Has the Patent Game Changed? Just Ask Kodak

by Tim Carmody (excerpted)

The intellectual property hustle used to be so simple: purer, even. Patent holders extracted licensing fees, lump-sum settlements or cross-licensing agreements from nonholders, who paid up to avoid messy lawsuits or injunctions. It was a drag for almost everyone involved, but the stakes were comparatively small. Now, multibillion-dollar portfolio sales have put blood in the water, attracting an entirely different kind of shark.

We’ve already seen this play out once with Motorola. It’s easy to forget now that just a few weeks before Google stepped in to buy the company, investor Carl Icahn publicly and privately urged Motorola to sell off its patents, either for cash or by (again) splitting up the company.

This put both Motorola and Google in an awkward spot: If Motorola couldn’t find a buyer, the company could be torn apart; if Google didn’t step in, they risked losing another patent bidding war. In the end, Motorola was able to negotiate a premium price, and Icahn now stands to pocket millions of dollars.

Right now, it looks like a seller’s market. Because nobody seems to be kicking the tires to see exactly what they’re buying, the conventional wisdom is to sell. Like Motorola a few weeks ago, RIM is in a tough spot, so this pressure is hard to resist. If RIM were to publicly announce that it wasn’t for sale, its already-weakened stock, temporarily buoyant from acquisition rumors, would fall to the ground.

It’s even harder for Kodak, which really does have a substantial patent portfolio and is in an even weaker market position. On Wednesday, Bloomberg ran an analyst-driven story titled “Kodak Worth Five Times More in Breakup With $3 Billion Patents“:

Kodak’s stock jumped 16 percent overnight, fueled by rumors of a Motorola-style takeover or patent sell-off.

Steve Lohr’s “A Bull Market in Tech Patents,” published Wednesday in The New York Times, begins by detailing the broader downside of the patent craze: billions of dollars to purchase or defend existing patents is money companies like Apple or Google don’t have to spend on new products or research.

But that money doesn’t simply evaporate. “It’s a transfer of wealth from innovators to bondholders and stockholders who have no motivation to innovate,” Harvard Business School economist Josh Lerner tells the NYT. “It’s disturbing.”

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Economic Policy

[ed.  Federal Reserve and European Union economic recovery plans.]

Tom Petty, Eddie Vedder

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The Empire at Dusk

by Stephen Glain

In its scramble to avoid another legislative gang war over the nation's debt ceiling, Washington is preparing to shake down the Defense Department in the name of deficit reduction. While budget cutters preoccupy themselves with line-item expenditures, they overlook the Pentagon's biggest cost center: empire. The burden of global hegemony, the commitment to project force across every strategic waterway, air corridor, and land bridge, has exhausted the U.S. military and will be even harder to sustain as budget cuts force strategists and logisticians to do more with less. A national discussion about the logic of maintaining huge forward bases, to say nothing of their financial and human costs, is long overdue.

American relations with the world, and increasingly America's security policy at home, have become thoroughly and all but irreparably militarized. The culprits are not the nation's military leaders, though they can be aggressive and cunning interagency operators, but civilian elites who have seen to it that the nation is engaged in a self-perpetuating cycle of low-grade conflict. They have been hiding in plain sight, hyping threats and exaggerating the capabilities and resources of adversaries. They have convinced a plurality of citizens that their best guarantee of security is not peace but war, and they did so with the help of a supine or complicit Congress. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidents have ordered troops into battle 22 times, compared with 14 times during the Cold War. Not once did they appeal to lawmakers for a declaration of war.

The legacy of American militarism is a national security complex that thrives on fraud, falsehood, and deception. In the 1950s, Americans were told the Soviets had not only the means to destroy the United States but the desire to do so. In reality, Moscow lacked the former and so gave little thought to the latter, while Washington squandered billions of dollars on needless weaponry. Time and again, U.S. presidents weaponized their response to challenges overseas to protect them from charges of appeasement from the right. Habitually, their administrations misinterpreted events -- from Russia's Bolshevik revolution to the September 11 attacks -- to disastrous effect. In each case, expert advice was overlooked, ignored, or concealed, while in others, threats were manufactured as chips in petty political wagers. The fraudulent bomber and missile gaps and the Gulf of Tonkin incident did as much to injure U.S. interests overseas as did the notion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them preemptively.

