Andrew McAfee: Race Against the Machine

Andrew McAfee, coauthor of Race Against the Machine did very interesting TED talk recently on the subject of his book, overlapping heavily with the subject of this blog. The first half of the talk does an excellent job of stating the problem. He demonstrates how businesses are profiting more than ever today, investing in technology more than ever -- but are not hiring. He also talks about how various technologies are starting to catch up and even eclipse humans in cognitive tasks such as translation and writing grammatically-perfect articles, and that 'we ain't seen nothing yet'.


Oddly, while demonstrating that 'droids are coming for your jobs' he also claims that current debate on 'whether these technologies are affecting people's ability to make a living' is 'missing the point entirely'.

For the millions of people people losing their houses to foreclosure, shuffling in the dole queues and soup kitchens, collecting paltry benefits, wallowing in depression and freezing in alleys and tent cities I would say the concern about losing income is exactly on point and in need of urgent focus. Is he saying that we ought to just wait out the storms in a 'laissez-faire' kind of manner and that the problems will spontaneously sort themselves out?

Unfortunately, I think so. He doesn't offer anything in the way of suggested actions and decisions we could be making. Instead, his talk pivots half-way through onto an optimistic feel-good frame which I think has shaky foundations. He points to one good aspect of technology at the bottom of the pyramid -- citing a study of poor rural fishing villages leveraging the power of cell phones to improve their knowledge of the market situation and reduce waste.

Yes, we know that human productivity rises when technology is introduced, and it's initially a huge benefit to independent workers. But what happens when poor fishermen with creaky boats come into competition with hyper-efficient automated fishing operations? On land, where robots have a surer footing, we can see how small, poor farmers suffer in competition with gigantic, scaled and highly automated agribusiness.

A time when hands are not needed to steer the ship and haul the fishing nets can't be too far away, as these are pretty routine tasks, and there's plenty of research going into ship automation. With no income stream to leverage,  information carrier technology becomes increasingly useless, not to mention unaffordable (in the current consumer paradigm).

I'm too am hopeful that technology will benefit the neediest in the world. We know of it's potential, but we can't afford to think that technology will steer itself to that end without heavy political upheaval going on of some kind or another. That's the missing step in the transition that too few people (and almost no prominent futurists and economists) are willing to talk about -- including myself, for now.

Obsopocalyptic Visions

Miles of sophisticated capital devoid of human labour... Automated factories, automated stacking for shipping, automated warehousing...

With automated haulage (possible with the wave of unmanned vehicle technology in recent years) and automated retail on the horizon, we're getting close to the point where you can have a gigantic distribution system churning out products with nary a human involved. Unless you count the owner.

With such awesome capabilities, is it any wonder that profits are skyrocketing for capital, while unemployment remains intractable, and may even be getting worse?

Automated Manufacturing

Automated Palletizing

Automated Warehousing

Can We Really Depend on Hi-Tech Start-Ups to Power Future Employment?

Many who refute the coming obsopocalypse argue that displacement by technology simply frees people up to do new jobs in more cutting-edge ventures -- ventures often created by the very same disruptive technology. Obviously there new businesses and new jobs categories pop up all the time -- but the related jobs are just not being created in large enough numbers any more.
 
The Kauffman Foundation produced an excellent study last year Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller, America's Slow Leak in Job Creation detailing how new start-up businesses have become increasingly poor engines of employment.

From the report:

''Even before the Great Recession, firms were starting smaller. They were opening their doors with fewer workers than the historic norm and were relatively reluctant to expand their workforces even during good economic times. Since at least the middle of the last decade and perhaps earlier, the growth trajectories and survival rates for these businesses meant that they were contributing fewer and fewer new jobs to the  economy.
[...]
Media and academic commentators who bemoan America’s unusually slow rate of job creation after the 2007–2009 recession are missing what we believe is a longer-term trend that began earlier in the decade and might best be called a slow jobs “leak.”
[...]
In many cases, companies or individuals that once would have been hired as employees of a business now are performing the work on a temporary basis as contractors through other professional service organizations or under their own self-employment contracts. These individuals, while sometimes characterized as "entrepreneurs,” are not likely to employ others or to reach significant scale".

Some of key trends from the report:
-The number of new start-ups has declined significantly in recent years
-The percentage of the new business that are providing jobs for other people (other than the founder) is decreasing -- there's a huge rise of one-person businesses.
-The average number of employees per new business has been declining since 2002 (when 10.8 would be employed) to less than 8 now
-Fewer new businesses are surviving more than 5 years
-Of  the businesses that survive their initial years, and go on to grow their operations, job growth is now slower than the historic norm

The extinct switchboard operator

The report refrained from speculating on the causes of the job growth leaks compared to previous decades. To me, and I believe to anyone who gives it 5 minutes thought, the story seems quite obvious. The timeline completely coincides with the computer revolution, and the growing use of computers makes an increasing number of former roles redundant.

The precipitous decline in job creation of contemporary start-ups is an entirely predictable result of technological development. Advancing technology, especially IT tools in the past 2 decades, increases worker productivity, allowing companies to do more with less workers.

For example, secretaries, data entry staff and even accountants are found less and less in new companies. The notion of a human secretary at a desk could soon seem as quaint as telephone switchboard operators today.

