Reddit reviews The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
We found 17 Reddit comments about The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
W W Norton Company
Negative income tax, as described in The Second Machine Age. A must read for anyone whom I consider voting for.
Highly effective narrow AI should be a huge long-term boon, but will be a big problem in the short term. Many, many people spend most of their days doing work they do not enjoy only because they must do so to support themselves (and family etc.) Moreover a lot of the least pleasant jobs pay the worst, which has always seemed backward to me. A world in which there are only a small number of unpleasant jobs remaining, and higher compensation to do them, would be awesome.
But it will be tricky for us to make it into that awesome world. Although in the past increased automation has also led to the creation of new jobs to replace the old ones, there is no law of physics — or for that matter economics so far as I know — guaranteeing this. Brynjolfsson and McAfe make a pretty compelling case that we are already seeing heightening inequality resulting from recent automation, and this is very like to continue on overdrive.
I see nothing to suggest that our economic, let alone political, systems are ready for this. Such a society would require enormous wealth redistribution from the company owners to lots of people who are doing essentially nothing for that wealth in traditional economic terms. Its hard to conceive of the idea of something like that happening in the US until/unless there is huge upheaval. It seems almost guaranteed that we will go through a phase of hyper-inequality.
Moreover, AI is unlikely to just stay at the goldilocks state of doing all of our unpleasant jobs for us, without replacing us in the jobs we humans do want to do, and thus essentially replacing humanity altogether.
Yes, all economists completely agree on this. There isn't ample literature from respected economists saying there is going to be massive unemployment at all...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393239357/ref=pd_aw_sims_2?pi=SY115&simLd=1
Many economists disagree that jobs will magically appear this time. That makes sense, because previously much of the work was created by increased demand and urbanization. There isn't enough time in the day to utilize the services of everyone who has been made unemployed by automation when computers can do almost anything a human can do, cheaper.
Probably a lot of readers of /r/water have read Cadillac Desert.
I own a copy of, and have made two false starts reading, The King Of California as recommend by the anonymous author of the blog On The Public Record.
I highly recommend A Great Aridness, a worthy heir to Cadillac Desert.
Also on my to-read list is Rising Tide. I would like to find a book that does for the Great Lakes what Marc Reisner did for water in the American West with his book Cadillac Desert.
A few things I've read this year that have little to do with water:
EDIT: Oh, and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
You hit the proverbial nail on the head. Make-work bias has been around for centuries and there is usually only temporary unemployment for those whose jobs get replaced by capital. But like you said it's not really worth worrying about at this point.
If anyone has any interest in technological advancement or capital from an economic standpoint, these are some great books to check out:
[Capital in the Twenty-First Century] (http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0ETBP81SYG4890W6R34T)
[The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=0N2W244G0SF4XT3Q5MDB)
[The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Lights-Tunnel-Automation-Accelerating/dp/1448659817/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0Q1BR5DDQRM29TZPTGBN)
You're right, it has been happening since the Industrial Revolution. However, it's never grown at a rate like this before. You should check out the book The Second Machine Age.
You probably don't want to read books like The Second Machine Age or Rise of the Robots then. Self-driving cars are the least of our problems. Consider what we're going to be faced with when automation replaces roughly half of all jobs in the United States over the next 30 years. Truck driving is already headed that way.
Anyway, I work in automation, and unless there's a major (like life-altering) change in government policy, we are all going to be proper fucked in a short amount of time. But at least we'll get there faster in our self-driven cars.
funny that you mention the MIT.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357
Both guys are from the MIT and all my arguments are from this Book.
You should read it.
The Second Machine Age is a book.
Google Scholar search for articles related to The Second Machine Age.
Will Humans Go The Way of Horses, an article by McAfee and Brynjolfsson, and related articles on Google Scholar.
Here's an article/collection on AEI.
Google Scholar search for basic income has lot's of great articles.
I agree macroeconomic prediction has a poor track record. I believe this is because it generally tries to extrapolate from past trends, rather than looking at the first principles causality - e.g. macroeconomics through extrapolation could not have predicted the impact of the internet, but looking at the underlying capability of the technology could (and did).
I think we're already seeing service sector jobs being obsoleted. See http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357 for examples and data backing this up.
Job sectors relying primarily on perception will be the first and hardest hit, since perception is what computers are most rapidly improving at thanks to deep learning.
The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjollfsson and Andrew McKee.
Explains everything about this jobless recovery, the real nature of the coming time of plenty, and what we might want to do to avoid revolution. Goes deep into impacts of AI and automation.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357
Actually, the argument is a bit different now than it was in the past. I can recommend several books on the subject that can explain it more eloquently, specifically "The Second Machine Age" and "Robots will Steal your Job (but that's OK)", but in a nutshell it is because of AI.
