The New Philadelphia Story

Feb. xx, 2019

Let'south face up it: From a branding perspective, Philadelphia is a cemetery. It is a identify where people come up from around the world to pay their respects to the visionary men, the sacred documents, and the revolutionary ideas that changed the form of history about 250 years ago.  Judging past the selfie-snapping crowds that nevertheless flock to Independence Hall and queue up for a glimpse of the Liberty Bong, William Penn's "greene country towne" has done pretty well selling history. But history is not a renewable resources or a sustainable make. As the pace of change approaches light speed, and economic, technological and political prowess go on to concentrate in a handful of global epicenters, it'south downright irresponsible for any urban center that cares about its survival to go on living in the by. These days, it'due south not even plenty to exist living in the nowadays.

Today, a mere 300 large and intermediate-sized cities around the globe account for half of the global GDP. To put things in perspective, New York Metropolis currently manages a upkeep of about $82 billion per yr, exceeding the budget of more than 160 countries around the globe. Cities are apace supplanting nation-states as the predominant actors of international ability, and the competition for primacy amid them is only intensifying. If Philadelphia hopes to be anything more than than roadkill in this accelerating death race, we need to find a style out of our doldrums, a new way forwards, and to step on the gas.

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I believe we do have a fashion, and to the pole position at that. Every bit I've argued before in these pages, our region—from University City up I-95 to Princeton—is a hotbed of innovation in medical research and engineering science. I've worn out my vocal chords singing the praises of Penn Medicine, CHOP and Jefferson Academy, not to mention the trailblazing breakthroughs of biotherapeutics firms like Tmunity and Spark Therapeutics that have commercialized the interventions developed past the bright doctors and researchers at those institutions. If we tin successfully brand and evangelize Philadelphia equally the global mecca for medical engineering science—let's call it medtech—in the 21 st Century, I am convinced that we can not but survive, but thrive in the dauntless new earth ahead.

And right at present presents a unique and fleeting opportunity to take this spring. The existing centers of technological imagination, innovation and commercialization cannot concur. Already, Silicon Valley, the fertile crescent of technological imagination and revolution for the past l years, is sliding into its inevitable period of decadence and decline. Followers of socioeconomic and cultural trends in the Valley have pointed to the region's hyperinflation and astronomical toll of living as the chief culprit; to be sure, in a identify where you have to be rich just to be poor, something is severely out of whack. This state of affairs is borne out in the trickling exodus from the region; San Francisco lost more residents than information technology gained in 2017, and the number of people looking to ditch the Bay Area has tripled since 2016.

History is non a renewable resources or a sustainable make. As the stride of modify approaches calorie-free speed, and economical, technological and political prowess go along to concentrate in a handful of global epicenters, information technology's downright irresponsible for whatsoever city that cares about its survival to keep living in the past.

Every bit Silicon Valley bloats and collapses nether the weight of the endless bags of cash dumped upon it over the years, and as its talent disperses, a space has opened for new regional players to footstep in. Boston has risen to the occasion; Pittsburgh has shed its rust belt mantle and reemerged equally a leader in the driverless car realm; Miami, Portland, Dallas and Vancouver are all making apparent bids as home bases for tech development and destinations for the venture upper-case letter that funds information technology. Forrad-thinking Colorado governor John Hickenlooper (who was a featured speaker at The Citizen's recent Ideas We Should Steal Festival) has been working to transform his state into the Silicon Valley of the Rockies. The list goes on.

But to fully understand the scope and underlying drivers of this watershed in technological change and opportunity, we need to zoom out from the cities-as-centers-power thesis for a moment, and expect to the Eastward. In his middle-opening, and occasionally nervus-wracking new book, AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New Globe Order , the visionary Chinese venture capitalist and artificial intelligence adept Kai-Fu Lee argues that the worldwide tech revolution has advanced from the era of discovery to the era of implementation.

In a nutshell, Lee says, if the first epoch of information technology was all about the micro-processor, the personal computer, the series of tubes we telephone call the "Internet," and eventually the mobile devices nosotros all now use to admission that series of tubes anywhere and everywhere at all times, we are now in an epoch where the awarding of that technology to every facet of our waking and sleeping lives, and to the societal order itself, is the ascendant force.

According to Lee, the energy behind that force is the vast trove of data to which we all constantly contribute, whether we know information technology or not. Whereas steam, oil and electricity were the fuel of the industrial revolution, data is the fuel of the next revolution: The coming age of artificial intelligence (AI). When information is fed into a system known as a neural network, an AI rubric whose capacity to perform any number of complex tasks increases the more information it receives, the potential to disrupt industries and social relations from the interpersonal to the transnational is staggering. And as the engineering science becomes more than refined, it is being increasingly deployed into "narrow AI" or "deep learning" systems, which focus on and become expert in specified areas.  Since the dawn of this decade, narrow AI has disrupted everything from shipping and trucking, to personal automobiles to loan processing to war machine technology.