Only a country so rich in resources and blessed by favorable geography could afford such malfeasance. America has been spared foreign invasion for more than 200 years and it can expect to remain inviolate for centuries to come. Yet each year, it spends enough money on national security to match the economic output of Indonesia -- with money borrowed largely from China, a country with which it is preparing for conflict. It insists on its right to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against such countries as North Korea and Iran -- oafish, bankrupt regimes that seek a complement of atomic bombs because they are surrounded by countries with bunkers full of them. America guarantees its friends and allies a place under its security umbrella even if their interests, particularly in the Middle East, diverge markedly from its own. In Europe, NATO remains a feudal confederation of armed forces with no raison d'être save to lend sanction to America's far-flung military enterprises. In Asia, South Korea, the world's 15th-largest economy, remains critically dependent on U.S. forces as a deterrent against its isolated, impoverished northern neighbor, while Japan wallows in a twilight world of middle-class prosperity and political ennui, content to slowly diminish as an American vassal.

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Tears for Fears

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

by Matt Taibbi

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties.

As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating. In another case, the agency farmed out its inquiry to a private law firm – one hired by the company under investigation. The outside firm, unsurprisingly, concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. To complete the bureaucratic laundering process, Flynn says, the SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files.

Much has been made in recent months of the government's glaring failure to police Wall Street; to date, federal and state prosecutors have yet to put a single senior Wall Street executive behind bars for any of the many well-documented crimes related to the financial crisis. Indeed, Flynn's accusations dovetail with a recent series of damaging critiques of the SEC made by reporters, watchdog groups and members of Congress, all of which seem to indicate that top federal regulators spend more time lunching, schmoozing and job-interviewing with Wall Street crooks than they do catching them. As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within."

The destruction of records by the SEC, as outlined by Flynn, is something far more than an administrative accident or bureaucratic fuck-up. It's a symptom of the agency's terminal brain damage. Somewhere along the line, those at the SEC responsible for policing America's banks fell and hit their head on a big pile of Wall Street's money – a blow from which the agency has never recovered. "From what I've seen, it looks as if the SEC might have sanctioned some level of case-related document destruction," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose staff has interviewed Flynn. "It doesn't make sense that an agency responsible for investigations would want to get rid of potential evidence. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what time frame and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law."

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Ray Morimura
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Anthony Freda
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Decision Fatigue

by John Tierney

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control ­— the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.

But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?

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Temporary Tattoos Fitted with Electronics Make Flexible, Ultrathin Sensors

by Kyle Niemeyer

Modern methods of measuring the body's activty, such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and electromyography (EMG), use electrical signals to measure changes in brain, heart, and muscle activity, respectively. Unfortunately, they rely on bulky and uncomfortable electrodes that are mounted using adhesive tape and conductive gel—or even needles. Because of this, these types of measurements are limited to research and hospital settings and typically used over short periods of time because the contacts can irritate skin.

These limitations may be at an end, however. New research published in Science describes technology that allows electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements. These devices connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and can even be attached via temporary tattoo.

The authors refer to their approach as an "epidermal electronic system" (EES), which is basically a fancy way of saying that the device matches the physical properties of the skin (such as stiffness), and its thickness matches that of skin features (wrinkles, creases, etc.). In fact, it adheres to skin only using van der Waals forces—the forces of attraction between atoms and molecules—so no adhesive material is required. Between the flexibility and the lack of adhesive, you wouldn’t really notice one of these attached.

As demonstrations, the authors used their devices to measure heartbeats on the chest (ECG), muscle contractions in the leg (EMG), and alpha waves through the forehead (EEG). The results were all high quality, comparing well against traditional electrode/conductive gel measurements in the same locations. In addition, the devices continuously captured data for six hours, and the devices could be worn for a full 24 hours without any degradation or skin irritation.

One interesting demonstration that also suggests future applications was the measuring of throat muscle activity during speech. Different words showed distinctive signals, and a computer analysis enabled the authors to recognize the vocabulary being used.

