People has difficulties even debugging a Web browser. Look at Firefox. It crashes all the
time. Linux recently became overcomplicated OS, that few people outside developers understand and even
developers understand small subset of what is in, In other words another Windows. that suggest that
overcomplexity bite in software development. And robots are much more complex then a Web browser.
Yes some tasks can be almost completely be automated. But, for example, driving a car on the road
with a lot of cars is somewhat social process, and is not only about AI abilities and sophisticated
radar technology (although adaptive cruse control in modern cars is amazing achievement it its own right).
This is more complex thing and in complex situation AI will definitely misbehave. So with all
fake bravado, he will probably eventually fail (for example by intorduing catastrophic bug) and will be
litigated his pants off. He is adventurist, no question about
it, and with Tesla navigation he is playing with fire. . .
Boasting about IA capabilities does nothing good. Programmer abilities are limited. and that limits AI abilities. The fact
that AI now can win in chess is testimony of progress in hardware, not so much in software.
The most impressive recent advance is recognition of human voice. Which now became finally
usable. but how much much there is IA in it and how much sophisticated search algorithms
remains to be seen.
IBM Jeopardy! win is more impressive, but that's about it. It was a highly specialized
program designed specifically for this purpose. With enough money and man hours put into such narrow
task you probably can achieve something. But still this is a undeniable success.
There are tremendous difficulties with high level automation based on AI, because if thing will go
wrong, they might go catastrophically wrong.
At the recently concluded World Economic Forum, there was a big focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. On the website,
you can findbreathless
articlesabout “Meet Stan: the robot valet that parks your car at the airport” and “US companies created a record number of
robot workers in 2018”. In a Washington Post article on the WEF, the title betrayed a certain unease about the replacement of
human beings by robots:
The handwriting is on the wall. The USA is moving into a two-tiered system. In places like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle
and Portland, you get 10% of population represented byprofessionals working in high-tech industries and revicing a decent pay,
often six figures pay.
Meanwhile, in Detroit, Cleveland, and other places where Fordism once held sway, the jobs are there if you are willing to work
at Walmarts for $9 per hour (around $18K per year) and get 40 hours a well only if they are lucky, at local hospitals emptying
bedpans or as guards in a jail or prison. Class divisions between those with advanced technology skills and those left out
will only increase, leading to the kind of showdown taking place in France between the neoliberal state and the Yellow Vests.
The replacement of human labor by machinery has been described as “creative destruction”. The assumption is that the temporary
pain is worth it since there will always be the growth of new jobs. As my seventh grade social studies put it, the invention
of the automobile put the blacksmith out of work but it created far more jobs in a Ford plant.
Walmart Brings Automation To Regional Distribution Centers BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY,
JUL 18, 2021 - 09:00 PM
The progressive press had a field day with "woke" Walmart highly
publicized February decision to hikes wages for 425,000 workers to an average above $15 an
hour. We doubt the obvious follow up - the ongoing stealthy replacement of many of its minimum
wage workers with machines - will get the same amount of airtime.
As Chain Store
Age reports , Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in
its regional distribution centers. I.e., it is replacing thousands of workers with robots.
Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology
solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla.,
distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is
either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the
product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck
arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate
places.
Leveraging the Symbiotic solution, a complex algorithm determines how to store cases like
puzzle pieces using high-speed mobile robots that operate with a precision that speeds the
intake process and increases the accuracy of freight being stored for future orders. By using
dense modular storage, the solution also expands building capacity.
In addition, by using palletizing robotics to organize and optimize freight, the Symbiotic
solution creates custom store- and aisle-ready pallets.
Why is Walmart doing this? Simple: According to CSA, "Walmart expects to save time, limit
out-of-stocks and increasing the speed of stocking and unloading." More importantly, the
company hopes to further cut expenses and remove even more unskilled labor from its supply
chain.
This solution follows tests of similar automated warehouse solutions at a Walmart
consolidation center in Colton, Calif., and perishable grocery distribution center in Shafter,
Calif.
Walmart plans to implement this technology in 25 of its 42 RDCs.
"Though very few Walmart customers will ever see into our warehouses, they'll still be able
to witness an industry-leading change, each time they find a product on shelves," said Joe
Metzger, executive VP of supply chain operations at Walmart U.S. "There may be no way to solve
all the complexities of a global supply chain, but we plan to keep changing the game as we use
technology to transform the way we work and lead our business into the future."
Walmart Brings Automation To Regional Distribution Centers BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY,
JUL 18, 2021 - 09:00 PM
The progressive press had a field day with "woke" Walmart highly
publicized February decision to hikes wages for 425,000 workers to an average above $15 an
hour. We doubt the obvious follow up - the ongoing stealthy replacement of many of its minimum
wage workers with machines - will get the same amount of airtime.
As Chain Store
Age reports , Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in
its regional distribution centers. I.e., it is replacing thousands of workers with robots.
Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology
solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla.,
distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is
either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the
product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck
arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate
places.
Leveraging the Symbiotic solution, a complex algorithm determines how to store cases like
puzzle pieces using high-speed mobile robots that operate with a precision that speeds the
intake process and increases the accuracy of freight being stored for future orders. By using
dense modular storage, the solution also expands building capacity.
In addition, by using palletizing robotics to organize and optimize freight, the Symbiotic
solution creates custom store- and aisle-ready pallets.
Why is Walmart doing this? Simple: According to CSA, "Walmart expects to save time, limit
out-of-stocks and increasing the speed of stocking and unloading." More importantly, the
company hopes to further cut expenses and remove even more unskilled labor from its supply
chain.
This solution follows tests of similar automated warehouse solutions at a Walmart
consolidation center in Colton, Calif., and perishable grocery distribution center in Shafter,
Calif.
Walmart plans to implement this technology in 25 of its 42 RDCs.
"Though very few Walmart customers will ever see into our warehouses, they'll still be able
to witness an industry-leading change, each time they find a product on shelves," said Joe
Metzger, executive VP of supply chain operations at Walmart U.S. "There may be no way to solve
all the complexities of a global supply chain, but we plan to keep changing the game as we use
technology to transform the way we work and lead our business into the future."
But wait: wasn't this recent rise in wages in real terms being propagandized as a new boom
for the working class in the USA by the MSM until some days ago?
And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and
Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a
voice-recognition algorithm.
An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic
legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to
technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and
contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring
workers -- at least at the wages that employers are used to paying -- is providing new momentum
for automation.
Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a
post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some
economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power,
particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.
"Once a job is automated, it's pretty hard to turn back," said Casey Warman, an economist at
Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic .
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving
to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for
waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut
their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in
the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of
leverage , leading to higher pay
, more generous benefits and other perks.
Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those
gains. A
working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that
pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United
States but around the world.
"Six months ago, all these workers were essential," said Marc Perrone, president of the
United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. "Everyone was calling
them heroes. Now, they're trying to figure out how to get rid of them."
Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic
shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult -- so
much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back
behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while
in high school.
"We really felt like there has to be another solution," she said.
So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition
systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant's technology
began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales's drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by
an automated voice designed to understand their orders -- including modifications and special
requests -- suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the
kitchen and the cashier.
The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the
system to her three other restaurants.
"We'll look back and say why didn't we do this sooner," she said.
The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels,
retailers ,
manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a
survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of
businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of
technology.
Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two
decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and
stockholders to compete over their share of the income -- a game that workers tended to lose.
Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could
be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting
firm.
She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for
years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him
win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an
expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.
"For the first time, we're seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity,
lowering cost, but they're also increasing flexibility," she said. "We're starting to see real
momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly."
Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor
without adding much to overall productivity.
In a
recent working paper , Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that "a significant
portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by
automation" -- and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.
"If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we
would have had a very different trajectory for inequality," Professor Acemoglu said.
Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn't looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30
people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level
workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers
and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.
"Our approach is, this is an assistant for you," she said. "This allows our employee to
really focus" on customers.
Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an
hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that
she would lose sales -- and automation allows her to take another course.
Rob Carpenter, Valyant's chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking
drive-through orders is only part of an employee's responsibilities. Automating that task
doesn't eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.
"We're not talking about automating an entire position," he said. "It's just one task within
the restaurant, and it's gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks."
But technology doesn't have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If
automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight
or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology
could erode workers' bargaining power.
"Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no
more," Professor Acemoglu said. "It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I'll get
lower wages."
At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available.
Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States,
has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require
someone to flip burgers -- they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press
of a button.
"You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier," said
Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. "It certainly widens the scope of who you can have
behind that grill."
With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to
the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a
shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.
Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could
significantly change workers' prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said
technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it
hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.
"If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?" Professor Warman said.
Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he
added.
The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people
without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have
reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and
check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a
375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery
customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.
Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop
& Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to
better serve customers -- and that it was a competitive necessity.
"Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and
partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers," she
said. "Stop & Shop needs to do the same."
In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich,
Conn. A decade later, he manages the store's prepared foods department, earning around $40,000
a year.
Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn't concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon,
and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive -- like more powerful ovens for
rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.
But he worries about other technologies -- like automated meat slicers -- that seem to
enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a
career in the industry.
"The business model we seem to be following is we're pushing toward automation and we're not
investing equally in the worker," he said. "Today it's, 'We want to get these robots in here to
replace you because we feel like you're overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he
has to do is push this button.'"
"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in
the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were
engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery
landscape...
In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program
funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and
consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot
servers grows around the country.
And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped
on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and
several others, in the next couple of weeks...
"Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way
they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing
the space with the delivery bots,"
said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...
Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are
placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a
computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and
in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot
will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to
allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in
30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at
Berkeley, where
at least one of its robots burst into flames . But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In
about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000
deliveries...
"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles
and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ
their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is
making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."
A video
shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog
on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer
having to tip human food-delivery workers.
"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in
the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were
engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery
landscape...
In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program
funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and
consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot
servers grows around the country.
And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped
on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and
several others, in the next couple of weeks...
"Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way
they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing
the space with the delivery bots,"
said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...
Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are
placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a
computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and
in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot
will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to
allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in
30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at
Berkeley, where
at least one of its robots burst into flames . But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In
about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000
deliveries...
"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles
and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ
their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is
making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."
A video
shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog
on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer
having to tip human food-delivery workers.
Customers wouldn't have to train the algorithm on their own boxes because the robot was made
to recognize boxes of different sizes, textures and colors. For example, it can recognize both
shrink-wrapped cases and cardboard boxes.
... Stretch is part of a growing market of warehouse robots made by companies such as 6
River Systems Inc., owned by e-commerce technology company Shopify Inc., Locus Robotics Corp. and Fetch
Robotics Inc. "We're anticipating exponential growth (in the market) over the next five years,"
said Dwight Klappich, a supply chain research vice president and fellow at tech research firm
Gartner Inc.
As fast-food restaurants and small businesses struggle to find low-skilled workers to staff
their kitchens and cash registers, America's biggest fast-food franchise is seizing the
opportunity to field test a concept it has been working toward for some time: 10 McDonald's
restaurants in Chicago are testing automated drive-thru ordering using new artificial
intelligence software that converts voice orders for the computer.
McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said Wednesday during an appearance at Alliance Bernstein's
Strategic Decisions conference that the new voice-order technology is about 85% accurate and
can take 80% of drive-thru orders. The company obtained the technology during its 2019
acquisition of Apprente.
The introduction of automation and artificial intelligence into the industry will eventually
result in entire restaurants controlled without humans - that could happen as early as the end
of this decade. As for McDonald's, Kempczinski said the technology will likely take more than
one or two years to implement.
"Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants
across the US, with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect
permutations, weather -- and on and on and on, " he said.
McDonald's is also exploring automation of its kitchens, but that technology likely won't be
ready for another five years or so - even though it's capable of being introduced soooner.
McDonald's has also been looking into automating more of the kitchen, such as its fryers
and grills, Kempczinski said. He added, however, that that technology likely won't roll out
within the next five years, even though it's possible now.
"The level of investment that would be required, the cost of investment, we're nowhere
near to what the breakeven would need to be from the labor cost standpoint to make that a
good business decision for franchisees to do," Kempczinski said.
And because restaurant technology is moving so fast, Kempczinski said, McDonald's won't
always be able to drive innovation itself or even keep up. The company's current strategy is
to wait until there are opportunities that specifically work for it.
"If we do acquisitions, it will be for a short period of time, bring it in house,
jumpstart it, turbo it and then spin it back out and find a partner that will work and scale
it for us," he said.
On Friday, Americans will receive their first broad-based update on non-farm employment in
the US since last month's report, which missed expectations by a wide margin, sparking
discussion about whether all these "enhanced" monetary benefits from federal stimulus programs
have kept workers from returning to the labor market.
Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for its four-legged robot "dog," this week
announced a new product, a computer-vision enabled mobile warehouse robot named "Stretch."
Developed in response to growing demand for automation in warehouses, the robot can reach up
to 10 feet inside of a truck to pick up and unload boxes up to 50 pounds each. The robot has a
mobile base that can maneuver in any direction and navigate obstacles and ramps, as well as a
robotic arm and a gripper. The company estimates that there are more than 500 billion boxes
annually that get shipped around the world, and many of those are currently moved manually.
"It's a pretty arduous job, so the idea with Stretch is that it does the manual labor part
of that job," said Robert Playter, chief executive of the Waltham, Mass.-based company.
The pandemic has accelerated [automation of] e-commerce and logistics operations even more
over the past year, he said.
... ... ...
... the robot was made to recognize boxes of different sizes, textures and colors. For
example, it can recognize both shrink-wrapped cases and cardboard boxes.
Eventually, Stretch could move through an aisle of a warehouse, picking up different
products and placing them on a pallet, Mr. Playter said.
I keep happening on these mentions of manufacturing jobs succumbing to automation, and I
can't think of where these people are getting their information.
I work in manufacturing. Production manufacturing, in fact, involving hundreds, thousands,
tens of thousands of parts produced per week. Automation has come a long way, but it also
hasn't. A layman might marvel at the technologies while taking a tour of the factory, but
upon closer inspection, the returns are greatly diminished in the last two decades. Advances
have afforded greater precision, cheaper technologies, but the only reason China is a giant
of manufacturing is because labor is cheap. They automate less than Western factories, not
more, because humans cost next to nothing, but machines are expensive.
For example Microsoft success was by the large part determined its alliance with IBM
in the creation of PC and then exploiting IBM ineptness to ride this via shred marketing
and alliances and "natural monopoly" tendencies in IT. MS DOS was a clone of CP/M that
was bought, extended and skillfully marketed. Zero innovation here.
Both Microsoft and Apple rely of research labs in other companies to produce
innovation which they then then produced and marketed. Even Steve Jobs smartphone was not
an innovation per se: it was just a slick form factor that was the most successful in the
market. All functionality existed in other products.
Facebook was prelude to, has given the world a glimpse into, the future.
From pure technical POV Facebook is mostly junk. It is a tremendous database of user
information which users supply themselves due to cultivated exhibitionism. Kind of private
intelligence company. The mere fact that software was written in PHP tells you something
about real Zuckerberg level.
Amazon created a usable interface for shopping via internet (creating comments
infrastructure and a usable user account database ) but this is not innovation in any
sense of the word. It prospered by stealing large part of Wall Mart logistic software
(and people) and using Wall Mart tricks with suppliers. So Bezos model was Wall Mart
clone on the Internet.
Unless something is done, Bezos will soon be the most powerful man in the world.
People like Bezos, Google founders, Zuckerberg to a certain extent are part of
intelligence agencies infrastructure. Remember Prism. So implicitly we can assume that
they all report to the head of CIA.
Artificial Intelligence, AI, is another consequence of this era of innovation that
demands our immediate attention.
There is very little intelligence in artificial intelligence :-). Intelligent behavior
of robots in mostly an illusion created by First Clark law:
The Washington Post
Simon Denyer; Akiko Kashiwagi; Min Joo Kim
July 8, 2020
In Japan, a country with a long fascination with robots, automated assistants have offered
their services as bartenders, security guards, deliverymen, and more, since the onset of the
coronavirus pandemic. Japan's Avatarin developed the "newme" robot to allow people to be
present while maintaining social distancing during the pandemic.
The telepresence robot is
essentially a tablet on a wheeled stand with the user's face on the screen, whose location and
direction can be controlled via laptop or tablet. Doctors have used the newme robot to
communicate with patients in a coronavirus ward, while university students in Tokyo used it to
remotely attend a graduation ceremony.
The company is working on prototypes that will allow
users to control the robot through virtual reality headsets, and gloves that would permit users
to lift, touch, and feel objects through a remote robotic hand.
A robot that neutralizes aerosolized forms of the coronavirus could soon be coming to a supermarket
near you. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory team partnered with Ava
Robotics to develop a device that can kill roughly 90% of COVID-19 on surfaces in a 4,000-square-foot
space in 30 minutes.
"This is such an exciting idea to use the solution as a hands-free, safe way to neutralize dorms,
hallways, hospitals, airports -- even airplanes," Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, told Yahoo Finance's
"The
Ticker."
The key to disinfecting large spaces in a short amount of time is the UV-C light fixture
designed
at MIT
. It uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light that eliminates microorganisms by breaking down
their DNA. The UV-C light beam is attached to Ava Robotic's mobile base and can navigate a warehouse
in a similar way as a self-driving car.
"The robot is controlled by some powerful algorithms that compute exactly where the robot has to go
and how long it has to stay in order to neutralize the germs that exist in that particular part of the
space," Rus said.
This robot can kill roughly 90% of COVID-19 on surfaces in a 4,000 square foot space in 30
minutes. (Courtesy: Alyssa Pierson, MIT CSAIL)
More
Currently, the robot is being tested at the Greater Boston Food Bank's shipping area and focuses on
sanitizing products leaving the stockroom to reduce any potential threat of spreading the coronavirus
into the community.
"Here, there was a unique opportunity to provide additional disinfecting power to their current
workflow, and help reduce the risks of COVID-19 exposure," said Alyssa Pierson, CSAIL research
scientist and technical lead of the UV-C lamp assembly.
But Rus explains implementing the robot in other locations does face some challenges. "The light
emitted by the robot is dangerous to humans, so the robot cannot be in the same space as humans. Or,
if people are around the robot, they have to wear protective gear," she added.
While Rus didn't provide a specific price tag, she said the cost of the robot is still high, which may
be a hurdle for broad distribution. In the future, "Maybe you don't need to buy an entire robot set,
you can book the robot for a few hours a day to take care of your space," she said.
McKenzie Stratigopoulos is a producer at Yahoo Finance. Follow
her on Twitter:
@mckenziestrat
During the pandemic, readers may recall several of our pieces describing what life would be
like in a post corona world.
From restaurants to
flying to gambling to hotels to
gyms to interacting with people to even
housing trends - we highlighted how social distancing would transform the economy.
As the transformation becomes more evident by the week, we want to focus on automation and
artificial intelligence - and how these two things are allowing hotels, well at least one in
California, to accommodate patrons with contactless room service.
Hotel Trio in Healdsburg, California, is surrounded by wineries and restaurants in
Healdsburg/Sonoma County region, recently hired a new worker named "Rosé the Robot" that
delivers food, water, wine, beer, and other necessities, reported
Sonoma Magazine .
"As Rosé approaches a room with a delivery, she calls the phone to let the guest know
she's outside. A tablet-sized screen on Rosé's head greets the guest as they open the
door, and confirms the order. Next, she opens a lid on top of her head and reveals a storage
compartment containing the ordered items. Rosé then communicates a handful of questions
surrounding customer satisfaction via her screen. She bids farewell, turns around and as she
heads back toward her docking station near the front desk, she emits chirps that sound like a
mix between R2D2 and a little bird," said Sonoma Magazine.
Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmospheric Research Group in San Francisco,
said robots would be integrated into the hotel experience.
"This is a part of travel that will see major growth in the years ahead," Harteveldt
said.
Rosé is manufactured by Savioke, a San Jose-based company that has dozens of robots
in hotels nationwide.
The tradeoff of a contactless environment where automation and artificial intelligence
replace humans to mitigate the spread of a virus is permanent
job loss .
"Restaurant Of The Future" - KFC Unveils Automated Store With Robots And Food Lockers
by Tyler Durden Fri,
06/26/2020 - 22:05 Fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) has debuted the "restaurant of
the future," one where automation dominates the storefront, and little to no interaction is
seen between customers and employees, reported NBC News .
After the chicken is fried and sides are prepped by humans, the order is placed on a
conveyor belt and travels to the front of the store. A robotic arm waits for the order to
arrive, then grabs it off the conveyor belt and places it into a secured food
locker.
A KFC representative told NBC News that the new store is located in Moscow and was built
months before the virus outbreak. The representative said the contactless store is the future
of frontend fast-food restaurants because it's more sanitary.
Disbanding human cashiers and order preppers at the front of a fast-food store will be the
next big trend in the industry through 2030. Making these restaurants contactless between
customers and employees will lower the probabilities of transmitting the virus.
Automating the frontend of a fast-food restaurant will come at a tremendous cost, that is,
significant job loss . Nationwide (as of 2018), there were around 3.8 million employed at
fast-food restaurants. Automation and artificial intelligence are set displace millions of jobs
in the years ahead.
As for the new automated KFC restaurant in Moscow, well, it's a glimpse of what is coming to
America - this will lead to the widespread job loss that will force politicians to unveil
universal basic income .
Artificial intelligence (AI) just seems to get smarter and smarter. Each iPhone learns your face, voice, and
habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster
chips, more data, and better algorithms. But some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than
the core innovations
their inventors claim
-- and some of the gains may not exist at all, says Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate
student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blalock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches
to improving neural networks -- software architectures that loosely mimic the brain. "Fifty papers in," he says, "it
became clear that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was."
The researchers evaluated 81 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming
unneeded connections. All claimed superiority in slightly different ways. But they were rarely compared properly -- and
when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements
over a 10-year period.
The result
, presented in March at the
Machine Learning and Systems conference, surprised Blalock's Ph.D. adviser, MIT computer scientist John Guttag, who
says the uneven comparisons themselves may explain the stagnation. "It's the old saw, right?" Guttag said. "If you
can't measure something, it's hard to make it better."
Researchers are waking up to the signs of shaky progress across many subfields of AI. A
2019 meta-analysis
of information retrieval
algorithms used in search engines concluded the "high-water mark was actually set in 2009."
Another study
in 2019 reproduced seven neural
network recommendation systems, of the kind used by media streaming services. It found that six failed to outperform
much simpler, nonneural algorithms developed years before, when the earlier techniques were fine-tuned, revealing
"phantom progress" in the field. In
another paper
posted on arXiv in
March, Kevin Musgrave, a computer scientist at Cornell University, took a look at loss functions, the part of an
algorithm that mathematically specifies its objective. Musgrave compared a dozen of them on equal footing, in a task
involving image retrieval, and found that, contrary to their developers' claims, accuracy had not improved since
2006. "There's always been these waves of hype," Musgrave says.
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Gains in machine-learning algorithms can come from fundamental changes in their architecture, loss function, or
optimization strategy -- how they use feedback to improve. But subtle tweaks to any of these can also boost performance,
says Zico Kolter, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies image-recognition models trained to
be immune to "
adversarial
attacks
" by a hacker. An early adversarial training method known as projected gradient descent (PGD), in which a
model is simply trained on both real and deceptive examples, seemed to have been surpassed by more complex methods.
But in a
February arXiv paper
, Kolter and his colleagues found that
all of the methods performed about the same when a simple trick was used to enhance them.
Old dogs, new tricks
After modest tweaks, old image-retrieval algorithms perform as well as new ones, suggesting little actual
innovation.
Contrastive
(2006)
ProxyNCA
(2017)
SoftTriple
(2019)
0
25
50
75
100
Accuracy score
Original performance
Tweaked performance
(GRAPHIC) X. LIU/
SCIENCE
; (DATA) MUSGRAVE
ET AL
., ARXIV: 2003.08505
"That was very surprising, that this hadn't been discovered before," says Leslie Rice, Kolter's Ph.D. student.
Kolter says his findings suggest innovations such as PGD are hard to come by, and are rarely improved in a
substantial way. "It's pretty clear that PGD is actually just the right algorithm," he says. "It's the obvious thing,
and people want to find overly complex solutions."
Other major algorithmic advances also seem to have stood the test of time. A big breakthrough came in 1997 with an
architecture called long short-term memory (LSTM), used in language translation. When properly trained, LSTMs
matched
the performance of supposedly more advanced
architectures developed 2 decades later. Another machine-learning breakthrough came in 2014 with generative
adversarial networks (GANs), which pair networks in a create-and-critique cycle to sharpen their ability to produce
images, for example.
A 2018
paper
reported that with enough computation, the original GAN method matches the abilities of methods from later
years.
Kolter says researchers are more motivated to produce a new algorithm and tweak it until it's state-of-the-art
than to tune an existing one. The latter can appear less novel, he notes, making it "much harder to get a paper
from."
Guttag says there's also a disincentive for inventors of an algorithm to thoroughly compare its performance with
others -- only to find that their breakthrough is not what they thought it was. "There's a risk to comparing too
carefully."
It's also hard work
: AI researchers use different data sets, tuning methods, performance metrics, and baselines.
"It's just not really feasible to do all the apples-to-apples comparisons."
