulse, captured lighter. Flight Sciences International, a con- ing track. Spectators scattered when they enough solar energy during the day to y sultancy based in Santa Barbara, Califor- saw the silent approach of the aircraft. As throughout the night. Small drones are be- nia, has found that fuselage-insulation the aircraft’s wheels hit the racetrack, the ing developed with highly e cient wing- blanketing costs airlines unnecessarily: it front landing gear collapsed and the nose bottom infra-red cells that scavenge radia- absorbs humidity and becomes heavier slammed into the tarmac, sending sparks tion energy re ected up from the ground. over the years. This is typical of the zeal ying. Scraping against a guard rail that di- Boeing is developing unmanned spy air- with which savings are being sought. The vided the track in two, the aircraft skidded craft capable of staying aloft using hydro- only area where technologists have failed to a stop. No one was killed. gen power for ve years without refuell- to improve e ciency is in reducing the Had the pilots been ying one of to- ing. Drew Mallow, the project’s leader, calls weight of passengers, says John Corl of day’s more aerodynamic airliners, they Phantom Eye, a prototype with a 46-metre Flight Sciences. He is only half joking. could easily have reached Winnipeg’s air- wingspan, a poor man’s satellite . The fu- Aircraft engineers have for years sought port, says Carl Holden, a recreational-glid- ture of ight will involve gradual changes to replace metal components with light- er instructor and head of Holden Dynam- in the near term, with the prospect of more weight plastics reinforced with carbon - ics, a consultancy based in Sydney that radical shifts in the decades to come. bres. Such materials, known as compos- advises Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Much research has been driven by ef- ites, are generally 20-40% lighter according 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 The future of ight 11 Changing the shape of an aircraft can be done at a microscopic as well as a macroscopic level.
2 to ATK, an aerospace company based in turbofan engine, it uses a gearbox, rather down, increasing drag, in order to lift its Utah that makes them for aircraft manu- than a shaft, to transmit power from the nose up. The Double Bubble sports a wide, facturers. Composites account for as much turbine (which spins as hot gases blast out downward-sloping nose which air ow as 15% of today’s airliners, but some next- of the back) to the fan (which sucks in air at pushes up, so its tail wings can be much generation aircraft will be more composite the front). This allows the turbine to spin smaller. Conventional airframes require than metal, including the Boeing 787 faster than the fan, which is more e cient. heavy structural material to transfer the fu- (which enters service this year) and Airbus Called the PurePower PW1000G, it cuts selage’s weight laterally to landing gear A350 (due in 2013). fuel consumption (and noise) by about and wheels under the wings. The MIT New, lightweight ceramics will further 15%, says Paul Finklestein of Pratt & Whit- team reduced the plane’s weight about 1% reduce the need for metals in aircraft, says ney, saving about $400 per ight hour. by fattening the aircraft’s body essential- Joy de Lisser, vice-president of ATK Aero- More than 1,200 of the engines have been ly running the fuselage to the landing space Structures, the division developing ordered at an estimated $13m each. Deliv- gear , in the words of Mark Drela, the them. Ceramic composites can also with- eries begin in 2013. The rm’s president, team’s leader. The engines are mounted at stand hotter temperatures than metal al- David Hess, has said the new engine could the back of the fuselage, rather than under loys can. Accordingly, they are beginning double the size of the company, which had the wings. Air slipping along the fuselage to replace some metal parts in jet engines sales of nearly $13 billion last year. moves slower, so the engines ingest less developed by Snecma, a French engine- On most passenger jets, the wings and oxygen and burn less fuel. maker, and General Electric, an American fuselage generate about 90% and 10% of manufacturer. GE says it has shaved 136kg, the lift respectively. Working with funding Making planes more slippery or 3%, o the weight of an engine that pro- from NASA, aerospace engineers at the Changing the shape of an aircraft can be pels the Boeing 787 using a ceramic-com- Massachusetts Institute of Technology done at a microscopic as well as a macro- posites fan case and blade, a world rst. (MIT) have designed an aeroplane with a scopic level. Aircraft paint, viewed with a GE has also found a way to lighten met- body so fat, and wings so narrow, that the microscope, looks like the Pyrenees , says al components, including some for en- fuselage provides about a fth of the air- Paul Booker, managing director of tripleO, gines, by printing rather than forging craft’s lift. Its cross-section resembles that a rm based in Poole, England. His rm has them. Known as 3D printing or additive of two partially joined bubbles. The Dou- developed a way to reduce drag on aircraft manufacturing, the process involves build- ble Bubble , as it is called, looks awkward, by smoothing the painted surfaces with a ing components by zapping a succession but the team estimates that its design very thin layer of acrylic resin that lls in of thin layers of powdered metals with a would reduce fuel consumption by about tiny cracks. Britain’s easyJet, the rst com- laser or electron beam which melts and 70%. This is only partly because it would mercial carrier to use the product, had bonds the material. Precision is measured y about 10% slower than today’s airliners. three airliners coated about 16 months ago. in microns. Designers leave empty spaces Tail wings push the back of an aircraft The airline has since coated ve more inside some components, reducing their planes and two other airlines have also weight by a fth. The process is less given it a go. Mr Booker says the ex- expensive than hollowing out tra slipperiness cuts fuel consump- forged parts, says Luana Iorio, head tion by around 1%, so that the coat- of manufacturing technologies at ing treatment pays for itself within GE Global Research’s lab in Niskay- a few months. una, New York. She reckons that There may also be a way to cut GE’s printed, hollow parts will be aircraft drag by making some sur- used in passenger aircraft within faces less slippery. In research fund- about three years. ed by the European Union, Ales- In 2009 GE, working with sandro Bottaro of the University of NASA, America’s space agency, Genoa in Italy has devised small picked up work it had largely set keratin bristles that mimic the aside in the 1980s on a radically dif- smallest type of bird feathers, ferent sort of engine called an un- known as coverts. Vibrating in the ducted fan. It combines the fuel ef- wind, the bristles create some drag. ciency of a propeller engine with But they also reduce the wing’s slip- the greater power and acceleration stream, an area of low-pressure tur- of a jet by using two rings of short, bulence that pulls back on the propeller-like rotors that spin in wing, and hence reduce drag. A opposite directions in open air be- fuzzy tennis ball ies faster than a hind the jet housing. GE says the bald one for the same reason, Mr engine consumes almost a third Bottaro explains. less fuel than other designs. But it is However perfectly an aircraft is loud, and if a rotor breaks it could built, its full potential cannot be smash into the fuselage. harnessed without a perfectly cal- Pratt & Whitney, another Amer- culated trajectory. At most airports, ican engine-maker, has devised a tra c controllers organise the ap- di erent design that is far closer to proach and landing order of incom- widespread use. Called a geared Airbus imagines in- ight entertainment in 2050 ing planes in their last half-hour or 1 12 The future of ight The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
