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Untangling China, Decoding the West’s Response

Untangling China, Decoding the West’s Response

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
The politics of Chinese technology investments remain nuanced. Western technology companies want a piece of its market but are wary of giving up IP and are even more concerned about the impact of their governments’ growing anti-China policies. But which reality is true: a China filled with minefields for Western technology companies or a merely assertive nation trying to increase its own global economic presence. Figuring out which will determine how the West fares in the world’s second-largest economy.

Gina Raimondo was in China this week, on an inevitable trip, and saying the unavoidable.

Having helped to nurture China into the world’s second-largest economy, the West finds itself unable to take its eyes off or have its hands fully on the communist nation. It can neither be controlled and structured the way America and its allies would like nor exploited for the kind of profits they once dreamed could be gained.

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Aftermath of Artificial Stupidity

I Left My Intelligence in San Francisco

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Calif. Governor Gavin Newsom can remain a cheerleader for tech. San Francisco Giants can proudly wear a Cruise jersey patch. Cruise can continue to push its narrative that humans are terrible drivers. But at stake is the safety of a non-consenting public forced to share the roads with inscrutable machine drivers.

Bryan Reimer, research scientist at MIT Age Lab, recently linked me to a TED Talk he gave five years ago.

In it, he reminded the audience: “We almost always forget that our infrastructure was really designed and built for human drivers.”

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Multitasking secretary

Where Have All the Secretaries Gone?

By David Benjamin

What’s at stake:
Digital tools are wonderful things. They can do miracles — awesome things that ordinary humans cannot do. And yet, we all need to be reminded that the tool suffers as many limitations as the humans who wield it.

In this and other tech publications, I’ve learned that lidar is a sort of sensor that has advanced the promise of autonomous driving, because it can help read a vehicle’s surroundings and guide its safe passage down the road, past hail and sleet and leaping herds of deer.

The potential of lidars and radars and their bond with artificial intelligence, machine learning and other miracles of the digital revolution is intriguing. But it also stirs my reserves of skepticism. Since seeing my first Vegematic commercial on late-night Channel 8, I’ve been guided by the principle that no labor-saving device has ever lived up to its promos.

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Cruise robotaxi crashes into San Francisco Muni Bus

CPUC Votes: Lobbyists 1, Firefighters, Cops & Engineers 0

What’s at stake: 
Technology innovations should be welcomed by all. But every new development requires rigorous engineering based on sufficient data. We now face a future arranged by corporate lobbyists and compliant regulators — captivated by the latest miracle machine — with little regard to safety, to which the machine’s ensabler will pay mere lip service ’til catastrophe strikes.  

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC)’s 3-1 vote last night has given official approval to a plan proposed by Waymo and Cruise to expand their commercial robotaxi business 24 hours a day, to all parts of San Francisco — without restriction or regulation.

This win is huge for the autonomous vehicle companies, and those who own them – Alphabet and General Motors.

Read More »CPUC Votes: Lobbyists 1, Firefighters, Cops & Engineers 0

Europe’s RISC-V JV: The Anti-Monopoly Gang

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Automotive chip suppliers and carmakers are betting their future on RISC-V to unshackle themselves from Arm’s roadmap. This might work, it might not. At stake is the future of the IP house, which persists in its delusion that the momentum behind RISC-V does not matter.

To me, it seems clear that the recently announced formation of an equally-shared RISC-V joint venture in Germany – among Bosch, Infineon, NXP, Nordic and Qualcomm – will prove a significant force in the way the electronics industry does business, despite some skepticism in the industry.

Doubters call this a “more of the same” European project, especially in automotive, in which Bosch often takes charge. collaborates with others, to deveop certain technologies.

Others wonder how long it will be before the JV’s RISC-V cores can be designed into commercial products and make a difference on the market. One analyst quipped: “If I am a manager at Arm looking after the partnerships, I won’t be losing my sleep over this.”

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Supply Chain has Become the Electronics Industry’s Defining Topic

ESMC, RISC-V: Supply Chain has Become the Electronics Industry’s Defining Topic

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
The electronics industry has always been consumed by the search for the “next big thing,” that huge design, product or new market that would create massive revenue and profits for the first group of companies to release it. The supply chain that brings these “breakthroughs” to the market is not typically in the limelight. Until now. Look no further than just announced European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a Dresden-based new foundry led byTSMC, joined by Bosch, Infineon and NXP. Another example is a brand new RISC-V JV, equally shared among NXP, Infineon, Qualcomm, Bosch and Nordic, unveiled late last week. For the foreseeable future, creating effective supply chains via partnerships will be the industry’s greatest passion. Pay attention.

In the world of electronics, the design engineer is a demi-god.

He (usually a man but, thank goodness, increasingly less so nowadays), designs, throws his creation over the wall and everyone else scrambles to bring it to production and sell to customers. The only engineers who get involved in the post-design processes are typically those who moved into management, sales positions and components engineers.

This is a worn process. The industry goes through it daily, thousands of times, and all over the world. Which makes engineers believe they rule the roost.

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supply chain

Yes, it is the Supply Chain, Ladies & Gents

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Modern commerce, of any kind, hangs on the strengths, durability and effectiveness of the supply chain(s) that supports it. In the electronics industry, when the supply chain is fragile, porous or insufficiently flexible, disaster is never far away, notwithstanding the type of business, the value or uniqueness of the design. Engineers, too, are negatively impacted when the supply chain crashes. Now, they are teaming up with other players to find solutions. Will this be a permanent move or will the momentum die as quickly as the next cycle?

What does the global electronics industry have in common with The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway’s ageless story of one man’s struggle with fate?

Read More »Yes, it is the Supply Chain, Ladies & Gents