The Rise of the Robots: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
From my perspective, here we have Mariana Mazzucato picking up on themes (not original to us by any means!) of Steve Cohen's and my Concrete Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1422189821:Mariana Mazzucato: Who Really Creates Value in an Economy?: "Investment remains weak... [because] economic policy continues to be informed by neoliberal ideology... rather than by historical experience...
Susan Athey: The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics: "ML does not add much to questions about identification... but rather yields great improvements when the goal is semi-parametric estimation or when there are a large number of covariates relative to the number of observations...
Long-run changes in the nature of work and jobs happen, but they happen in the long run. In the short run in which we live, low-pressure and high-pressure economies dominate. Why does anybody find this surprising?: Larry Mishel: "One reporter told me there’s quite a ‘furor’ over the new BLS Contingent worker data. Not sure why that should be, except if you bought the hype about a rapidly changing nature of work and an explosion of freelancing and gig work. @EconomicPolicy...
The rise of the factory—shift from home production to production under the eye of a boss, at a workplace—was underway, long before mechanization, in numeric calculation as well as in craft piecework: Lorraine Daston (2017): Calculation and the Division Of Labor, 1750-1950: "On an August morning in 1838, the seventeen-year-old Edwin Dunkin and his brother...
What I am going to be trying to figure out this weekend: Daniel M. Sullivan: Econtools Documentation: "0.1...
This is the most hopeful take on American productivity growth relative stagnation I have seen. I thought it was coherent and might well be right 20 years ago. I think it is coherent and might possibly be right today. But is that just a vain hope?: Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald (1997): Managing Our Way to Higher Service-Sector Productivity: "What electricity, railroads, and gasoline power did for the U.S. economy between roughly 1850 and 1970, computer power is widely expected to do for today’s information-based service economy...
I concur with Noah Smith here that the biggest dangers of machine learning, etc., are not on the labor but on the consumer side. They won't make us obsolete as producers. They could make us easier to grift as customers. Consider that nearly all of Silicon Valley these days is seeking not to make electrons get up and dance in circuits or to make circuits get up and dance in applications that accomplish tasks users wish done, but rather in trying to hack users' brains so their eyeballs will stay glued to screens: Noah Smith: Artificial Intelligence Still Isn’t All That Smart: "Machine learning will revolutionize white-collar jobs in much the same way that engines, electricity and machine tools revolutionized blue-collar jobs...
Brent Simmons: I’m a Goddamn Social Media Professional: "I’ve joined Mastodon, and I find myself constantly confused.... The apps I’ve tried (including the web app) are difficult to use and/or don’t do the things I want them to do, or do them confusingly...
This may, to some degree, be the growing pains of new technology. There were people who strongly objected to printing, on the grounds that the only way to truly grok a book was to copy it out word-for-word by hand. In their view, printing produced a bunch of shallow intellectual poseurs who would have only a surface and inadequate knowledge of the books that they had not really read but only skimmed. And Sokrates's attitude toward writing as a greatly inferior simulacrum and inadequate mimesis that could not create the true knowledge obtained through real dialogue is well known. Nevertheless, we believe that we have managed to adapt to printing and indeed to the creation of manuscript rather than just the oldest oral master-and-apprentice intellectual technologies. Perhaps we will find different things to be true once we will have trained our information-technology networks to be our servants as trusted information intermediaries and intellectual force multipliers, rather than (as they know are) the servants of the advertisers that pay them and thus that try to glue our eyeballs and attention to screens whether having our eyeballs and attention so-glued helps us become more like our best selves or not. But as of now the empirical evidence has become overteherliong: Susan Dynarski: For better learning in college lectures, lay down the laptop and pick up a pen: "When college students use computers or tablets during lecture, they learn less and earn worse grades. The evidence consists of a series of randomized trials, in both college classrooms and controlled laboratory settings...
Dan Davies: "If Amazon's marketing department were a bit sharper, they wouldn't rub my face quite so aggressively in the fact that their signature device is unreliable and breaks:
Jamie Powell: Who cares if Elon is incinerating capital?: "The great American railways provide a helpful illustration...
Put me down as somebody who is now not feeling sorry at all for these entitled clowns who greatly overestimate smarts and skill vs. luck. And F--- you, @jack, especially: Cathy O'Neal: Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth: "I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They’re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created...
I am confident that there will be jobs. I am much less confident that there will be enough middle-class jobs: Adam Ozimek: Robots and Jobs: A Check on Fear: "When it comes to discussing the effects of automation on labor markets, I see far too much partial equilibrium thinking...
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..."
Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...
OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech’s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind” companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms.
Jason Rhode: What tech calls “AI” isn’t really AI: "We're in the dark ages of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, to say nothing of the philosophical riddles...
We call them "AI", but that confuses and distracts us: Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra... intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike...
Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...
Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook’s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte...
Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren’t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook’s... core advertising business.
Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...
A. Michael Froomkin, Ian R. Kerr, Joelle Pineau: When AIs Outperform Doctors: The Dangers of a Tort-Induced Over-Reliance on Machine Learning and What (Not) to Do About it: "Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors...
David Autor and Anna Salomons: Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share: "Is automation a labor-displacing force?...
Sean Gallagher: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones: "A New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site...
Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...
Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn’t Be In the Driverless Car Business: "The fact that it’s an Uber car doesn’t surprise me. They’re exactly the kind of company that would cut corners..
A Question About the Future of Work...: I have no sense of what kinds of things the masses of displaced workers will do in the future at the level of "microprocessor", "robot", "accounting software 'bot"...
Charlie Stross: Test Case: "There are ramifications...
Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump’s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as “psychographs”...
Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...
Matt Townsend et al.: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn’t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...
Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...
Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...
Cory Doctorow: Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech: "In 2018, companies from John Deere to GM to Johnson & Johnson use digital locks and abusive license agreements to force you to submit to surveillance and control how you use their products...
Janelle Shane: Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?: "Neural network[s]... used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition...
Kenneth Rogoff: Economists vs. Scientists on Long-Term Growth: "Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence...
Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney: Explaining the Decline in the U.S. Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence: "Within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important...
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers: On the link between US pay and productivity: "More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth...
Kenneth Rogoff: When Will Tech Disrupt Higher Education?: "Universities and colleges are pivotal to the future of our societies...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Andrew Wachtel: Universities in the Age of AI: "Over the next 50 years or so, as AI and machine learning become more powerful, human labor will be cannibalized by technologies that outperform people in nearly every job function..
Dan Davies and Others: Chris Hanretty: LRT: study in most recent APSR suggests getting people to take perspective of marginalised group...
Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox...F
Charlie Stross: Dude, you broke the future!: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion...
#riseoftherobots
#publicsphere