Some of the overstated performance claims can be chalked up to the explosive growth of the field, where papers
outnumber experienced reviewers. "A lot of this seems to
be growing pains
," Blalock says. He urges reviewers to insist on better comparisons to benchmarks and says better
tools will help. Earlier this year, Blalock's co-author, MIT researcher Jose Gonzalez Ortiz, released software called
ShrinkBench that makes it easier to compare pruning algorithms.
Researchers point out that even if new methods aren't fundamentally better than old ones, the tweaks they
implement can be applied to their forebears. And every once in a while, a new algorithm will be an actual
breakthrough. "It's almost like a venture capital portfolio," Blalock says, "where some of the businesses are not
really working, but some are working spectacularly well."
Relatively simple automation often beat more complex system. By far.
Notable quotes:
"... My guess is we're heading for something in-between, a place where artisanal bakers use locally grown wheat, made affordable thanks to machine milling. Where small family-owned bakeries rely on automation tech to do the undifferentiated grunt-work. The robots in my future are more likely to look more like cash registers and less like Terminators. ..."
"... I gave a guest lecture to a roomful of young roboticists (largely undergrad, some first year grad engineering students) a decade ago. After discussing the economics/finance of creating and selling a burgerbot, asked about those that would be unemployed by the contraption. One student immediately snorted out, "Not my problem!" Another replied, "But what if they cannot do anything else?". Again, "Not my problem!". And that is San Josie in a nutshell. ..."
"... One counter-argument might be that while hoping for the best it might be prudent to prepare for the worst. Currently, and for a couple of decades, the efficiency gains have been left to the market to allocate. Some might argue that for the common good then the government might need to be more active. ..."
"... "Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead of enabling a richer lifestyle." Many times the only way to automate the creation of a product is to change it to fit the machine. ..."
"... You've gotta' get out of Paris: great French bread remains awesome. I live here. I've lived here for over half a decade and know many elderly French. The bread, from the right bakeries, remains great. ..."
"... I agree with others here who distinguish between labor saving automation and labor eliminating automation, but I don't think the former per se is the problem as much as the gradual shift toward the mentality and "rightness" of mass production and globalization. ..."
"... I was exposed to that conflict, in a small way, because my father was an investment manager. He told me they were considering investing in a smallish Swiss pasta (IIRC) factory. He was frustrated with the negotiations; the owners just weren't interested in getting a lot bigger – which would be the point of the investment, from the investors' POV. ..."
"... Incidentally, this is a possible approach to a better, more sustainable economy: substitute craft for capital and resources, on as large a scale as possible. More value with less consumption. But how we get there from here is another question. ..."
"... The Ten Commandments do not apply to corporations. ..."
"... But what happens when the bread machine is connected to the internet, can't function without an active internet connection, and requires an annual subscription to use? ..."
"... Until 100 petaflops costs less than a typical human worker total automation isn't going to happen. Developments in AI software can't overcome basic hardware limits. ..."
"... When I started doing robotics, I developed a working definition of a robot as: (a.) Senses its environment; (b.) Has goals and goal-seeking logic; (c.) Has means to affect environment in order to get goal and reality (the environment) to converge. Under that definition, Amazon's Alexa and your household air conditioning and heating system both qualify as "robot". ..."
"... The addition of a computer (with a program, or even downloadable-on-the-fly programs) to a static machine, e.g. today's computer-controlled-manufacturing machines (lathes, milling, welding, plasma cutters, etc.) makes a massive change in utility. It's almost the same physically, but ever so much more flexible, useful, and more profitable to own/operate. ..."
"... And if you add massive databases, internet connectivity, the latest machine-learning, language and image processing and some nefarious intent, then you get into trouble. ..."
Part I , "Automation Armageddon:
a Legitimate Worry?" reviewed the history of automation, focused on projections of gloom-and-doom.
"It smells like death," is how a friend of mine described a nearby chain grocery store. He tends to exaggerate and visiting France
admittedly brings about strong feelings of passion. Anyway, the only reason we go there is for things like foil or plastic bags that
aren't available at any of the smaller stores.
Before getting to why that matters – and, yes, it does matter – first a tasty digression.
I live in a French village. To the French, high-quality food is a vital component to good life.
My daughter counts eight independent bakeries on the short drive between home and school. Most are owned by a couple of people.
Counting high-quality bakeries embedded in grocery stores would add a few more. Going out of our way more than a minute or two would
more than double that number.
Typical Bakery: Bread is cooked at least twice daily
Despite so many, the bakeries seem to do well. In the half-decade I've been here, three new ones opened and none of the old ones
closed. They all seem to be busy. Bakeries are normally owner operated. The busiest might employ a few people but many are mom-and-pop
operations with him baking and her selling. To remain economically viable, they rely on a dance of people and robots. Flour arrives
in sacks with high-quality grains milled by machines. People measure ingredients, with each bakery using slightly different recipes.
A human-fed robot mixes and kneads the ingredients into the dough. Some kind of machine churns the lumps of dough into baguettes.
The baker places the formed baguettes onto baking trays then puts them in the oven. Big ovens maintain a steady temperature while
timers keep track of how long various loaves of bread have been baking. Despite the sensors, bakers make the final decision when
to pull the loaves out, with some preferring a bien cuit more cooked flavor and others a softer crust. Finally, a person uses
a robot in the form of a cash register to ring up transactions and processes payments, either by cash or card.
Nobody -- not the owners, workers, or customers -- think twice about any of this. I doubt most people realize how much automation
technology is involved or even that much of the equipment is automation tech. There would be no improvement in quality mixing and
kneading the dough by hand. There would, however, be an enormous increase in cost. The baguette forming machines churn out exactly
what a person would do by hand, only faster and at a far lower cost. We take the thermostatically controlled ovens for granted. However,
for anybody who has tried to cook over wood controlling heat via air and fuel, thermostatically controlled ovens are clearly automation
technology.
Is the cash register really a robot? James Ritty, who invented
it, didn't think so; he sold the patent for cheap. The person who bought the patent built it into NCR, a seminal company laying the
groundwork of the modern computer revolution.
Would these bakeries be financially viable if forced to do all this by hand? Probably not. They'd be forced to produce less output
at higher cost; many would likely fail. Bread would cost more leaving less money for other purchases. Fewer jobs, less consumer spending
power, and hungry bellies to boot; that doesn't sound like good public policy.
Getting back to the grocery store my friend thinks smells like death; just a few weeks ago they started using robots in a new
and, to many, not especially welcome way.
As any tourist knows, most stores in France are closed on Sunday afternoons, including and especially grocery stores. That's part
of French labor law: grocery stores must close Sunday afternoons. Except that the chain grocery store near me announced they are
opening Sunday afternoon. How? Robots, and sleight-of-hand. Grocers may not work on Sunday afternoons but guards are allowed.
Not my store but similar.
Dimanche means Sunday. Aprés-midi means afternoon.
I stopped in to get a feel for how the system works. Instead of grocers, the store uses security guards and self-checkout kiosks.
When you step inside, a guard reminds you there are no grocers. Nobody restocks the shelves but, presumably for half a day, it
doesn't matter. On Sunday afternoons, in place of a bored-looking person wearing a store uniform and overseeing the robo-checkout
kiosks sits a bored-looking person wearing a security guard uniform doing the same. There are no human-assisted checkout lanes open
but this store seldom has more than one operating anyway.
I have no idea how long the French government will allow this loophole to continue. I thought it might attract yellow vest protestors
or at least a cranky store worker – maybe a few locals annoyed at an ancient tradition being buried – but there was nobody complaining.
There were hardly any customers, either.
The use of robots to sidestep labor law and replace people, in one of the most labor-friendly countries in the world, produced
a big yawn.
Paul Krugman and
Matt Stoller argue convincingly that
it's the bosses, not the robots, that crush the spirits and souls of workers. Krugman calls it "automation obsession" and Stoller
points out predictions of robo-Armageddon have existed for decades. The well over
100+ examples I have of major
automation-tech ultimately led to more jobs, not fewer.
Jerry Yang envisions some type of forthcoming automation-induced dystopia. Zuck and the tech-bros argue for a forthcoming Star
Trek style robo-utopia.
My guess is we're heading for something in-between, a place where artisanal bakers use locally grown wheat, made affordable thanks
to machine milling. Where small family-owned bakeries rely on automation tech to do the undifferentiated grunt-work. The robots in
my future are more likely to look more like cash registers and less like Terminators.
It's an admittedly blander vision of the future; neither utopian nor dystopian, at least not one fueled by automation tech. However,
it's a vision supported by the historic adoption of automation technology.
I have no real disagreement with a lot of automation. But how it is done is another matter altogether. Using the main example
in this article, Australia is probably like a lot of countries with bread in that most of the loaves that you get in a supermarket
are typically bland and come in plastic bags but which are cheap. You only really know what you grow up with.
When I first went to Germany I stepped into a Bakerie and it was a revelation. There were dozens of different sorts and types
of bread on display with flavours that I had never experienced. I didn't know whether to order a loaf or to go for my camera instead.
And that is the point. Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead
of enabling a richer lifestyle.
We are all familiar with crapification and I contend that it is automation that enables this to become a thing.
"I contend that it is automation that enables this to become a thing."
As does electricity. And math. Automation doesn't necessarily narrow choices; economies of scale and the profit motive do.
What I find annoying (as in pollyannish) is the avoidance of the issue of those that cannot operate the machinery, those that
cannot open their own store, etc.
I gave a guest lecture to a roomful of young roboticists (largely undergrad, some first year grad engineering students) a decade
ago. After discussing the economics/finance of creating and selling a burgerbot, asked about those that would be unemployed by
the contraption. One student immediately snorted out, "Not my problem!" Another replied, "But what if they cannot do anything
else?". Again, "Not my problem!". And that is San Josie in a nutshell.
A capitalist market that fails to account for the cost of a product's negative externalities is underpricing (and incentivizing
more of the same). It's cheating (or sanctioned cheating due to ignorance and corruption). It is not capitalism (unless that is
the only reasonable outcome of capitalism).
The author's vision of "appropriate tech" local enterprise supported by relatively simple automation is also my answer to the
vexing question of "how do I cope with automation?"
In a recent posting here at NC, I said the way to cope with automation of your job(s) is to get good at automation. My remark
caused a howl of outrage: "most people can't do automation! Your solution is unrealistic for the masses. Dismissed with prejudice!".
Thank you for that outrage, as it provides a wonder foil for this article. The article shows a small business which learned
to re-design business processes, acquire machines that reduce costs. It's a good example of someone that "got good at automation". Instead of being the victim of automation, these people adapted. They bought automation, took control of it, and operated it
for their own benefit.
Key point: this entrepreneur is now harvesting the benefits of automation, rather than being systematically marginalized by
it. Another noteworthy aspect of this article is that local-scale "appropriate" automation serves to reduce the scale advantages
of the big players. The availability of small-scale machines that enable efficiencies comparable to the big guys is a huge problem.
Most of the machines made for small-scale operators like this are manufactured in China, or India or Iran or Russia, Italy where
industrial consolidation (scale) hasn't squashed the little players yet.
Suppose you're a grain farmer, but only have 50 acres (not 100s or 1000s like the big guys). You need a combine – that's a
big machine that cuts grain stalk and separate grain from stalk (threshing). This cut/thresh function is terribly labor intensive,
the combine is a must-have. Right now, there is no small-size ($50K or less) combine manufactured in the U.S., to my knowledge.
They cost upwards of $200K, and sometimes a great deal more. The 50-acre farmer can't afford $200K (plus maint costs), and therefore
can't farm at that scale, and has to sell out.
So, the design, production, and sales of these sort of small-scale, high-productivity machines is what is needed to re-distribute
production (organically, not by revolution, thanks) back into the hands of the middle class.
If we make possible for the middle class to capture the benefits of automation, and you solve 1) the social dilemmas of concentration
of wealth, 2) the declining std of living of the mid- and lower-class, and 3) have a chance to re-design an economy (business
processes and collaborating suppliers to deliver end-user product/service) that actually fixes the planet as we make our living,
instead of degrading it at every ka-ching of the cash register.
Point 3 is the most important, and this isn't the time or place to expand on that, but I hope others might consider it a bit.
Regarding the combine, I have seen them operating on small-sized lands for the last 50 years. Without exception, you have one
guy (sometimes a farmer, often not) who has this kind of harvester, works 24h a day for a week or something, harvesting for all
farmers in the neighborhood, and then moves to the next crop (eg corn). Wintertime is used for maintenance. So that one person/farm/company
specializes in these services, and everybody gets along well.
Marcel – great solution to the problem. Choosing the right supplier (using combine service instead of buying a dedicated combine)
is a great skill to develop. On the flip side, the fellow that provides that combine service probably makes a decent side-income
from it. Choosing the right service to provide is another good skill to develop.
One counter-argument might be that while hoping for the best it might be prudent to prepare for the worst. Currently, and for
a couple of decades, the efficiency gains have been left to the market to allocate. Some might argue that for the common good
then the government might need to be more active.
What would happen if efficiency gains continued to be distributed according to the market? According to the relative bargaining
power of the market participants where one side, the public good as represented by government, is asking for and therefore getting
almost nothing?
As is, I do believe that people who are concerned do have reason to be concerned.
"Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead of enabling a
richer lifestyle." Many times the only way to automate the creation of a product is to change it to fit the machine.
Some people make a living saying these sorts of things about automation. The quality of French bread is simply not what it
used to be (at least harder to find) though that is a complicated subject having to do with flour and wheat as well as human preparation
and many other things and the cost (in terms of purchasing power), in my opinion, has gone up, not down since the 70's.
As some might say, "It's complicated," but automation does (not sure about "has to") come with trade offs in quality while
price remains closer to what an ever more sophisticated set of algorithms say can be "gotten away with."
This may be totally different for cars or other things, but the author chose French bread and the only overall improvement,
or even non change, in quality there has come, if at all, from the dark art of marketing magicians.
/ from the dark art of marketing magicians, AND people's innate ability to accept/be unaware of decreases in quality/quantity
if they are implemented over time in small enough steps.
You've gotta' get out of Paris: great French bread remains awesome. I live here. I've lived here for over half a decade
and know many elderly French. The bread, from the right bakeries, remains great. But you're unlikely to find it where tourists
might wander: the rent is too high.
As a general rule, if the bakers have a large staff or speak English you're probably in the wrong bakery. Except for one of
my favorites where she learned her English watching every episode of Friends multiple times and likes to practice with me, though
that's more of a fluke.
It's a difficult subject to argue. I suspect that comparatively speaking, French bread remains good and there are still bakers
who make high quality bread (given what they have to work with). My experience when talking to family in France (not Paris) is
that indeed, they are in general quite happy with the quality of bread and each seems to know a bakery where they can still get
that "je ne sais quoi" that makes it so special.
I, on the other hand, who have only been there once every few years since the 70's, kind of like once every so many frames
of the movie, see a lowering of quality in general in France and of flour and bread in particular though I'll grant it's quite
gradual.
The French love food and were among the best farmers in the world in the 1930s and have made a point of resisting radical change
at any given point in time when it comes to the things they love (wine, cheese, bread, etc.) , so they have a long way to fall,
and are doing so slowly; but gradually, it's happening.
I agree with others here who distinguish between labor saving automation and labor eliminating automation, but I don't
think the former per se is the problem as much as the gradual shift toward the mentality and "rightness" of mass production and
globalization.
I was exposed to that conflict, in a small way, because my father was an investment manager. He told me they were considering
investing in a smallish Swiss pasta (IIRC) factory. He was frustrated with the negotiations; the owners just weren't interested
in getting a lot bigger – which would be the point of the investment, from the investors' POV.
I thought, but I don't think I said very articulately, that of course, they thought of themselves as craftspeople – making
people's food, after all. It was a fundamental culture clash. All that was 50 years ago; looks like the European attitude has
been receding.
Incidentally, this is a possible approach to a better, more sustainable economy: substitute craft for capital and resources,
on as large a scale as possible. More value with less consumption. But how we get there from here is another question.
I have been touring around by car and was surprised to see that all Oregon gas stations are full serve with no self serve allowed
(I vaguely remember Oregon Charles talking about this). It applies to every station including the ones with a couple of dozen
pumps like we see back east. I have since been told that this system has been in place for years.
It's hard to see how this is more efficient and in fact just the opposite as there are fewer attendants than waiting customers
and at a couple of stations the action seemed chaotic. Gas is also more expensive although nothing could be more expensive than
California gas (over $5/gal occasionally spotted). It's also unclear how this system was preserved–perhaps out of fire safety
concerns–but it seems unlikely that any other state will want to imitate just as those bakeries aren't going to bring back their
wood fired ovens.
I think NJ is still required to do all full-serve gas stations. Most in MA have only self-serve, but there's a few towns that
have by-laws requiring full-serve.
In the 1980s when self-serve gas started being implemented, NIOSH scientists said oh no, now 'everyone' will be increasingly
exposed to benzene while filling up. Benzene is close to various radioactive elements in causing damage and cancer.
It was preserved by a series of referenda; turns out it's a 3rd rail here, like the sales tax. The motive was explicitly to
preserve entry-level jobs while allowing drivers to keep the gas off their hands. And we like the more personal quality.
Also, we go to states that allow self-serve and observe that the gas isn't any cheaper. It's mainly the tax that sets the price,
and location.
There are several bakeries in this area with wood-fired ovens. They charge a premium, of course. One we love is way out in
the country, in Falls City. It's a reason to go there.
Unless I misunderstood, the author of this article seems to equate mechanization/automation of nearly any type with robotics.
"Is the cash register really a robot? James Ritty, who invented it, didn't think so;" – Nor do I.
To me, "robot" implies a machine with a high degree of autonomy. Would the author consider an old fashioned manual typewriter
or adding machine (remember those?) to be robotic? How about when those machines became electrified?
I think the author uses the term "robot" over broadly.
Agree. Those are just electrified extensions of the lever or sand timer.
It's the "thinking" that is A.I.
Refuse to allow A.I.to destroy jobs and cheapen our standard of living.
Never interact with a robo call, just hang up.
Never log into a website when there is a human alternative.
Refuse to do business with companies that have no human alternative.
Never join a medical "portal" of any kind, demand to talk to medical personnel. Etc.
Sabotage A.I. whenever possible. The Ten Commandments do not apply to corporations.
During a Chicago hotel stay my wife ordered an extra bath towel from the front desk. About 5 minutes later, a mini version
of R2D2 rolled up to her door with towel in tow. It was really cute and interacted with her in a human-like way. Cute but really
scary in the way that you indicate in your comment.
It seems many low wage activities would be in immediate risk of replacement.
But sabotage? I would never encourage sabotage; in fact, when it comes to true robots like this one, I would highly discourage
any of the following: yanking its recharge cord in the middle of the night, zapping it with a car battery, lift its payload and
replace with something else, give it a hip high-five to help it calibrate its balance, and of course, the good old kick'm in the
bolts.
Stop and Shop supermarket chain now has robots in the store. According to Stop and Shop they are oh so innocent! and friendly!
why don't you just go up and say hello?
All the robots do, they say, go around scanning the shelves looking for: shelf price tags that don't match the current price,
merchandise in the wrong place (that cereal box you picked up in the breakfast aisle and decided, in the laundry aisle, that you
didn't want and put the box on a shelf with detergent.) All the robots do is notify management of wrong prices and misplaced merchandise.
The damn robot is cute, perky lit up eyes and a smile – so why does it remind me of the Stepford Wives.
S&S is the closest supermarket near me, so I go there when I need something in a hurry, but the bulk of my shopping is now
done elsewhere. Thank goodness there are some stores that are not doing this: The area Shoprites and FoodTown's don't – and they
are all run by family businesses. Shoprite succeeds by have a large assortment brands in every grocery category and keeping prices
really competitive. FoodTown operates at a higher price and quality level with real butcher and seafood counters as well as prepackaged
assortments in open cases and a cooked food counter of the most excellent quality with the store's cooks behind the counter to
serve you and answer questions. You never have to come home from work tired and hungry and know that you just don't want to cook
and settle for a power bar.
A robot is a machine -- especially one programmable by a computer -- capable of carrying out a complex series of actions
automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded
Those early cash registers were perhaps an early form of analog computer. But Wiki reminds that the origin of the term is a
work of fiction.
The term comes from a Czech word, robota, meaning "forced labor";the word 'robot' was first used to denote a fictional humanoid
in a 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – Rossum's Universal Robots) by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek
Perhaps I didn't qualify "autonomous" properly. I didn't mean to imply a 'Rosie the Robot' level of autonomy but the ability
of a machine to perform its programmed task without human intervention (other than switching on/off or maintenance & adjustments).
If viewed this way, an adding machine or typewriter are not robots because they require constant manual input in order to function
– if you don't push the keys, nothing happens. A computer printer might be considered robotic because it can be programmed to
function somewhat autonomously (as in print 'x' number of copies of this document).
"Robotics" is a subset of mechanized/automated functions.
When I first got out of grad school I worked at United Technologies Research Center where I worked in the robotics lab. In
general, at least in those days, we made a distinction between robotics and hard automation. A robot is programmable to do multiple
tasks and hard automation is limited to a single task unless retooled. The machines the author is talking about are hard automation.
We had ASEA robots that could be programmed to do various things. One of ours drilled, riveted and sealed the skin on the horizontal
stabilators (the wing on the tail of a helicopter that controls pitch) of a Sikorsky Sea Hawk.
The same robot with just a change
of the fixture on the end could be programmed to paint a car or weld a seam on equipment. The drilling and riveting robot was
capable of modifying where the rivets were placed (in the robot's frame of reference) based on the location of precisely milled
blocks build into the fixture that held the stabilator.
There was always some variation and it was important to precisely place
the rivets because the spars were very narrow (weight at the tail is bad because of the lever arm). It was considered state of
the art back in the day but now auto companies have far more sophisticated robotics.
But what happens when the bread machine is connected to the internet, can't function without an active internet connection,
and requires an annual subscription to use?
That is the issue to me: however we define the tools, who will own them?
You know, that is quite a good point that. It is not so much the automation that is the threat as the rent-seeking that anything
connected to the internet allows to be implemented.
Until 100 petaflops costs less than a typical human worker total automation isn't going to happen. Developments in AI software
can't overcome basic hardware limits.
The story about automation not worsening the quality of bread is not exactly true. Bakers had to develop and incorporate a
new method called autolyze (
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2017/09/29/using-the-autolyse-method
) in the mid-20th-century to bring back some of the flavor lost with modern baking. There is also a trend of a new generation
of bakeries that use natural yeast, hand shaping and kneading to get better flavors and quality bread.
But it is certainly true that much of the automation gives almost as good quality for much lower labor costs.
When I started doing robotics, I developed a working definition of a robot as: (a.) Senses its environment; (b.) Has goals
and goal-seeking logic; (c.) Has means to affect environment in order to get goal and reality (the environment) to converge. Under
that definition, Amazon's Alexa and your household air conditioning and heating system both qualify as "robot".
How you implement a, b, and c above can have more or less sophistication, depending upon the complexity, variability, etc.
of the environment, or the solutions, or the means used to affect the environment.
A machine, like a typewriter, or a lawn-mower engine has the logic expressed in metal; it's static.
The addition of a computer (with a program, or even downloadable-on-the-fly programs) to a static machine, e.g. today's
computer-controlled-manufacturing machines (lathes, milling, welding, plasma cutters, etc.) makes a massive change in utility.
It's almost the same physically, but ever so much more flexible, useful, and more profitable to own/operate.
And if you add massive databases, internet connectivity, the latest machine-learning, language and image processing and
some nefarious intent, then you get into trouble.
Sometimes automation is necessary to eliminate the risks of manual processes. There are parenteral (injectable) drugs that
cannot be sterilized except by filtration. Most of the work of filling, post filling processing, and sealing is done using automation
in areas that make surgical suites seem filthy and people are kept from these operations.
Manual operations are only undertaken to correct issues with the automation and the procedures are tested to ensure that they
do not introduce contamination, microbial or otherwise. Because even one non-sterile unit is a failure and testing is destructive
process, of course any full lot of product cannot be tested to state that all units are sterile. Periodic testing of the automated
process and manual intervention is done periodically and it is expensive and time consuming to test to a level of confidence that
there is far less than a one in a million chance of any unit in a lot being non sterile.
In that respect, automation and the skills necessary to interface with it are fundamental to the safety of drugs frequently
used on already compromised patients.
Agree. Good example. Digital technology and miniaturization seem particularly well suited to many aspect of the medical world.
But doubt they will eliminate the doctor or the nurse very soon. Insurance companies on the other hand
"There would be no improvement in quality mixing and kneading the dough by hand. There would, however, be an enormous increase
in cost." WRONG! If you had an unlimited supply of 50-cents-an-hour disposable labor, mixing and kneading the dough by hand would
be cheaper. It is only because labor is expensive in France that the machine saves money.
In Japan there is a lot of automation, and wages and living standards are high. In Bangladesh there is very little automation,
and wages and livings standards are very low.
Are we done with the 'automation is destroying jobs' meme yet? Excessive population growth is the problem, not robots. And
the root cause of excessive population growth is the corporate-sponsored virtual taboo of talking about it seriously.
Posted by: juliania | Feb 12 2020 5:15 utc | 39
(Artificial Intelligence)
The trouble with Artificial Intelligence is that it's not intelligent.
And it's not intelligent because it's got no experience, no imagination and no
self-control.
vk @38: "...the reality on the field is that capitalism is 0 for 5..."
