Tag Archives: innovation

Replacing Asimov’s Laws of Responsible Robotics?; more thoughts on innovation in Canada

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David Woods, professor of integrated systems engineering at Ohio State University, and Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University propose three new robot laws in the current issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems in the media release on Science Daily. According to Woods,

“When you think about it, our cultural view of robots has always been anti-people, pro-robot,” … “The philosophy has been, ‘sure, people make mistakes, but robots will be better — a perfect version of ourselves.’ We wanted to write three new laws to get people thinking about the human-robot relationship in more realistic, grounded ways.”

This view contrasts somewhat with Mary King’s work on the differences between Japanese and Western perspectives on robots. She acknowledges the fascination and anti-people perspectives in the West but notes pervasive fears while contrasting them with Japanese perspectives on robots where they are viewed in a more purely beneficial way and as being related to nature. You can read her work here or you can check out my previous posts about Mary King’s work in my series on robots and human enhancement, July 22 and 23 2009 are particularly relevant.

Before looking at the new laws, here’s a refresher of Asimov’s three:

  • A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Woods points out that Asimov was a writer and his laws were developed as a literary device. Woods’ and Murpy’s proposed laws are these,

  • A human may not deploy a robot without the human-robot work system meeting the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics.
  • A robot must respond to humans as appropriate for their roles.
  • A robot must be endowed with sufficient situated autonomy to protect its own existence as long as such protection provides smooth transfer of control which does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

I see Rob Annan at Don’t leave Canada behind has written some more on innovation in Canada. He highlights a couple of articles in MacLean’s magazine, one focusing on John Manley, former Liberal deputy Prime Minister in Jean Chretien’s cabinet, and a two-part series on Canada’s big five universities. Manley who’s in the process of becoming president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives has some rather pithy (compared to the usual) things to say about innovation and Canadian business. What makes this interesting is the group he will be leading has 150 members, the chief executives of Canada’s biggest corporations, who claim $3.5 trillion in assets and $800 billion in revenues.

Meanwhile, the presidents of Canada’s big five universities point out that Canadian business does not develop and promote its own research and development labs relying instead on university research. Do read Rob’s blog for more discussion about this.

And since it’s Friday, I’m going to mention Raincoaster’s upcoming 3-day novel workshop on Bowen Island (Vancouver, Canada) which will be held on the Labour Day Weekend. I don’t have any details but will post them as soon as I get them. If you’re curious about Raincoaster, you can check out the regular blog here or the blog that has information about other courses here.

Business research and development and Canada’s innovation gap (the last of this 4 part informal series)

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This is definitely the last in this informal series on Canadian innovation with an occasional foray in the nanotechnology scene. I have commented more frequently in my postings on government funding of R&D (research and development) but Canadian business should also be included in the equation.

Canadian businesses don’t tend to invest as much in R&D as their counterparts in other countries. From the Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage report issued in 2007 by the Industry Canada,

Businesses in Canada need to do more to improve their productivity. Canada’s private-sector R&D as a proportion of GDP is below levels in Japan, the US, Germany, and France. Similarly, the number of patents produced in Canada is low compared with many other OECD countries. Canadian firms also invest less in new machinery and equipment, which embody the latest innovations, than do many of their competitors.

Whether you agree with current patenting laws and trends or not, it is a standard measurement for innovation. Konrad Yakabuski’s article in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, which kicked off this series, notes this Canadian business R&B investing,

Between 1981 and 2000, Canadian companies’ expenditures on R&D grew by almost 10 per cent annually. But since 2001, they have been flat in real, after-inflation terms and have declined by fully one-fifth when expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Yakabuski’s article goes on to paint a bleaker picture of Canadian business investment in R&D.

There are many reasons for these problems as noted in the Industry Canada 2007 report. However there’s one reason that I didn’t see mentioned and it may be due to geography.

I live in British Columbia (Canada) and the Vancouver area has a very active technology community where I worked for some years as a technical writer. My observation (it’s not unique but I note it because I haven’t seen any analyses which mention it) is this: the business plan for most of these companies (over 90% and I think I’m being conservative) is simple.

  1. Get an idea for a technology.
  2. Start up a company.
  3. Get some R&D funding from the government.
  4. Get some interest from the media.
  5. Sell the product and grow the company to a few million dollars in revenue.
  6. Now, sell the company to another larger business (usually from the US) and retire.

The local branch of PricewaterhouseCoopers produced a BC TechMap (the version I saw was produced in either 2004 or 2005) that depicts visually the number of technology companies started in BC and the assimilations and mergers over the years. There were hundreds of companies and it was extraordinary to see that most had been acquired. (I think the map starts in the 1980s and the 2004/5 version gave viewers information valid to 2003.) To summarize brutally, the business plan is to sell the business not grow it or invest in it for longevity. I suspect that where BC and nanotechnology are concerned that the same business plan will apply.

Tomorrow, science’s exquisite corpse.

Finland, Canada, innovation, and risk taking

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In Konrad Yakabuski’s article (I started commenting on it yesterday), Canada’s innovation gap, Finland is held up as an example of where innovation has fueled economic success. In yesterday’s posting I included quotes from the article which outline some historical reasons why the Finnish have embraced innovation. Now it’s Canada’s turn.