On Software Automation (and Dilbert)

Serious point to these comics -- automation used to be mainly associated with manual tasks, but we've seen a steady march into elements of office service work that secretaries, call centre operators, bank tellers etc. used to do. In many companies now, even CVs and job applications are being read and discarded automatically by clever software identifying the best fits, so that only a shortlist, a fraction, of the applications is passed to a human for the final decision.

Pretty much any clerical task that can be done using a computer or network can be automated by sufficiently advanced software. Because software is replicable, it is stunningly cheap compared to hiring human brains. Unlike machinery and people, software does not really wear out over time, and it is can be very quickly upgraded. Institutions in the service sector are becoming increasingly lean with IT technologies, a trend that started in the early 90. This is probably why the disruptive start-ups of the internet age don't create as many jobs as they destroy.

Anyway, I've always loved Dilbert, enjoy :)




 



(From Scott Adam's Dilbert cartoon,  www.dilbert.com)

Growing Mainstream Acceptance of Human Displacement by Tech

A great article from the Economist Magazine -- it's unusual to see this magazine question the standard market ideology.
Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy

From the article:

'[I]f the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country's joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession.'

[...]

'[There] is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.'

Rethinking Artificial Intelligence

Rethinking Artificial Intelligence

An interesting read from the front lines of MIT research on some of the bottlenecks and mistakes in AI development so far. Artificial Intelligence is a very young field, we've only recently had the computing power to run the powerful algorithms necessary for complex thought.

Processing power has been doubling at a steady rate according to Moore's Law for several decades now. This is greatly increasing AI capabilities in brute force calculations, making them superior to humans at certain narrow tasks (predicting weather patterns, for example).

But in other aspects of AI programming, in more convoluted tasks, the software and the algorithms we produce is lagging behind our rocketing hardware capabilities. The development of these programmes still depends on human creativity and work. AI is still incapable of grasping the basic subtleties of human language for example, something a human child masters reflexively.

Since we still have a very incomplete understanding of the human brain, professionals in the field are trying to tackle the problem in a plethora of interesting ways. If research teams such as this one at MIT can successfully identify misguided avenues which are bogging down progress, we can expect to see bigger leaps in the near future.

From the article:

“[H]ow do you model thought?” In AI research to date, he says, “what’s been missing is an ecology of models, a system that can solve problems in many ways,” as the mind does.

Part of this difficulty comes from the very nature of the human mind, evolved over billions of years as a complex mix of different functions and systems. “The pieces are very disparate; they’re not necessarily built in a compatible way,” Gershenfeld says. “There’s a similar pattern in AI research. There are lots of pieces that work well to solve some particular problem, and people have tried to fit everything into one of these.” Instead, he says, what’s needed are ways to “make systems made up of lots of pieces” that work together like the different elements of the mind. “Instead of searching for silver bullets, we’re looking at a range of models, trying to integrate them and aggregate them,” he says.

Welcome : )

If you're a dork like me, there's a good chance that you believe humanity is fast approaching the Singularity, which, speaking conservatively, will probably occur within the next 100 years (assuming we survive that long). This is the point when artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon it can rapidly improve itself at accelerating rates beyond our comprehension. Lots of geeks all over the planet are looking forward to the rapturous enlightened time when we will be able to commune harmoniously with our future machine friends and benefactors and everything wrong and outmoded will be changed for the better.

It sounds great to me too. But hold on...

Before we reach a machine-intelligence singularity, we are surely also about to hit another major period in human history, which I will call the obsopocalypse. The obsopocalypse is a coming explosion of the obsolescence of the human workforce brought about by technological sophistication -- such as automation, robots, narrow artificial intelligences and perhaps artificial forms of life. What the heck is society going to look like if we reach a point where 50+% of humans have no means of adding value to the workforce?

Most mainstream economists and futurists I've seen who are questioned about this concern do not appear to take the possibility of technological unemployment seriously. But I've found that their responses tend to be faith-based more than anything else, believing, or perhaps pretending, that there is nothing to worry about since the 'market' is an infallible system that will correct itself in any way necessary to benefit mankind.

As an alternative to traditional jobs, the word 'innovation' is bandied around greatly by economists speculating on the future, as though everyone whose job has been lost to a metal claw is expected to become a successful entrepreneur instead. Such economists never, to my knowledge, manage to specify realistic sources of work that will be able to absorb the displaced billions.

If the obsopocalypse is an accurate prediction, then the event will completely alter human civilization beyond recognition, for better or for worse. There is a great danger that humanity's utopian dreams of abundance, formerly a common theme in the popular science fiction, will be permanently crushed in this period, for reasons I will go into later.

I believe the obsopocalypse will happen within 50 years -- a pretty conservative estimate compared to what many celebrated futurists come out with these days (if Kurzweil is accurate in predicting the Singularity in 2045, then the obsopocalypse is likely to be closer to just 25 years away). In any case this is absolutely an issue of our times, and of our childrens', something that needs to be urgently considered. Mobilizing any kind of global political response to the issue is naturally going to take years. Walking blind, the disruptive effects could be catastrophic.

If the current economic paradigm is still in place, the obsopocalypse will mean a huge swelling of the ranks of the desperate poor as wages are depressed and human jobs evaporate. It will also mean an even more gigantic gap between the world's poorest and richest people, with dire implications,.

I hope that this blog will make a contribution to discussing possible futures we might create over the next few decades, and to catalyzing some steps towards change if they are needed.

Welcome anxious masses! I'd love to get a discussion going here, whatever your views. Don't be shy to comment on the guff I post...   : )