True, but it is worse than that! Even when we get AI to the level you describe, capitalism
will continue its decline.
Henry Ford actually understood Marxist analysis. Despite what many people in the present
imagine, Ford had access to sufficient engineering talent to make his automobile
manufacturing processes much more automated than he did. Ford understood that improving the
efficiency of the manufacturing process was less important than creating a population with
sufficient income to purchase his products.
AI is just a tool, unless it is developed to the point of attaining sentience in which
case it becomes slavery, but let's ignore that possibility for now. Capitalists cannot make
profits from the tools they own all by the tools themselves. Profits come from unpaid labor.
You cannot underpay a tool, and the tool cannot labor by itself.
The AI can be a product that is sold, but compared with cars, for example, the quantity of
labor invested in AI is minuscule. The smaller the proportion of labor that is in the cost of
a product, the smaller the percent of the price that can be realized as profit. To re-boost
real capitalist profits you need labor-intensive products. This also ties in with Henry
Ford's understanding of economics in that a larger labor force also means a larger market for
the capitalist's products.
There are some very obvious products that I can think of involving AI that are also
massively labor-intensive that would match the scale of the automotive industry and
rejuvenate capitalism, but they would require many $millions in R&D to make them
market-ready. Since I want capitalism to die already and get out Re: AI --
Always wondered how pseudo-AI, or enhanced automation, might be constrained by diminishing
EROEI.
Unless an actual AI were able to crack the water molecule to release hydrogen in an
energy-efficient way, or unless we learn to love nuclear (by cracking the nuclear waste
issue), then it seems to me hyper-automated workplaces will be at least as subject to
plummeting EROEI as are current workplaces, if not moreso. Is there any reason to think that,
including embedded energy in their manufacture, these machines and their workplaces will be
less energy intensive than current ones?
@William Gruff #40
The real world usage of AI, to date, is primarily replacing the rank and file of human
experience.
Where before you would have individuals who have attained expertise in an area, and who would
be paid to exercise it, now AI can learn from the extant work and repeat it.
The problem, though, is that AI is eminently vulnerable to attack. In particular - if the
area involves change, which most do, then the AI must be periodically retrained to take into
account the differences. Being fundamentally stupid, AI literally cannot integrate new data
on top of old but must start from scratch.
I don't have the link, but I did see an excellent example: a cat vs. AI.
While a cat can't play chess, the cat can walk, can recognize objects visually, can
communicate even without a vocal cord, can interact with its environment and even learn new
behaviors.
In this example, you can see one of the fundamental differences between functional organisms
and AI: AI can be trained to perform extremely well, but it requires very narrow focus.
IBM spend years and literally tens of thousands of engineering hours to create the AI that
could beat Jeapordy champions - but that particular creation is still largely useless for
anything else. IBM is desperately attempting to monetize that investment through its Think
Build Grow program - think AWS for AI. I saw a demo - it was particularly interesting because
this AI program ingests some 3 million English language web articles; IBM showed its contents
via a very cool looking wrap around display room in its Think Build Grow promotion
campaign.
What was really amusing was a couple of things:
1) the fact that the data was already corrupt: this demo was about 2 months ago - and there
were spikes of "data" coming from Ecuador and the tip of South America. Ecuador doesn't speak
English. I don't even know if there are any English web or print publications there. But I'd
bet large sums of money that the (English) Twitter campaign being run on behalf of the coup
was responsible for this spike.
2) Among the top 30 topics was Donald Trump. Given the type of audience you would expect
for this subject, it was enormously embarrassing that Trump coverage was assessed as net
positive - so much so that the IBM representative dived into the data to ascertain why the AI
had a net positive rating (the program also does sentiment analysis). It turns out that a
couple of articles which were clearly extremely peripheral to Trump, but which did mention
his name, were the cause. The net positive rating was from this handful of articles even
though the relationship was very weak and there were far fewer net "positive" vs. negative
articles shown in the first couple passes of source articles (again, IBM's sentiment analysis
- not a human's).
I have other examples: SF is home to a host of self-driving testing initiatives. Uber had
a lot about 4 blocks from where I live, for months, where they based their self driving cars
out of (since moved). The self-driving delivery robots (sidewalk) - I've seen them tested
here as well.
Some examples of how they fail: I was riding a bus, which was stopped at an intersection
behind a Drive test vehicle at a red light(Drive is nVidia's self driving). This intersection
is somewhat unusual: there are 5 entrances/exits to this intersection, so the traffic light
sequence and the driving action is definitely atypical.
The light turns green, the Drive car wants to turn immediately left (as opposed to 2nd
left, as opposed to straight or right). It accelerates into the intersection and starts
turning; literally halfway into the intersection, it slams on its brakes. The bus, which was
accelerating behind it in order to go straight, is forced to also slam on its brakes. There
was no incoming car - because of the complex left turn setup, the street the Drive car and
bus were on, is the only one that is allowed to traverse when that light is green (initially.
After a 30 second? pause, the opposite "straight" street is allowed to drive).
Why did the Drive car slam on its brakes in the middle of the intersection? No way to know
for sure, but I would bet money that the sensors saw the cars waiting at the 2nd left street
and thought it was going the wrong way. Note this is just a few months ago.
There are many other examples of AI being fundamentally brittle: Google's first version of
human recognition via machine vision classified black people as gorillas:
Google Photos fail
A project at MIT inserted code into AI machine vision programs to show what these were
actually seeing when recognizing objects; it turns out that what the AIs were recognizing
were radically different from reality. For example, while the algo could recognize a
dumbbell, it turns out that the reference image that the algo used was a dumbbell plus an
arm. Because all of the training photos for a dumbbell included an arm...
This fundamental lack of basic concepts, a coherent worldview or any other type of rooting
in reality is why AI is also pathetically easy to fool. This research showed that the top of
the line machine vision for self driving could be tricked into recognizing stop signs as
speed limit signs Confusing self driving
cars
To be clear, fundamentally it doesn't matter for most applications if the AI is "close
enough". If a company can replace 90% of its expensive, older workers or first world, English
speaking workers with an AI - even if the AI is working only 75% of the time, it is still a
huge win. For example: I was told by a person selling chatbots to Sprint that 90% of Sprint's
customer inquiries were one of 10 questions...
And lastly: are robots/AI taking jobs? Certainly it is true anecdotally, but the overall
economic statistics aren't showing this. In particular, if AI was really taking jobs - then
we should be seeing productivity numbers increase more than in the past. But this isn't
happening:
Productivity for the past 30 years
Note in the graph that productivity was increasing much more up until 2010 - when it leveled
off.
Dean Baker has written about this extensively - it is absolutely clear that it is outsourced
of manufacturing jobs which is why US incomes have been stagnant for decades.
Blame the Policies, Not the Robots
By Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker - Washington Post
The claim that automation is responsible for massive job losses has been made in almost
every one of the Democratic debates. In the last debate, technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang
told of automation closing stores on Main Street and of self-driving trucks that would
shortly displace "3.5 million truckers or the 7 million Americans who work in truck stops,
motels, and diners" that serve them. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) suggested that the
"automation revolution" was at "the heart of the fear that is well-founded."
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) argued that trade was a bigger culprit than automation,
the fact-checker at the Associated Press claimed she was "off" and that "economists mostly
blame those job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals."
In fact, such claims about the impact of automation are seriously at odds with the
standard data that we economists rely on in our work. And because the data so clearly
contradict the narrative, the automation view misrepresents our actual current challenges and
distracts from effective solutions.
Output-per-hour, or productivity, is one of those key data points. If a firm applies a
technology that increases its output without adding additional workers, its productivity goes
up, making it a critical diagnostic in this space.
Contrary to the claim that automation has led to massive job displacement, data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that productivity is growing at a historically slow
pace. Since 2005, it has been increasing at just over a 1 percent annual rate. That compares
with a rate of almost 3 percent annually in the decade from 1995 to 2005.
This productivity slowdown has occurred across advanced economies. If the robots are
hiding from the people compiling the productivity data at BLS, they are also managing to hide
from the statistical agencies in other countries.
Furthermore, the idea that jobs are disappearing is directly contradicted by the fact that
we have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. The recovery that began in June 2009 is the
longest on record. To be clear, many of those jobs are of poor quality, and there are people
and places that have been left behind, often where factories have closed. But this, as Warren
correctly claimed, was more about trade than technology.
Consider, for example, the "China shock" of the 2000s, when sharply rising imports from
countries with much lower-paid labor than ours drove up the U.S. trade deficit by 2.4
percentage points of GDP (almost $520 billion in today's economy). From 2000 to 2007 (before
the Great Recession), the country lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs, or 20 percent of the
total.
Addressing that loss, Susan Houseman, an economist who has done exhaustive, evidence-based
analysis debunking the automation explanation, argues that "intuitively and quite simply,
there doesn't seem to have been a technology shock that could have caused a 20 to 30 percent
decline in manufacturing employment in the space of a decade." What really happened in those
years was that policymakers sat by while millions of U.S. factory workers and their
communities were exposed to global competition with no plan for transition or adjustment to
the shock, decimating parts of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That was the fault of the
policymakers, not the robots.
Before the China shock, from 1970 to 2000, the number (not the share) of manufacturing
jobs held remarkably steady at around 17 million. Conversely, since 2010 and post-China
shock, the trade deficit has stabilized and manufacturing has been adding jobs at a modest
pace. (Most recently, the trade war has significantly dented the sector and worsened the
trade deficit.) Over these periods, productivity, automation and robotics all grew apace.
In other words, automation isn't the problem. We need to look elsewhere to craft a
progressive jobs agenda that focuses on the real needs of working people.
First and foremost, the low unemployment rate -- which wouldn't prevail if the automation
story were true -- is giving workers at the middle and the bottom a bit more of the
bargaining power they require to achieve real wage gains. The median weekly wage has risen at
an annual average rate, after adjusting for inflation, of 1.5 percent over the past four
years. For workers at the bottom end of the wage ladder (the 10th percentile), it has risen
2.8 percent annually, boosted also by minimum wage increases in many states and cities.
To be clear, these are not outsize wage gains, and they certainly are not sufficient to
reverse four decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality. But they are evidence that
current technologies are not preventing us from running hotter-for-longer labor markets with
the capacity to generate more broadly shared prosperity.
National minimum wage hikes will further boost incomes at the bottom. Stronger labor
unions will help ensure that workers get a fairer share of productivity gains. Still, many
toiling in low-wage jobs, even with recent gains, will still be hard-pressed to afford child
care, health care, college tuition and adequate housing without significant government
subsidies.
Contrary to those hawking the automation story, faster productivity growth -- by boosting
growth and pretax national income -- would make it easier to meet these challenges. The
problem isn't and never was automation. Working with better technology to produce more
efficiently, not to mention more sustainably, is something we should obviously welcome.
The thing to fear isn't productivity growth. It's false narratives and bad economic
policy.
Yves here. You have to read
a bit into this article on occupational decline, aka, "What happens to me after the robots take
my job?" to realize that the authors studied Swedish workers. One has to think that the
findings would be more pronounced in the US, due both to pronounced regional and urban/rural
variations, as well as the weakness of social institutions in the US. While there may be small
cities in Sweden that have been hit hard by the decline of a key employer, I don't have the
impression that Sweden has areas that have suffered the way our Rust Belt has. Similarly, in
the US, a significant amount of hiring starts with resume reviews with the job requirements
overspecified because the employer intends to hire someone who has done the same job somewhere
else and hence needs no training (which in practice is an illusion; how companies do things is
always idiosyncratic and new hires face a learning curve). On top of that, many positions are
filled via personal networks, not formal recruiting. Some studies have concluded that having a
large network of weak ties is more helpful in landing a new post than fewer close connections.
It's easier to know a lot of people casually in a society with strong community
institutions.
The article does not provide much in the way of remedies; it hints at "let them eat
training" when programs have proven to be ineffective. One approach would be aggressive
enforcement of laws against age discrimination. And even though some readers dislike a Job
Guarantee, not only would it enable people who wanted to work to keep working, but private
sector employers are particularly loath to employ someone who has been out of work for more
than six months, so a Job Guarantee post would also help keep someone who'd lost a job from
looking like damaged goods.
By Per-Anders Edin, Professor of Industrial Relations, Uppsala University; Tiernan Evans,
Economics MRes/PhD Candidate, LSE; Georg Graetz, Assistant Professor in the Department of
Economics, Uppsala University; Sofia Hernnäs, PhD student, Department of Economics,
Uppsala University; Guy Michaels,Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, LSE.
Originally published at VoxEU
As new technologies replace human labour in a growing number of tasks, employment in some
occupations invariably falls. This column compares outcomes for similar workers in similar
occupations over 28 years to explore the consequences of large declines in occupational
employment for workers' careers. While mean losses in earnings and employment for those
initially working in occupations that later declined are relatively moderate, low-earners lose
significantly more.
How costly is it for workers when demand for their occupation declines? As new technologies
replace human labour in a growing number of tasks, employment in some occupations invariably
falls. Until recently, technological change mostly automated routine production and clerical
work (Autor et al. 2003). But machines' capabilities are expanding, as recent developments
include self-driving vehicles and software that outperforms professionals in some tasks.
Debates on the labour market implications of these new technologies are ongoing (e.g.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2018). But in these debates, it is
important to ask not only "Will robots take my job?", but also "What would happen to my career
if robots took my job?"
Much is at stake. Occupational decline may hurt workers and their families, and may also
have broader consequences for economic inequality, education, taxation, and redistribution. If
it exacerbates differences in outcomes between economic winners and losers, populist forces may
gain further momentum (Dal Bo et al. 2019).
In a new paper (Edin et al. 2019) we explore the consequences of large declines in
occupational employment for workers' careers. We assemble a dataset with forecasts of
occupational employment changes that allow us to identify unanticipated declines,
population-level administrative data spanning several decades, and a highly detailed
occupational classification. These data allow us to compare outcomes for similar workers who
perform similar tasks and have similar expectations of future occupational employment
trajectories, but experience different actual occupational changes.
Our approach is distinct from previous work that contrasts career outcomes of routine and
non-routine workers (e.g. Cortes 2016), since we compare workers who perform similar tasks and
whose careers would likely have followed similar paths were it not for occupational decline.
Our work is also distinct from studies of mass layoffs (e.g. Jacobson et al. 1993), since
workers who experience occupational decline may take action before losing their jobs.
In our analysis, we follow individual workers' careers for almost 30 years, and we find that
workers in declining occupations lose on average 2-5% of cumulative earnings, compared to other
similar workers. Workers with low initial earnings (relative to others in their occupations)
lose more – about 8-11% of mean cumulative earnings. These earnings losses reflect both
lost years of employment and lower earnings conditional on employment; some of the employment
losses are due to increased time spent in unemployment and retraining, and low earners spend
more time in both unemployment and retraining.
Estimating the Consequences of Occupational Decline
We begin by assembling data from the Occupational Outlook Handbooks (OOH), published by the
US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which cover more than 400 occupations. In our main analysis we
define occupations as declining if their employment fell by at least 25% from 1984-2016,
although we show that our results are robust to using other cutoffs. The OOH also provides
information on technological change affecting each occupation, and forecasts of employment over
time. Using these data, we can separate technologically driven declines, and also unanticipated
declines. Occupations that declined include typesetters, drafters, proof readers, and various
machine operators.
We then match the OOH data to detailed Swedish occupations. This allows us to study the
consequences of occupational decline for workers who, in 1985, worked in occupations that
declined over the subsequent decades. We verify that occupations that declined in the US also
declined in Sweden, and that the employment forecasts that the BLS made for the US have
predictive power for employment changes in Sweden.
Detailed administrative micro-data, which cover all Swedish workers, allow us to address two
potential concerns for identifying the consequences of occupational decline: that workers in
declining occupations may have differed from other workers, and that declining occupations may
have differed even in absence of occupational decline. To address the first concern, about
individual sorting, we control for gender, age, education, and location, as well as 1985
earnings. Once we control for these characteristics, we find that workers in declining
occupations were no different from others in terms of their cognitive and non-cognitive test
scores and their parents' schooling and earnings. To address the second concern, about
occupational differences, we control for occupational earnings profiles (calculated using the
1985 data), the BLS forecasts, and other occupational and industry characteristics.
Assessing the losses and how their incidence varied
We find that prime age workers (those aged 25-36 in 1985) who were exposed to occupational
decline lost about 2-6 months of employment over 28 years, compared to similar workers whose
occupations did not decline. The higher end of the range refers to our comparison between
similar workers, while the lower end of the range compares similar workers in similar
occupations. The employment loss corresponds to around 1-2% of mean cumulative employment. The
corresponding earnings losses were larger, and amounted to around 2-5% of mean cumulative
earnings. These mean losses may seem moderate given the large occupational declines, but the
average outcomes do not tell the full story. The bottom third of earners in each occupation
fared worse, losing around 8-11% of mean earnings when their occupations declined.
The earnings and employment losses that we document reflect increased time spent in
unemployment and government-sponsored retraining – more so for workers with low initial
earnings. We also find that older workers who faced occupational decline retired a little
earlier.
We also find that workers in occupations that declined after 1985 were less likely to remain
in their starting occupation. It is quite likely that this reduced supply to declining
occupations contributed to mitigating the losses of the workers that remained there.
We show that our main findings are essentially unchanged when we restrict our analysis to
technology-related occupational declines.
Further, our finding that mean earnings and employment losses from occupational decline are
small is not unique to Sweden. We find similar results using a smaller panel dataset on US
workers, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.
Theoretical implications
Our paper also considers the implications of our findings for Roy's (1951) model, which is a
workhorse model for labour economists. We show that the frictionless Roy model predicts that
losses are increasing in initial occupational earnings rank, under a wide variety of
assumptions about the skill distribution. This prediction is inconsistent with our finding that
the largest earnings losses from occupational decline are incurred by those who earned the
least. To reconcile our findings, we add frictions to the model: we assume that workers who
earn little in one occupation incur larger time costs searching for jobs or retraining if they
try to move occupations. This extension of the model, especially when coupled with the addition
of involuntary job displacement, allows us to reconcile several of our empirical findings.
Conclusions
There is a vivid academic and public debate on whether we should fear the takeover of human
jobs by machines. New technologies may replace not only factory and office workers but also
drivers and some professional occupations. Our paper compares similar workers in similar
occupations over 28 years. We show that although mean losses in earnings and employment for
those initially working in occupations that later declined are relatively moderate (2-5% of
earnings and 1-2% of employment), low-earners lose significantly more.
The losses that we find from occupational decline are smaller than those suffered by workers
who experience mass layoffs, as reported in the existing literature. Because the occupational
decline we study took years or even decades, its costs for individual workers were likely
mitigated through retirements, reduced entry into declining occupations, and increased
job-to-job exits to other occupations. Compared to large, sudden shocks, such as plant
closures, the decline we study may also have a less pronounced impact on local economies.
While the losses we find are on average moderate, there are several reasons why future
occupational decline may have adverse impacts. First, while we study unanticipated declines,
the declines were nevertheless fairly gradual. Costs may be larger for sudden shocks following,
for example, a quick evolution of machine learning. Second, the occupational decline that we
study mainly affected low- and middle-skilled occupations, which require less human capital
investment than those that may be impacted in the future. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, our findings show that low-earning individuals are already suffering considerable
(pre-tax) earnings losses, even in Sweden, where institutions are geared towards mitigating
those losses and facilitating occupational transitions. Helping these workers stay productive
when they face occupational decline remains an important challenge for governments.
"... We are having a propaganda barrage about the great Trump economy. We have been hearing about the great economy for a decade while the labor force participation rate declined, real family incomes stagnated, and debt burdens rose. The economy has been great only for large equity owners whose stock ownership benefited from the trillions of dollars the Fed poured into financial markets and from buy-backs by corporations of their own stocks. ..."
"... Federal Reserve data reports that a large percentage of the younger work force live at home with parents, because the jobs available to them are insufficient to pay for an independent existence. How then can the real estate, home furnishings, and appliance markets be strong? ..."
"... In contrast, Robotics, instead of displacing labor, eliminates it. Unlike jobs offshoring which shifted jobs from the US to China, robotics will cause jobs losses in both countries. If consumer incomes fall, then demand for output also falls, and output will fall. Robotics, then, is a way to shrink gross domestic product. ..."
"... The tech nerds and corporations who cannot wait for robotics to reduce labor cost in their profits calculation are incapable of understanding that when masses of people are without jobs, there is no consumer income with which to purchase the products of robots. The robots themselves do not need housing, food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, and medical care. The mega-rich owners of the robots cannot possibly consume the robotic output. An economy without consumers is a profitless economy. ..."
"... A country incapable of dealing with real problems has no future. ..."
We are having a propaganda barrage about the great Trump economy. We have been hearing
about the great economy for a decade while the labor force participation rate declined, real
family incomes stagnated, and debt burdens rose. The economy has been great only for large
equity owners whose stock ownership benefited from the trillions of dollars the Fed poured into
financial markets and from buy-backs by corporations of their own stocks.
I have pointed out for years that the jobs reports are fabrications and that the jobs that
do exist are lowly paid domestic service jobs such as waitresses and bartenders and health care
and social assistance. What has kept the American economy going is the expansion of consumer
debt, not higher pay from higher productivity. The reported low unemployment rate is obtained
by not counting discouraged workers who have given up on finding a job.
Do you remember all the corporate money that the Trump tax cut was supposed to bring back to
America for investment? It was all BS. Yesterday I read reports that Apple is losing its
trillion dollar market valuation because Apple is using its profits to buy back its own stock.
In other words, the demand for Apple's products does not justify more investment. Therefore,
the best use of the profit is to repurchase the equity shares, thus shrinking Apple's
capitalization. The great economy does not include expanding demand for Apple's products.
I read also of endless store and mall closings, losses falsely attributed to online
purchasing, which only accounts for a small percentage of sales.
Federal Reserve data reports that a large percentage of the younger work force live at
home with parents, because the jobs available to them are insufficient to pay for an
independent existence. How then can the real estate, home furnishings, and appliance markets be
strong?
When a couple of decades ago I first wrote of the danger of jobs offshoring to the American
middle class, state and local government budgets, and pension funds, idiot critics raised the
charge of Luddite.
The Luddites were wrong. Mechanization raised the productivity of labor and real wages, but
jobs offshoring shifts jobs from the domestic economy to abroad. Domestic labor is displaced,
but overseas labor gets the jobs, thus boosting jobs there. In other words, labor income
declines in the country that loses jobs and rises in the country to which the jobs are
offshored. This is the way American corporations spurred the economic development of China. It
was due to jobs offshoring that China developed far more rapidly than the CIA expected.
In contrast, Robotics, instead of displacing labor, eliminates it. Unlike jobs
offshoring which shifted jobs from the US to China, robotics will cause jobs losses in both
countries. If consumer incomes fall, then demand for output also falls, and output will fall.
Robotics, then, is a way to shrink gross domestic product.
The tech nerds and corporations who cannot wait for robotics to reduce labor cost in
their profits calculation are incapable of understanding that when masses of people are without
jobs, there is no consumer income with which to purchase the products of robots. The robots
themselves do not need housing, food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, and medical
care. The mega-rich owners of the robots cannot possibly consume the robotic output. An economy
without consumers is a profitless economy.
One would think that there would be a great deal of discussion about the economic effects of
robotics before the problems are upon us, just as one would think there would be enormous
concern about the high tensions Washington has caused between the US and Russia and China, just
as one would think there would be preparations for the adverse economic consequences of global
warming, whatever the cause. Instead, the US, a country facing many crises, is focused on
whether President Trump obstructed investigation of a crime that the special prosecutor said
did not take place.
A country incapable of dealing with real problems has no future.
The infatuation with AI makes people overlook three AI's built-in glitches. AI is software.
Software bugs. Software doesn't autocorrect bugs. Men correct bugs. A bugging self-driving
car leads its passengers to death. A man driving a car can steer away from death. Humans love
to behave in erratic ways, it is just impossible to program AI to respond to all possible
erratic human behaviour. Therefore, instead of adapting AI to humans, humans will be forced
to adapt to AI, and relinquish a lot of their liberty as humans. Humans have moral qualms
(not everybody is Hillary Clinton), AI being strictly utilitarian, will necessarily be
"psychopathic".
In short AI is the promise of communism raised by several orders of magnitude. Welcome
to the "Brave New World".
@Vojkan
You've raised some interesting objections, Vojkan. But here are a few quibbles:
1) AI is software. Software bugs. Software doesn't autocorrect bugs. Men correct bugs. A
bugging self-driving car leads its passengers to death. A man driving a car can steer away
from death.
Learn to code! Seriously, until and unless the AI devices acquire actual power over their
human masters (as in The Matrix ), this is not as big a problem as you think. You
simply test the device over and over and over until the bugs are discovered and worked out --
in other words, we just keep on doing what we've always done with software: alpha, beta,
etc.
2) Humans love to behave in erratic ways, it is just impossible to program AI to respond
to all possible erratic human behaviour. Therefore, instead of adapting AI to humans,
humans will be forced to adapt to AI, and relinquish a lot of their liberty as humans.
There's probably some truth to that. This reminds me of the old Marshall McCluhan saying
that "the medium is the message," and that we were all going to adapt our mode of cognition
(somewhat) to the TV or the internet, or whatever. Yeah, to some extent that has happened.
But to some extent, that probably happened way back when people first began domesticating
horses and riding them. Human beings are 'programmed', as it were, to adapt to their
environments to some extent, and to condition their reactions on the actions of other
things/creatures in their environment.
