Dead Man Walking

Back in March 2010--yes, more than seven years ago--I blogged about 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.  In only seven years, that goal has become even more a remote idea than it was even then.

The Scientific American reported ten days ago that we breached the 410 ppm threshold!

In what’s become a spring tradition like Passover and Easter, carbon dioxide has set a record high each year since measurements began. It stood at 280 ppm when record keeping began at Mauna Loa in 1958. In 2013, it passed 400 ppm. Just four years later, the 400 ppm mark is no longer a novelty. It’s the norm.

In 1958, it was only at 280 ppm  Think about that for a minute.

The article ends with this:

Right now we’re on track to create a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century.

Keep in mind that our species was not around 50 million years ago.  So, yes, what happened?  It was the Eocene:

a period when the world was completely different than the present due to extreme heat and oceans that covered a wide swath of currently dry land.
“The early Eocene was much warmer than today: global mean surface temperature was at least 10°C (18°F) warmer than today,” Dana Royer, a paleoclimate researcher at Wesleyan University who co-authored the new research, said. “There was little-to-no permanent ice. Palms and crocodiles inhabited the Canadian Arctic.”

For all we know, we seem to be headed towards "little-to-no permanent ice."

The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, suggests a huge assessment of the region. The warming is hastening the melting of Arctic ice and boosting sea-level rise.

Imagine that!  The more worrisome aspect is that what happens at the Arctic does not merely stay at the Arctic.  The Economist writes that we should be afraid. Very afraid.

The right response is fear. The Arctic is not merely a bellwether of matters climatic, but an actor in them (see Briefing).

So?

The hard truth, however, is that the Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone. Efforts to mitigate global warming by cutting emissions remain essential. But the state of the Arctic shows that humans cannot simply undo climate change. They will have to adapt to it.

While all this is happening, the New York Times hires a columnist who writes as if his employer is not the newspaper but Exxon.  My old classmate in India wants me to cancel my subscription to the Times.

My subversive activism has failed, and failed miserably, to convey the urgency of this problem to the denialists like some of the readers in the past.  My newspaper columns on climate change did not do shit.  My fellow citizens proudly elected a guy who claims that global warming and climate change are a hoax created by the Chinese, and his party elders bring snowballs to the Senate chambers as evidence that there is no climate change.

I know fully well that I cannot do a damn thing here.  Which is why, more to commiserate than with any hope of achieving anything, did I participate in a march last Saturday.  Ironically enough, while the march was about the future, a good chunk of  the young men and women in college--the intended beneficiaries--were partying in the streets, on the porches, in the apartments, and in bars, because it was the spring scrimmage, and they could not be bothered with joining the march.  Football beats climate change!

The future has arrived ... Robot Appleseed

It seems like forever that I have been writing here, and talking in the classrooms, about how the modern day automation is a huge job-killer and a contributor to income inequality.  And, therefore, why we need to rethink public policies.  The newspaper gives me more material evidence:

Harvesting Washington state’s vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States.
That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market.
The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.

Yes, robots picking apples.

The anti-immigration folks can yell and scream all they want about the "illegals" in this country.  But, those illegals are also the ones working our farms, our yards, our hotels, our cows, our ... If that labor supply were to be choked off, it is not as if the apples will harvest themselves and miraculously get to the nearest grocery store!

Enter automation.  It is the same automation dynamics that have also led to severe job losses in manufacturing.  But, I don't want to digress; I want to stay focused on the farm.

“Human pickers are getting scarce,” said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. “Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly retiring.”
FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, Calif., are racing to get their mechanical pickers to market within the next couple of years.
Harvest has been mechanized for large portions of the agriculture industry such as wheat, corn, green beans and tomatoes for some time. But for more fragile commodities like apples, berries, table grapes and lettuce — where the crop’s appearance is especially important — harvest is still done by hand.

Did you catch that?  "Israel-based."  If only people understood that economic geography is global!

