http://takimag.com/article/useless_mouths_john_derbyshire "The book that people are reading now," according to Lion of the Blogosophere, is Brynjolfsson and McAfee's The Second Machine Age. I hastened to buy a copy and read itso you don't have to! The authors are professional Deep Thinkers with positions at the MIT Center for Digital Business, which you can read about at that link should you care. So what's it all about? The Second Machine Age is an addition to the growing pile of books about the vanishing middle class, books such as Charles Murray's Coming Apart and Tyler Cowen's Average is Over. If you haven't been paying attention, here's the message: Great swaths of the pen-pushing middle classes are about to lose their jobs to smart machines. The authors offer TurboTax as an illustration. Why use an H&R Block tax preparer when, for much less money (the basic version costs $29.99) and a modest investment of time, TurboTax will do the job for you? You get a better service at a lower price. The creators of TurboTax get richone is a billionaire. Tens of thousands of tax preparers lose their jobs. This has been going on for a while. You could ask a travel agent; or, much easier to find, an ex-travel agent. Brynjolfsson and McAfee did a New York Times op-ed after their original e-book came out, and it's accompanied by a striking graph. The graph shows private employment and productivity since 1947. The two curves rise together until the year 2000. Then the productivity curve keeps on rising, but the employment curve flattens out. The authors call this a "decoupling." There is no reason to think there will be a re-coupling, ever. Yes, folks, it's official: The futurethe quite near futurewill have less and less use for human workers. Software or gadgets will do the tasks that millions of people now do for modest middle-class salaries. The software and gadgets' creators will get tremendously rich without employing many people. WhatsApp, whose entire payroll headcount seems barely to have made it into two digits, sold for $19 billion. It's all happening very fast. The field of Artificial Intelligence was dominated for decades by Moravec's Paradox: Tasks that are very difficult for human beings, such as playing grandmaster-level chess, are fairly easy to get computers to do, while tasks any two-year-old can accomplish, such as distinguishing between a cat and a dog, are ferociously difficult to computerize. That's beginning to look quaint. The authors tell us about some robotics researchers working on SLAMsimultaneous location and mapping. That's the mental work of knowing where you are in an environment and where other things are in relation to you. It's the kind of thing the human brain does well, with very little conscious thought, but which is hard to get machines to do. In 2008 the researchers were close to despair. A review of the topic that year described SLAM as "one of the fundamental challenges of robotics[but it] seems that almost all the current approaches cannot perform consistent maps for large areas." Three years later, thanks to the development work behind the Xbox Kinect accessory, SLAM was a solved problem. There has been similarly fast progress in other problems at the hard end of Moravec's Paradoxnatural language processing, face recognition. As with TurboTax, once the code is written, you can stamp out a million copies for essentially zero cost per copy; and also as with TurboTax, each new application will wipe out thousands of jobs, decoupling work done from the human workers once needed to do it. What will a thoroughly decoupled society look like? Perhaps something like this: Overclass. There will be an overclass of great wealth, made up of working and non-working subclasses. Among the workers will be sports and media celebrities, together with senior administrative and political typesSupreme Court judges and such. The non-workers will be those who made their fortunes, then withdrew to enjoy the fruits of successretired Zuckerbergs and their children. Craftsmen. The overclass won't need much in the way of servants; robotics should take care of that. They will, though, likely choose to indulge themselves with handmade furniture, hand-tended gardens, and so on, if only for purposes of status display. Residuals. For social and political reasons, some human workers will be retained: nurses, soldiers, politicians, and professors. Useless Mouths. The authors quote Voltaire: "Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need." With no work for the great mass of people to do, boredom will be kept at bay by an endless stream of entertainment (we are already there, I think), and a universal dole will vanquish need. Vice will always be with us but will probably only be a problem for some minority of people. Most of us simply aren't vicious. Those are my guesses. Brynjolfsson and McAfee are Pollyannas about the future. Their prescriptions are all blather: "rethinking education," for example, as if education can make dumb people smart. Either from fear or (more likely) sheer ignorance, they show no awareness of human biodiversity. They quote the USA's unimpressive overall scores on the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, apparently unaware that if the scores are disaggregated by race, our whites do better than most other countries' whites, our Asians better than Asia's Asians, our Hispanics as well as Latin America's, and our blacks better than Trinidad's (the only black nation listed). Their prescriptions for immigration are even stupiderthe full prompt sheet of Wall Street Journal and wacko-libertarian talking points. Why, with middle-class jobs melting away, would we need more people? And guys, if you're going to write about immigration, at least try to get the jargon right. There is no such thing as an "H1-B visa." That's the book that people are reading now. My advice would be to pass on it; or, if you have fifty minutes to spare, watch the authors talk about it on YouTube.