lation and training. Avinor Around 50 potential customers have put says it will take at least anoth- down a $250,000 deposit for the $80m jet, er ve years to deploy the which would y at 1.6 times the speed of technology widely in Norway. sound (Mach 1.6). Aerion does not yet have Saving fuel is all very well, a manufacturing partner, however. you may be thinking, but America’s armed forces see potential in what can technology do to im- hypersonic aircraft, which y at Mach 5 or prove conditions for passen- faster using a type of engine known as a gers? In the run-up to this scramjet. HTV-2, an unmanned hyperson- year’s Paris Air Show in June, ic aircraft designed to travel at Mach 20, Airbus released its vision of failed during a test ight last month. An- creature comforts for the air- other hypersonic craft, the X-51A Wave - liner of 2050. Cabin walls Rider developed by Boeing, has fared little have been replaced with a better. Of the two WaveRiders tested, both skeletal structure and trans- for short distances over the Paci c, one parent membrane. Vitalis- failed. But Joe Vogel, the project manager at ing swivel seats mould to, Boeing, says the technology has crossed and massage, each passen- over the threshold into hypersonic ight. ger’s body while harvesting its He reckons that scramjets might one day Aerion’s design (top) and the Double Bubble (below) heat to power individual power civilian aircraft. sound pods, mood lighting Some military types have enthused 2 so of ight. As a result, pilots waste fuel and holographic entertainment units. It that, before then, hypersonic troop carriers slowing down and speeding up as they de- sounds great, even if Airbus’s vice-presi- could be built. But Robert Mercier, a senior scend in staircase fashion. This and other dent of engineering, Charles Champion, technology o cial in the Air Force Re- ine ciencies such as circling while acknowledges that much of the kit cannot search Laboratory’s aerospace propulsion awaiting a landing slot will soon be great- be built with today’s technology. He points division, notes with understatement that ly reduced, thanks to a new sort of ight- out that in recent years the industry has parachuting into the trailing vortices of management software. placed a far higher priority on making air- such an aircraft would make for a rough Such software crunches data on each craft more e cient and comfortable than it ride. It is more likely, he says, that a hyper- aircraft’s performance and other tra c in has on making them go faster. sonic aircraft would be used as a high- the air or at airports to determine the opti- Yet despite the withdrawal from service speed cruise missile, to deliver a surprise mal ight plan. The software can work out, of Concorde in 2003, the dream of super- hammer-blow behind enemy lines. Using for example, the exact rate at which a plane sonic ight has not died. Dassault Avia- a long-range ballistic missile to do the job should rise into thinner air (to reduce drag) tion, a French rm, and Aerion and Gulf- would be risky, as its launch could be mis- as fuel burn makes it lighter. Aircraft can stream Aerospace, two American taken for an imminent nuclear strike. collect and exchange atmospheric data to companies, are among the rms develop- Might the idea of near-hypersonic pas- help each other ne-tune trajectory and ing technologies for private supersonic senger aircraft, which has lain dormant for speed. Crucially, the technology harnesses jets. Breaking the sound barrier generates a a few years, be coming back? At this year’s airliners’ ability to glide. With a favourable sonic boom, so supersonic travel is heavily Paris Air Show, EADS, the parent company wind, a new airliner’s engines can be idled restricted over land. Tests by NASA with a of Airbus, revealed a concept design for an more than 150km from an airport for a glid- modi ed ghter jet have shown that novel aircraft called the Zero Emission High Su- ing descent to the runway. airframe shapes can reduce the boom. But personic Transport (ZEHST), devised in A single such green approach , as it is Aerion reckons that a far better approach is conjunction with Japanese researchers. It known, saves about 100kg of fuel, says to abandon e orts to reduce the sonic has three separate kinds of engine: ordin- Torbjorn Henriksen, head of airline negoti- boom and y supersonic only over water. ary jet engines (running on biofuels made ations at Avinor, the operator of Norway’s The company’s 8-to-12-seat Supersonic from seaweed or algae) for take-o , rocket 19 commercial airports. Steve Fulton of Business Jet, designed but not yet built, engines to accelerate to Mach Naverus, a subsidiary of GE that designs sports thin but broad knife edge wings 2.5, and ramjets to reach Mach 4. and installs such systems, likens them to a and other aerodynamic features that The aircraft would carry 50-100 railway track: aeroplanes do not deviate produce less drag than compet- passengers and would travel from more than a wingspan from their charted ing designs, says Douglas Paris to Tokyo in around 2.5 hours, rath- courses and touch down within ten sec- Nichols of Aerion. er than the 11hours it takes today. onds of the predicted time. Even its designers admit that the The airport at Brisbane, Australia, is the ZEHST is unlikely to be ying before 2040. only one that fully uses the system so far. It But the future of air travel will look some- has reduced delays and cut noise in sur- thing like the ZEHST, declared Jean Botti, rounding neighbourhoods by nearly a director-general for technology and inno- third. If adopted across Europe, fuel costs vation at EADS. It sounds fanciful. But so (and pollution) for internal ights would too, not that long ago, did rapid and routine drop by more than 8%, says Mr Fulton. Doz- intercontinental air travel. In aviation, ens of airports are adopting the technol- what sounds outlandish today may be ogy, but the process requires a lot of instal- ZEHST the job for travellers in a hurry commonplace tomorrow. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Modelling behaviour 13
Game theory in practice
Computing: Software that models human behaviour can make forecasts, outfox rivals and transform negotiations