While financial details are not available, the builders say the robotic pickers should pay for themselves in two years. That puts the likely cost of the machines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
FFRobotics is developing a machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch. The machine would have between four and 12 robotic arms, and can pick up to 10,000 apples an hour, Kober said.
One machine would be able to harvest a variety of crops, taking 85 to 90 percent of the crop off the trees, Kober said. Humans could pick the rest.
Abundant Robotics is working on a picker that uses suction to vacuum apples off trees.

I was now fascinated with this suction technology to vacuum apples.  This from IEEE--back in college, I was a student member of this professional organization of electrical and electronic engineers!--offers some interesting observations:

Besides the sheer entertainment value, the vacuum picking technique (an approach being used by other robotics groups) looks like it might be faster in operation and easier to implement than a traditional gripper. Since it only exerts pressure when its, er, orifice (?) is mostly sealed, it can pluck apples out of trees while leaves remain untouched, and as long as it gets close enough, it looks like the apples essentially pick themselves.
The tricky parts are going to be consistently “seeing” apples that may be (I would guess) almost entirely hidden behind leaves and branches, and then managing to reach those apples with a very bulky picking system. Making it reliable and cost-effective will be another challenge, although the potential market is certainly significant. Of course, all we really have to go on right now is a blurry video of a prototype that’s almost a year old and our usual wild speculation, but our guess is that we’ll be finding out more within the year.

The video of the vaccuum-technology in apple picking is without sounds.  The gripper technology is impressive enough for me.

Building that wall--even the mere rhetoric--accelerates the building of more robots, I suppose.

As I wrote in my recent op-ed::

We the people need to try to understand such complexities in a rapidly evolving global economic geography. And, more importantly, we will need political leaders who can articulate constructive policy responses

The future has arrived

In an op-ed back in January 2015, I wrote:

 I increasingly worry that there is a huge disconnect between how undergraduates spend their four or five — or even six — years in college and the real world, which is changing by the minute.
Some of the important issues of the day, which will influence our lives well into the next few decades, arise from China, India, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
Will it shock readers to know that a typical college student can earn a diploma without learning anything substantive about these areas, which account for half of the world’s population even now, and whose share will increase in the future? Wouldn’t we want students to know at least a little bit about the global drivers of economic and political decisions?

Nobody cares for what I worry about!  We continue to graduate students who have no idea about China, India, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.  I wish I could ask every graduating student at my university to name the leaders of the governments of China and India, and to point out where Syria is on a map of the Middle East.

Students are like most Americans who simply have no idea how rapidly China has transformed.  If I were to present the following to them, they might simply collapse from hyperventilation:

China became the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit rates every year for two decades.
In matters of national security the momentum of Chinese growth has meant, for example, that while Japan’s military spending was triple China’s in 2000, it was only half as large by 2015.

Go ahead, and re-read those previous sentences.

Seventeen years ago, China was merely an eighth of the US economy.  During those years, while the US was busy fighting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever we wanted to drop bombs, China went about expanding its economic and military might.  Here we are in 2017, with China launching a home-built aircraft carrier.

In that op-ed, I wrote about the need to learn the languages that we will need to learn and become fluent in, if we want to understand the future.  Especially Chinese and Arabic.  But, of course, most universities couldn't care!

I cannot figure out how much longer we can go on without truly understanding China, and recognizing it as an important player.

China is a challenge to the United States on several fronts; not an enemy. However, the relationship is riven with tensions that could escalate into open conflict. Neither side understands or trusts the other. Avoiding these thorns will depend on steady leaders and skilled diplomacy in reading each other’s behavior. Improvisation or short-sighted deals made for a domestic audience are likely to end badly. History also warns that success will not be easy. Most often, in the past, rising new powers have clashed with reigning ones. The US–China relationship will remain the most consequential in the world for decades to come.

And if we continue to insult China?

Never before has a president suggested handing over most of the currency of US global leadership to others, free of charge. China will not hesitate to seize every opportunity offered. A much diminished and less influential America, and consequently a much less secure Asia, would be the result.

Alas, we gleefully continue eating "Asian Salad"!