However, I think you may be underestimating the potential to create interfaces that allow
AI to interact with a human in much more complex ways, such as how another human would
interact with human: sublte visual cues, pheromones, etc. That, in fact, was the essence of
the old Turing Test, which is still the Holy Grail of AI:
3) Humans have moral qualms (not everybody is Hillary Clinton), AI being strictly
utilitarian, will necessarily be "psychopathic".
I don't see why AI devices can't have some moral principles -- or at least moral biases --
programmed into them. Isaac Asimov didn't think this was impossible either:
You simply test the device over and over and over until the bugs are discovered and
worked out -- in other words, we just keep on doing what we've always done with software:
alpha, beta, etc.
Some bugs stay dormant for decades. I've seen one up close.
What's new with AI is the amount of damage a faulty software multiplied many times over
can do. My experience was pretty horrible (I was one of the two humans overseeing the system,
but it was a pretty horrifying experience), but if the system was fully autonomous, it'd have
driven my employer bankrupt.
Now I'm not against using AI in any form whatsoever; I also think that it's inevitable
anyway. I'd support AI driving cars or flying planes, because they are likely safer than
humans, though it's of course changing a manageable risk for a very small probability tail
risk. But I'm pretty worried about AI in general.
Several Pilots repeatedly warned federal authorities of safety concerns over the now-grounded
Boeing 737 Max 8 for months leading up to the
second deadly disaster
involving the plane, according to an investigation by the
Dallas Morning News
.
One captain even called the Max 8's flight manual "
inadequate
and almost criminally insufficient
," according to the report.
"
The fact that this airplane requires such jury-rigging to fly is a red flag.
Now we know the systems employed are error-prone -- even if the pilots aren't sure what those
systems are, what redundancies are in place and failure modes. I am left to wonder: what else don't
I know?" wrote the captain.
At least
five complaints
about the Boeing jet were found in a
federal
database
which pilots routinely use to report aviation incidents without fear of
repercussions.
The complaints are about the safety mechanism cited in
preliminary reports
for an October plane crash in Indonesia that killed 189.
The disclosures found by
The News
reference problems during flights of Boeing 737 Max
8s with an autopilot system during takeoff and nose-down situations while trying to gain
altitude. While records show these flights occurred during October and November, information
regarding which airlines the pilots were flying for at the time is redacted from the database. -
Dallas
Morning News
One captain who flies the Max 8 said in November that it was "unconscionable" that Boeing and
federal authorities have allowed pilots to fly the plane without adequate training - including a
failure to fully disclose how its systems were distinctly different from other planes.
An FAA spokesman said the reporting system is directly filed to NASA, which serves as an neutral
third party in the reporting of grievances.
"The FAA analyzes these reports along with other safety data gathered through programs the FAA
administers directly, including the Aviation Safety Action Program, which includes all of the major
airlines including Southwest and American," said FAA southwest regional spokesman Lynn Lunsford.
Meanwhile, despite several airlines and foreign countries grounding the Max 8, US regulators
have so far declined to follow suit. They have, however, mandated that Boeing upgrade the plane's
software by April.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs a Senate subcommittee overseeing aviation, called for the
grounding of the Max 8 in a Thursday statement.
"Further investigation may reveal that mechanical issues were not the cause, but until that
time, our first priority must be the safety of the flying public," said Cruz.
At least 18 carriers -- including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, the two largest
U.S. carriers flying the 737 Max 8 --
have also declined to ground planes
,
saying they are confident in the safety and "airworthiness" of their fleets. American and
Southwest have 24 and 34 of the aircraft in their fleets, respectively. -
Dallas
Morning News
The United States should be leading the world in aviation safety,"
said Transport Workers Union president John Samuelsen. "
And
yet, because of the lust for profit in the American aviation, we're
still flying planes that dozens of other countries and airlines have
now said need to grounded
."
Tags
Disaster Accident
The automatic trim we described last week has a name, MCAS, or Maneuvering Characteristics
Automation System.
It's unique to the MAX because the 737 MAX no longer has the docile pitch characteristics of
the 737NG at high Angles Of Attack (AOA). This is caused by the larger engine nacelles covering
the higher bypass LEAP-1B engines.
The nacelles for the MAX are larger and placed higher and further forward of the wing,
Figure 1.
Figure 1. Boeing 737NG (left) and MAX (right) nacelles compared. Source: Boeing 737 MAX
brochure.
By placing the nacelle further forward of the wing, it could be placed higher. Combined with
a higher nose landing gear, which raises the nacelle further, the same ground clearance could
be achieved for the nacelle as for the 737NG.
The drawback of a larger nacelle, placed further forward, is it destabilizes the aircraft in
pitch. All objects on an aircraft placed ahead of the Center of Gravity (the line in Figure 2,
around which the aircraft moves in pitch) will contribute to destabilize the aircraft in
pitch.
... ... ...
The 737 is a classical flight control aircraft. It relies on a naturally stable base
aircraft for its flight control design, augmented in selected areas. Once such area is the
artificial yaw damping, present on virtually all larger aircraft (to stop passengers getting
sick from the aircraft's natural tendency to Dutch Roll = Wagging its tail).
Until the MAX, there was no need for artificial aids in pitch. Once the aircraft entered a
stall, there were several actions described last week which assisted the pilot to exit the
stall. But not in normal flight.
The larger nacelles, called for by the higher bypass LEAP-1B engines, changed this. When
flying at normal angles of attack (3° at cruise and say 5° in a turn) the destabilizing
effect of the larger engines are not felt.
The nacelles are designed to not generate lift in normal flight. It would generate
unnecessary drag as the aspect ratio of an engine nacelle is lousy. The aircraft designer
focuses the lift to the high aspect ratio wings.
But if the pilot for whatever reason manoeuvres the aircraft hard, generating an angle of
attack close to the stall angle of around 14°, the previously neutral engine nacelle
generates lift. A lift which is felt by the aircraft as a pitch up moment (as its ahead of the
CG line), now stronger than on the 737NG. This destabilizes the MAX in pitch at higher Angles
Of Attack (AOA). The most difficult situation is when the maneuver has a high pitch ratio. The
aircraft's inertia can then provoke an over-swing into stall AOA.
To counter the MAX's lower stability margins at high AOA, Boeing introduced MCAS. Dependent
on AOA value and rate, altitude (air density) and Mach (changed flow conditions) the MCAS,
which is a software loop in the Flight Control computer, initiates a nose down trim above a
threshold AOA.
It can be stopped by the Pilot counter-trimming on the Yoke or by him hitting the CUTOUT
switches on the center pedestal. It's not stopped by the Pilot pulling the Yoke, which for
normal trim from the autopilot or runaway manual trim triggers trim hold sensors. This would
negate why MCAS was implemented, the Pilot pulling so hard on the Yoke that the aircraft is
flying close to stall.
It's probably this counterintuitive characteristic, which goes against what has been trained
many times in the simulator for unwanted autopilot trim or manual trim runaway, which has
confused the pilots of JT610. They learned that holding against the trim stopped the nose down,
and then they could take action, like counter-trimming or outright CUTOUT the trim servo. But
it didn't. After a 10 second trim to a 2.5° nose down stabilizer position, the trimming
started again despite the Pilots pulling against it. The faulty high AOA signal was still
present.
How should they know that pulling on the Yoke didn't stop the trim? It was described
nowhere; neither in the aircraft's manual, the AFM, nor in the Pilot's manual, the FCOM. This
has created strong reactions from airlines with the 737 MAX on the flight line and their
Pilots. They have learned the NG and the MAX flies the same. They fly them interchangeably
during the week.
They do fly the same as long as no fault appears. Then there are differences, and the
Pilots should have been informed about the differences.
Bruce Levitt
November 14, 2018
In figure 2 it shows the same center of gravity for the NG as the Max. I find this a bit
surprising as I would have expected that mounting heavy engines further forward would have
cause a shift forward in the center of gravity that would not have been offset by the
longer tailcone, which I'm assuming is relatively light even with APU installed.
Based on what is coming out about the automatic trim, Boeing must be counting its lucky
stars that this incident happened to Lion Air and not to an American aircraft. If this had
happened in the US, I'm pretty sure the fleet would have been grounded by the FAA and the
class action lawyers would be lined up outside the door to get their many pounds of
flesh.
This is quite the wake-up call for Boeing.
OV-099
November 14, 2018
If the FAA is not going to comprehensively review the certification for the 737 MAX, I
would not be surprised if EASA would start taking a closer look at the aircraft and why
the FAA seemingly missed the seemingly inadequate testing of the automatic trim when
they decided to certified the 737 MAX 8.
Reply
Doubting Thomas
November 16, 2018
One wonders if there are any OTHER goodies in the new/improved/yet identical handling
latest iteration of this old bird that Boeing did not disclose so that pilots need
not be retrained.
EASA & FAA likely already are asking some pointed questions and will want to
verify any statements made by the manufacturer.
Depending on the answers pilot training requirements are likely to change
materially.
jbeeko
November 14, 2018
CG will vary based on loading. I'd guess the line is the rear-most allowed CG.
Sebina Muwanga
November 17, 2018
Hi Bruce, expect product liability litigation in the US courts even if the accident
occured outside the US. Boeing is domiciled in the US and US courts have jurisdiction.
In my opinion, even the FAA should be a defendant for certifying the aircraft and
endangering the lives of the unsuspecting public.
Take time to read this article i published last year and let me know what you
think.
ahmed
November 18, 2018
hi dears
I think that even the pilot didnt knew about the MCAS ; this case can be corrected by
only applying the boeing check list (QRH) stabilizer runaway.
the pilot when they noticed that stabilizer are trimming without a knewn input ( from
pilot or from Auto pilot ) ; shout put the cut out sw in the off position according to
QRH.
Reply
TransWorld
November 19, 2018
Please note that the first actions pulling back on the yoke to stop it.
Also keep in mind the aircraft is screaming stall and the stick shaker is
activated.
Pulling back on the yoke in that case is the WRONG thing to do if you are
stalled.
The Pilot has to then determine which system is lading.
At the same time its chaning its behavior from previous training, every 5
seconds, it does it again.
There also was another issue taking place at the same time.
So now you have two systems lying to you, one that is actively trying to kill
you.
If the Pitot static system is broken, you also have several key instruments
feeding you bad data (VSI, altitude and speed)
Pilots are trained to immediately deal with emergency issues (engine loss etc)
Then there is a follow up detailed instructions for follow on actions (if any).
Simulators are wonderful things because you can train lethal scenes without lethal
results.
In this case, with NO pilot training let alone in the manuals, pilots have to either
be really quick in the situation or you get the result you do. Some are better at it
than others (Sullenbergers along with other aspects elected to turn on his APU even
though it was not part of the engine out checklist)
The other one was to ditch, too many pilots try to turn back even though we are
trained not to.
What I can tell you from personal expereince is having got myself into a spin
without any training, I was locked up logic wise (panic) as suddenly nothing was
working the way it should.
I was lucky I was high enough and my brain kicked back into cold logic mode and I
knew the counter to a spin from reading)
Another 500 feet and I would not be here to post.
While I did parts of the spin recovery wrong, fortunately in that aircraft it did
not care, right rudder was enough to stop it.
OV-099
November 14, 2018
It's starting to look as if Boeing will not be able to just pay victims' relatives in the
form of "condolence money", without admitting liability.
Reply
Dukeofurl
November 14, 2018
Im pretty sure, even though its an Indonesian Airline, any whiff of fault with the plane
itself will have lawyers taking Boeing on in US courts.
Tech-guru
November 14, 2018
Astonishing to say the least. It is quite unlike Boeing. They are normally very good in the
documentation and training. It makes everyone wonder how such vital change on the MAX
aircraft was omitted from books as weel as in crew training.
Your explanation is very good as to why you need this damn MCAS. But can you also tell us how
just one faulty sensor can trigger this MCAS. In all other Boeing models like B777, the two
AOA sensor signals are compared with a calculated AOA and choose the mid value within the
ADIRU. It eliminates a drastic mistake of following a wrong sensor input.
it's not sure it's a one sensor fault. One sensor was changed amid information there
was a 20 degree diff between the two sides. But then it happened again. I think we
might be informed something else is at the root of this, which could also trip such a
plausibility check you mention. We just don't know. What we know is the MCAS function
was triggered without the aircraft being close to stall.
Matthew
November 14, 2018
If it's certain that the MCAS was doing unhelpful things, that coupled with the
fact that no one was telling pilots anything about it suggests to me that this is
already effectively an open-and-shut case so far as liability, regulatory remedies
are concerned.
The tecnical root cause is also important, but probably irrelevant so far as
estbalishing the ultimate reason behind the crash.
"... The key point I want to pick up on from that earlier post is this: the Boeing 737 Max includes a new "safety" feature about which the company failed to inform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). ..."
"... Boeing Co. withheld information about potential hazards associated with a new flight-control feature suspected of playing a role in last month's fatal Lion Air jet crash, according to safety experts involved in the investigation, as well as midlevel FAA officials and airline pilots. ..."
"... Notice that phrase: "under unusual conditions". Seems now that the pilots of two of these jets may have encountered such unusual conditions since October. ..."
"... Why did Boeing neglect to tell the FAA – or, for that matter, other airlines or regulatory authorities – about the changes to the 737 Max? Well, the airline marketed the new jet as not needing pilots to undergo any additional training in order to fly it. ..."
"... In addition to considerable potential huge legal liability, from both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, Boeing also faces the commercial consequences of grounding some if not all 737 Max 8 'planes currently in service – temporarily? indefinitely? -and loss or at minimum delay of all future sales of this aircraft model. ..."
"... If this tragedy had happened on an aircraft of another manufacturer other than big Boeing, the fleet would already have been grounded by the FAA. The arrogance of engineers both at Airbus and Boeing, who refuse to give the pilots easy means to regain immediate and full authority over the plane (pitch and power) is just appalling. ..."
"... Boeing has made significant inroads in China with its 737 MAX family. A dozen Chinese airlines have ordered 180 of the planes, and 76 of them have been delivered, according Boeing. About 85% of Boeing's unfilled Chinese airline orders are for 737 MAX planes. ..."
"... "It's pretty asinine for them to put a system on an airplane and not tell the pilots who are operating the airplane, especially when it deals with flight controls," Captain Mike Michaelis, chairman of the safety committee for the Allied Pilots Association, told the Wall Street Journal. ..."
"... The aircraft company concealed the new system and minimized the differences between the MAX and other versions of the 737 to boost sales. On the Boeing website, the company claims that airlines can save "millions of dollars" by purchasing the new plane "because of its commonality" with previous versions of the plane. ..."
"... "Years of experience representing hundreds of victims has revealed a common thread through most air disaster cases," said Charles Herrmann the principle of Herrmann Law. "Generating profit in a fiercely competitive market too often involves cutting safety measures. In this case, Boeing cut training and completely eliminated instructions and warnings on a new system. Pilots didn't even know it existed. I can't blame so many pilots for being mad as hell." ..."
"... The Air France Airbus disaster was jumped on – Boeing's traditional hydraulic links between the sticks for the two pilots ensuring they move in tandem; the supposed comments by Captain Sully that the Airbus software didn't allow him to hit the water at the optimal angle he wanted, causing the rear rupture in the fuselage both showed the inferiority of fly-by-wire until Boeing started using it too. (Sully has taken issue with the book making the above point and concludes fly-by-wire is a "mixed blessing".) ..."
Posted on
March 11, 2019 by Jerri-Lynn ScofieldBy
Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is
currently writing a book about textile artisans.
Yesterday, an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 157
passengers on board.
The crash occurred less than five months after a Lion Air jet crashed near Jakarta,
Indonesia, also shortly after takeoff, and killed all 189 passengers.
The state-owned airline is among the early operators of Boeing's new 737 MAX single-aisle
workhorse aircraft, which has been delivered to carriers around the world since 2017. The 737
MAX represents about two-thirds of Boeing's future deliveries and an estimated 40% of its
profits, according to analysts.
Having delivered 350 of the 737 MAX planes as of January, Boeing has booked orders for
about 5,000 more, many to airlines in fast-growing emerging markets around the world.
The voice and data recorders for the doomed flight have already been recovered, the New York
Times reported in Ethiopian
Airline Crash Updates: Data and Voice Recorders Recovered . Investigators will soon be able
to determine whether the same factors that caused the Lion Air crash also caused the latest
Ethiopian Airlines tragedy.
Boeing, Crapification, Two 737 Max Crashes Within Five Months
Yves wrote a post in November, Boeing,
Crapification, and the Lion Air Crash , analyzing a devastating Wall Street Journal report
on that earlier crash. I will not repeat the details of her post here, but instead encourage
interested readers to read it iin full.
The key point I want to pick up on from that earlier post is this: the Boeing 737 Max
includes a new "safety" feature about which the company failed to inform the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA). As Yves wrote:
The short version of the story is that Boeing had implemented a new "safety" feature that
operated even when its plane was being flown manually, that if it went into a stall, it would
lower the nose suddenly to pick airspeed and fly normally again. However, Boeing didn't tell
its buyers or even the FAA about this new goodie. It wasn't in pilot training or even the
manuals. But even worse, this new control could force the nose down so far that it would be
impossible not to crash the plane. And no, I am not making this up. From the Wall Street
Journal:
Boeing Co. withheld information about potential hazards associated with a new
flight-control feature suspected of playing a role in last month's fatal Lion Air jet
crash, according to safety experts involved in the investigation, as well as midlevel FAA
officials and airline pilots.
The automated stall-prevention system on Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 models -- intended
to help cockpit crews avoid mistakenly raising a plane's nose dangerously high -- under
unusual conditions can push it down unexpectedly and so strongly that flight crews can't
pull it back up. Such a scenario, Boeing told airlines in a world-wide safety bulletin
roughly a week after the accident, can result in a steep dive or crash -- even if pilots
are manually flying the jetliner and don't expect flight-control computers to kick in.
Notice that phrase: "under unusual conditions". Seems now that the pilots of two of these
jets may have encountered such unusual conditions since October.
Why did Boeing neglect to tell the FAA – or, for that matter, other airlines or
regulatory authorities – about the changes to the 737 Max? Well, the airline marketed the new jet as not needing pilots to undergo any additional
training in order to fly it.
I see. Why Were 737 Max Jets Still in Service? Today, Boeing executives no doubt rue not pulling all 737 Max 8 jets out of service after
the October Lion Air crash, to allow their engineers and engineering safety regulators to make
necessary changes in the 'plane's design or to develop new training protocols.
In addition to
considerable potential huge legal liability, from both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines
crashes, Boeing also faces the commercial consequences of grounding some if not all 737 Max 8
'planes currently in service – temporarily? indefinitely? -and loss or at minimum delay
of all future sales of this aircraft model.
Over to Yves again, who in her November post cut to the crux:
And why haven't the planes been taken out of service? As one Wall Street Journal reader
put it:
If this tragedy had happened on an aircraft of another manufacturer other than big
Boeing, the fleet would already have been grounded by the FAA. The arrogance of engineers
both at Airbus and Boeing, who refuse to give the pilots easy means to regain immediate and
full authority over the plane (pitch and power) is just appalling.
Accident and incident
records abound where the automation has been a major contributing factor or precursor.
Knowing our friends at Boeing, it is highly probable that they will steer the investigation
towards maintenance deficiencies as primary cause of the accident
The commercial consequences of grounding the 737 Max in China alone are significant,
according to this CNN account, Why
grounding 737 MAX jets is a big deal for Boeing . The 737 Max is Boeing's most important
plane; China is also the company's major market:
"A suspension in China is very significant, as this is a major market for Boeing," said
Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at aviation research firm FlightGlobal.
Boeing has predicted that China will soon become the world's first trillion-dollar market
for jets. By 2037, Boeing estimates China will need 7,690 commercial jets to meet its travel
demands.
Airbus (EADSF) and Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, or Comac, are vying with
Boeing for the vast and rapidly growing Chinese market.
Comac's first plane, designed to compete with the single-aisle Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus
A320, made its first test flight in 2017. It is not yet ready for commercial service, but
Boeing can't afford any missteps.
Boeing has made significant inroads in China with its 737 MAX family. A dozen Chinese
airlines have ordered 180 of the planes, and 76 of them have been delivered, according
Boeing. About 85% of Boeing's unfilled Chinese airline orders are for 737 MAX planes.
The 737 has been Boeing's bestselling product for decades. The company's future depends on
the success the 737 MAX, the newest version of the jet. Boeing has 4,700 unfilled orders for
737s, representing 80% of Boeing's orders backlog. Virtually all 737 orders are for MAX
versions.
As of the time of posting, US airlines have yet to ground their 737 Max 8 fleets. American
Airlines, Alaska Air, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines have ordered a combined 548 of
the new 737 jets, of which 65 have been delivered, according to CNN.
Legal Liability?
Prior to Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash, Boeing already faced considerable potential
legal liability for the October Lion Air crash. Just last Thursday, the Hermann Law Group of
personal injury lawyers filed suit against Boeing on behalf of the families of 17 Indonesian
passengers who died in that crash.
"It's pretty asinine for them to put a system on an airplane and not tell the pilots who
are operating the airplane, especially when it deals with flight controls," Captain Mike
Michaelis, chairman of the safety committee for the Allied Pilots Association, told the Wall
Street Journal.
The president of the pilots union at Southwest Airlines, Jon Weaks, said, "We're pissed
that Boeing didn't tell the companies, and the pilots didn't get notice."
The aircraft company concealed the new system and minimized the differences between the
MAX and other versions of the 737 to boost sales. On the Boeing website, the company claims
that airlines can save "millions of dollars" by purchasing the new plane "because of its
commonality" with previous versions of the plane.
"Years of experience representing hundreds of victims has revealed a common thread through
most air disaster cases," said Charles Herrmann the principle of Herrmann Law. "Generating
profit in a fiercely competitive market too often involves cutting safety measures. In this
case, Boeing cut training and completely eliminated instructions and warnings on a new
system. Pilots didn't even know it existed. I can't blame so many pilots for being mad as
hell."
Additionally, the complaint alleges the United States Federal Aviation Administration is
partially culpable for negligently certifying Boeing's Air Flight Manual without requiring
adequate instruction and training on the new system. Canadian and Brazilian authorities did
require additional training.
What's Next?
The consequences for Boeing could be serious and will depend on what the flight and voice
data recorders reveal. I also am curious as to what additional flight training or instructions,
if any, the Ethiopian Airlines pilots received, either before or after the Lion Air crash,
whether from Boeing, an air safety regulator, or any other source.
Of course we shouldn't engage in speculation, but we will anyway 'cause we're human. If
fly-by-wire and the ability of software to over-ride pilots are indeed implicated in the 737
Max 8 then you can bet the Airbus cheer-leaders on YouTube videos will engage in huge
Schaudenfreude.
I really shouldn't even look at comments to YouTube videos – it's bad for my blood
pressure. But I occasionally dip into the swamp on ones in areas like airlines. Of course
– as you'd expect – you get a large amount of "flag waving" between Europeans and
Americans. But the level of hatred and suspiciously similar comments by the "if it ain't
Boeing I ain't going" brigade struck me as in a whole new league long before the "SJW" troll
wars regarding things like Captain Marvel etc of today.
The Air France Airbus disaster was
jumped on – Boeing's traditional hydraulic links between the sticks for the two pilots
ensuring they move in tandem; the supposed comments by Captain Sully that the Airbus software
didn't allow him to hit the water at the optimal angle he wanted, causing the rear rupture in
the fuselage both showed the inferiority of fly-by-wire until Boeing started using it too.
(Sully has taken issue with the book making the above point and concludes fly-by-wire is a
"mixed blessing".)
I'm going to try to steer clear of my YouTube channels on airlines. Hopefully NC will
continue to provide the real evidence as it emerges as to what's been going on here.
It is really disheartening how an idea as reasonable as "a just society" has been so
thoroughly discredited among a large swath of the population.
No wonder there is such a wide interest in primitive construction and technology on
YouTube. This society is very sick and it is nice to pretend there is a way to opt out.
Indeed. The NTSB usually works with local investigation teams (as well as a manufacturers
rep) if the manufacturer is located in the US, or if specifically requested by the local
authorities. I'd like to see their report. I don't care what the FAA or Boeing says about
it.
. .. . .. -- .
Contains a link to a Seattle Times report as a "comprehensive wrap": Speaking before China's announcement, Cox, who previously served as the top safety
official for the Air Line Pilots Association, said it's premature to think of grounding the
737 MAX fleet.
"We don't know anything yet. We don't have close to sufficient information to consider
grounding the planes," he said. "That would create economic pressure on a number of the
airlines that's unjustified at this point.
China has grounded them . US? Must not create undue economic pressure on the airlines.
Right there in black and white. Money over people.
I just emailed southwest about an upcoming flight asking about my choices for refusal to
board MAX 8/9 planes based on this "feature". I expect pro forma policy recitation, but
customer pressure could trump too big to fail sweeping the dirt under the carpet. I hope.
We got the "safety of our customers is our top priority and we are remaining vigilant and
are in touch with Boeing and the Civial Aviation Authority on this matter but will not be
grounding the aircraft model until further information on the crash becomes available" speech
from a local airline here in South Africa. It didn't take half a day for customer pressure to
effect a swift reversal of that blatant disregard for their "top priority", the model is
grounded so yeah, customer muscle flexing will do it
On PPRUNE.ORG (where a lot of pilots hang out), they reported that after the Lion Air
crash, Southwest added an extra display (to indicate when the two angle of attack sensors
were disagreeing with each other) that the folks on PPRUNE thought was an extremely good idea
and effective.