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Gerry and the Pacemakers

Catherine McCarthy. My Petit Monsoon, 2005.
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Marc Chagall. The Three Candles, 1938 - 1940. France
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Dale Frank
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Mad About Metered Billing? They Were in 1886, too.

[ed.  Like your cable company?  Do you like paying metered rates for internet use and data transfer when cloud computing, streaming Netflix, Spotify and other web-based technologies are amping up broadband requirements for the use of their products?  Read this article.  The more things change the more they stay the same.]

by Matthew Lasar

Hopping mad about metered billing? Spluttering about tethering restrictions and early termination fees? Raging over data caps? You're not alone. Perhaps you can take some comfort from this editorial in The New York Times:

"The greedy and extortionate nature of the telephone monopoly is notorious. Controlling a means of communication which has now become indispensable to the business and social life of the country, the company takes advantage of the public's need to force from it every year an extortionate tribute".

Yes, that's how The Times saw it—in 1886. And the newspaper's readers applauded these words. But reading Richard R. John's wonderful book, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, one is struck by the contrasts between then and now. The issues are often recognizable; the players a little less so. 

Nothing whatever

It was 1887, and Charles M. Fay, General Manager of the Chicago Telephone Exchange, had had about as much as he could take. The pseudo populist legislatures that kowtowed to telephone subscriber groups were on a rampage, Fay warned in a lengthy screed that appeared in the National Telephone Exchange Association's annual journal. Now they were demanding rate caps and price regulation—but for whom?

The poor and working class have "nothing whatever" to do with the telephone, and never will, Fay insisted. "Telephone users are men whose business is so extended and whose time is so valuable as to demand rapid and universal communication," he continued, leaving to posterity this remarkable claim about the service:

"A laborer who goes to work with his dinner basket has no occasion to telephone home that he will be late to dinner; the small householder, whose grocer lives just around corner, would not pay once cent for a telephone wherewith to reach him; the villager, whose deliberate pace is never hurried, will walk every time the few steps necessary to see his neighbor in order to save a nickel. The telephone, like the telegraph, post office and the railroad, is only upon extraordinary occasions used or needed by the poor. It is demanded, and daily depended upon, and should be liberally paid for by the capitalist, mercantile, and manufacturing classes."

To be fair, Fay was right about the immediate moment. Given 1887 telephone subscription rates, hardly any workers or villagers bought regular telephone service. They couldn't afford it. But the Bell System's big problem in 1887 wasn't the poor and struggling masses. It was those "mercantile and manufacturing" types—also up in arms at Bell franchise prices.

Appalled at schemes like "measured service" for billing consumers for local calls, telephone subscribers launched municipal and state-wide reform campaigns, backed independent network providers, and ran "rate strikes" on more than one occasion.

"Telephomania," Fay bitterly called the phenomenon—the "only fit word" to describe these ingrates. But their largely forgotten uprisings made a difference.

"By demonstrating the vulnerability of operating companies to legislative intervention," writes John, "they goaded a new generation of telephone managers into providing telephone service to thousands of potential telephone users whom their predecessors had ignored. The popularization of the telephone was the result."

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Righthaven Rocked, Owes $34,000 After "Fair Use" Loss

[ed.  If you're not familiar with Righthaven click on the link below, or the "Interesting Article" link on the sidebar to this blog.]

by Nate Anderson

The wheels appear to be coming off the Righthaven trainwreck-in-progress. The litigation outfit, which generally sues small-time bloggers, forum operators, and the occasional Ars Technica writer, has just been slapped with a $34,000 bill for legal fees.

Righthaven v. Hoehn, filed in Nevada federal court, has been an utterly shambolic piece of litigation. Righthaven sued one Wayne Hoehn, a longtime forum poster on the site Madjack Sports. Buried in Home>>Forums>>Other Stuff>>Politics and Religion, Hoehn made a post under the username "Dogs That Bark" in which he pasted in two op-ed pieces. One came from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which helped set up the Righthaven operation. Righthaven sued.

This was the salvation of the news business? Targeting forum posters in political subforums of sports handicapping sites? But at least it looked like Righthaven had a point; copying had certainly occurred. Had infringement?