OR a man who claims to lack expertise Fin the eld, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an academic at New York University, has made some impressively accurate political forecasts. In May 2010 he predicted that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, would fall from power within a year. Nine months later Mr Mubarak ed Cairo amid massive street protests. In February 2008 Mr Bueno de Mesquita predicted that Paki- consulting out ts that run such computer consultant and Stanford University profes- stan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, would simulations for law rms, companies and sor, customised his game-theory software leave o ce by the end of summer. He was governments. Most decision-making ad- to assist a consortium of bidders. The re- gone before September. Five years before vice is political, in the broadest sense of the sult was a triumph. the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in word how best to outfox a trial prosecu- When the auction began, Dr Milgrom’s 1989, Mr Bueno de Mesquita correctly tor, sway a jury, win support from share- software tracked competitors’ bids to esti- named his successor, and, since then, has holders or woo alienated voters by shuf- mate their budgets for the 1,132 licences on made hundreds of prescient forecasts as a ing a political coalition and making o er. Crucially, the software estimated the consultant both to foreign governments legislative concessions. secret values bidders placed on speci c li- and to America’s State Department, Penta- But feeding software with good data on cences and determined that certain big li- gon and intelligence agencies. What is the all the players involved is especially tricky cences were being overvalued. It directed secret of his success? I don’t have in- for political matters. Reinier van Oosten of Dr Milgrom’s clients to obtain a patchwork sights the game does, he says. Decide, a Dutch rm that models political of smaller, less expensive licences instead. Mr Bueno de Mesquita’s game is a negotiations and vote-trading in European Two of his clients, Time Warner and Com- computer model he developed that uses a Union institutions, notes that forecasts go cast, paid about a third less than their com- branch of mathematics called game the- astray when people unexpectedly give in petitors for equivalent spectrum, saving al- ory, which is often used by economists, to to non-rational emotions , such as ha- most $1.2 billion. work out how events will unfold as people tred, rather than pursuing what is appar- Advances in game theory have picked and organisations act in what they per- ently in their best interests. Sorting out up dramatically in recent years as it has ceive to be their best interests. Numerical people’s motivations is much easier, how- become apparent that failing to do a values are placed on the goals, motivations ever, when making money is the main ob- proper analysis can be costly, says Sergiu and in uence of players negotiators, ject. Accordingly, modelling behaviour us- Hart, a colleague of Dr Aumann’s at He- business leaders, political parties and orga- ing game theory is proving especially brew University. For example, a few years nisations of all stripes, and, in some cases, useful when applied to economics. ago Israel’s government added a novel their o cials and supporters. The comput- twist to an auction of oil-re nery facilities. er model then considers the options open Follow the money To encourage more and higher bids, the to the various players, determines their Modelling auctions has proved especially government o ered a $12m prize to the sec- likely course of action, evaluates their abil- successful, says Robert Aumann, an aca- ond-highest bidder. It was an expensive ity to in uence others and hence predicts demic at the Hebrew University of Jerusa- mistake. Without the incentive, the highest the course of events. Mr Mubarak’s in u- lem who received a Nobel prize in 2005 for bid would have been about $12m higher, ence, for example, waned as cuts in Ameri- his work in game-theory economics. Bids, an analysis showed participants bid low can aid threatened his ability to keep cro- being quanti ed, facilitate analysis, and because the loser would strike it rich. Com- nies in the army and security forces happy. predicting the right answer can be very lu- bine that sum with the prize payout, and Underemployed citizens then realised that crative. Consulting rms are popping up to the government’s loss amounted to disgruntled o cials would be less willing help clients design pro table auctions or roughly $24m. The conclusion, then, is to use violence to put down street protests win them less expensively. In the run-up to don’t presume you know what the sol- against the ailing dictator. an online auction in 2006 of radio-spec- ution is without help from modelling Mesquita & Roundell, Mr Bueno de trum licences by America’s Federal Com- software, says Brad Miller, senior modeller Mesquita’s company, is just one of several munications Commission, Paul Milgrom, a at Charles River Associates, a consultancy 1 14 Modelling behaviour The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 The use of modelling makes business clients more inclined to adopt longer-term strategies.
2 in Boston. It designs game-theory software an important role in nding Osama bin O’Neill, a game theorist at the University to model industrial auctions and the plot- Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, of California, Los Angeles, describes how ting of corporate mergers and acquisitions. says Mr Owen. it can facilitate divorce settlements. A hus- Software is not always needed. A stu- Where is all this heading? Alongside band and wife are each given a number of dent at Hebrew University, for example, the arms race of increasingly elaborate points which they secretly allocate to demonstrated the Israeli government’s modelling software, there are also e orts household assets they desire. The wife $24m loss using pen and paper. It took him to develop software that can assist in nego- may inform the software that her valua- about two days, however, according to a tation and mediation. Two decades ago tion of the family car is, say, 15 points. If the professor there. Software, naturally, is far Clara Ponsatí, a Spanish academic, came husband puts the car’s value at 10 points, faster. But gathering and handling the nec- up with a clever idea while pondering the he cannot later claim that he deserves essary data can require expensive exper- arduous Israeli-Palestinian peace process. more compensation for not getting the car tise or training. Decide, the Dutch consul- As negotiators everywhere know, the rst than she would be entitled to. tancy, usually charges 20,000-70,000 side to disclose all that it is willing to sacri- ($28,000-100,000) to solve a problem us- ce (or pay) loses considerable bargaining Predicting an end to con ict ing its software, called DCSim, because it power. Bereft of leverage, it can be pushed Participants need to be sure that such me- must rst conduct lengthy interviews with back to its bottom line by a clever oppo- diation technology is fully neutral. For experts. Its clients include government bo- nent. But if neither side reveals the conces- large deals, audit rms closely monitor the dies in the Netherlands and abroad, and sions it is prepared to make, negotiations development and use of such software to big companies including IBM, a computer can stall or collapse. In a paper published ensure that no party secretly obtains infor- giant, and ABN AMRO, a Dutch bank. in 1992, Dr Ponsatí described how software mation about another’s bargaining posi- PA Consulting, a British rm, designs could be designed to break the impasse. tions, says Benny Moldovanu, a game bespoke models to help its clients solve Di cult negotiations can often be theorist at the University of Bonn. He ad- speci c problems in areas as diverse as nudged along by neutral mediators, espe- vises rms that design negotiation soft- pharmaceuticals, fossil-fuel energy and cially if they are entrusted with the secret ware for privatisation schemes and whole- the production of television shows. British sale-electricity markets. This approach government agencies have asked PA Con- will spread to other utility markets, such as sulting to build models to test regulatory water, he believes. schemes and zoning rules. To give a simple Could software-based mediation example: if two shrewd, competing ice- spread from divorce settlements and utili- cream sellers share a long beach, they will ty pricing to resolving political and mili- set up stalls back-to-back in the middle and tary disputes? Game theorists, who con- stay put, explains Stephen