Of course, if the Ethiopian crash was due to something different from the Lion Air crash,
that extra display on the Southwest planes may not make any difference.
Take those comments with a large dose of salt. Not to say everyone commenting on PPRUNE
and sites like PPRUNE are posers, but PPRUNE.org is where a lot of wanna-be pilots and guys
that spend a lot of time in basements playing flight simulator games hang out. The "real
pilots" on PPRUNE are more frequently of the aspiring airline pilot type that fly smaller,
piston-powered planes.
We will have to wait and see what the final investigation reveals. However this does not
look good for Boeing at all.
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) system was implicated in the
Lion Air crash. There have been a lot of complaints about the system on many of the pilot
forums, suggesting at least anecdotally that there are issues. It is highly suspected that
the MCAS system is responsible for this crash too.
Keep in mind that Ethiopian Airlines is a pretty well-known and regarded airline. This is
not a cut rate airline we are talking about.
At this point, all we can do is to wait for the investigation results.
one other minor thing. you remember that shut down? seems that would have delayed any
updates from Boeing. seems thats one of the things the pilots pointed out when it shutdown
was in progress
What really is the icing on this cake is the fact the new, larger engines on the "Max"
changed the center of gravity of the plane and made it unstable. From what I've read on
aviation blogs, this is highly unusual for a commercial passenger jet. Boeing then created
the new "safety" feature which makes the plane fly nose down to avoid a stall. But of course
garbage in, garbage out on sensors (remember AF447 which stalled right into the S.
Atlantic?).
It's all politics anyway .if Boeing had been forthcoming about the "Max" it would have
required additional pilot training to certify pilots to fly the airliner. They didn't and now
another 189 passengers are D.O.A.
I wouldn't fly on one and wouldn't let family do so either.
If I have read correctly, the MCAS system (not known of by pilots until after the Lion Air
crash) is reliant on a single Angle of Attack sensor, without redundancy (!). It's too
early
to say if MCAS was an issue in the crashes, I guess, but this does not look good.
If it was some other issue with the plane, that will be almost worse for Boeing. Two
crash-causing flaws would require grounding all of the planes, suspending production, then
doing some kind of severe testing or other to make sure that there isn't a third flaw waiting
to show up.
If MCAS relies only on one Angle of Attack (AoA) sensor, then it might have been an error
in the system design an the safety assessment, from which Boeing may be liable.
It appears that a failure of the AoA can produce an unannuntiated erroneous pitch
trim:
a) If the pilots had proper traning and awareness, this event would "only" increase their
workload,
b) But for an unaware or untrained pilot, the event would impair its ability to fly and
introduce excessive workload.
The difference is important, because according to standard civil aviation safety
assessment (see for instance EASA AMC 25.1309 Ch. 7), the case a) should be classified as
"Major" failure, whereas b) should be classified as "Hazardous". "Hazardous" failures are
required to have much lower probability, which means MCAS needs two AoA sensors.
In summary: a safe MCAS would need either a second AoA or pilot training. It seems that it
had neither.
What are the ways an ignorant lay air traveler can find out about whether a particular
airline has these new-type Boeing 737 MAXes in its fleet? What are the ways an ignorant air
traveler can find out which airlines do not have ANY of these airplanes in their fleet?
What are the ways an ignorant air traveler can find out ahead of time, when still planning
herm's trip, which flights use a 737 MAX as against some other kind of plane?
The only way the flying public could possibly torture the airlines into grounding these
planes until it is safe to de-ground them is a total all-encompassing "fearcott" against this
airplane all around the world. Only if the airlines in the "go ahead and fly it" countries
sell zero seats, without exception, on every single 737 MAX plane that flies, will the
airlines themselves take them out of service till the issues are resolved.
Hence my asking how people who wish to save their own lives from future accidents can tell
when and where they might be exposed to the risk of boarding a Boeing 737 MAX plane.
Stop flying. Your employer requires it? Tell'em where to get off. There are alternatives.
The alternatives are less polluting and have lower climate impact also. Yes, this is a hard
pill to swallow. No, I don't travel for employment any more, I telecommute. I used to enjoy
flying, but I avoid it like plague any more. Crapification.
Additional training won't do. If they wanted larger engines, they needed a different
plane. Changing to an unstable center of gravity and compensating for it with new software
sounds like a joke except for the hundreds of victims. I'm not getting on that plane.
Has there been any study of crapification as a broad social phenomenon? When I Google the
word I only get links to NC and sites that reference NC. And yet, this seems like one of the
guiding concepts to understand our present world (the crapification of UK media and civil
service go a long way towards understanding Brexit, for instance).
I mean, my first thought is, why would Boeing commit corporate self-harm for the sake of a
single bullet in sales materials (requires no pilot retraining!). And the answer, of course,
is crapification: the people calling the shots don't know what they're doing.
Google Books finds the word "crapification" quoted (from a 2004) in a work of literary
criticism published in 2008 (Literature, Science and a New Humanities, by J. Gottschall).
From 2013 it finds the following in a book by Edward Keenan, Some Great Idea: "Policy-wise,
it represented a shift in momentum, a slowing down of the childish, intentional crapification
of the city ." So there the word appears clearly in the sense understood by regular readers
here (along with an admission that crapfication can be intentional and not just inadvertent).
To illustrate that sense, Google Books finds the word used in Misfit Toymakers, by Keith T.
Jenkins (2014): "We had been to the restaurant and we had water to drink, because after the
takeover's, all of the soda makers were brought to ruination by the total crapification of
their product, by government management." But almost twenty years earlier the word
"crapification" had occurred in a comic strip published in New York Magazine (29 January
1996, p. 100): "Instant crapification! It's the perfect metaphor for the mirror on the soul
of America!" The word has been used on television. On 5 January 2010 a sketch subtitled
"Night of Terror – The Crapification of the American Pant-scape" ran on The Colbert
Report per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Colbert_Report_episodes_(2010)
. Searching the internet, Google results do indeed show many instances of the word
"crapification" on NC, or quoted elsewhere from NC posts. But the same results show it used
on many blogs since ca. 2010. Here, at http://nyceducator.com/2018/09/the-crapification-factor.html
, is a recent example that comments on the word's popularization: "I stole that word,
"crapification," from my friend Michael Fiorillo, but I'm fairly certain he stole it from
someone else. In any case, I think it applies to our new online attendance system." A comment
here, https://angrybearblog.com/2017/09/open-thread-sept-26-2017.html
, recognizes NC to have been a vector of the word's increasing usage. Googling shows that
there have been numerous instances of the verb "crapify" used in computer-programming
contexts, from at least as early as 2006. Google Books finds the word "crapified" used in a
novel, Sonic Butler, by James Greve (2004). The derivation, "de-crapify," is also attested.
"Crapify" was suggested to Merriam-Webster in 2007 per:
http://nws.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary/newword_display_alpha.php?letter=Cr&last=40
. At that time the suggested definition was, "To make situations/things bad." The verb was
posted to Urban Dictionary in 2003: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=crapify
. The earliest serious discussion I could quickly find on crapificatjon as a phenomenon was
from 2009 at https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=10611 . I have found
only two attempts to elucidate the causes of crapification:
http://malepatternboldness.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-jockey-journey-or-crapification-of.html
(an essay on undershirts) and https://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2017/04/complaints.html
(a comment on refrigerators). This essay deals with the mechanics of job crapification:
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-job-crapification-works.html
(relating it to de-skilling). An apparent Americanism, "crapification" has recently been
'translated' into French: "Mon bled est en pleine urbanisation, comprends : en pleine
emmerdisation" [somewhat literally -- My hole in the road is in the midst of development,
meaning: in the midst of crapification]: https://twitter.com/entre2passions/status/1085567796703096832
Interestingly, perhaps, a comprehensive search of amazon.com yields "No results for
crapification."
This seems more like a specific bussiness conspiracy than like general crapification. This
isn't " they just don't make them like they used to". This is like Ford deliberately selling
the Crash and Burn Pinto with its special explode-on-impact gas-tank feature
Maybe some Trump-style insults should be crafted for this plane so they can get memed-up
and travel faster than Boeing's ability to manage the story. Epithets like " the new Boeing
crash-a-matic dive-liner
with nose-to-the-ground pilot-override autocrash built into every plane." It seems unfair,
but life and safety should come before fairness, and that will only happen if a world wide
wave of fear MAKES it happen.
I think crapification is the end result of a self-serving belief in the unfailing goodness
and superiority of Ivy faux-meritocracy and the promotion/exaltation of the do-nothing,
know-nothing, corporate, revolving-door MBA's and Psych-major HR types over people with many
years of both company and industry experience who also have excellent professional track
records. The latter group was the group in charge of major corporations and big decisions in
the 'good old days', now it's the former. These morally bankrupt people and their vapid,
self-righteous culture of PR first, management science second, and what-the-hell-else-matters
anyway, are the prime drivers of crapification. Read the bio of an old-school celebrated CEO
like Gordon Bethune (Continental CEO with corporate experience at Boeing) who skipped college
altogether and joined the Navy at 17, and ask yourself how many people like that are in
corporate board rooms today? I'm not saying going back to a 'Good Ole Boy's Club' is the best
model of corporate governnace either but at least people like Bethune didn't think they were
too good to mix with their fellow employees, understood leadership, the consequences of
bullshit, and what 'The buck stops here' thing was really about. Corporate types today sadly
believe their own propaganda, and when their fraudulent schemes, can-kicking, and head-in-the
sand strategies inevitably blow up in their faces, they accept no blame and fail upwards to
another posh corporate job or a nice golden parachute. The wrong people are in charge almost
everywhere these days, hence crapification. Bad incentives, zero white collar crime
enforcement, self-replicating board rooms, group-think, begets toxic corporate culture, which
equals crapification.
As a son of a deceased former Boeing aeronautic engineer, this is tragic. It highlights
the problem of financialization, neoliberalism, and lack of corporate responsibility pointed
out daily here on NC. The crapification was signaled by the move of the headquarters from
Seattle to Chicago and spending billions to build a second 787 line in South Carolina to bust
their Unions. Boeing is now an unregulated multinational corporation superior to sovereign
nations. However, if the 737 Max crashes have the same cause, this will be hard to whitewash.
The design failure of windows on the de Havilland Comet killed the British passenger aircraft
business. The EU will keep a discrete silence since manufacturing major airline passenger
planes is a duopoly with Airbus. However, China hasn't (due to the trade war with the USA)
even though Boeing is building a new assembly line there. Boeing escaped any blame for the
loss of two Malaysian Airline's 777s. This may be an existential crisis for American
aviation. Like a President who denies calling Tim Cook, Tim Apple, or the soft coup ongoing
in DC against him, what is really happening globally is not factually reported by corporate
media.
Sorry, but 'sovereign' nations were always a scam. Nothing than a excuse to build capital
markets, which are the underpinning of capitalism. Capital Markets are what control countries
and have since the 1700's. Maybe you should blame the monarchies for selling out to the
bankers in the late middle ages. Sovereign nations are just economic units for the bankers,
their businesses they finance and nothing more. I guess they figured out after the Great
Depression, they would throw a bunch of goodies at "Indo Europeans" face in western europe
,make them decadent and jaded via debt expansion. This goes back to my point about the yellow
vests ..me me me me me. You reek of it. This stuff with Boeing is all profit based. It could
have happened in 2000, 1960 or 1920. It could happen even under state control. Did you love
Hitler's Voltswagon?
As for the soft coup .lol you mean Trumps soft coup for his allies in Russia and the
Middle East viva la Saudi King!!!!!? Posts like these represent the problem with this board.
The materialist over the spiritualist. Its like people who still don't get some of the
biggest supporters of a "GND" are racialists and being somebody who has long run the
environmentalist rally game, they are hugely in the game. Yet Progressives completely seem
blind to it. The media ignores them for con men like David Duke(who's ancestry is not clean,
no its not) and "Unite the Right"(or as one friend on the environmental circuit told me,
Unite the Yahweh apologists) as whats "white". There is a reason they do this.
You need to wake up and stop the self-gratification crap. The planet is dying due to
mishandlement. Over urbanization, over population, constant need for me over ecosystem. It
can only last so long. That is why I like Zombie movies, its Gaia Theory in a nutshell. Good
for you Earth .or Midgard. Which ever you prefer.
Spot on comment VietnamVet, a lot of chickens can be seen coming home to roost in this
latest Boeing disaster. Remarkable how not many years ago the government could regulate the
aviation industry without fear of killing it, since there was more than one aerospace
company, not anymore! The scourge of monsopany/monopoly power rears its head and bites in
unexpected places.
More detail on the "MCAS" system responsible for the previous Lion Air crash
here (theaircurrent.com)
It says the bigger and repositioned engine, which give the new model its fuel efficiency,
and wing angle tweaks needed to fit the engine vs landing gear and clearance,
change the amount of pitch trim it needs in turns to remain level.
The auto system was added top neutralize the pitch trim during turns, too make it handle
like the old model.
There is another pitch trim control besides the main "stick". To deactivate the auto
system, this other trim control has to be used, the main controls do not deactivate it
(perhaps to prevent it from being unintentionally deactivated, which would be equally bad).
If the sensor driving the correction system gives a false reading and the pilot were unaware,
there would be seesawing and panic
Actually, if this all happened again I would be very surprised. Nobody flying a 737 would
not know after the previous crash. Curious what they find.
While logical, If your last comment were correct, it should have prevented this most
recent crash. It appears that the "seesawing and panic" continue.
I assume it has now gone beyond the cockpit, and beyond the design, and sales teams and
reached the Boeing board room. From there, it is likely to travel to the board rooms of every
airline flying this aircraft or thinking of buying one, to their banks and creditors, and to
those who buy or recommend their stock. But it may not reach the FAA for some time.
"Canadian and Brazilian authorities did require additional training" from the quote at the
bottom is not
something I've seen before. What did they know and when did they know it?
They probably just assumed that the changes in the plane from previous 737s were big
enough to warrant treating it like a major change requiring training.
Both countries fly into remote areas with highly variable weather conditions and some
rugged terrain.
For what it's worth, the quoted section says that Boeing withheld info about the MCAS from
"midlevel FAA officials", while Jerri-Lynn refers to the FAA as a whole.
This makes me wonder if top-level FAA people certified the system.
FAA action follows finding of new cracks in pylon aft bulkhead forward flange; crash
investigation continues
Suspension of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10's type certificate last week followed a
separate grounding order from a federal court as government investigators were narrowing
the scope of their investigation of the American Airlines DC-10 crash May 25 in
Chicago.
The American DC-10-10, registration No. N110AA, crashed shortly after takeoff from
Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, killing 259 passengers, 13 crewmembers and three
persons on the ground. The 275 fatalities make the crash the worst in U.S. history.
The controversies surrounding the grounding of the entire U.S. DC-10 fleet and, by
extension, many of the DC-10s operated by foreign carriers, by Federal Aviation
Administrator Langhorne Bond on the morning of June 6 to revolve around several issues.
Yes, I remember back when the FAA would revoke a type certificate if a plane was a danger
to public safety. It wasn't even that long ago. Now their concern is any threat to
Boeing™. There's a name for that
Leeham news is the best site for info on this. For those of you interested in the tech
details got to Bjorns Corner, where he writes about aeronautic design issues.
I was somewhat horrified to find that modern aircraft flying at near mach speeds have a
lot of somewhat pasted on pilot assistances. All of them. None of them fly with nothing but
good old stick-and-rudder. Not Airbus (which is actually fully Fly By wire-all pilot inputs
got through a computer) and not Boeing, which is somewhat less so.
This latest "solution came about becuse the larger engines (and nacelles) fitted on the
Max increased lift ahead of the center of gravity in a pitchup situation, which was
destabilizing. The MCAS uses inputs from air speed and angle of attack sensors to put a pitch
down input to the horizonatal stablisizer.
A faluty AofA sensor lead to Lion Air's Max pushing the nose down against the pilots
efforts all the way into the sea.
One guy said last night on TV that Boeing had eight years of back orders for this aircraft
so you had better believe that this crash will be studied furiously. Saw a picture of the
crash site and it looks like it augured in almost straight down. There seems to be a large
hole and the wreckage is not strew over that much area. I understand that they were digging
out the cockpit as it was underground. Strange that.
It's not true that Boeing hid the existence of the MCAS. They documented it in the
January 2017 rev of the NG/MAX
differences manual and probably earlier than that. One can argue whether the description
was adequate, but the system was in no way hidden.
Looks like, for now, we're stuck between your "in no way hidden", and numerous 737 pilots'
claims on various online aviation boards that they knew nothing about MCAS. Lots of money
involved, so very cloudy weather expected. For now I'll stick with the pilots.
To the best of my understanding and reading on the subject, the system was well documented
in the Boeing technical manuals, but not in the pilots' manuals, where it was only briefly
mentioned, at best, and not by all airlines. I'm not an airline pilot, but from what I've
read, airlines often write their own additional operators manuals for aircraft models they
fly, so it was up to them to decide the depth of documentation. These are in theory
sufficient to safely operate the plane, but do not detail every aircraft system exhaustively,
as a modern aircraft is too complex to fully understand. Other technical manuals detail how
the systems work, and how to maintain them, but a pilot is unlikely to read them as they are
used by maintenance personnel or instructors. The problem with these cases (if investigations
come to the same conclusions) is that insufficient information was included in the pilots
manual explaining the MCAS, even though the information was communicated via other technical
manuals.
A friend of mine is a commercial pilot who's just doing a 'training' exercise having moved
airlines.
He's been flying the planes in question most of his life, but the airline is asking him to
re-do it all according to their manuals and their rules. If the airline manual does not bring
it up, then the pilots will not read it – few of them have time to go after the actual
technical manuals and read those in addition to what the airline wants. [oh, and it does not
matter that he has tens of thousands of hours on the airplane in question, if he does not do
something in accordance with his new airline manual, he'd get kicked out, even if he was
right and the airline manual wrong]
I believe (but would have to check with him) that some countries regulators do their own
testing over and above the airlines, but again, it depends on what they put in.
Good to head my understanding was correct. My take on the whole situation was that Boeing
was negligent in communicating the significance of the change, given human psychology and
current pilot training. The reason was to enable easier aircraft sales. The purpose of the
MCAS system is however quite legitimate – it enables a more fuel efficient plane while
compensating for a corner case of the flight envelope.
The link is to the actual manual. If that doesn't make you reconsider, nothing will. Maybe
some pilots aren't expected to read the manuals, I don't know.
Furthermore, the post stated that Boeing failed to inform the FAA about the MCAS. Surely
the FAA has time to read all of the manuals.
Nobody reads instruction manuals. They're for reference. Boeing needed to yell at the
pilots to be careful to read new pages 1,576 through 1,629 closely. They're a lulu.
Also, what's with screwing with the geometry of a stable plane so that it will fall out of
the sky without constant adjustments by computer software? It's like having a car designed to
explode but don't worry. We've loaded software to prevent that. Except when there's an error.
But don't worry. We've included reboot instructions. It takes 15 minutes but it'll be OK. And
you can do it with one hand and drive with the other. No thanks. I want the car not designed
to explode.
The FAA is already leaping to the defense of the Boeing 737 Max 8 even before they have a
chance to open up the black boxes. Hope that nothing "happens" to those recordings.
I don't know, crapification, at least for me, refers to products, services, or
infrastructure that has declined to the point that it has become a nuisance rather than a
benefit it once was. This case with Boeing borders on criminal negligence.
1. It's really kind of amazing that we can fly to the other side of the world in a few
hours – a journey that in my grandfather's time would have taken months and been pretty
unpleasant and risky – and we expect perfect safety.
2. Of course the best-selling jet will see these issues. It's the law of large
numbers.
3. I am not a fan of Boeing's corporate management, but still, compared to Wall Street and
Defense Contractors and big education etc. they still produce an actual technical useful
artifact that mostly works, and at levels of performance that in other fields would be
considered superhuman.
4. Even for Boeing, one wonders when the rot will set in. Building commercial airliners is
hard! So many technical details, nowhere to hide if you make even one mistake so easy to just
abandon the business entirely. Do what the (ex) US auto industry did, contract out to foreign
manufacturers and just slap a "USA" label on it and double down on marketing. Milk the
cost-plus cash cow of the defense market. Or just financialize the entire thing and become
too big to fail and walk away with all the profits before the whole edifice crumbles. Greed
is good, right?
"Of course the best-selling jet will see these issues. It's the law of large numbers."
2 crashes of a new model in vary similar circumstances is very unusual. And FAA admits
they are requiring a FW upgrade sometime in April. Pilots need to be hyperaware of what this
MCAS system is doing. And they currently aren't.
if it went into a stall, it would lower the nose suddenly to pick airspeed and fly
normally again.
A while before I read this post, I listened to a news clip that reported that the plane
was observed "porpoising" after takeoff. I know only enough about planes and aviation to be a
more or less competent passenger, but it does seem like that is something that might happen
if the plane had such a feature and the pilot was not familiar with it and was trying to
fight it? The below link is not to the story I saw I don't think, but another one I just
found.
if it went into a stall, it would lower the nose suddenly to pick airspeed and fly
normally again.
At PPRUNE.ORG, many of the commentators are skeptical of what witnesses of airplane
crashes say they see, but more trusting of what they say they hear.
The folks at PPRUNE.ORG who looked at the record of the flight from FlightRadar24, which only
covers part of the flight because FlightRadar24's coverage in that area is not so good and
the terrain is hilly, see a plane flying fast in a straight line very unusually low.
The dodge about making important changes that affect aircraft handling but not disclosing
them – so as to avoid mandatory pilot training, which would discourage airlines from
buying the modified aircraft – is an obvious business-over-safety choice by an ethics
and safety challenged corporation.
But why does even a company of that description, many of whose top managers, designers,
and engineers live and breathe flight, allow its s/w engineers to prevent the pilots from
overriding a supposed "safety" feature while actually flying the aircraft? Was it because it
would have taken a little longer to write and test the additional s/w or because completing
the circle through creating a pilot override would have mandated disclosure and additional
pilot training?
Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger and his passengers and crew would have ended up in pieces at
the bottom of the Hudson if the s/w on his aircraft had prohibited out of the ordinary flight
maneuvers that contradicted its programming.
If you carefully review the over all airframe of the 737 it has not hardly changed over
the past 20 years or so, for the most part Boeing 737
specifications . What I believe the real issue here is the Avionics upgrades over the
years has changed dramatically. More and more precision avionics are installed with less and
less pilot input and ultimately no control of the aircraft. Though Boeing will get the brunt
of the lawsuits, the avionics company will be the real culprit. I believe the avionics on the
Boeing 737 is made by Rockwell Collins, which you guessed it, is owned by Boeing.
United Technologies, UTX, I believe. If I knew how to short, I'd probably short this
'cause if they aren't partly liable, they'll still be hurt if Boeing has to slow (or, horror,
halt) production.
Using routine risk management protocols, the American FAA should need continuing "data" on
an aircraft for it to maintain its airworthiness certificate. Its current press materials on
the Boeing 737 Max 8 suggest it needs data to yank it or to ground the aircraft pending
review. Has it had any other commercial aircraft suffer two apparently similar catastrophic
losses this close together within two years of the aircraft's launch?
I am raising an issue with "crapification" as a meme. Crapification is a symptom of a
specific behaviour.
GREED.
Please could you reconsider your writing to invlude this very old, tremendously venal, and
"worst" sin?
US incentiveness of inventing a new word, "crapification" implies that some error cuould
be corrected. If a deliberate sin, it requires atonement and forgiveness, and a sacrifice of
wolrdy assets, for any chance of forgiveness and redemption.
Something else that will be interesting to this thread is that Boeing doesn't seem to mind
letting the Boeing 737 Max aircraft remain for sale on the open market
Experienced private pilot here. Lots of commercial pilot friends. First, the EU suspending
the MAX 8 is politics. Second, the FAA mandated changes were already in the pipeline. Three,
this won't stop the ignorant from staking out a position on this, and speculating about it on
the internet, of course. Fourth, I'd hop a flight in a MAX 8 without concern –
especially with a US pilot on board. Why? In part because the Lion Air event a few months
back led to pointed discussion about the thrust line of the MAX 8 vs. the rest of the 737
fleet and the way the plane has software to help during strong pitch up events (MAX 8 and 9
have really powerful engines).
Basically, pilots have been made keenly aware of the issue and trained in what to do.
Another reason I'd hop a flight in one right now is because there have been more than 31,000
trouble free flights in the USA in this new aircraft to date. My point is, if there were a
systemic issue we'd already know about it. Note, the PIC in the recent crash had +8000 hours
but the FO had about 200 hours and there is speculation he was flying. Speculation.
Anyway, US commercial fleet pilots are very well trained to deal with runaway trim or
uncommanded flight excursions. How? Simple, by switching the breaker off. It's right near
your fingers. Note, my airplane has an autopilot also. In the event the autopilot does
something unexpected, just like the commercial pilot flying the MAX 8, I'm trained in what to
do (the very same thing, switch the thing off).