Ye good one TeaPot.... How about you go ring all your relatives and tell them to stop having sex and producing people we dont even need in a world at this very IN DEBTEDand a time we are all facing, mainly due too over population.???
Yes I read Taki's Magazine. No I did not like this article. I posted this article because I thought it was worth being read. I disagree with Carl Sagan that we are star dust, we are the consciousness of the cosmos. The system we have now is not capitalism but authoritarianism. Central Banking and money printing is leading to these advances which the free market of free individuals would not produce. Body Corporates ( The military industrial complex ) pay no tax and are bailed out and have access to printed money and are lead by people who have eugenic tendencies. We live in a community and the market is meant to work for this community. I can only ponder how The Silent Generation & the Boomers let this country become so screwed.
"We"? Who do you think you are speaking for? The world is indebted mainly due to over population is it? Got nothing to do with fractional reserve banking and usury I don't suppose?
TheEnd fu.ck off and get a job, maybe then you won't have so much spare time to discriminate against hard working Asians.
As fuel for the debate, and turn things away from race, yet again, I recommend everyone look up Ray Kurzweil, a futurist with a good grasp of what AI can do and cannot/will not do. He has speeches recorded onto Youtube of course. Also the chairman and another head honcho of Google was recently interviewed by Glenn Beck in the US, what I've seen of that was very good and in parts fascinating. Most of it is behind a pay wall however.
I don't begrudge those who spend money earned from honest work, its the few bad apples that cause me the most concern (the boys club in the us, the palm greasers in asia and the generally ruthless russians). As to the f off and get a job comment; I believe that is highly irrelevant, and since you won't be part of the solution to that problem, I'll publicly ask for you to attack the post and not the poster in future.
I'm not sure if you're new here, but TheEnd has highly publicized the fact that he quit his job to go on the dole and has got fired for not doing work at the places where he's been given a chance since. He is a good representation of many Australians who are clueless, jobless and blame their ineptitude on other races, political parties and whoever else is the flavpur of the month. So no, saying that he should go get a job and stop posting racist bullshit is relevant.
Honestly I couldn't give a rats arse who does what and where (you are not your job nor useless if you don't have one), all I ask is that we stick to the topic and not try to launch a tirade of personal attacks on other people directly. Doing otherwise does not make anyone any better than those that are racist.
You're right, I apologise. Standing by quietly while people spout racist bullshit definitely makes you better.
Didn't you know? Col and Trew are the sites' self appointed politically correct clowns telling everyone how to act and what to say. Minnows of the nanny state. It would be great if they got what they wished for, a bunch of Sudanese living next to them and a large group of Arabs on the other side.
Byron, I couldn't care less about political correctness. However, I do have a problem with stupidity, fortunately stupid people and smokers are the only people you can have a go at these days, so you and TheEnd are free targets. Racism is born of fear and ignorance, both of which unfortunately are rife within Australian bogans.
It's idiots like you that are ruining this country, trying to shut down free speech. Btw despite your assumptions I have multiple postgraduate qualifications and speak 3 languages. To your surprise I also have numerous Asian friends and non white extended family. Hey they don't like what is happening either with this dirty foreign money pushing up prices and undesirables imported en mass. Sorry but your label of a racist bogan doesn't stick with me. Now piss off, you've wasted enough of my time. I am working a 12 hour shift tomorrow and need some rest.
Trying to shut down free speech? I told him to get a job. It's people like you trying to encourage (white) people to stay on the dole that is ruining the country That is incredibly impressive. How exactly do you differentiate between Chinese, Russian, Australian, American, Brazillian and British dirty money? Which dirty money is ok?
Mate You are one little sick little puppie. You have no job, you have no idea where your going and you denigrate others because of the colour of their skin or the slant of their eyes? Does that really solve your issues END or are you hiding? There are three basic things you need to work on. 1. You need to Love someone. 2. You need need someone to Love you 3.You need something to Do (a full time job) Kind Regards non recourse