Black, a model- sider all these to be variations of the same ler in the rm’s London headquarters. Un- kind of problem, have developed an in- fortunately for potential customers at the triguing conceptual model of war. The far ends of the beach, each seller prevents principle of convergence , as it is known, the other from relocating no other spot holds that armed con ict is, in essence, an would be closer to more people. Introduce information-gathering exercise. Belliger- a third seller, however, and the sti ing ents ght to determine the military equilibrium is broken as a series of market- strength and political resolve of their op- energising relocations and pricing changes ponents; when all sides have converged kick in. The use of modelling makes busi- on accurate and identical assessments, a ness clients more inclined to adopt longer- surrender or peace deal can be hammered term strategies, Dr Black says. out. Each belligerent has a strong motiva- But game-theory software can also tion to hit the enemy hard to show that it work well outside the sphere of econom- bottom lines of all parties. Dr Ponsatí’s values victory very highly. Such a model ics. In 2007 America’s military provided idea was that if a human mediator was not might be said to re ect poorly on human Mr Bueno de Mesquita with classi ed in- trusted, a ordable or available, a comput- nature. But some game theorists believe formation to enable him to model the po- er could do the job instead. Negotiating that the model could be harnessed to make litical impact of moving an aircraft carrier parties would give the software con den- diplomatic negotiations a more viable close to North Korea (he will not reveal the tial information on their bargaining posi- substitute for armed con ict. ndings). Game-theory software can even tions after each round of talks. Once posi- Today’s game-theory software is not help locate a terrorist’s hideout. To run sim- tions on both sides were no longer yet su ciently advanced to mediate be- ulations, Guillermo Owen of the Naval mutually exclusive, the software would tween warring countries. But one day op- Postgraduate School in Monterey, Califor- split the di erence and propose an agree- ponents on the brink of war might be nia, uses intelligence data from the US Air ment. Dr Ponsatí, now head of the Institute tempted to use it to exchange information Force to estimate on a 100-point scale the of Economic Analysis at the Autonomous without having to kill and die for it. They importance a wanted man attaches to his University of Barcelona, says such media- could learn how a war would turn out, likes ( shing, say) and priorities (remain- tion machines could lubricate negotia- skip the ghting and strike a deal, Mr ing hidden or, at greater risk of discovery, tions by unlocking information that would Bueno de Mesquita suggests. Over-opti- recruiting suicide-bombers). Such factors otherwise be withheld from an opponent mistic, perhaps but he does have rather determine where and how terrorists de- or human mediator. an impressive track record when it comes cide to live. Game-theory software played Such software is now emerging. Barry to predicting the future. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Inside story 15
Muscling in on motors
in reverse as generators, transforming ments can do useful work. Unlike a rotary movement into electricity. motor, which requires a crank arrange- Materials science: Electroactive There are two main types of electro- ment to produce linear motion, an arti - polymers, also known as arti cial active polymer (EAP), which are usually re- cial muscle can do it directly, for example muscles, could replace electric ferred to as ionic and dielectric (see dia- in a smartphone’s autofocus mechanism, motors in some applications gram on next page). An ionic EAP consists which requires tiny, precise linear move- of a sponge-like polymer, soaked in a liq- ments. Moreover, a stack of several dielec- T IS di cult to imagine a world without uid electrolyte containing free- oating tric EAPs can generate substantial forces Ielectric motors. They are everywhere: positive ions, and sandwiched between using little power. They are also light, spinning discs inside DVD players, power- two electrodes. When a voltage is applied, which is one reason why America’s space ing washing machines and fans, keeping the positively charged ions move towards agency, NASA, is so interested in them, says trains and escalators moving, starting car the negative electrode, carrying electrolyt- Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a physicist and pioneer engines, waving windscreen wipers and ic uid with them. The sponge swells up in the eld at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab- making phones vibrate when new mes- on one side and shrinks on the other, oratory in Pasadena, California. sages arrive. If you want to transform elec- which causes it to move. This kind of EAP trical energy into physical motion, you use can bend a lot, producing a large move- Brain and brawn a motor. But that could be about to change ment when a voltage is applied. A single Using arti cial muscles in place of motors as a lighter, more exible and less power- muscle of this kind can be used to power a could reduce the size and weight of space hungry alternative starts to muscle in, windscreen wiper, for example, by making probes and robots. The next-generation quite literally, on the motor’s patch. it bend one way and then the other. Two or space telescope will have to be signi cant- Researchers have been experimenting more such muscles can be con gured as a ly bigger, says Dr Bar-Cohen. But doubling with arti cial muscles electroactive po- gripper to pick up objects. But the electro- the diameter of the telescope’s mirror, lymers that can expand or contract when a lyte can evaporate, causing the muscle to without changing its design, would in- voltage is applied for decades. But until dry out when exposed to the air. And ionic crease its weight fourfold. So one idea be- recently researchers assumed that they EAPs revert to their original shape as soon ing explored is to make in atable space would mainly be used, as their name sug- as the applied voltage is removed. telescopes that use arti cial muscles to un- gests, to move the limbs of robots. It turns Dielectric EAPs, by contrast, are easier furl the mirror and then, once it is fully ex- out, however, that with a few design twists to work with and have much more pulling tended, to adjust its optics, much like the they can be applied to many other tasks. and pushing power. They consist of a ex- muscles in an eye, he says. Arti cial muscles can provide force-feed- ible polymer sandwiched between two Just how strong are these muscles? In back wobbles and clicks in mobile devices, electrodes. When a voltage is applied, posi- 2005 Dr Bar-Cohen decided to nd out by for example, or move components inside tive charge builds up on one electrode and pitting a human against a trio of robotic autofocus camera lenses. With the right negative charge on the other, creating an at- arms, based on EAPs, in an arm-wrestling con guration of muscles it is even possible tractive force that squeezes the polymer. contest. In theory it should be possible to to produce rotary motion. And, just like As the polymer contracts in one direction, make EAPs as strong as human muscle, he motors, arti cial muscles can also be used it expands in another, and these move- says. (By weight, EAPs are 40 times strong 1 16 Inside story The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Using arti cial muscles instead of motors could cut the size and weight of space probes and robots.