Before it was all over, the judge decided that Righthaven had no standing even to bring the case, since only a copyright holder can file an infringement suit (Righthaven's contract only gave it a bare right to sue… which is no right at all). Then the irritated judge decided that Hoehn's cut-and-paste job was fair use, helping establish a precedent that could undercut the entire Righthaven approach.

Then the defense lawyers wanted to be paid. They asked for $34,000 in fees, arguing that they had won the case. To avoid paying the opposing lawyers, Righthaven recently argued that fees could not be awarded; since Righthaven had no standing to sue in the first place, it argued, the court had no jurisdiction over the case at all, not even to assign legal fees.

Defense attorney Marc J. Randazza was furious. "Righthaven deserves some credit for taking this position, as it requires an amazing amount of chutzpah," he wrote to the judge. "Righthaven seeks a ruling holding that, as long as a plaintiff’s case is completely frivolous, then the court is deprived of the right to make the frivolously sued defendant whole, whereas a partially frivolous case might give rise to fee liability. Righthaven’s view, aside from being bizarre, does not even comport with the law surrounding prudential standing."

The judge agreed. In a terse order today, he decided that Hoehn had won the case (as the "prevailing party") and "the attorney’s fees and costs sought on his behalf are reasonable." Righthaven has until September 14 to cut a check for $34,045.50.

Read more:  here and here

USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD

[ed.  Fascinating speech about where we might go as a society: technologically, economically, socially and culturally.  Along with great historical insights.]

by Charlie Stross

Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security.

Unlike you, I am not a security professional. However, we probably share a common human trait, namely that none of us enjoy looking like a fool in front of a large audience. I therefore chose the title of my talk to minimize the risk of ridicule: if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.

So what follows should be seen as a farrago of speculation by a guy who earns his living telling entertaining lies for money.

The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?

I’d like to start by making a few basic assumptions about the future, some implicit and some explicit: if only to narrow the field.

For starters, it’s not impossible that we’ll render ourselves extinct through warfare, be wiped out by a gamma ray burster or other cosmological sick joke, or experience the economic equivalent of a kernel panic – an unrecoverable global error in our technosphere. Any of these could happen at some point in the next five and a half centuries: survival is not assured. However, I’m going to spend the next hour assuming that this doesn’t happen – otherwise there’s nothing much for me to talk about.

The idea of an AI singularity has become common currency in SF over the past two decades – that we will create human-equivalent general artificial intelligences, and they will proceed to bootstrap themselves to ever-higher levels of nerdish god-hood, and either keep us as pets or turn us into brightly coloured machine parts. I’m going to palm this card because it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV. More to the point, the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men. I do expect us to develop some eerily purposeful software agents over the next decades, tools that can accomplish human-like behavioural patterns better than most humans can, but all that’s going to happen is that those behaviours are going to be reclassified as basically unintelligent, like playing chess or Jeopardy.

In addition to all this Grinch-dom, I’m going to ignore a whole grab-bag of toys from science fiction’s toolbox. It may be fun in fiction, but if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS. This is non-constructive. You can’t look for ways to harden systems against threats that emerge from the existence of Leprechauns or Martians or invisible pink unicorns. So, no Hollywood movie scenarios need apply.

Having said which, I cheerfully predict that at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down, just as the internet has pretty much invalidated any survey of the future of computer security that might have been carried out in 1961.

So what do I expect the world of 2061 to look like?

I am going to explicitly assume that we muddle through our current energy crises, re-tooling for a carbon-neutral economy based on a mixture of power sources. My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power. Meanwhile, intermittent renewables such as solar and wind power will be hooked to batteries for load smoothing, used to power up off-grid locations such as much of the (current) developing world, and possibly used on a large scale to produce storable fuels – hydrocarbons via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, or hydrogen gas vial electrolysis.

We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry. This doesn’t mean magic nanite pixie-dust a la Star Trek; it means, at a minimum, what today we’d consider to be exotic structural materials. It also means engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems, but much more efficiently and controllably, and under a much wider range of temperatures and pressures.

Chih Han Hsu, Spectacular Leviathan
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