In less than five years, China has gone from playing frantic, furious techno-catch-upwardly to establishing itself equally the runaway global leader in applied AI. The explanation for this remarkable reversal is twofold. First, it's a matter of demographics. With a population approaching ane.4 billion, China is the biggest land in the world, four times the size of the U.Due south. When it comes to AI, more information ways more deep learning, stronger neural networks and more than powerful and effective implementation.

And the Chinese people have been happy to practice their part. Cheers largely to the embrace by a newly awakened Chinese consumer class of seamless mobile payment technologies and online-to-offline apps (think: ownership groceries, laundry service and automobile rides via your phone), Chinese data scientists and developers have been able to get together near countless data on man behavior. What people purchase and sell, who they buy information technology from and sell it to, where people get, how they get there, what they see, hear, touch on, smell and endeavour to avoid along the fashion—there is virtually no action, transaction or interaction that tin't be traced, tracked and aggregated.

While the feds nonetheless try to go their AI human action together, Philadelphia should accept a page out of China'due south volume and make a nuance to the head of the pack in the West. We have the institutional resources, the reserves of brainpower gear up to brand their mark, and the entrepreneurial spirit to be the American leader in medtech narrow AI.

The second contributor to People's republic of china'south preeminence in AI is a cultural one. Lee characterizes Silicon Valley's competitive civilization—for  all its relaxed dress codes, and foosball tables—as staid, gentlemanly, and downright stodgy. In item, he critiques the American tech sector's fixation on originality and its corresponding aversion to anything that might even be perceived as copying. As a consequence, he contends, competitors will concede to the beginning mover in any new territory, backing off and changing course rather than trying to improve or observe an border. The rules of appointment in China, says Lee, are quite different.

The main affair is that Chinese entrepreneurs have no compunctions about copying, lifting and outright stealing from their competitors both at home and abroad. Lee attributes this lack of stigma to the land's educational tradition of rote memorization, reproduction and recitation of the words and thoughts of eminent thinkers and leaders. Likewise, the relative lack in Cathay of a robust copyright and intellectual property legal regime ways the business organization mural lacks the regulatory barriers that tamp down competitive fervor in the West. The result, says Lee, is an entrepreneurial surround that commands fierce contest and brooks nothing in the mode of scruples or conventional Western business ideals.

This tendency toward ruthless pragmatism, or perchance pragmatic ruthlessness, is only the prescription for the current moment in technological advancement, and precisely why Mainland china is at the vanguard of the new revolution in AI. And perhaps the most revolutionary application of narrow AI, and 1 however but scratching the surface of its potential, is in the medical field.

Co-ordinate to a but-published report in Nature , a group of Chinese scientists (no surprise there) accept adamant that "machine learning classifiers tin can query electronic health records in a style like to the hypothetico-deductive reasoning used past physicians and unearth associations that previous statistical methods have not found." In other words, AI can now clarify wellness data to make diagnoses of childhood diseases with as much accuracy as an experienced pediatrician.

The potential applications of narrow AI in medtech are virtually limitless, and it's hither that Philadelphia should pay listen to the achievements of our neighbors to the East. With its enormous on-line population, relative paucity of privacy restrictions and state apparatus fully mobilized behind the efforts of the AI sector, China is at a significant advantage in developing the systems that are reshaping diagnostic healthcare, but that's not to say the U.S. can't compete in this space.  Recently, no less a visionary than President Donald Trump signed an executive social club launching an "American AI Initiative" to advance national investment in the field. While the particulars of the programme are sketchy at best, it is reassuring-ish to know that attention is beingness paid to this cataclysmic technological shift at the highest echelons of American political power.

While the feds nevertheless endeavour to become their AI deed together, Philadelphia should take a page out of China's book and make a dash to the head of the pack in the West. As noted, we accept the institutional resources, the reserves of brainpower ready to brand their mark, and the entrepreneurial spirit (at least in some quarters) to brand Philadelphia the American leader in medtech narrow AI.  What nosotros lack, at least for the time being, is the political imagination and strategic marketing message to concenter the venture capital dollars and legions of tech talent required to launch our region into this new realm. Rather than abiding a political course committed to relitigating the blame for our 20 th century turn down while paying fealty to the same gatekeepers deadset on maintaining a self-serving status quo, nosotros demand a concerted effort to assemble and deploy ample tools at our disposal to reinvent and rebrand our city. It won't be easy, but we've seen information technology tin be done. And if we tin get out of our own way and put our minds and money to the chore, I see no reason why Philadelphia tin can't become the greene country towne of the future.

Header: Pixabay

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-new-philadelphia-story-2/

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