2 er than human muscle, according to re- well, says Dr Anderson. This is hard to into the EAP itself, making the device both searchers at the Auckland Bioengineering achieve with rigid bearings and could lead soft and self-contained. These could be Institute.) Even so, the person representing to strange new modes of locomotion, al- used to produce energy on a large scale, in humanity in the contest a 17-year-old lowing robots to walk or roll, depending wave-power generators, or on a small high-school student from San Diego called upon which is more appropriate. scale, by integrating small, lightweight de- Panna Felsen took a matter of seconds to As well as working on rotary motion, vices into the heels of shoes. Previous re- crush each of her three robotic opponents. Dr Anderson’s group is also investigating search by SRI estimated that this arrange- To Dr Bar-Cohen this humiliating defeat is the use of EAPs as electrical generators. ment could generate around one watt of a clear sign that it is not how big your mus- The pioneering work in this eld was done power from normal walking. cles are that counts, it is how you use them. by researchers at SRI International, former- And it is precisely by using dielectric ly known as the Stanford Research Insti- Pressing forward EAPs in a clever way that, earlier this year, a tute, a non-pro t research out t spun out Using your shoes to recharge your phone group of researchers in New Zealand man- of Stanford University that is based in as you walk has obvious appeal, though aged to get muscles to do something that Menlo Park, California, and holds many of quite how the two would be connected is no living creature has managed to pull o : the patents on EAPs. unclear. But the rst product intended to turn a wheel. With the possible exception Although SRI researchers have shown put arti cial muscles into consumers’ of the propeller-like agella of bacteria, that it is possible to use arti cial muscles to hands will be aimed at video gamers. A there are no examples of organisms that convert kinetic energy into electricity, get- company called Arti cial Muscle based in use muscles to create continuous rotary ting the process started has always been a Sunnyvale, California, which was spun motion. But a team led by Iain Anderson, bit of a problem, because dielectric EAPs out of SRI International, is about to launch the head of the Auckland Bioengineering need a small initial charge in each cycle. a product called the Mophie Pulse, a hap- Institute’s Biomimetics Lab, has built an SRI solved this problem using an external tic case for the iPod touch. It uses a tech- entire menagerie of muscle-powered mo- priming circuit, but Dr Anderson’s team nology called ViviTouch which is designed tors. Although there are di erences be- has found a way to integrate the primer to provide gamers with realistic tactile tween them, the basic principle for each is feedback, letting them feel every tremor the same. The muscles manipulate the and explosion in a game or conveying shaft of the motor like a nger and thumb Pumping ions more subtle sensations, like a heartbeat, would hold a pencil, says Dr Anderson. How artificial muscles work says Marcus Rosenthal of Arti cial Muscle. These rotary motors (see picture on pre- An ionic artificial muscle consists of a permeable Existing haptic devices use rotary mo- polymer membrane, immersed in a positively vious page) resemble bicycle wheels that charged electrolyte and sandwiched between two tors with o -centre weights to generate have had their spokes replaced with thin, electrodes. Positive ions can move freely within such tremors. But this approach only al- black slivers of EAP. With at least six per the membrane, but negative ions cannot. lows vibrations within a narrow band of motor, working as opposing pairs, these – + Off +– On frequencies to be generated, says Mr Ro- muscles are positioned between the outer senthal. By using a pair of arti cial muscles rim and the central driveshaft. To make the to move a weight and generate tremors, his shaft turn, the muscles work in concert, rm’s technology provides far more subtle rhythmically contracting, one pair after an- Positive ions control. It’s the di erence between a door- other. As they do so, each pair applies pres- bell and a speaker, he says. And it uses sure to a soft ring around the driveshaft. Electrodes one-third of the energy of a conventional The pulsating muscles collectively and haptic device. Beyond gaming, the technol- continuously pinch the shaft and apply a Electrolyte ogy can also be used to provide better sen- rotational force, causing it to turn. When a voltage is applied, positive ions in the sory feedback when using touch screens. Strictly speaking this is not the rst time electrolyte drift towards the negative electrode, Existing devices can emulate a clicking arti cial muscles have been used to turn a carrying electrolytic fluid along with them. The sensation when the user touches an on- polymer expands at the negative electrode and wheel, says Dr Anderson. But it was previ- shrinks at the positive electrode, causing it to move. screen button, for example, but Arti cial ously done using a ratcheting mechanism Muscle’s approach can create many di er- which required heavy solid parts such as a In a dielectric artificial muscle, a flexible polymer ent types of click, depending on the kind clutch. His team’s new design eliminates is sandwiched between two electrodes. of control being pressed. the need for anything rigid, such as bear- – Arti cial muscles seem unlikely ever to ings or gears. The breakthrough idea was to + Electrodes be able to compete with hydraulic actua- grip the shaft from both sides, which made Off tors for strength, or combustion engines bearings redundant, he says. for speed and torque. But in some applica- Flexible polymer Dr Anderson concedes that these mus- tions, it seems, they could give the venera- cle motors are unlikely to start powering – ––––––– ble electric motor a run for its money. And cars or trains any time soon. They cannot + although they may yet nd uses in Mars come close to electric motors in revolu- +++++++ rovers and space telescopes, in the short tions per minute, for a start. But it has On term they would appear to have more po- When a voltage is applied, positive charges build opened up a new design space, he says. up on one electrode, and negative charges on the tential inside mobile phones, cameras, For example, by using multiple motors on other. Because unlike charges attract, the game controllers and other consumer- the same shaft it is possible to get more electrodes move towards each other, squeezing electronics products. Having originated in the polymer and causing it to move. than one degree of freedom. Not only can the eld of robotics, arti cial muscles’ real The Economist they turn the shaft but they can lift it as Sources: Auckland Bioengineering Institute; strength, it seems, may lie elsewhere. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Brainwave controllers 17
