What Are Our New Big Mega-Projects?

A recent article in the NY times commented on the lack of any big mega-projects being undertaken. The article points out that in the past we had “The Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad.. the Hoover Dam, the Interstate System, the subway networks in San Francisco and Washington, the Big Dig in Boston ... and the list abruptly stops. For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way.” Such big projects, the article suggests, can have transformative effects and create significant long term improvement for the economy.

Ok, an interesting observation. But do we really have no big mega-projects under development at this time? Or are the current really big projects just somewhat different than those of the past? I would argue that the biggest development project for the last decade was the build-out of the Internet. This required enormous investments in effort and money, generated significant wealth, and is having an incredibly transformative effect on our economy and our society. I will argue that the long term transformative impact of the Internet and related technologies will transform society much greater than the transcontinental railroad or the interstate highway system. It was government funded, at least at the beginning, though private funds have taken over the still on-going build-out. The current focus now seems to be shifting to the phase of integrating the rest of our communication and business structures into the Internet infrastructure. This is also different form the past mega-projects in that it is global in scope.

What other major mega-projects are now underway? It could be argued that transforming our health care system is one such project. This also suggests another big scientific mega-project that we are in the middle of – understanding and learning how to manipulate genomes. Understanding how DNA operates and controls living organisms, and how to manipulate it is certainly a major effort that will eventually have long lasting economic and social transformative effects on our society.

If we want to focus on more physical projects though, the biggest mega-project we have just started is clearly the transformation of our energy system away from a fossil fuel based system to one that is based on less carbon intensive and more renewable fuels and overall greatly improved efficiency. Government has an important role to play in this, but like the Internet, private funding will eventually have to provide most of the funding. I’d like to think of this as the great physical mega-project of the next 20 years for our society. Its effect on the economy and our society are likely to be profound. It's something we can rally around that should be generating much more enthusiasm and pride than a comparatively limited project like the transcontinental railroad ever could.

Effects of Technology on the Events in Iran

A very interesting question that many people are watching closely "How will the internet and modern technology change the course of what happens in Iran?" More and more videos of the street marches and the violence are appearing on YouTube. One of the most famous has become the video of a young girl named "Neda" dying on the street after being shot by a sniper. This generates anger in the population, not fear. Modern communication technology is so far being used more successfully to organize than to control.

As Radley Balko writes on his blog:

Government has been murdering its own citizens for as long as we’ve had government, particularly when the people begin to pose a threat to those in power. The difference is that now, the entire world is watching. Iran’s brutality is on display for everyone to see, archived for history, in a way that we didn’t have even in Tiananmen, and haven’t had for most of human history. That, at least, is progress.

Has the methodology of political movements around the world undergone a major change?

First Impressions of WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha came finally came online a few days ago (you can try it at www.wolframalpha.com). It is touted by some as the most serious competitor for Google, and possibly its eventual replacement. The major advancement in WolframAlpha is it's ability to actually gather data available on the web and answer questions, as opposed to just supplying you with links that may contain the answer to your questions. Of course if this is successful, nobody expects Google to sit passively by and loose market share. Google will undoubtedly come out with its own capabilities similar to WolframAlpha in the near future. We are on the verge of the next major revolution in making the knowledge on the web more accessible and useful to people, spurred on by the competition between WolframAlpha and Google.

I spent some time test driving WolframAlpha recently, and here are my first impressions.

My first test was to try to get a table of life expectancy listed by nation. I typed in “life expectancy by nation” and hit enter. WolframAlpha gave me a list of possible data, and the very first item was exactly the type of table I was looking for. Score one for WolframAlpha. (The United States was number 50 on the rankings by the way, in spite of the fact that we spend far more than any other nation on health care. Those of you involved in promoting health care reform probably already knew that.) Another great feature at the bottom of the data was a little link that points you to the source of the information. This is actually a critical feature for anyone expecting to use WolframAlpha for serious research. Score two for WolframAlpha.

As a second test, I tried to get a table of the carbon footprint of each nation. I typed in “carbon footprint by nation” and the response was “WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input.” I tried to simplify the query and just typed in “carbon footprint”, but still got the same response. Oh my, it seems there is a lot of work to do still.

To be fair, WolframAlpha is described as “an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come.” Clearly this is a major advance over the current Google search capabilities which will eventually change the way we use the web to gather data, but it is clearly also early in a long development process.

Unfortunately the creator of WolframAlpha, Stephen Wolfram, has left us all with a difficult problem to wrestle with. Somehow the phrase “I'm going to WolframAlpha that” just doesn't quite work. They will have to come up with a better verb if this is to enter the popular lexicon and replace "googling a question".

Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web

I just watched a TED Talk by Tim Burners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. His main point was that the current Web was mainly a collection of linked documents, and what we need to do next is transform it into a collection of linked data. Once a major portion of our data becomes freely available on the web, it will start generating major social benefits.

Tim mentions two items that resonated with me. First, ALL government data should be freely available on the Web. After all, we paid for it, and we should rightly claim free access to it. (There may be some exceptions, such as personal data of government employees, but this is a relatively small portion of the government data). It seems to me that in a truly free open society, the "Freedom of Information" act should become almost obsolete since everything that it would have been used for in the past is now readily available. That would be a wonderful principle for the Obama administration to follow.

The second issue is medical data. Three years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We caught it early and now I'm cured, but it is a much more common problem than many people realize. One thing that really surprised me is that I was not asked to fill out any survey on my lifestyle or exposure to various chemicals. It would seem to me that such detailed background data should be collected about everyone who has a major disease and made available to researchers looking for common links. This is just one example of data that should be on the web. In this case it has potential for major health benefits if links can be established to various things that increase the risk of a disease.

There are two interesting items that Tim Berners-Lee did not mention about the future of the web. First, it is establishing new business models. Old ones, such as newspapers and the music recording industry are having to make substantial changes to survive. Significant new developments, specifically the open source software movement and Wikipedia could not have been predicted by any business model analysis before they happened. Yet they are becoming increasingly important.

The second unforeseen development is the use of the web for organizing mass social movements. Moveon.org and various other political movements are examples of this. Allowing groups of people to come together and organize in ways that were previously impractical may be one of the most profound impacts of the web in the long run.