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The
Radin Report
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The Future is Now
Will technology experience
20,000 years of growth in the next century? Futurist
Ray Kurzweil thinks so.
Tribute to a Sensor Industry Giant
When
Emory Farr handed over the keys to Sensortronics in early 2002, a
generational torch was passed—and with it, leadership qualities that are
absent in today’s corporate culture.
Crash
Diets: The Cure for Overweight Companies?
Given the enormous costs of recruiting and training employees, it’s
surprising that so many companies are purging themselves so quickly of their
valuable talent resources.
How
Effective is Your Capture Strategy?
In the war for talent, you may
know how to wine and dine the talent you need. But as a manager, are you
able
to actually
consummate the deal?
Intelligence
Failure Costly to Employers
If
the syntax used in the employment game could be improved, employers would
save millions of hours—and
dollars.
Merger
Mania Hits the Sensor Industry
Sensor companies may lack
celebrity status, but they’re no less active than the highest profile
companies when it comes to shuffling the deck.
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Sensors
Expo: The Future is Now
By Bill Radin
Time
hiccupped for a brief moment in Boston last week, as keynote speaker Ray
Kurzweil delighted several hundred attendees with his insightful ruminations
on progress and technology.
An inventor and futurist, Kurzweil’s message packs a pretty powerful
punch: That technology not only grows at an exponential rate, but that the
exponential rate of growth itself grows exponentially.
Got that? It means that progress in such areas as computing power,
e-commerce and human life expectancy are all hurtling forward at a rate
greater than anyone could ever have imagined or can currently predict. By
his estimation, technology will experience
20,000 years of growth in the next century, rather than a mere 100 turns of
the calendar.
And here’s the kicker: If
for some reason the rate of growth becomes blocked or reaches its inevitable
conclusion (as in the case of Moore’s Law), a paradigm shift will swoop in
to ensure the rate of progress continues unabated.
Nanobots
and Sitcoms
For
those of us eagerly awaiting retirement, Kurzweil had some good news: If we
can just hang around long enough, nanobots and other non-biological
inventions will enable our species to achieve immortality.
But
is a world in which we outlive our pets several hundred times over such a
good deal? Will mankind truly benefit from an exponentially growing number
of cable channels? Personally, I’d settle for fewer sitcoms and medical
dramas if they were exponentially more entertaining.
As if anticipating my concerns, Kurzweil acknowledged that certain aspects
of immortality might indeed become, um, repetitive. So to keep things
lively, he prescribed the perfect vehicle for self-expression: virtual
reality.
To demonstrate, Kurzweil played us a computer-generated music video
featuring his perky female alter ego, Ramona. Not that any of us in the
audience would have chosen the exact same fantasy makeover; but the
possibilities certainly got us excited.
So you can imagine our letdown as we returned to the un-virtual reality of
the exhibit hall, where scores of restless booth dwellers stood poised for
customers with traditional life expectancies to stop by and sample their
wares.
Call me retro, but I actually find comfort in the predictability of the
Sensors Expo. Year in and year out, there’s no better place to meet and
greet the sensor elite and ogle the hot new strain gages, signal
conditioners and LVDTs.
Besides, if Kurzweil’s theory of exponential efficiency growth applied to
our little trade show, all the products would by now fit in a single booth
anyway -- the GE booth. Or is the future here already?
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