We are automating thinking, in the same way that the first machine age automated mechanical labor.
The issue is, you are thinking of the past technological unemployment scares and comparing the human position there to the human position here, which theoretically makes sense.
The problem is, this Machine Age is with us in the positions of horses circa 1860. They were for centuries the source of physical labor and transportation. Then the engine replaced them entirely because it was better in absolute terms.
AI is getting better and better. It's already better than us at a great many things, and that list only gets larger as time passes (driving being a recent grab). As it moves into general intelligence instead of specific situations, more and more people will be rendered effectively obsolete.
How's the horse employment rate these days?
As an aside, the other industrial revolution also resulted in widespread social unrest, many people who dropped out of the work market from automation simply blankly starved because they didn't have welfare programs back then. Society is much better off if we offer a safety net.
Thanks...he (and that same co-author) recently came out with a newer book, too. FYI
A couple of related books are:
a) [The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies] (http://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393239357/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407946623&sr=1-1&keywords=the+second+machine+age)
b) [The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future] (http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Tunnel-Automation-Accelerating-Technology/dp/1448659817/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407946576&sr=1-1&keywords=the+lights+in+the+tunnel)
They are both pretty sobering
I will try to make this short and sweet. (I failed)
What you're talking about is tongue-in-cheek referred to as "The Rise of the Robots" in the economic and technological discourse. To be clear, it's not so much that robots will "take people's jobs" so much as having robots do those jobs will be more cost-effective than having humans do them at a politically acceptable wage.
The thing to understand about technological progress and automation is that all of the previous waves of industrialization (the so-called "first" and "second" industrial revolutions) all involved technology that was complementary to unskilled labor. Whereas before a man would have likely done hard labor out on the farm, because of industrialization one man with farming equipment could do the work of dozens or hundreds before. This freed up labor to go work in efficient assembly lines. So previous waves of industrialization were consistent with high demand for low-skilled labor and thus, rising wages at the low-end. When your grandpa talks about how back in his day you could graduate high school and then go work at the factory or mill or whatever, that's what he's talking about.
Why was this? Well, to summarize this Brad DeLong post, previous industrial technologies were able to substitute for brute force, but they still required a human brain to serve as a sort of "cybernetic control loop," which is to say, you still needed crane operators, tractor drivers, assembly line workers, truck drivers, retail and fast food employees, etc.
So for a long time people such as the Luddites have protested that labor-saving devices were "taking their jobs." Economists have long regarded those fears as unfounded. On the contrary, labor-saving machines freed up labor to be put to other uses. The transition period could be painful as businesses rise and fall and people find themselves in and out of work, but the greater prosperity gained thereby was more than worth it.
But now, we seem to be entering a "Third Industrial Revolution." McAfee and Brynjolfsson call it The Second Machine Age in their book. What separates the current round of automation from previous ones is that they are substitutes for low-skilled labor rather than complements to it. Each passing year we seem to be getting closer and closer to the point where smart computers can drive cars and trucks, run warehouses, stores, farms, and factories, run fast food restaurants, either by themselves or almost entirely by themselves. In fact there is a running joke in certain circles that "a modern manufacturing plant only has two employees: a man and a dog. The man to feed the dog, and the dog to stop the man from touching the machines." In addition, technologies such as the internet are creating a "superstar economy," in which a handful of successful people (think Taylor Swift or the guy who invented TurboTax) get ALL the moneyz because their "product" can be scaled up almost without limit.
What are the broader societal implications of this? Probably the best source to check out is Tyler Cowen's Average is Over. He argues that we will increasingly see a divergence between the roughly 20% of people who are either superstars or able to interact well with machines (data scientists, computer programmers and engineers, etc.) and the 80% or so who won't. The depressing implication is that many people are today what horses were 100 years ago: on the brink of obsolescence.
My own personal opinion is that we do have a non-trivial problem on our hands as we plow ahead into the 21st century. If managed correctly we can ensure that robots are by-and-large beneficial to most people instead of detrimental. This is a topic where it's very hard to tell who is a crank and who is being reasonable if you're just reading about it for the first time, so I'm trying hard to give you a balanced approach.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Tyler Cowen have both done podcasts on their books if you are interested in listening to them. Brad DeLong also discusses this occasionally on his blog, which in my opinion is one of the best econ blogs out there.
Hope this helps. If I wasn't clear about something I'd be happy to clarify.
Once thought the same, evolved from it after reading The Second Machine Age: Work Progress And Prosperity In A Time Of Brilliant Technologies
The only people you do need in times of an aging population would be medical professionals and caretakers, the first is not happening at all, the second to a small degree. Canadians though are not becoming doctors in sufficient numbers and definitely not become caretakers. All the rest could be automatized, the inefficiency that you can see in Canadian companies is beyond explanation.
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.