them, for instance, to attend a family re- union virtually. Dr Minguez is also part of a group developing a robot arm that could help patients reach for a drink or feed themselves. The University of Zaragoza has set up a spin-o to commercialise the research and Dr Minguez expects a fully edged device by 2014. The number of electrodes needed to get useful EEG results is steadily decreasing. Several EEG devices have been released in recent years sporting fewer sensors than the high-end kit, notably for use in video gaming. In May an organisation called Thought-Wired, based in New Zealand, showed o a system that uses a commer- cially available 14-sensor headset called the Emotiv EPOC, which costs around $300 and was designed with gaming in mind, as a smart-home controller. It en- ables disabled people to control lights, Put your thinking cap on make phone calls, operate air conditioners and perform other simple tasks. Early e orts to use rudimentary head- sets for computer games were not exactly riveting. Two headset-based toys released in 2009 Uncle Milton’s Star Wars Force Consumer electronics: Once the stu of fables, hoaxes and science ction, Trainer and Mattel’s Mind ex used play- controlling things via thought alone is fast becoming a reality ers’ concentration and relaxation levels, gauged by comparing brain waves of dif- HE idea of moving objects with the Electroencephalography (EEG), which ferent frequencies, to make a ball rise or fall Tpower of the mind has fascinated man- measures electrical activity along the using air ow from a fan. kind for millennia. At rst it was the prov- scalp, has long been used clinically to diag- Since then, however, headset prices ince of gods, then sorcerers and witches. In nose epilepsy, comas and brain death, and have tumbled, leading to several niftier of- the late 19th century psychokinesis, as the as a research tool in neuroscience and cog- ferings. For instance, researchers in Ger- trick then came to be known, became a le- nitive psychology. Last year an Austrian many have used Emotiv’s headset to build gitimate object of study, as part of the na- company called Guger Technologies re- a device which allows a driver to tell a car scent eld of parapsychology, before fall- leased a system that uses EEG to allow par- to go left or right, accelerate or slow down ing into disrepute in the arch-rationalist alysed patients to type. The system high- by thinking about it. In July Toyota un- 20th century. Since the 1990s, however, it lights letters one by one on a grid. When veiled a concept bicycle, the PXP, with a has seen something of a revival, under a the desired letter comes up an EEG headset thought-controlled gear-shift mechanism. more scienti cally acceptable guise. picks up the brain activity associated with Meanwhile, a British company called There is nothing particularly magical recognising it. At ve to ten characters per Myndplay is creating short interactive about moving things with thoughts. Hu- minute the process is slow and laborious, lms in which viewers step into the shoes man beings perform the feat every time but it o ers patients a way to communicate of the protagonists and in uence the plot they move a limb, or breathe, by sending with others. The device can also be used to by focusing or relaxing. Mohammed electrical impulses to appropriate muscles. attract a minder’s attention, to get a com- Azam, Myndplay’s boss, thinks the tech- If these electrical signals could be detected puter to read out a text or to send com- nology has potential beyond entertain- and interpreted, the argument goes, there mands to external devices such as a TV. ment. For example, he has been working is in principle no reason why they could on an app in which users must keep their not be used to steer objects other than the Follow the jumping blue dot cool in various dating scenarios. Other thinker’s own body. Indeed, over the past A team at the University of Zaragoza, in projects include training for job interviews two decades brain-computer interfaces Spain, led by Javier Minguez, has devel- and a virtual-therapy app to help treat (BCIs) which use electrodes implanted in oped some promising prototypes using stress and phobias. Myndplay will unveil the skull have enabled paralysed patients similar principles. One is a wheelchair that its latest product at the Tokyo Games Show to control computer cursors, robotic arms generates a 3D map on a screen. A blue dot on September 15th. and wheelchairs. jumps between places on the map and In April NeuroSky, a Californian maker Now, though, non-invasive BCIs, where when it hits the desired destination, the of EEG headgear, launched its $100 Mind- electrodes sit on the scalp instead of bur- EEG electrodes pick this up and steer the Wave headset, which reduces the number rowing through it, are nally becoming a wheelchair towards it. Another lets severe- of sensors to just one. This is possible using realistic alternative to the complicated sur- ly disabled patients use a real-time video algorithms that lter out interference gical procedure that implants necessitate. camera connected to the internet, allowing caused by external electrical activity. The 1 18 Brainwave controllers The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
pupils’ needs. converted EEG readings of people drinking Market-research com- vodka cocktails into colourful, real-time vi- panies, too, have sual displays. Chris Meyer, a graphic de- jumped on the BCI signer from California, has used the tech- bandwagon. Propo- nology to modify his Nerf gun so that he nents of the newish can shoot foam bullets using thought eld of neuromarket- alone. Others have gone even further. One ing trumpet non-inva- group of artists from Toronto used a Neu- sive BCI as a way for roSky headset connected to a gas canister companies to gain in- to generate seven-metre (23-foot) ames. sights into how con- As might be expected, not everyone sumers perceive their shares the enthusiasm for supplanting products, packaging or mankind’s traditional, arm’s length rela- advertisements. In tionship with technology with a deeper, Simpler sensors: Headsets from Emotiv March NeuroFocus, anoth- BCI-mediated sort. Jens Clausen, a medical (above) and NeuroSky (below) er California-based out t, ethicist at Tübingen University, warns that demonstrated what it claims is the rst excessive use of BCI for gaming could alter 2 American Olympic archery team has used medical-grade dry EEG headset. The com- brain activity in ways that conventional the company’s technology to help athletes pany, which was recently bought by Niel- gaming does not, and that as yet are poorly gain and retain composure. B-Bridge Inter- sen, a big research rm, has been using understood. And blurring the distinction national, NeuroSky’s partner, has conventional EEG devices (which require between thinking about an act and actual- launched BrainAthlete, a golf visor gooey conductivity gels), in its neuromar- ly performing it raises some tricky moral equipped with two EEG sensors. It lets keting activities for around ve years. and philosophical questions. players plot their concentration levels at Mynd, the rm’s new wireless headset, Yet as it stands, the technology seems important moments in a game during a will have between 32 and 64 sensors, and poised for a period of rapid development golf swing, say on a chart and, in so doing, will begin commercial use from Septem- which both the needy and thrill-seekers helps them learn to ignore distractions. ber. A.K. Pradeep, the company’s boss, says are bound to greet with cheers. As Tan Le, There are some decidedly frivolous ap- that by measuring attention, engagement co-founder of Emotiv, the headset-maker, plications for EEG technology, too, such as and memory retention, its equipment