Yakabuski mentions Harold Adams Innis (an influential professor of political economy at the University of Toronto) and his work,

The staples theory was originally developed in the 1920s by historian Harold Innis to explain Canada’s development as a provider of valuable raw resources – initially fish and fur – to the British Empire. …

Though the staples theory seemed outdated as Nortel rose to prominence and Ontario’s auto sector grew to overtake Michigan’s, it has been revived recently by economists to explain the slide back into resource dependence. Raw or lightly processed resources declined steadily as a share of Canada’s exports between 1960 and 2000, falling by half from 90 per cent to about 45 per cent. But since the beginning of this decade, their share of exports has risen dramatically to 65 per cent in 2008, according to new research by Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford.

Not everyone buys this picture of Canada’s role as a “drawer of water and hewer of wood.” Preston Manning, former politician and leader of the Reform Party of Canada (which later merged into the Progressive Conservative Party) doesn’t. In his May 27, 2009 speech, Stimulating an Ailing Economy: The Crucial Role of Science, Technology and Innovation, at the Public Policy Forum’s Science Day in Canada he suggests that Canada’s founding was more than just a vision of uniting British North American Colonies into a single country.

From Manning’s speech,

But what few of us fully appreciate is that there was also a science-based dimension to that story and vision. A generation earlier the leaders and people of those same British North American colonies launched a scientific endeavour which was to contribute as much to the building of Canada as the BNA Act and the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was called the Geological Survey of Canada and began with a £1500 grant from the legislature of the United Colony of Canada to carry out a geological survey of its territory.

…

Why do I make reference to the historical role of the Geological Survey of Canada (which still exists today) in the formation of Canada? Because it reminds us that the Fathers of Confederation recognized that scientific investigation, and the technologies, innovations, and economic activities which flowed from it, had a vital role to play in the realization of the national vision. And if that was true in their day and generation, when many aspects of scientific investigation and technology were in their infancy, surely it is even more true today in an age when the scientific method has become the principal approach to problem solving and where science based technologies have become the principal drivers of the modern knowledge based economy.

Given the current emphasis on funding scientific and technological infrastructure over research and development (see Rob Annan’s postings on Don’t leave Canada behind for many examples including this one on Arctic research stations) I think we’re not taking risks, which is an essential element of innovation.

Finland is not an economic miracle right now, nor is Nokia. According to a June 30, 2009 statement from Finland’s Minister of Economy, the country is moving towards an 11% unemployment rate and as much as a 7% contraction in its economy. Nokia which has had economic woes since last fall, announced (April 16, 2009) that its earnings plummeted 90% year to year. Buying the Nortel division (mentioned in Yakabuski’s article) is a gutsy move and contrasts strongly with how Canadian business is dealing with the current economic uncertainties.

Good Nano Guide and the UK’s NHECD project complementary? plus the Finnish, the Canadians, nanotechnology and innovation

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About a week and a half ago, I came across an announcement about a new nanoparticle toxicity project that’s being undertaken in the UK. The Nano health-environment commented database (NHECD) has had Euro 1.45 million allocated by the EU. From the announcement on the Azonano website,

The ultimate objective of NHECD is to develop an open access, robust and sustainable system that can meet the challenge of automatically maintaining a rich and up-to-date scientific research repository. This repository would enable a comprehensive analysis of published data on health and environment effects following exposure to nanoparticles, according to the project partners. The repository would also be harmonised to be compatible with existing databases at the metadata level.

It strikes me that this database project, which is in its very early stages, could be a very complementary to some of the work being done on the Good Nano Guide wiki (still in beta) which is being supported by the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON). I commented on my experience with the Good Nano Guide in my  Friday, July 10, 2009 posting.

Rob Annan on the Don’t leave Canada behind researcher forum posted a provocative commentary about Canada’s innovation gap on July 7, 2009 last week. The commentary was occasioned by an article in the Globe & Mail’s Report on Business (ROB) by Konrad Yakabuski here. The ROB (not to be confused with Annan) article, makes an excellent point about the importance of instability for stimulating innovation. From the ROB article,

The expression “necessity is the mother of invention” comes to mind. Though Finland’s history is full of rude awakenings, as it alternately succumbed to Swedish and Russian invaders in previous centuries, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was its biggest economic setback. The breakup of Finland’s biggest trading partner sparked a near depression in the nation of 5.3 million. Economic output shrank 13 per cent over three years and unemployment rose to 20 per cent from 3 per cent.

The crisis prompted much collective soul-searching, enabling the government to rally Finns behind the idea that the country’s revival lay in innovation. Government spending on R&D grew rapidly, even as overall public expenditures were slashed.

No company epitomized the transformation of the Finnish economy more than Nokia. The company (which takes its name from the river where its founders built a pulp mill in 1865) nearly went bankrupt in 1991. Its conglomerate strategy – making everything from telephone cables to car tires to TV sets, and selling them to consumers in the Nordic and Soviet-bloc countries – no longer proved viable. Backed by massive government research funding, Nokia dropped its other businesses to focus exclusively on making wireless communications devices, just as the global cellphone industry was poised to explode.

Today, Finland spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on R&D, compared with less than 2 per cent in Canada. In 2008, Nokia alone invested €6-billion ($9.8-billion) in R&D, or 12 per cent of its sales, including €2.3-billion in research and development spending at NSN, the unit that is buying Nortel’s key LTE assets and technology.

For a little more information about Canada’s R & D spending, you can check out my June 9, 2009 blog posting here. There’s more to the Finnish miracle (I did a little digging) which I will post about tomorrow. I’ll also be including some specifics about the nanotechnology situation both in Finland and in Canada.