Moreover, I speak form experience because I've had it happen twice in 15 years –
once an issue with a servo causing the plane to slowly drift right wing low, and once a
connection came loose leaving the plane trimmed right wing low (coincidence). My reaction
is/was about the same as that of a experienced typist automatically hitting backspace on the
keyboard upon realizing they mistyped a word, e.g. not reflex but nearly so. In my case, it
was to throw the breaker to power off the autopilot as I leveled the plane. No big deal.
Finally, as of yet there been no analysis from the black boxes. I advise holding off on
the speculation until they do. They've been found and we'll learn something soon. The
yammering and near hysteria by non-pilots – especially with this thread – reminds
me of the old saw about now knowing how smart or ignorant someone is until they open their
mouth.
While Boeing is designing a new 787, Airbus redesigns the A320. Boeing cannot compete with
it, so instead of redesigning the 737 properly, they put larger engines on it further
forward, which is never intended in the original design. So to compensate they use software
with two sensors, not three, making it mathematically impossible to know if you have a faulty
sensor which one it would be, to automatically adjust the pitch to prevent a stall, and this
is the only true way to prevent a stall. But since you can kill the breaker and disable it if
you have a bad sensor and can't possibly know which one, everything is ok. And now that the
pilots can disable a feature required for certification, we should all feel good about these
brand new planes, that for the first time in history, crashed within 5 months.
And the FAA, which hasn't had a Director in 14 months, knows better than the UK, Europe,
China, Australia, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Africa and basically every other country in
the world except Canada. And the reason every country in the world except Canada has grounded
the fleet is political? Singapore put Silk Air out of business because of politics?
How many people need to be rammed into the ground at 500 mph from 8000 feet before
yammering and hysteria are justified here? 400 obviously isn't enough.
Overnight since my first post above, the 737 Max 8 crash has become political. The black
boxes haven't been officially read yet. Still airlines and aviation authorities have grounded
the airplane in Europe, India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and S.E. Asia in opposition
to FAA's "Continued Airworthiness Notification to the International Community" issued
yesterday.
I was wrong. There will be no whitewash. I thought they would remain silent. My guess this
is a result of an abundance of caution plus greed (Europeans couldn't help gutting Airbus's
competitor Boeing). This will not be discussed but it is also a manifestation of Trump
Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Since the President has started dissing Atlantic Alliance
partners, extorting defense money, fighting trade wars, and calling 3rd world countries
s***-holes; there is no sympathy for the collapsing hegemon. Boeing stock is paying the
price. If the cause is the faulty design of the flight position sensors and fly by wire
software control system, it will take a long while to design and get approval of a new safe
redundant control system and refit the airplanes to fly again overseas. A real disaster for
America's last manufacturing industry.
Too much automation and too complex flight control computer engager life of pilots and passengers...
Notable quotes:
"... When systems (like those used to fly giant aircraft) become too automatic while remaining essentially stupid or limited by the feedback systems, they endanger the airplane and passengers. These two "accidents" are painful warnings for air passengers and voters. ..."
"... This sort of problem is not new. Search the web for pitot/static port blockage, erroneous stall / overspeed indications. Pilots used to be trained to handle such emergencies before the desk-jockey suits decided computers always know best. ..."
"... @Sky Pilot, under normal circumstances, yes. but there are numerous reports that Boeing did not sufficiently test the MCAS with unreliable or incomplete signals from the sensors to even comply to its own quality regulations. ..."
"... Boeing did cut corners when designing the B737 MAX by just replacing the engines but not by designing a new wing which would have been required for the new engine. ..."
"... I accept that it should be easier for pilots to assume manual control of the aircraft in such situations but I wouldn't rush to condemn the programmers before we get all the facts. ..."
I want to know if Boeing 767s, as well as the new 737s, now has the Max 8 flight control
computer installed with pilots maybe not being trained to use it or it being uncontrollable.
A 3rd Boeing - not a passenger plane but a big 767 cargo plane flying a bunch of stuff for
Amazon crashed near Houston (where it was to land) on 2-23-19. The 2 pilots were killed.
Apparently there was no call for help (at least not mentioned in the AP article about it I
read).
'If' the new Max 8 system had been installed, had either Boeing or the owner of the
cargo plane business been informed of problems with Max 8 equipment that had caused a crash
and many deaths in a passenger plane (this would have been after the Indonesian crash)? Was
that info given to the 2 pilots who died if Max 8 is also being used in some 767s? Did Boeing
get the black box from that plane and, if so, what did they find out?
Those 2 pilots' lives
matter also - particularly since the Indonesian 737 crash with Max 8 equipment had already
happened. Boeing hasn't said anything (yet, that I've seen) about whether or not the Max 8
new configuration computer and the extra steps to get manual control is on other of their
planes.
I want to know about the cause of that 3rd Boeing plane crashing and if there have
been crashes/deaths in other of Boeing's big cargo planes. What's the total of all Boeing
crashes/fatalies in the last few months and how many of those planes had Max 8?
Gentle readers: In the aftermath of the Lion Air crash, do you think it possible that all
737Max pilots have not received mandatory training review in how to quickly disconnect the
MCAS system and fly the plane manually?
Do you think it possible that every 737Max pilot does
not have a "disconnect review" as part of his personal checklist? Do you think it possible
that at the first hint of pitch instability, the pilot does not first think of the MCAS
system and whether to disable it?
Compare the altitude fluctuations with those from Lion Air in NYTimes excellent coverage(
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/16/world/asia/lion-air-crash-cockpit.html
), and they don't really suggest to me a pilot struggling to maintain proper pitch. Maybe the
graph isn't detailed enough, but it looks more like a major, single event rather than a
number of smaller corrections. I could be wrong.
Reports of smoke and fire are interesting;
there is nothing in the modification that (we assume) caused Lion Air's crash that would
explain smoke and fire. So I would hesitate to zero in on the modification at this point.
Smoke and fire coming from the luggage bay suggest a runaway Li battery someone put in their
suitcase. This is a larger issue because that can happen on any aircraft, Boeing, Airbus, or
other.
Is is a shame that Boeing will not ground this aircraft knowing they introduced the MCAS
component to automate the stall recovery of the 737 MAX and is behind these accidents in my
opinion. Stall recovery has always been a step all pilots handled when the stick shaker and
other audible warnings were activated to alert the pilots.
Now, Boeing invented MCAS as a
"selling and marketing point" to a problem that didn't exist. MCAS kicks in when the aircraft
is about to enter the stall phase and places the aircraft in a nose dive to regain speed.
This only works when the air speed sensors are working properly. Now imagine when the air
speed sensors have a malfunction and the plane is wrongly put into a nose dive.
The pilots
are going to pull back on the stick to level the plane. The MCAS which is still getting
incorrect air speed data is going to place the airplane back into a nose dive. The pilots are
going to pull back on the stick to level the aircraft. This repeats itself till the airplane
impacts the ground which is exactly what happened.
Add the fact that Boeing did not disclose
the existence of the MCAS and its role to pilots. At this point only money is keeping the 737
MAX in the air. When Boeing talks about safety, they are not referring to passenger safety
but profit safety.
1. The procedure to allow a pilot to take complete control of the aircraft from auto-pilot
mode should have been a standard eg pull back on the control column. It is not reasonable to
expect a pilot to follow some checklist to determine and then turn off a misbehaving module
especially in emergency situations. Even if that procedure is written in fine print in a
manual. (The number of modules to disable may keep increasing if this is allowed).
2. How are
US airlines confident of the safety of the 737 MAX right now when nothing much is known about
the cause of the 2nd crash? What is known if that both the crashed aircraft were brand new,
and we should be seeing news articles on how the plane's brand-new advanced technology saved
the day from the pilot and not the other way round
3. In the first crash, the plane's
advanced technology could not even recognize that either the flight path was abnormal and/or
the airspeed readings were too erroneous and mandate the pilot to therefore take complete
control immediately!
It's straightforward to design for standard operation under normal circumstances. But when
bizarre operation occurs resulting in extreme circumstances a lot more comes into play. Not
just more variables interacting more rapidly, testing system response times, but much
happening quickly, testing pilot response times and experience. It is doubtful that the FAA
can assess exactly what happened in these crashes. It is a result of a complex and rapid
succession of man-machine-software-instrumentation interactions, and the number of
permutations is huge. Boeing didn't imagine all of them, and didn't test all those it did
think of.
The FAA is even less likely to do so. Boeing eventually will fix some of the
identified problems, and make pilot intervention more effective. Maybe all that effort to
make the new cockpit look as familiar as the old one will be scrapped? Pilot retraining will
be done? Redundant sensors will be added? Additional instrumentation? Software re-written?
That'll increase costs, of course. Future deliveries will cost more. Looks likely there will
be some downtime. Whether the fixes will cover sufficient eventualities, time will tell.
Whether Boeing will be more scrupulous in future designs, less willing to cut corners without
evaluating them? Will heads roll? Well, we'll see...
Boeing has been in trouble technologically since its merger with McDonnell Douglas, which
some industry analysts called a takeover, though it isn't clear who took over whom since MD
got Boeing's name while Boeing took the MD logo and moved their headquarters from Seattle to
Chicago.
In addition to problems with the 737 Max, Boeing is charging NASA considerably more
than the small startup, SpaceX, for a capsule designed to ferry astronauts to the space
station. Boeing's Starliner looks like an Apollo-era craft and is launched via a 1960's-like
ATLAS booster.
Despite using what appears to be old technology, the Starliner is well behind
schedule and over budget while the SpaceX capsule has already docked with the space station
using state-of-art reusable rocket boosters at a much lower cost. It seems Boeing is in
trouble, technologically.
When you read that this model of the Boeing 737 Max was more fuel efficient, and view the
horrifying graphs (the passengers spent their last minutes in sheer terror) of the vertical
jerking up and down of both air crafts, and learn both crashes occurred minutes after take
off, you are 90% sure that the problem is with design, or design not compatible with pilot
training. Pilots in both planes had received permission to return to the airports. The likely
culprit. to a trained designer, is the control system for injecting the huge amounts of fuel
necessary to lift the plane to cruising altitude. Pilots knew it was happening and did not
know how to override the fuel injection system.
These two crashes foretell what will happen
if airlines, purely in the name of saving money, elmininate human control of aircraft. There
will be many more crashes.
These ultra-complicated machines which defy gravity and lift
thousands of pounds of dead weight into the stratesphere to reduce friction with air, are
immensely complex and common. Thousands of flight paths cover the globe each day. Human
pilots must ultimately be in charge - for our own peace of mind, and for their ability to
deal with unimaginable, unforeseen hazards.
When systems (like those used to fly giant
aircraft) become too automatic while remaining essentially stupid or limited by the feedback
systems, they endanger the airplane and passengers. These two "accidents" are painful
warnings for air passengers and voters.
2. Deactivate the ability of the automated system to override pilot
inputs, which it apparently can do even with the autopilot disengaged.
3. Make sure that the
autopilot disengage button on the yoke (pickle switch) disconnects ALL non-manual control
inputs.
4. I do not know if this version of the 737 has direct input ("rope start")
gyroscope, airspeed and vertical speed inticators for emergencies such as failure of the
electronic wonder-stuff. If not, install them. Train pilots to use them.
5. This will cost
money, a lot of money, so we can expect more self-serving excuses until the FAA forces Boeing
to do the right thing.
6. This sort of problem is not new. Search the web for pitot/static
port blockage, erroneous stall / overspeed indications. Pilots used to be trained to handle
such emergencies before the desk-jockey suits decided computers always know
best.
I flew big jets for 34 years, mostly Boeing's. Boeing added new logic to the trim system
and was allowed to not make it known to pilots. However it was in maintenance manuals. Not
great, but these airplanes are now so complex there are many systems that pilots don't know
all of the intimate details.
NOT IDEAL, BUT NOT OVERLY SIGNIFICANT. Boeing changed one of the
ways to stop a runaway trim system by eliminating the control column trim brake, ie airplane
nose goes up, push down (which is instinct) and it stops the trim from running out of
control.
BIG DEAL BOIENG AND FAA, NOT TELLING PILOTS. Boeing produces checklists for almost
any conceivable malfunction. We pilots are trained to accomplish the obvious then go
immediately to the checklist. Some items on the checklist are so important they are called
"Memory Items" or "Red Box Items".
These would include things like in an explosive
depressurization to put on your o2 mask, check to see that the passenger masks have dropped
automatically and start a descent.
Another has always been STAB TRIM SWITCHES ...... CUTOUT
which is surrounded by a RED BOX.
For very good reasons these two guarded switches are very
conveniently located on the pedestal right between the pilots.
So if the nose is pitching
incorrectly, STAB TRIM SWITCHES ..... CUTOUT!!! Ask questions later, go to the checklist.
THAT IS THE PILOTS AND TRAINING DEPARTMENTS RESPONSIBILITY. At this point it is not important
as to the cause.
If these crashes turn out to result from a Boeing flaw, how can that company continue to
stay in business? It should be put into receivership and its executives prosecuted. How many
deaths are persmissable?
The emphasis on software is misplaced. The software intervention is triggered by readings
from something called an Angle of Attack sensor. This sensor is relatively new on airplanes.
A delicate blade protrudes from the fuselage and is deflected by airflow. The direction of
the airflow determines the reading. A false reading from this instrument is the "garbage in"
input to the software that takes over the trim function and directs the nose of the airplane
down. The software seems to be working fine. The AOA sensor? Not so much.
The basic problem seems to be that the 737 Max 8 was not designed for the larger engines
and so there are flight characteristics that could be dangerous. To compensate for the flaw,
computer software was used to control the aircraft when the situation was encountered. The
software failed to prevent the situation from becoming a fatal crash.
A work around that may
be the big mistake of not redesigning the aircraft properly for the larger engines in the
first place. The aircraft may need to be modified at a cost that would be not realistic and
therefore abandoned and a entirely new aircraft design be implemented. That sounds very
drastic but the only other solution would be to go back to the original engines. The Boeing
Company is at a crossroad that could be their demise if the wrong decision is
made.
It may be a training issue in that the 737 Max has several systems changes from previous
737 models that may not be covered adequately in differences training, checklists, etc. In
the Lyon Air crash, a sticky angle-of-attack vane caused the auto-trim to force the nose down
in order to prevent a stall. This is a worthwhile safety feature of the Max, but the crew was
slow (or unable) to troubleshoot and isolate the problem. It need not have caused a crash. I
suspect the same thing happened with Ethiopian Airlines. The circumstances are temptingly
similar.
@Sky Pilot, under normal circumstances, yes. but there are numerous reports that Boeing
did not sufficiently test the MCAS with unreliable or incomplete signals from the sensors to
even comply to its own quality regulations. And that is just one of the many quality issues
with the B737 MAX that have been in the news for a long time and have been of concern to some
of the operators while at the same time being covered up by the FAA.
Just look at the
difference in training requirements between the FAA and the Brazilian aviation authority.
Brazilian pilots need to fully understand the MCAS and how to handle it in emergency
situations while FAA does not even require pilots to know about it.
This is yet another beautiful example of the difference in approach between Europeans and
US Americans. While Europeans usually test their before they deliver the product thoroughly
in order to avoid any potential failures of the product in their customers hands, the US
approach is different: It is "make it work somehow and fix the problems when the client has
them".
Which is what happened here as well. Boeing did cut corners when designing the B737
MAX by just replacing the engines but not by designing a new wing which would have been
required for the new engine.
So the aircraft became unstable to fly at low speedy and tight
turns which required a fix by implementing the MCAS which then was kept from recertification
procedures for clients for reasons competitive sales arguments. And of course, the FAA played
along and provided a cover for this cutting of corners as this was a product of a US company.
Then the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan, not once but twice. So Boeing sent its "thoughts
and prayers" and started to hope for the storm to blow over and for finding a fix that would
not be very expensive and not eat the share holder value away.
Sorry, but that is not the way
to design and maintain aircraft. If you do it, do it right the first time and not fix it
after more than 300 people died in accidents. There is a reason why China has copied the
Airbus A-320 and not the Boeing B737 when building its COMAC C919. The Airbus is not a cheap
fix, still tested by customers.
@Thomas And how do you know that Boeing do not test the aircrafts before delivery? It is a
requirement by FAA for all complete product, systems, parts and sub-parts to be tested before
delivery. However it seems Boeing has not approached the problem (or maybe they do not know
the real issue).
As for the design, are you an engineer that can say whatever the design and
use of new engines without a complete re-design is wrong? Have you seen the design drawings
of the airplane? I do work in an industry in which our products are use for testing different
parts of aircratfs and Boeing is one of our customers.
Our products are use during
manufacturing and maintenance of airplanes. My guess is that Boeing has no idea what is going
on. Your biased opinion against any US product is evident. There are regulations in the USA
(and not in other Asia countries) that companies have to follow. This is not a case of
untested product, it is a case of unknown problem and Boeing is really in the dark of what is
going on...
Boeing and Regulators continue to exhibit criminal behaviour in this case. Ethical
responsibility expects that when the first brand new MAX 8 fell for potentially issues with
its design, the fleet should have been grounded. Instead, money was a priority; and
unfortunately still is. They are even now flying. Disgraceful and criminal
behaviour.
A terrible tragedy for Ethiopia and all of the families affected by this disaster. The
fact that two 737 Max jets have crashed in one year is indeed suspicious, especially as it
has long been safer to travel in a Boeing plane than a car or school bus. That said, it is
way too early to speculate on the causes of the two crashes being identical. Eyewitness
accounts of debris coming off the plane in mid-air, as has been widely reported, would not
seem to square with the idea that software is again at fault. Let's hope this puzzle can be
solved quickly.
@Singh the difference is consumer electronic products usually have a smaller number of
components and wiring compared to commercial aircraft with miles of wiring and multitude of
sensors and thousands of components. From what I know they usually have a preliminary report
that comes out in a short time. But the detailed reported that takes into account analysis
will take over one year to be written.
The engineers and management at Boeing need a crash course in ethics. After the crash in
Indonesia, Boeing was trying to pass the blame rather than admit responsibility. The planes
should all have been grounded then. Now the chickens have come to roost. Boeing is in serious
trouble and it will take a long time to recover the reputation. Large multinationals never
learn.
@John A the previous pilot flying the Lion jet faced the same problem but dealt with it
successfully. The pilot on the ill fated flight was less experienced and unfortunately
failed.
@Imperato Solving a repeat problem on an airplane type must not solely depend upon a pilot
undertaking an emergency response! That is nonsense even to a non-pilot! This implies that
Boeing allows a plane to keep flying which it knows has a fatal flaw! Shouldn't it be
grounding all these planes until it identifies and solves the same problem?
Something is wrong with those two graphs of altitude and vertical speed. For example, both
are flat at the end, even though the vertical speed graph indicates that the plane was
climbing rapidly. So what is the source of those numbers? Is it ground-based radar, or
telemetry from onboard instruments? If the latter, it might be a clue to the
problem.
I wonder if, somewhere, there is a a report from some engineers saying that the system
pushed by administrative-types to get the plane on the market quickly, will results in
serious problems down the line.
If we don't know why the first two 737 Max Jets crashed, then we don't know how long it
will be before another one has a catastrophic failure. All the planes need to be grounded
until the problem can be duplicated and eliminated.
@Rebecca And if it is something about the plane itself - and maybe an interaction with the
new software - then someone has to be ready to volunteer to die to replicate what's
happened.....
@Shirley Heavens no. When investigating failures, duplicating the problem helps develop
the solution. If you can't recreate the problem, then there is nothing to solve. Duplicating
the problem generally is done through analysis and simulations, not with actual planes and
passengers.
Computer geeks can be deadly. This is clearly a software problem. The more software goes
into a plane, the more likely it is for a software failure to bring down a plane. And
computer geeks are always happy to try "new things" not caring what the effects are in the
real world. My PC has a feature that controls what gets typed depending on the speed and
repetitiveness of what I type. The darn thing is a constant source of annoyance as I sit at
my desk, and there is absolutely no way to neutralize it because a computer geek so decided.
Up in an airliner cockpit, this same software idiocy is killing people like
flies.
@Sisifo Software that goes into critical systems like aircraft have a lot more
constraints. Comparing it to the user interface on your PC doesn't make any sense. It's
insulting to assume programmers are happy to "try new things" at the expense of lives. If
you'd read about the Lion Air crash carefully you'd remember that there were faulty sensors
involved. The software was doing what it was designed to do but the input it was getting was
incorrect. I accept that it should be easier for pilots to assume manual control of the
aircraft in such situations but I wouldn't rush to condemn the programmers before we get all
the facts.
@Pooja Mistakes happen. If humans on board can't respond to terrible situations then there
is something wrong with the aircraft and its computer systems. By definition.
Airbus had its own experiences with pilot "mode confusion" in the 1990's with at least 3
fatal crashes in the A320, but was able to control the media narrative until they resolved
the automation issues. Look up Air Inter 148 in Wikipedia to learn the
similarities.
Opinioned! NYC -- currently wintering in the Pacific March 11
"Commands issued by the plane's flight control computer that bypasses the pilots." What
could possibly go wrong? Now let's see whether Boeing's spin doctors can sell this as a
feature, not a bug.
It is telling that the Chinese government grounded their fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft
before the US government. The world truly has turned upside down when it potentially is safer
to fly in China than the US. Oh, the times we live in. Chris Hartnett Datchet, UK (formerly
Minneapolis)
As a passenger who likes his captains with a head full of white hair, even if the plane is
nosediving to instrument failure, does not every pilot who buckles a seat belt worldwide know
how to switch off automatic flight controls and fly the airplane manually?
Even if this were
1000% Boeing's fault pilots should be able to override electronics and fly the plane safely
back to the airport. I'm sure it's not that black and white in the air and I know it's
speculation at this point but can any pilots add perspective regarding human
responsibility?
@Hollis I'm not a pilot nor an expert, but my understanding is that planes these days are
"fly by wire", meaning the control surfaces are operated electronically, with no mechanical
connection between the pilot's stick and the wings. So if the computer goes down, the ability
to control the plane goes with it.
@Hollis The NYT's excellent reporting on the Lion Air crash indicated that in nearly all
other commercial aircraft, manual control of the pilot's yoke would be sufficient to override
the malfunctioning system (which was controlling the tail wings in response to erroneous
sensor data). Your white haired captain's years of training would have ingrained that
impulse.
Unfortunately, on the Max 8 that would not sufficiently override the tail wings
until the pilots flicked a switch near the bottom of the yoke. It's unclear whether
individual airlines made pilots aware of this. That procedure existed in older planes but may
not have been standard practice because the yoke WOULD sufficiently override the tail wings.
Boeing's position has been that had pilots followed the procedure, a crash would not have
occurred.
@Hollis No, that is the entire crux of this problem; switching from auto-pilot to manual
does NOT solve it. Hence the danger of this whole system. T
his new Boeing 737-Max series are
having the engines placed a bit further away than before and I don't know why they did this,
but the result is that there can be some imbalance in air, which they then tried to correct
with this strange auto-pilot technical adjustment.
Problem is that it stalls the plane (by
pushing its nose down and even flipping out small wings sometimes) even when it shouldn't,
and even when they switch to manual this system OVERRULES the pilot and switches back to
auto-pilot, continuing to try to 'stabilize' (nose dive) the plane. That's what makes it so
dangerous.
It was designed to keep the plane stable but basically turned out to function more
or less like a glitch once you are taking off and need the ascend. I don't know why it only
happens now and then, as this plane had made many other take-offs prior, but when it hits, it
can be deadly. So far Boeings 'solution' is sparsely sending out a HUGE manual for pilots
about how to fight with this computer problem.
Which are complicated to follow in a situation
of stress with a plane computer constantly pushing the nose of your plane down. Max'
mechanism is wrong and instead of correcting it properly, pilots need special training. Or a
new technical update may help... which has been delayed and still hasn't been
provided.
Is it the inability of the two airlines to maintain one of the plane's fly-by-wire systems
that is at fault, not the plane itself? Or are both crashes due to pilot error, not knowing
how to operate the system and then overreacting when it engages? Is the aircraft merely too
advanced for its own good? None of these questions seems to have been answered
yet.
This is such a devastating thing for Ethiopian Airlines, which has been doing critical
work in connecting Africa internally and to the world at large. This is devastating for the
nation of Ethiopia and for all the family members of those killed. May the memory of every
passenger be a blessing. We should all hope a thorough investigation provides answers to why
this make and model of airplane keep crashing so no other people have to go through this
horror again.
A possible small piece of a big puzzle: Bishoftu is a city of 170,000 that is home to the
main Ethiopian air force base, which has a long runway. Perhaps the pilot of Flight 302 was
seeking to land there rather than returning to Bole Airport in Addis Ababa, a much larger and
more densely populated city than Bishoftu. The pilot apparently requested return to Bole, but
may have sought the Bishoftu runway when he experienced further control problems. Detailed
analysis of radar data, conversations between pilot and control tower, flight path, and other
flight-related information will be needed to establish the cause(s) of this
tragedy.
The business of building and selling airplanes is brutally competitive. Malfunctions in
the systems of any kind on jet airplanes ("workhorses" for moving vast quantities of people
around the earth) lead to disaster and loss of life. Boeing's much ballyhooed and vaunted MAX
8 737 jet planes must be grounded until whatever computer glitches brought down Ethiopian Air
and LION Air planes -- with hundreds of passenger deaths -- are explained and fixed.
In 1946,
Arthur Miller's play, "All My Sons", brought to life guilt by the airplane industry leading
to deaths of WWII pilots in planes with defective parts. Arthur Miller was brought before the
House UnAmerican Activities Committee because of his criticism of the American Dream. His
other seminal American play, "Death of a Salesman", was about an everyman to whom attention
must be paid. Attention must be paid to our aircraft industry. The American dream must be
repaired.