can told the TED conference last year, We are a pair of cat ears on a hairband that stand gauge purchase intent, novelty factor and only really scratching the surface of what is up when the wearer is concentrating and comprehension of an advertisement. possible. Those scratches are, however, lie down when he or she is relaxed. Videos Others dismiss neuromarketing as junk getting deeper all the time. 7 of the one-o toy proved such a hit online science, at least for now. Although there is that its Japanese creator, Neurowear, is evidence that EEG-based metrics can re- considering mass production. ect cognitive processes of interest to mar- keters, says Phil Harris, who lectures on Not all fun and games neuromarketing at the University of Mel- On a more serious note, earlier this year bourne, no published evidence so far indi- Myndplay games and interactive lms cates that portable dry-electrode systems were used as part of a scheme to reduce re- o er a reliable glimpse of these processes. o ending rates and anti-social behaviour The Advertising Research Foundation among prison inmates aged 18 to 25. We (ARF), an industry body, recently carried found it to be an excellent tool to show out an evaluation of neuromarketing tech- them how they can develop greater con- nologies. NeuroFocus and EmSense, an- trol over their thought processes, says other company that uses dry EEG headsets David Apparicio, a magistrate who spear- in market research, declined to take part. headed the programme, called Chrysalis. Dr Pradeep says he thinks the methods the He hopes to commission customised con- ARF used in its appraisal were awed. The tent to test young o enders’ reactions in eight companies that did participate, scenarios such as being challenged to a which were asked to analyse a campaign ght or invited to commit a crime. for a toothpaste brand, came up with SpeedMath, a game that comes with widely varying conclusions. the NeuroSky headset, shows students which types of task require most mental Mind-blowing e ort on their part, with the aim of encour- Artists using BCI face no such aging more focused work. Jack Mostow, a niggles. At the Future- researcher at Carnegie Mellon University Everything festival, in Pittsburgh, has used NeuroSky’s head- which was held in May sets to distinguish between the patterns of in Manchester, Marcos brain activity involved in reading easy and Lutyens created an in- di cult sentences. This, he thinks, means teractive multimedia that EEG could be used to tailor teaching to installation which The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Brain scan 19 Disrupting the disrupters
changes in the technological landscape mean some relatively big companies can Marc Andreessen made his name still grow to many times their current size. taking on Microsoft in the browser He reckons that talk of overheated valua- wars. Now he is stirring things up tions among social-media rms is being again as a venture capitalist driven by people who got their ngers burned in the dotcom bust and can’t see OFTWARE is eating the world, that the world has changed since then. S proclaims Marc Andreessen, the All this bubble stu is people ghting the 40-year-old co-founder of Andreessen last war, he says. Horowitz, a venture-capital rm in Silicon Mr Andreessen is also frustrated with Valley that has leapt to prominence since Cassandras who occasionally predict that he set it up in mid-2009 with his partner, innovation in computer science is pretty Ben Horowitz. That alimentary analogy is much over. Andreessen Horowitz’s part- shorthand, in Andreessen-speak, for the ners believe there are still plenty more phenomenon in which industry after black swans ideas with the potential to industry, from media to nancial services trigger dramatic changes in technology to to health care, is being chewed up by the come in computing, which explains why rise of the internet and the spread of they have resisted the temptation to copy smartphones, tablet computers and other other big venture out ts that have div- fancy electronic devices. Mr Andreessen ersi ed into new areas such as biotech and his colleagues are doing their best to and clean tech. This is an evergreen area. speed up this digital digestion process Just when you think computer science is and make money from it as they do so. stabilising, everything changes, he says. Andreessen Horowitz has raised piles For instance, he believes that net- of cash from investors it has some $1.2 working and storage technology is about billion under management and has been to go through the same kind of funda- eagerly putting the money to work both in mental transition that the server business large deals, such as a $50m investment in experienced in the late 1990s, when ex- Skype, an internet-calling service recently pensive, proprietary servers were re- acquired by Microsoft, and in a host of placed by much cheaper ones that used smaller companies, such as TinyCo, a new technology. That shift made possible maker of mobile games. It has also taken the explosive growth of rms such as stakes in several of the biggest social- Google and Facebook, who bought large networking rms, including Twitter, Face- numbers of cheap servers to power their book and Foursquare (a service that lets businesses. Mr Andreessen reckons a people broadcast their whereabouts to similar change in the networking and their friends). Along the way it has attract- storage world will lead to the creation of ed some prominent supporters. Larry many more new companies. Summers, a former treasury secretary, is a He is also convinced that there will be special adviser to the rm and Michael dramatic changes in the realm of personal Ovitz, a former Hollywood power-broker, technology. One of the companies that is among its investors. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in is Some rivals argue that by making big Jawbone. Best known for its Bluetooth- bets on relatively mature companies such equipped headsets and portable speakers, as Facebook, Mr Andreessen’s rm is the rm is developing plans for a range of acting more like a private-equity rm than wearable smart devices that operate on a as a nurturer of edgling businesses and single software platform, or body-area is contributing to a bubble in tech valua- network . Jawbone is the new Sony, tions too. They’re behaving in ways that claims Mr Andreessen, who predicts that will not be helpful to them in the long its future products will prove wildly suc- run, gripes a nancier at a competing cessful as people carry more and more venture rm, who insists on anonymity networked gadgets around with them. for fear of alienating Andreessen Horo- witz’s in uential founders. From boom to bust Pooh-poohing such criticisms, Mr It is tempting to discount such a grandiose Andreessen argues that growth in- claim as typical venture-capital pu ery. vestments, such as the one in Skype But Mr Andreessen is hardly a typical which was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 bil- venture capitalist. Raised in small towns lion in May, netting Andreessen Horowitz in Iowa and Wisconsin, he started playing a return of over three times its original around on the internet while at university stake make sense because profound and co-created Mosaic, which became the 1 20 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011
Just when you think computer science is stabilising, everything changes.
