The Onrushing Wave

Douglas_Reay

There's a long article in this week's The Economist:

The onrushing wave

discussing the effect of changing technology upon the amount of employment available in different sectors of the economy.

Sample paragraph from it:

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

(There's a summary online of their previous book: Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy)

What do people think are society's practical options for coping with this change?

There's a long article in this week's The Economist:

The onrushing wave

discussing the effect of changing technology upon the amount of employment available in different sectors of the economy.

Sample paragraph from it:

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

What do people think are society's practical options for coping with this change?

No, a FAI would have many advantages. For one thing, it wouldn't have the same level of coordination problems that humans do. The technological problems of making DVD were solved years before they replaced VHS. Their sales were delayed by competing standards and the worry that all but one of the standards would be "the next Betamax". The current state of technological development is an absolute mess. We have competing companies with competing standards, and even within a company there are different generations. You have an iPhone 3 that you want to upgrade to the newest generation? You're going to have to replace your charger and other peripherals. Software companies keep releasing new versions of their programs, which means that users have to learn new user interfaces, and people who are using different versions now have compatibility issues. We have technologies involving dozens on patents owned by different companies that are stuck in development hell because the companies can't work out a profit distribution agreement.

You have an iPhone 3 that you want to upgrade to the newest generation? You're going to have to replace your charger and other peripherals.

From the perspective of the company, this is a feature and not a bug.

0MrMind12y

Yep. The idea that the space of possible innovations brought by any technological advancement is explored, not even completely, but just semi-efficiently, is starkly at odds with reality.