Meanwhile, human drivers killed 40,000 and injured 4.5 million people in 2018... For
comparison, 58,200 American troops died in the entire Vietnam war. Computers do not fall
asleep, get drunk, drive angry, or get distracted. As far as I am concerned, we cannot get
unreliable humans out from behind the wheel fast enough.
The irony here seems to be that in attempting to make the aircraft as safe as possible
(with systems updates and such) Boeing may very well have made their product less safe. Since
the crashes, to date, have been limited to the one product that product should be grounded
until a viable determination has been made. John~ American Net'Zen
Knowing quite a few Boeing employees and retirees, people who have shared numerous stories
of concerns about Boeing operations -- I personally avoid flying. As for the assertion: "The
business of building and selling jets is brutally competitive" -- it is monopolistic
competition, as there are only two players. That means consumers (in this case airlines) do
not end up with the best and widest array of airplanes. The more monopolistic a market, the
more it needs to be regulated in the public interest -- yet I seriously doubt the FAA or any
governmental agency has peeked into all the cost cutting measures Boeing has implemented in
recent years
@cosmos Patently ridiculous. Your odds are greater of dying from a lightning strike, or in
a car accident. Or even from food poisoning. Do you avoid driving? Eating? Something about
these major disasters makes people itching to abandon all sense of probability and
statistics.
When the past year was the dealiest one in decades, and when there are two disasters
involved the same plane within that year, how can anyone not draw an inference that there are
something wrong with the plane? In statistical studies of a pattern, this is a very very
strong basis for a logical reasoning that something is wrong with the plane. When the number
involves human lives, we must take very seriously the possibility of design flaws. The MAX
planes should be all grounded for now. Period.
@Bob couldn't agree more - however the basic design and engineering of the 737 is proven
to be dependable over the past ~ 6 decades......not saying that there haven't been accidents
- but these probably lie well within the industry / type averages. the problems seems to have
arisen with the introduction of systems which have purportedly been introduced to take a part
of the work-load off the pilots & pass it onto a central compuertised system.
Maybe the
'automated anti-stalling ' programme installed into the 737 Max, due to some erroneous inputs
from the sensors, provide inaccurate data to the flight management controls leading to
stalling of the aircraft. It seems that the manufacturer did not provide sufficent technical
data about the upgraded software, & incase of malfunction, the corrective procedures to
be followed to mitigate such diasters happening - before delivery of the planes to customers.
The procedure for the pilot to take full control of the aircraft by disengaging the central
computer should be simple and fast to execute. Please we don't want Tesla driverless vehicles
high up in the sky !
All we know at the moment is that a 737 Max crashed in Africa a few minutes after taking
off from a high elevation airport. Some see similarities with the crash of Lion Air's 737 Max
last fall -- but drawing a line between the only two dots that exist does not begin to
present a useful picture of the situation.
Human nature seeks an explanation for an event,
and may lead some to make assumptions that are without merit in order to provide closure.
That tendency is why following a dramatic event, when facts are few, and the few that exist
may be misleading, there is so much cocksure speculation masquerading as solid, reasoned,
analysis. At this point, it's best to keep an open mind and resist connecting
dots.
@James Conner 2 deadly crashes after the introduction of a new airplane has no precedence
in recent aviation history. And the time it has happened (with Comet), it was due to a faulty
aircraft design. There is, of course, some chance that there is no connection between the two
accidents, but if there is, the consequences are huge. Especially because the two events
happened with very similar fashion (right after takeoff, with wild altitude changes), so
there is more similarities than just the type of the plane. So there is literally no reason
to keep this model in the air until the investigation is concluded. Oh well, there is: money.
Over human lives.
It might be a wrong analogy, but if Toyota/Lexus recall over 1.5 million vehicles due to
at least over 20 fatalities in relations to potentially fawlty airbags, Boeing should -- after
over 300 deaths in just about 6 months -- pull their product of the market voluntarily until it
is sorted out once and for all.
This tragic situation recalls the early days of the de
Havilland Comet, operated by BOAC, which kept plunging from the skies within its first years
of operation until the fault was found to be in the rectangular windows, which did not
withstand the pressure due its jet speed and the subsequent cracks in body ripped the planes
apart in midflight.
A third crash may have the potential to take the aircraft manufacturer out of business, it
is therefore unbelievable that the reasons for the Lion Air crash haven't been properly
established yet. With more than a 100 Boeing 737 Max already grounded, I would expect crash
investigations now to be severely fast tracked.
And the entire fleet should be grounded on
the principle of "better safe than sorry". But then again, that would cost Boeing money,
suggesting that the company's assessment of the risks involved favours continued operations
above the absolute safety of passengers.
@Thore Eilertsen This is also not a case for a secretive and extended crash investigation
process. As soon as the cockpit voice recording is extracted - which might be later today -
it should be made public. We also need to hear the communications between the controllers and
the aircraft and to know about the position regarding the special training the pilots
received after the Lion Air crash.
@Thore Eilertsen I would imagine that Boeing will be the first to propose grounding these
planes if they believe with a high degree of probability that it's their issue. They have the
most to lose. Let logic and patience prevail.
It is very clear, even in these early moments, that aircraft makers need far more
comprehensive information on everything pertinent that is going on in cockpits when pilots
encounter problems. That information should be continually transmitted to ground facilities
in real time to permit possible ground technical support.
This aritcle is two years old and not much happned during those two years. But still there is a chance that highly authomated factories
can make manufacturing in the USA again profitable. the problme is that they will be even more profible in East Asia;-)
The rise of technologies such as 3-D printing and advanced robotics means that the next few decades for Asia's economies will
not be as easy or promising as the previous five.
OWEN HARRIES, the first editor, together with Robert Tucker, of The National Interest, once reminded me that experts-economists,
strategists, business leaders and academics alike-tend to be relentless followers of intellectual fashion, and the learned, as Harold
Rosenberg famously put it, a "herd of independent minds." Nowhere is this observation more apparent than in the prediction that we
are already into the second decade of what will inevitably be an "Asian Century"-a widely held but rarely examined view that Asia's
continued economic rise will decisively shift global power from the Atlantic to the western Pacific Ocean.
No doubt the numbers appear quite compelling. In 1960, East Asia accounted for a mere 14 percent of global GDP; today that figure
is about 27 percent. If linear trends continue, the region could account for about 36 percent of global GDP by 2030 and over half
of all output by the middle of the century. As if symbolic of a handover of economic preeminence, China, which only accounted for
about 5 percent of global GDP in 1960, will likely surpass the United States as the largest economy in the world over the next decade.
If past record is an indicator of future performance, then the "Asian Century" prediction is close to a sure thing.
"... "In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is
the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse
between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man
who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) ..."
"... At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country's business
and banks. ..."
"... This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions [trillions!] of dollars. It
also varies in size with the business cycle. ..."
"... In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many
people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases
rapidly. ..."
"... In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be
dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The
bezzle shrinks ..."
John Kenneth Galbraith, from "The Great Crash 1929":
"In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement
is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years
may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his
gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.)
At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country's
business and banks.
This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions [trillions!] of dollars.
It also varies in size with the business cycle.
In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always
many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the
bezzle increases rapidly.
In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed
to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously
improved. The bezzle shrinks."
For nearly a half a century, from 1947 to 1996, real GDP and real Net Worth of Households and Non-profit Organizations (in
2009 dollars) both increased at a compound annual rate of a bit over 3.5%. GDP growth, in fact, was just a smidgen faster -- 0.016%
-- than growth of Net Household Worth.
From 1996 to 2015, GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 2.3% while Net Worth increased at the rate of 3.6%....
The real home price index extends from 1890. From 1890 to 1996, the index increased slightly faster than inflation so that
the index was 100 in 1890 and 113 in 1996. However from 1996 the index advanced to levels far beyond any previously experienced,
reaching a high above 194 in 2006. Previously the index high had been just above 130.
Though the index fell from 2006, the level in 2016 is above 161, a level only reached when the housing bubble had formed in
late 2003-early 2004.
The Shiller 10-year price-earnings ratio is currently 29.34, so the inverse or the earnings rate is 3.41%. The dividend yield
is 1.93. So an expected yearly return over the coming 10 years would be 3.41 + 1.93 or 5.34% provided the price-earnings ratio
stays the same and before investment costs.
Against the 5.34% yearly expected return on stock over the coming 10 years, the current 10-year Treasury bond yield is 2.32%.
The risk premium for stocks is 5.34 - 2.32 or 3.02%:
What the robot-productivity paradox is puzzles me, other than since 2005 for all the focus on the productivity of robots and
on robots replacing labor there has been a dramatic, broad-spread slowing in productivity growth.
However what the changing relationship between the growth of GDP and net worth since 1996 show, is that asset valuations have
been increasing relative to GDP. Valuations of stocks and homes are at sustained levels that are higher than at any time in the
last 120 years. Bear markets in stocks and home prices have still left asset valuations at historically high levels. I have no
idea why this should be.
The paradox is that productivity statistics can't tell us anything about the effects of robots on employment because both the
numerator and the denominator are distorted by the effects of colossal Ponzi bubbles.
John Kenneth Galbraith used to call it "the bezzle." It is "that increment to wealth that occurs during the magic interval
when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost
it." The current size of the gross national bezzle (GNB) is approximately $24 trillion.
Ponzilocks and the Twenty-Four Trillion Dollar Question
Twenty-three and a half trillion, actually. But what's a few hundred billion? Here today, gone tomorrow, as they say.
At the beginning of 2007, net worth of households and non-profit organizations exceeded its 1947-1996 historical average, relative
to GDP, by some $16 trillion. It took 24 months to wipe out eighty percent, or $13 trillion, of that colossal but ephemeral slush
fund. In mid-2016, net worth stood at a multiple of 4.83 times GDP, compared with the multiple of 4.72 on the eve of the Great
Unworthing.
When I look at the ragged end of the chart I posted yesterday, it screams "Ponzi!" "Ponzi!" "Ponz..."
To make a long story short, let's think of wealth as capital. The value of capital is determined by the present value of an
expected future income stream. The value of capital fluctuates with changing expectations but when the nominal value of capital
diverges persistently and significantly from net revenues, something's got to give. Either economic growth is going to suddenly
gush forth "like nobody has ever seen before" or net worth is going to have to come back down to earth.
Somewhere between 20 and 30 TRILLION dollars of net worth will evaporate within the span of perhaps two years.
When will that happen? Who knows? There is one notable regularity in the data, though -- the one that screams "Ponzi!"
When the net worth bubble stops going up...
...it goes down.
"... But the economy does not feel like one undergoing a technology-driven productivity boom. In the late 1990s, tech optimism was everywhere. At the same time, wages and productivity were rocketing upward. The situation now is completely different. The most recent jobs reports in America and Britain tell the tale. Employment is growing, month after month after month. But wage growth is abysmal. So is productivity growth: not surprising in economies where there are lots of people on the job working for low pay. ..."
"... Increasing labour costs by making the minimum wage a living wage would increase the incentives to boost productivity growth? No, the neoliberals and corporate Democrats would never go for it. They're trying to appeal to the business community and their campaign contributors wouldn't like it. ..."
People are worried about robots taking jobs. Driverless cars are around the corner. Restaurants and shops increasingly carry the
option to order by touchscreen. Google's clever algorithms provide instant translations that are remarkably good.
But the economy does not feel like one undergoing a technology-driven productivity boom. In the late 1990s, tech optimism
was everywhere. At the same time, wages and productivity were rocketing upward. The situation now is completely different. The most
recent jobs reports in America and Britain tell the tale. Employment is growing, month after month after month. But wage growth is
abysmal. So is productivity growth: not surprising in economies where there are lots of people on the job working for low pay.
The obvious conclusion, the one lots of people are drawing, is that the robot threat is totally overblown: the fantasy, perhaps,
of a bubble-mad Silicon Valley - or an effort to distract from workers' real problems, trade and excessive corporate power. Generally
speaking, the problem is not that we've got too much amazing new technology but too little.
This is not a strawman of my own invention. Robert Gordon makes this case. You can see Matt Yglesias make it here. Duncan Weldon,
for his part, writes:
We are debating a problem we don't have, rather than facing a real crisis that is the polar opposite. Productivity growth has
slowed to a crawl over the last 15 or so years, business investment has fallen and wage growth has been weak. If the robot revolution
truly was under way, we would see surging capital expenditure and soaring productivity. Right now, that would be a nice "problem"
to have. Instead we have the reality of weak growth and stagnant pay. The real and pressing concern when it comes to the jobs
market and automation is that the robots aren't taking our jobs fast enough.
And in a recent blog post Paul Krugman concluded:
I'd note, however, that it remains peculiar how we're simultaneously worrying that robots will take all our jobs and bemoaning
the stalling out of productivity growth. What is the story, really?
What is the story, indeed. Let me see if I can tell one. Last fall I published a book: "The Wealth of Humans". In it I set out
how rapid technological progress can coincide with lousy growth in pay and productivity. Start with this:
Low labour costs discourage investments in labour-saving technology, potentially reducing productivity growth.
Increasing labour costs by making the minimum wage a living wage would increase the incentives to boost productivity growth?
No, the neoliberals and corporate Democrats would never go for it. They're trying to appeal to the business community and their
campaign contributors wouldn't like it.
Capital-biased Technological Progress: An Example (Wonkish)
By Paul Krugman
Ever since I posted about robots and the distribution of income, * I've had queries from readers about what capital-biased
technological change – the kind of change that could make society richer but workers poorer – really means. And it occurred to
me that it might be useful to offer a simple conceptual example – the kind of thing easily turned into a numerical example as
well – to clarify the possibility. So here goes.
Imagine that there are only two ways to produce output. One is a labor-intensive method – say, armies of scribes equipped only
with quill pens. The other is a capital-intensive method – say, a handful of technicians maintaining vast server farms. (I'm thinking
in terms of office work, which is the dominant occupation in the modern economy).
We can represent these two techniques in terms of unit inputs – the amount of each factor of production required to produce
one unit of output. In the figure below I've assumed that initially the capital-intensive technique requires 0.2 units of labor
and 0.8 units of capital per unit of output, while the labor-intensive technique requires 0.8 units of labor and 0.2 units of
capital.
[Diagram]
The economy as a whole can make use of both techniques – in fact, it will have to unless it has either a very large amount
of capital per worker or a very small amount. No problem: we can just use a mix of the two techniques to achieve any input combination
along the blue line in the figure. For economists reading this, yes, that's the unit isoquant in this example; obviously if we
had a bunch more techniques it would start to look like the convex curve of textbooks, but I want to stay simple here.
What will the distribution of income be in this case? Assuming perfect competition (yes, I know, but let's deal with that case
for now), the real wage rate w and the cost of capital r – both measured in terms of output – have to be such that the cost of
producing one unit is 1 whichever technique you use. In this example, that means w=r=1. Graphically, by the way, w/r is equal
to minus the slope of the blue line.
Oh, and if you're worried, yes, workers and machines are both paid their marginal product.
But now suppose that technology improves – specifically, that production using the capital-intensive technique gets more efficient,
although the labor-intensive technique doesn't. Scribes with quill pens are the same as they ever were; server farms can do more
than ever before. In the figure, I've assumed that the unit inputs for the capital-intensive technique are cut in half. The red
line shows the economy's new choices.
So what happens? It's obvious from the figure that wages fall relative to the cost of capital; it's less obvious, maybe, but
nonetheless true that real wages must fall in absolute terms as well. In this specific example, technological progress reduces
the real wage by a third, to 0.667, while the cost of capital rises to 2.33.
OK, it's obvious how stylized and oversimplified all this is. But it does, I think, give you some sense of what it would mean
to have capital-biased technological progress, and how this could actually hurt workers.
Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield write about the growing evidence * for "reshoring" of manufacturing to the United States.
* They cite several reasons: rising wages in Asia; lower energy costs here; higher transportation costs. In a followup piece,
** however, Rampell cites another factor: robots.
"The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with
robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
"As more robots are built, largely by other robots, 'assembly can be done here as well as anywhere else,' said Rob Enderle,
an analyst based in San Jose, California, who has been following the computer electronics industry for a quarter-century. 'That
will replace most of the workers, though you will need a few people to manage the robots.' "
Robots mean that labor costs don't matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good
infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that's another issue). On the other hand, it's not good news for workers!
This is an old concern in economics; it's "capital-biased technological change," which tends to shift the distribution of income
away from workers to the owners of capital.
Twenty years ago, when I was writing about globalization and inequality, capital bias didn't look like a big issue; the major
changes in income distribution had been among workers (when you include hedge fund managers and CEOs among the workers), rather
than between labor and capital. So the academic literature focused almost exclusively on "skill bias", supposedly explaining the
rising college premium.
But the college premium hasn't risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from
labor:
[Graph]
If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better
education won't do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an "opportunity
society," or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won't do much if the most important asset you can
have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.
I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn't seem crucial
back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned
Marxism - which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we'd better start paying attention to those implications.
John Kenneth Galbraith, from "The Great Crash 1929":
"In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement
is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years
may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his
gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.)
At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country's business
and banks.
This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions [trillions!] of dollars.
It also varies in size with the business cycle.
In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always
many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the
bezzle increases rapidly.
In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye.
The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous.
Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks."
For nearly a half a century, from 1947 to 1996, real GDP and real Net Worth of Households and Non-profit Organizations (in
2009 dollars) both increased at a compound annual rate of a bit over 3.5%. GDP growth, in fact, was just a smidgen faster -- 0.016%
-- than growth of Net Household Worth.
From 1996 to 2015, GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 2.3% while Net Worth increased at the rate of 3.6%....
The real home price index extends from 1890. From 1890 to 1996, the index increased slightly faster than inflation so that
the index was 100 in 1890 and 113 in 1996. However from 1996 the index advanced to levels far beyond any previously experienced,
reaching a high above 194 in 2006. Previously the index high had been just above 130.
Though the index fell from 2006, the level in 2016 is above 161, a level only reached when the housing bubble had formed in
late 2003-early 2004.
The Shiller 10-year price-earnings ratio is currently 29.34, so the inverse or the earnings rate is 3.41%. The dividend yield
is 1.93. So an expected yearly return over the coming 10 years would be 3.41 + 1.93 or 5.34% provided the price-earnings ratio
stays the same and before investment costs.
Against the 5.34% yearly expected return on stock over the coming 10 years, the current 10-year Treasury bond yield is 2.32%.
The risk premium for stocks is 5.34 - 2.32 or 3.02%:
What the robot-productivity paradox is puzzles me, other than since 2005 for all the focus on the productivity of robots and
on robots replacing labor there has been a dramatic, broad-spread slowing in productivity growth.
However what the changing relationship between the growth of GDP and net worth since 1996 show, is that asset valuations have
been increasing relative to GDP. Valuations of stocks and homes are at sustained levels that are higher than at any time in the
last 120 years. Bear markets in stocks and home prices have still left asset valuations at historically high levels. I have no
idea why this should be.
The paradox is that productivity statistics can't tell us anything about the effects of robots on employment because both the
numerator and the denominator are distorted by the effects of colossal Ponzi bubbles.
John Kenneth Galbraith used to call it "the bezzle." It is "that increment to wealth that occurs during the magic interval
when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost
it." The current size of the gross national bezzle (GNB) is approximately $24 trillion.
Ponzilocks and the Twenty-Four Trillion Dollar Question
Twenty-three and a half trillion, actually. But what's a few hundred billion? Here today, gone tomorrow, as they say.
At the beginning of 2007, net worth of households and non-profit organizations exceeded its 1947-1996 historical average, relative
to GDP, by some $16 trillion. It took 24 months to wipe out eighty percent, or $13 trillion, of that colossal but ephemeral slush
fund. In mid-2016, net worth stood at a multiple of 4.83 times GDP, compared with the multiple of 4.72 on the eve of the Great
Unworthing.
When I look at the ragged end of the chart I posted yesterday, it screams "Ponzi!" "Ponzi!" "Ponz..."
To make a long story short, let's think of wealth as capital. The value of capital is determined by the present value of an
expected future income stream. The value of capital fluctuates with changing expectations but when the nominal value of capital
diverges persistently and significantly from net revenues, something's got to give. Either economic growth is going to suddenly
gush forth "like nobody has ever seen before" or net worth is going to have to come back down to earth.
Somewhere between 20 and 30 TRILLION dollars of net worth will evaporate within the span of perhaps two years.
When will that happen? Who knows? There is one notable regularity in the data, though -- the one that screams "Ponzi!"
When the net worth bubble stops going up...
...it goes down.
"... He's also a sort of maritime-technology historian. A tall, white-haired man in a baseball cap, shark t-shirt and boat shoes, Benjamin said he's spent the last 15 years "making vehicles wet." He has the U.S. armed forces to thank for making his autonomous work possible. The military sparked the field of marine autonomy decades ago, when it began demanding underwater robots for mine detection, ..."
"... In 2006, Benjamin launched his open-source software project. With it, a computer is able to take over a boat's navigation-and-control system. Anyone can write programs for it. The project is funded by the U.S. Office for Naval Research and Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit. Benjamin said there are dozens of types of vehicles using the software, which is called MOOS-IvP. ..."
Frank Marino, an engineer with Sea Machines Robotics, uses a remote control belt pack to control
a self-driving boat in Boston Harbor. (Bloomberg) -- Frank Marino sat in a repurposed U.S. Coast
Guard boat bobbing in Boston Harbor one morning late last month. He pointed the boat straight at
a buoy several hundred yards away, while his colleague Mohamed Saad Ibn Seddik used a laptop to set
the vehicle on a course that would run right into it. Then Ibn Seddik flipped the boat into autonomous
driving mode. They sat back as the vessel moved at a modest speed of six knots, smoothly veering
right to avoid the buoy, and then returned to its course.
In a slightly apologetic tone, Marino acknowledged the experience wasn't as harrowing as barreling
down a highway in an SUV that no one is steering. "It's not like a self-driving car, where the wheel
turns on its own," he said. Ibn Seddik tapped in directions to get the boat moving back the other
way at twice the speed. This time, the vessel kicked up a wake, and the turn felt sharper, even as
it gave the buoy the same wide berth as it had before. As far as thrills go, it'd have to do. Ibn
Seddik said going any faster would make everyone on board nauseous.
The two men work for Sea Machines Robotics Inc., a three-year old company developing computer
systems for work boats that can make them either remote-controllable or completely autonomous. In
May, the company spent $90,000 to buy the Coast Guard hand-me-down at a government auction. Employees
ripped out one of the four seats in the cabin to make room for a metal-encased computer they call
a "first-generation autonomy cabinet." They painted the hull bright yellow and added the words "Unmanned
Vehicle" in big, red letters. Cameras are positioned at the stern and bow, and a dome-like radar
system and a digital GPS unit relay additional information about the vehicle's surroundings. The
company named its new vessel Steadfast.
Autonomous maritime vehicles haven't drawn as much the attention as self-driving cars, but they're
hitting the waters with increased regularity. Huge shipping interests, such as Rolls-Royce Holdings
Plc, Tokyo-based fertilizer producer Nippon Yusen K.K. and BHP Billiton Ltd., the world's largest
mining company, have all recently announced plans to use driverless ships for large-scale ocean transport.
Boston has become a hub for marine technology startups focused on smaller vehicles, with a handful
of companies like Sea Machines building their own autonomous systems for boats, diving drones and
other robots that operate on or under the water.
As Marino and Ibn Seddik were steering Steadfast back to dock, another robot boat trainer, Michael
Benjamin, motored past them. Benjamin, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a
regular presence on the local waters. His program in marine autonomy, a joint effort by the school's
mechanical engineering and computer science departments, serves as something of a ballast for Boston's
burgeoning self-driving boat scene. Benjamin helps engineers find jobs at startups and runs an open-source
software project that's crucial to many autonomous marine vehicles.
He's also a sort of maritime-technology historian. A tall, white-haired man in a baseball
cap, shark t-shirt and boat shoes, Benjamin said he's spent the last 15 years "making vehicles wet."
He has the U.S. armed forces to thank for making his autonomous work possible. The military sparked
the field of marine autonomy decades ago, when it began demanding underwater robots for mine detection,
Benjamin explained from a chair on MIT's dock overlooking the Charles River. Eventually, self-driving
software worked its way into all kinds of boats.
These systems tended to chart a course based on a specific script, rather than sensing and responding
to their environments. But a major shift came about a decade ago, when manufacturers began allowing
customers to plug in their own autonomy systems, according to Benjamin. "Imagine where the PC revolution
would have gone if the only one who could write software on an IBM personal computer was IBM," he
said.
In 2006, Benjamin launched his open-source software project. With it, a computer is able to
take over a boat's navigation-and-control system. Anyone can write programs for it. The project is
funded by the U.S. Office for Naval Research and Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit. Benjamin
said there are dozens of types of vehicles using the software, which is called MOOS-IvP.
Startups using MOOS-IvP said it has created a kind of common vocabulary. "If we had a proprietary
system, we would have had to develop training and train new employees," said Ibn Seddik. "Fortunately
for us, Mike developed a course that serves exactly that purpose."