2 rst widely used web browser. After Horowitz has invested. has a preference for America because he moving to Silicon Valley, he started Net- His fans claim that Mr Andreessen’s believes it remains the best place in the scape Communications when he was 22 ability to draw insightful conclusions from world to build companies. Still, many years old. Its stockmarket otation in 1995 these trends helps Andreessen Horowitz internet start-ups need to think global marked the beginning of the dotcom stand out from the crowd. In a world early on these days, which is one reason boom and made Mr Andreessen a celebri- where there is a lot of dreaming, hoping why Andreessen Horowitz has engaged ty in the business world. and guessing, Marc takes a really analyti- Mr Summers to give it advice on every- Having at rst dismissed Netscape, cal approach, says Mr Summers, who thing from pricing strategies to geopolitics. Microsoft sought to crush the edgling signed on as a part-time adviser to the rm Yet Mr Andreessen is especially bullish company, whose browser posed a threat after meeting with a number of other about Silicon Valley, where the process of to the dominance of Microsoft’s Windows venture out ts. Mr Andreessen’s symbiot- knowledge-sharing that drives innovation platform. Mr Andreessen maintains that ic relationship with Mr Horowitz, a highly has been greatly accelerated by the in- most big companies are painfully slow to experienced manager, is also said to be ternet and the rise of social networking. It react to upstarts that might threaten their central to the rm’s success. Tim Howes, a now feels like we were operating in the business a point made in Clayton Chris- co-founder of RockMelt, a browser com- Stone Age when I rst came out here, he tensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilem- pany in which Andreessen Horowitz has says. Another notable change is a demo- ma , which is one of the few business- invested, jokes that the two men have cratisation of entrepreneurialism in the school texts Mr Andreessen thinks is worked together for so long that they are Valley. Entrepreneurs no longer simply worth reading. But he admits Microsoft like an old married couple who comple- follow a well-worn path to venture funds’ did a remarkably good job in the 1990s. ment one another perfectly. doors from a handful of giant technology After a bruising battle a much-dimin- companies such as HP and Intel; today ished Netscape was sold to AOL in 1999 The Hollywood treatment they come from a much wider range of and Mr Andreessen went on to found Their partnership has spawned a bold backgrounds. In addition, says Mr An- Loudcloud, a cloud-computing rm, with new approach to rm-building in Silicon dreessen, there has recently been a mas- Mr Horowitz and other executives. But Valley. Most venture rms employ a skele- sive brain drain from Boston to the Valley, Loudcloud was soon caught up in the ton sta of in-house experts in areas such which has all but gutted Boston as a place fallout from the dotcom bust. To survive, it as recruiting and marketing to help advise for high-tech entrepreneurship . shed sta , renamed itself Opsware and start-ups. Andreessen Horowitz, which This narrow geographic focus means focused on software development before has a total sta of 36, has taken a di erent that Andreessen Horowitz could be in being sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 approach. In addition to its six general danger of missing out on the fat pro ts to billion in 2007. Mr Andreessen then spent partners, the rm has hired a bevy of be made backing entrepreneurial out ts some time as an angel investor before executives who are specialists in partic- founded in some of the world’s largest launching Andreessen Horowitz. ular areas, including 11dedicated to re- and fastest-growing markets. But Mr Mr Andreessen’s own experience as cruitment. This set-up, says Mr Andrees- Andreessen likes to point out that it is no practising entrepreneur makes him ideally sen, is inspired by Creative Artists Agency, accident that Silicon Valley has produced placed to counsel the bosses of start-ups which used to be run by Mr Ovitz. It and a string of success stories from Netscape to that his rm has funded, including Mark other Hollywood talent-management eBay, Google, Facebook and Twitter. Zuckerberg of Facebook and Mark Pincus companies spend a great deal of time China, India and other markets may be of Zynga, a social-gaming company. Mr nurturing directors and lm stars, and exciting places, but a large proportion of Andreessen seems especially fond of helping them to nd jobs. Andreessen the software that is eating the world still what he calls founder CEOs , perhaps Horowitz wants to do the same thing for seems to come from California. 7 because he was once one himself. Many talented tech folk, whose career paths venture rms tend to back young entrepre- might one day involve a stint at one of the rms it backs. O er to readers neurs for a period before replacing them Reprints of Technology Quarterly are available with professional managers. But Mr An- This in-house entourage also re ects from the Rights and Syndication Department. dreessen argues that founders who stuck Mr Andreessen’s rm belief that many A minimum order of ve copies is required. with their businesses for a long while start-ups today are damaging their pros- were often the ones who created many of pects by starving areas such as sales and Corporate o er the biggest successes in technology, in- marketing of investment on the often Customisation options on corporate orders of cluding Microsoft (Bill Gates), Amazon misguided assumption the internet will 100 or more are available. Please contact us to discuss your requirements. (Je Bezos) and Oracle (Larry Ellison). magically guarantee them a sizeable mar- For more information on how to order special Another reason that Mr Andreessen ket. Mr Andreessen says he really wants to reports, reprints or any queries you may have has become something of an entrepre- back full-spectrum rms that aim to be please contact: neur-magnet is his extensive network of outstanding in every operational area, contacts in Silicon Valley. He sits on the rather than just a few. Andreessen Horo- The Rights and Syndication Department boards of Hewlett-Packard, eBay and witz’s team will provide advice and guid- The Economist Facebook, among others. This gives him ance on how best to achieve this. 26 Red Lion Square London WC1R 4HQ an ideal perch from which to spot trends Many of these rms will be American Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8148 forming. Marc has a view of the entire ones. Mr Andreessen won’t rule out in- Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492 tech ecosystem that very few people vesting in other countries Skype, for e-mail: [email protected] have, says David Lieb, the boss of Bump, example, started in Estonia and is now www.economist.com.rights a wireless start-up in which Andreessen based in Luxembourg but says his rm