The Rise of the Robots: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
Very wise words from close to where the rubber meets the road about how the Rise of the Robots is likely to work out for the labor market over the next generation or so: Shane Greenstein: Adjusting to Autonomous Trucking: "Let’s come into contact with a grounded sense of the future.... Humans have invented tools for repetitive tasks, and some of those tools are becoming less expensive and more reliable...
The answer is: probably in the late 1960s: Joe McMahon: When was the last time all the computing power in the world equaled one iPhone?: "When was the last time all the computing power in the world equaled one iPhone?...
IMHO, the "long run" problems Martin discusses need to be postponed: we don't know enough about the future to even begin to think intelligently about them. The "medium run" problems, by contrast, deserve a lot of attention right now: Martin Wolf: Work in the age of intelligent machines: "How do you organise a society in which few people do anything economically productive?...
Wikipedia: FLOPS
Kevin is, I think, wrong here. Radiologists are not (yet) in trouble. Radiologists as image-reading 'bots are in trouble: Kevin Drum: Puny Humans Crushed By Machines Yet Again: "Radiologists are already in trouble, and if a robot can pass a medical licensing exam summa cum laude then how much longer can it be before robots are making house calls? Everybody thinks of truck drivers and retail clerks as the first victims of the coming robot revolution, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Jobs that require no tricky physical proficiency but very deep analytical skills are going to be some of the first to put people permanently out of work. In a sense, though, this is a good thing, since it means the challenge ahead will finally get some serious attention...."
Ben Thompson: Intel and the Danger of Integration: "Intel... has spent the last several years propping up its earnings by focusing more and more on the high-end, selling Xeon processors to cloud providers...
Neither Adam Smith’s nor Henry Ford's picture of the economy is relevant for us today. What thumbnail picture is relevant? We do not know, but Bill Janeway thinks harder and more successfully about this question than anybody else I have seen... William H. Janeway: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, 2nd Edition
Seth Godin: Failsafe tip: "The last thing to add to an important email is the email address...
Necessities become things that are beneath our notice. Conveniences become necessities. Luxuries become conveniences. And then we invent new luxuries—like feeling put upon yesterday because a new 2 terabyte backup disk cost $70 and took 8 hours to get delivered to my door so I couldn't get all of my backups done last night: Jeff Bezos: Divine Discontent: Disruption’s Antidote: "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent...
Paul Krugman says that the public sphere—even the good part of the public sphere—has gone wrong because of the threat and the menace that is twitter: Paul Krugman: Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "This discussion is taking place marks a kind of new frontier in the mechanics of scientific communication–and, I think, an unfortunate one...
Note to Self: I am pretty good at making sure Twitter does not seize my attention and hack my brain. But many other people are not. Platforms so that you can control aggregators. How was it that Tim Berners-Lee's Open Web crushed the Walled Gardeners in the 1990s? And how have the Walled Gardeners made their comeback? And what can be done?: Manton Reece (2014): Microblog Links: "Brent Simmons points to my post on microblogs and asks...
An interesting and complex argument: Ben Thompson: The Moat Map: "Aggregators and Platforms.... Apple and Microsoft, the two “bicycle of the mind” companies... platforms.... Google and Facebook... products of the Internet... not to platforms but to aggregators.... Platforms need 3rd parties....Aggregators attract end users by virtue of their inherent usefulness and, over time, leave suppliers no choice but to follow the aggregators’ dictates.... [But] what of companies like Amazon, or Netflix?... Clearly both have very different businesses — and supplier relationships — than either Google and Facebook on one side or Apple and Microsoft on the other, even as they both derive their power from owning the customer relationship.... Owning the customer relationship remains critical: that is the critical insight of Aggregation Theory. How that ownership of the customer translates into an enduring moat, though, depends on the interaction of two distinct attributes: supplier differentiation and network effects..."
With respect to U.S. technological leadership, it may be time to start quoting John Donne: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..." And remember England, starting a centurty and a half ago Dan Wang: How smartphones made Shenzhen China's innovation capital: "Companies have invested millions of dollars in figuring out how to make them small, cheap, and light enough to include in smartphones. And most of these chips have proven useful well beyond the smartphone market. As a result, we're in the midst of a hardware renaissance, in which it's easier than ever to develop and market new gadgets. The center of this renaissance is Shenzhen..."