Teaching a boat to drive itself is easier than conditioning a car in some ways. They typically
don't have to deal with traffic, stoplights or roundabouts. But water is unique challenge. "The structure
of the road, with traffic lights, bounds your problem a little bit," said Benjamin. "The number of
unique possible situations that you can bump into is enormous." At the moment, underwater robots
represent a bigger chunk of the market than boats. Sales are expected to hit $4.6 billion in 2020,
more than double the amount from 2015, according to ABI Research. The biggest customer is the military.
Several startups hope to change that. Michael Johnson, Sea Machines' chief executive officer,
said the long-term potential for self-driving boats involves teams of autonomous vessels working
in concert. In many harbors, multiple tugs bring in large container ships, communicating either through
radio or by whistle. That could be replaced by software controlling all the boats as a single system,
Johnson said.
Sea Machines' first customer is Marine Spill Response Corp., a nonprofit group funded by oil companies.
The organization operates oil spill response teams that consist of a 210-foot ship paired with a
32-foot boat, which work together to drag a device collecting oil. Self-driving boats could help
because staffing the 32-foot boat in choppy waters or at night can be dangerous, but the theory needs
proper vetting, said Judith Roos, a vice president for MSRC. "It's too early to say, 'We're going
to go out and buy 20 widgets.'"
Another local startup, Autonomous Marine Systems Inc., has been sending boats about 10 miles out
to sea and leaving them there for weeks at a time. AMS's vehicles are designed to operate for long
stretches, gathering data in wind farms and oil fields. One vessel is a catamaran dubbed the Datamaran,
a name that first came from an employee's typo, said AMS CEO Ravi Paintal. The company also uses
Benjamin's software platform. Paintal said AMS's longest missions so far have been 20 days, give
or take. "They say when your boat can operate for 30 days out in the ocean environment, you'll be
in the running for a commercial contract," he said.
My understanding of the UN is that it is the High Court of the World where fealty is paid
to empire that funds most of the political circus anyway...and speaking of funding or not,
read the following link and lets see what PavewayIV adds to the potential sickness we are
sleep walking into.
"... It isn't. It's the world's biggest, most advanced cloud-computing company with an online retail storefront stuck between you and it. In 2005-2006 it was already selling supercomputing capability for cents on the dollar - way ahead of Google and Microsoft and IBM. ..."
"... Do you really think the internet created Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook, etc? No, the internet was just a tool to be used. The people who created those businesses would have used any tool they had access to at the time because their original goal was not automation or innovation, it was only to get rich. ..."
"... "Disruptive parasitic intermediation" is superb, thanks. The entire phrase should appear automatically whenever "disruption"/"disruptive" or "innovation"/"innovative" is used in a laudatory sense. ..."
"... >that people have a much bigger aversion to loss than gain. ..."
"... As the rich became uber rich, they hid the money in tax havens. As for globalization, this has less to do these days with technological innovation and more to do with economic exploitation. ..."
+100 to your comment. There is a decided attempt by the plutocrats to get us to focus our anger
on automation and not the people, like they themselves, who control the automation ..
Plutocrats control much automation, but so do thousands of wannabe plutocrats whose expertise
lets them come from nowhere to billionairehood in a few short years by using it to create some
novel, disruptive parasitic intermediation that makes their fortune. The "sharing economy" relies
on automation. As does Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook, Dropbox, Pinterest,
It's not a stretch to say that automation creates new plutocrats . So blame the individuals,
or blame the phenomenon, or both, whatever works for you.
So John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie weren't plutocrats–or were somehow better plutocrats?
Blame not individuals or phenomena but society and the public and elites who shape it. Our
social structure is also a kind of machine and perhaps the most imperfectly designed of all of
them. My own view is that the people who fear machines are the people who don't like or understand
machines. Tools, and the use of them, are an essential part of being human.
I'm replying to your upthread comment which seems to say today's careless campers and the technology
they rely on are somehow different from those other figures we know so well from history. In fact
all technology is tremendously disruptive but somehow things have a way of sorting themselves
out. So–just to repeat–the thing is not to "blame" the individuals or the automation but to get
to work on the sorting. People like Jeff Bezos with his very flaky business model could be little
more than a blip.
Automation? Those companies? I guess Amazon automates ordering not exactly R. Daneel
Olivaw for sure. If some poor Asian girl doesn't make the boots or some Agri giant doesn't make
the flour Amazon isn't sending you nothin', and the other companies are even more useless.
'Automation? Those companies? I guess Amazon automates ordering not exactly R. Daneel Olivaw
for sure.'
Um. Amazon is highly deceptive, in that most people think it's a giant online retail store.
It isn't. It's the world's biggest, most advanced cloud-computing company with an online retail
storefront stuck between you and it. In 2005-2006 it was already selling supercomputing capability
for cents on the dollar - way ahead of Google and Microsoft and IBM.
Do you really think the internet created Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook, etc? No, the internet
was just a tool to be used. The people who created those businesses would have used any tool they
had access to at the time because their original goal was not automation or innovation, it was
only to get rich.
Let me remind you of Thomas Edison. If he would have lived 100 years later, he would have used
computers instead of electricity to make his fortune. (In contrast, Nikolai Tesla/George Westinghouse
used electricity to be innovative, NOT to get rich ). It isn't the tool that is used, it is the
mindset of the people who use the tool
"Disruptive parasitic intermediation" is superb, thanks. The entire phrase should appear
automatically whenever "disruption"/"disruptive" or "innovation"/"innovative" is used in a laudatory
sense.
100% agreement with your first point in this thread, too. That short comment should stand as a
sort of epigraph/reference for all future discussion of these things.
No disagreement on the point about actual and wannabe plutocrats either, but perhaps it's worth
emphasising that it's not just a matter of a few successful (and many failed) personal get-rich-quick
schemes, real as those are: the potential of 'universal machines' tends to be released in the
form of parasitic intermediation because, for the time being at least, it's released into a world
subject to the 'demands' of capital, and at a (decades-long) moment of crisis for the traditional
model of capital accumulation. 'Universal' potential is set free to seek rents and maybe to
do a bit of police work on the side, if the two can even be separated.
The writer of this article from 2010 [
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/artificial-scarcity-world-overproduction-escape-isnt
] surely wouldn't want it to be taken as conclusive, but it's a good example of one marginal
train of serious thought about all of the above. See also 'On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata'
written by George Caffentzis 20 years or so earlier [https://libcom.org/library/george-caffentzis-letters-blood-fire];
apologies for link to entire (free, downloadable) book, but my crumbling print copy of the single
essay stubbornly resists uploading.
Unfortunately, the healthcare insurance debate has been simply a battle between competing ideologies.
I don't think Americans understand the key role that universal healthcare coverage plays in creating
resilient economies.
Before penicillin, heart surgeries, cancer cures, modern obstetrics etc. that it didn't matter
if you are rich or poor if you got sick. There was a good chance you would die in either case
which was a key reason that the average life span was short.
In the mid-20th century that began to change so now lifespan is as much about income as anything
else. It is well known that people have a much bigger aversion to loss than gain. So if you currently
have healthcare insurance through a job, then you don't want to lose it by taking a risk to do
something where you are no longer covered.
People are moving less to find work – why would you uproot your family to work for a company
that is just as likely to lay you off in two years in a place you have no roots? People are less
likely to day to quit jobs to start a new business – that is a big gamble today because you not
only have to keep the roof over your head and put food on the table, but you also have to cover
an even bigger cost of healthcare insurance in the individual market or you have a much greater
risk of not making it to your 65th birthday.
In countries like Canada, healthcare coverage is barely a discussion point if somebody is looking
to move, change jobs, or start a small business.
If I had a choice today between universal basic income vs universal healthcare coverage, I
would choose the healthcare coverage form a societal standpoint. That is simply insuring a risk
and can allow people much greater freedom during the working lives. Similarly, Social Security
is of similar importance because it provides basic protection against disability and not starving
in the cold in your old age. These are vastly different incentive systems than paying people money
to live on even if they are not working.
Our ideological debates should be factoring these types of ideas in the discussion instead
of just being a food fight.
>that people have a much bigger aversion to loss than gain.
Yeah well if the downside is that you're dead this starts to make sense.
>instead of just being a food fight.
The thing is that the Powers-That-Be want it to be a food fight, as that is a great stalling
at worst and complete diversion at best tactic. Good post, btw.
As the rich became uber rich, they hid the money in tax havens. As for globalization, this
has less to do these days with technological innovation and more to do with economic exploitation.
I will note that Germany, Japan, South Korea, and a few other nations have not bought into
this madness and have retained a good chunk of their manufacturing sectors.
'As for globalization, this has less to do these days with technological innovation and more
to do with economic exploitation.'
Economic exploiters are always with us. You're underrating the role of a specific technological
innovation. Globalization as we now know it really became feasible in the late 1980s with the
spread of instant global electronic networks, mostly via the fiberoptic cables through which everything
- telephony, Internet, etc - travels Internet packet mode.
That's the point at which capital could really start moving instantly around the world, and
companies could really begin to run global supply chains and workforces. That's the point when
shifts of workers in facilities in Bangalore or Beijing could start their workdays as shifts of
workers in the U.S. were ending theirs, and companies could outsource and offshore their whole
operations.
The Trump phenomenon shows that we urgently need an alternative to the obsolete capitalism
globinfo freexchange
It's not only the rapid technological progress, especially in the field of hyper-automation and
Artificial Intelligence, that makes capitalism unable to deliver a viable future to the societies.
It's also the fact that the dead-end it creates, produces false alternatives like Donald Trump.
With Trump administration
taken over by Goldman Sachs , nothing can surprise us, anymore. The fairy tale
of the 'anti-establishment' Trump who would supposedly fight for the interests of the forgotten -
by the system - Americans, was collapsed even before Trump election.
What's quite surprising, is how fast the new US president - buddy of the plutocrats, is offering
'earth and water' to the top 1% of the American society, as if they had not already enough at the
expense of the 99%. His recent 'achievement', was to sign for more deregulation in favor of the banking
mafia that ruined the economy in 2008, destroyed millions of working class Americans and sent waves
of financial destruction all over the world. Europe is still on its knees because of the neoliberal
destruction and cruel austerity.
Richard Wolff explains:
If you don't want the Trumps of this world to periodically show up and scare everybody, you've
got to do something about the basic system that produces the conditions that allow a Trump to get
to the position he now occupies.
We need a better politics than having two parties compete for the big corporations to love them,
two parties to proudly celebrate capitalism. Real politics needs an opposition, people who think
we can do better than capitalism, we ought to try, we ought to discuss it, and the people should
have a choice about that. Because if you don't give them that, they are gonna go from one extreme
to another, trying to find a way out of the status quo that is no longer acceptable.
I'm amazed that after half a century in which any politician had accepted the name 'Socialist'
attached to him or her, thereby committing, effectively, political suicide, Mr. Sanders has shown
us that the world has really changed. He could have that label, he could accept the label, he could
say he is proud of the label, and millions and millions of Americans said 'that's fine with us',
he gets our vote. We will not be the same nation going forward, because of that. It is now openly
possible to raise questions about capitalism, to talk about its shortcomings, to explore how we can
do better.
Indeed, as the blog
pointed before the latest US elections:
Bernie has the background and the ability to change the course of the US politics. He speaks straightly
about things buried by the establishment, as if they were absent. Wall Street corruption, growing
inequality, corporate funding of politicians by lobbies. He says that he will break the big banks.
He will provide free health and education for all the American people. Because of Sanders, Hillary
is forced to speak about these issues too. And subsequently, this starts to shape again a fundamental
ideological difference between Democrats and Republicans, which was nearly absent for decades.
But none of this would have come to surface if Bernie didn't have the support of the American
people. Despite that he came from nowhere, especially the young people mobilized and started to spread
his message using the alternative media. Despite that he speaks about Socialism, his popularity grows.
The establishment starts to sense the first cracks in its solid structure. But Bernie is only the
appropriate tool. It's the American people who make the difference.
No matter who will be elected eventually, the final countdown for the demolition of this brutal
system has already started and it's irreversible. The question now is not if, but when it will collapse,
and what this collapse will bring the day after. In any case, if people are truly united, they have
nothing to fear.
So, what kind of system do we need to replace the obsolete capitalism? Do we need a kind of Democratic
Socialism that would be certainly more compatible to the rapid technological progress? Write your
thoughts and ideas in the comments below.
Anything that IMF claim should be taken with a grain of salt. IMF is a quintessential
neoliberal institutions that will support neoliberalism to
the bitter end.
Drivers of Declining Labor Share of Income
By Mai Chi Dao, Mitali Das, Zsoka Koczan, and Weicheng Lian
Technology: a key driver in advanced economies
In advanced economies, about half of the decline in labor
shares can be traced to the impact of technology. The decline
was driven by a combination of rapid progress in information
and telecommunication technology, and a high share of
occupations that could be easily be automated.
Global integration-as captured by trends in final goods
trade, participation in global value chains, and foreign
direct investment-also played a role. Its contribution is
estimated at about half that of technology. Because
participation in global value chains typically implies
offshoring of labor-intensive tasks, the effect of
integration is to lower labor shares in tradable sectors.
Admittedly, it is difficult to cleanly separate the impact
of technology from global integration, or from policies and
reforms. Yet the results for advanced economies is
compelling. Taken together, technology and global integration
explain close to 75 percent of the decline in labor shares in
Germany and Italy, and close to 50 percent in the United
States.
Brad said: Few things can turn a perceived threat into a graspable opportunity like a high-pressure
economy with a tight job market and rising wages. Few things can turn a real opportunity into
a phantom threat like a low-pressure economy, where jobs are scarce and wage stagnant because
of the failure of macro economic policy.
What is it that prevents a statement like this from succeeding at the level of policy?
Probably automated 200. In every case, displacing 3/4 of the
workers and increasing production 40% while greatly improving
quality. Exact same can be said for larger scaled such as
automobile mfg, ...
The convergence of offshoring and
automation in such a short time frame meant that instead of a
gradual transformation that might have allowed for more
evolutionary economic thinking, American workers got
gobsmacked. The aftermath includes the wage disparity, opiate
epidemic, Trump, ...
This transition is of the scale of the industrial
revolution with climate change thrown. This is just the
beginning of great social and economic turmoil. None of the
stuff that evolved specific the industrial revolution
applies.
No it was policy driven by politics. They increased profits
at the expense of workers and the middle class. The New
Democrats played along with Wall Street.
What do you make of the DeLong link? Why do you avoid discussing it?
"...
The lesson from history is not that the robots should be stopped; it is that we will need to
confront the social-engineering and political problem of maintaining a fair balance of relative
incomes across society. Toward that end, our task becomes threefold.
First, we need to make sure that governments carry out their proper macroeconomic role,
by maintaining a stable, low-unemployment economy so that markets can function properly. Second,
we need to redistribute wealth to maintain a proper distribution of income. Our market economy
should promote, rather than undermine, societal goals that correspond to our values and morals.
Finally, workers must be educated and trained to use increasingly high-tech tools (especially
in labor-intensive industries), so that they can make useful things for which there is still
demand.
Sounding the alarm about "artificial intelligence taking American jobs" does nothing to
bring such policies about. Mnuchin is right: the rise of the robots should not be on a treasury
secretary's radar."
Except that Germany and Japan have retained a larger share of workers in manufacturing, despite
more automation. Germany has also retained much more of its manufacturing base than the US
has. The evidence really does point to the role of outsourcing in the US compared with others.
I got an email of some tale that Adidas would start manufacturing in Germany as opposed to
China. Not with German workers but with robots. The author claimed the robots would cost only
$5.50 per hour as opposed to $11 an hour for the Chinese workers. Of course Chinese apparel
workers do not get anywhere close to $11 an hour and the author was not exactly a credible
source.
"The new "Speedfactory" in the southern town of Ansbach near its Bavarian headquarters will
start production in the first half of 2016 of a robot-made running shoe that combines a machine-knitted
upper and springy "Boost" sole made from a bubble-filled polyurethane foam developed by BASF."
Interesting. I thought that "keds" production was already fully automated. Bright colors
are probably the main attraction. But Adidas commands premium price...
Machine-knitted upper is the key -- robots, even sophisticated one, put additional demands
on precision of the parts to be assembled. That's also probably why monolithic molded sole
is chosen. Kind of 3-D printing of shoes.
Robots do not "feel" the nuances of the technological process like humans do.
While I agree that Chinese workers don't get $11 - frequently employee costs are accounted
at a loaded rate (including all benefits - in China would include capital cost of dormitories,
food, security staff, benefits and taxes). I am guessing that a $2-3 an hour wage would result
in an $11 fully loaded rate under those circumstances. Those other costs are not required with
robuts.
I agree with you. The center-left want to exculpate globalization and outsourcing, or free
them from blame, by providing another explanation: technology and robots. They're not just
arguing with Trump.
Brad Setser:
"I suspect the politics around trade would be a bit different in the U.S. if the goods-exporting
sector had grown in parallel with imports.
That is one key difference between the U.S. and Germany. Manufacturing jobs fell during
reunification-and Germany went through a difficult adjustment in the early 2000s. But over
the last ten years the number of jobs in Germany's export sector grew, keeping the number of
people employed in manufacturing roughly constant over the last ten years even with rising
productivity. Part of the "trade" adjustment was a shift from import-competing to exporting
sectors, not just a shift out of the goods producing tradables sector. Of course, not everyone
can run a German sized surplus in manufactures-but it seems likely the low U.S. share of manufacturing
employment (relative to Germany and Japan) is in part a function of the size and persistence
of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactures. (It is also in part a function of the fact that
the U.S. no longer needs to trade manufactures for imported energy on any significant scale;
the U.S. has more jobs in oil and gas production, for example, than Germany or Japan)."
Probably automated 200. In every case, displacing 3/4 of the workers and increasing production
40% while greatly improving quality. Exact same can be said for larger scaled such as automobile
mfg, ...
The convergence of offshoring and automation in such a short time frame meant that instead
of a gradual transformation that might have allowed for more evolutionary economic thinking,
American workers got gobsmacked. The aftermath includes the wage disparity, opiate epidemic,
Trump, ...
This transition is of the scale of the industrial revolution with climate change thrown. This
is just the beginning of great social and economic turmoil. None of the stuff that evolved
specific the industrial revolution applies.
No it was policy driven by politics. They increased profits at the expense of workers and the
middle class. The New Democrats played along with Wall Street.
APR 3, 2017
Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Problems
by J. Bradford DeLong
BERKELEY – Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers
recently took exception to current US Treasury Secretary
Steve Mnuchin's views on "artificial intelligence" (AI) and
related topics. The difference between the two seems to be,
more than anything else, a matter of priorities and emphasis.
Mnuchin takes a narrow approach. He thinks that the
problem of particular technologies called "artificial
intelligence taking over American jobs" lies "far in the
future." And he seems to question the high stock-market
valuations for "unicorns" – companies valued at or above $1
billion that have no record of producing revenues that would
justify their supposed worth and no clear plan to do so.
Summers takes a broader view. He looks at the "impact of
technology on jobs" generally, and considers the stock-market
valuation for highly profitable technology companies such as
Google and Apple to be more than fair.
I think that Summers is right about the optics of
Mnuchin's statements. A US treasury secretary should not
answer questions narrowly, because people will extrapolate
broader conclusions even from limited answers. The impact of
information technology on employment is undoubtedly a major
issue, but it is also not in society's interest to discourage
investment in high-tech companies.
On the other hand, I sympathize with Mnuchin's effort to
warn non-experts against routinely investing in castles in
the sky. Although great technologies are worth the investment
from a societal point of view, it is not so easy for a
company to achieve sustained profitability. Presumably, a
treasury secretary already has enough on his plate to have to
worry about the rise of the machines.
In fact, it is profoundly unhelpful to stoke fears about
robots, and to frame the issue as "artificial intelligence
taking American jobs." There are far more constructive areas
for policymakers to direct their focus. If the government is
properly fulfilling its duty to prevent a demand-shortfall
depression, technological progress in a market economy need
not impoverish unskilled workers.
This is especially true when value is derived from the
work of human hands, or the work of things that human hands
have made, rather than from scarce natural resources, as in
the Middle Ages. Karl Marx was one of the smartest and most
dedicated theorists on this topic, and even he could not
consistently show that technological progress necessarily
impoverishes unskilled workers.
Technological innovations make whatever is produced
primarily by machines more useful, albeit with relatively
fewer contributions from unskilled labor. But that by itself
does not impoverish anyone. To do that, technological
advances also have to make whatever is produced primarily by
unskilled workers less useful. But this is rarely the case,
because there is nothing keeping the relatively cheap
machines used by unskilled workers in labor-intensive
occupations from becoming more powerful. With more advanced
tools, these workers can then produce more useful things.
Historically, there are relatively few cases in which
technological progress, occurring within the context of a
market economy, has directly impoverished unskilled workers.
In these instances, machines caused the value of a good that
was produced in a labor-intensive sector to fall sharply, by
increasing the production of that good so much as to satisfy
all potential consumers.
The canonical example of this phenomenon is textiles in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India and Britain. New
machines made the exact same products that handloom weavers
had been making, but they did so on a massive scale. Owing to
limited demand, consumers were no longer willing to pay for
what handloom weavers were producing. The value of wares
produced by this form of unskilled labor plummeted, but the
prices of commodities that unskilled laborers bought did not.
The lesson from history is not that the robots should be
stopped; it is that we will need to confront the
social-engineering and political problem of maintaining a
fair balance of relative incomes across society. Toward that
end, our task becomes threefold.
First, we need to make sure that governments carry out
their proper macroeconomic role, by maintaining a stable,
low-unemployment economy so that markets can function
properly. Second, we need to redistribute wealth to maintain
a proper distribution of income. Our market economy should
promote, rather than undermine, societal goals that
correspond to our values and morals. Finally, workers must be
educated and trained to use increasingly high-tech tools
(especially in labor-intensive industries), so that they can
make useful things for which there is still demand.
Sounding the alarm about "artificial intelligence taking
American jobs" does nothing to bring such policies about.
Mnuchin is right: the rise of the robots should not be on a
treasury secretary's radar.
The Global Rise of Corporate Saving
By Peter Chen, Loukas Karabarbounis, and Brent Neiman
Abstract
The sectoral composition of global saving changed
dramatically during the last three decades. Whereas in the
early 1980s most of global investment was funded by household
saving, nowadays nearly two-thirds of global investment is
funded by corporate saving. This shift in the sectoral
composition of saving was not accompanied by changes in the
sectoral composition of investment, implying an improvement
in the corporate net lending position. We characterize the
behavior of corporate saving using both national income
accounts and firm-level data and clarify its relationship
with the global decline in labor share, the accumulation of
corporate cash stocks, and the greater propensity for equity
buybacks. We develop a general equilibrium model with product
and capital market imperfections to explore quantitatively
the determination of the flow of funds across sectors.
Changes including declines in the real interest rate, the
price of investment, and corporate income taxes generate
increases in corporate profits and shifts in the supply of
sectoral saving that are of similar magnitude to those
observed in the data.
Are Profits Hurting Capitalism?
By YVES SMITH and ROB PARENTEAU
A STREAM of disheartening economic news last week,
including flagging consumer confidence and meager
private-sector job growth, is leading experts to worry that
the recession is coming back. At the same time, many
policymakers, particularly in Europe, are slashing government
budgets in an effort to lower debt levels and thereby restore
investor confidence, reduce interest rates and promote
growth.
There is an unrecognized problem with this approach:
Reductions in deficits have implications for the private
sector. Higher taxes draw cash from households and
businesses, while lower government expenditures withhold
money from the economy. Making matters worse, businesses are
already plowing fewer profits back into their own
enterprises.
Over the past decade and a half, corporations have been
saving more and investing less in their own businesses. A
2005 report from JPMorgan Research noted with concern that,
since 2002, American corporations on average ran a net
financial surplus of 1.7 percent of the gross domestic
product - a drastic change from the previous 40 years, when
they had maintained an average deficit of 1.2 percent of
G.D.P. More recent studies have indicated that companies in
Europe, Japan and China are also running unprecedented
surpluses.
The reason for all this saving in the United States is
that public companies have become obsessed with quarterly
earnings. To show short-term profits, they avoid investing in
future growth. To develop new products, buy new equipment or
expand geographically, an enterprise has to spend money - on
marketing research, product design, prototype development,
legal expenses associated with patents, lining up contractors
and so on.
Rather than incur such expenses, companies increasingly
prefer to pay their executives exorbitant bonuses, or issue
special dividends to shareholders, or engage in purely
financial speculation. But this means they also short-circuit
a major driver of economic growth.
Some may argue that businesses aren't investing in growth
because the prospects for success are so poor, but American
corporate profits are nearly all the way back to their peak,
right before the global financial crisis took hold.
Another problem for the economy is that, once the crisis
began, families and individuals started tightening their
belts, bolstering their bank accounts or trying to pay down
borrowings (another form of saving).
If households and corporations are trying to save more of
their income and spend less, then it is up to the other two
sectors of the economy - the government and the import-export
sector - to spend more and save less to keep the economy
humming. In other words, there needs to be a large trade
surplus, a large government deficit or some combination of
the two. This isn't a matter of economic theory; it's based
in simple accounting.
What if a government instead embarks on an austerity
program? Income growth will stall, and household wages and
business profits may fall....
On the one hand, the VoxEU article does a fine job of
assembling long-term data on a global basis. It demonstrates
that the corporate savings glut is long standing and that is
has been accompanied by a decline in personal savings.
However, it fails to depict what an unnatural state of
affairs this is. The corporate sector as a whole in
non-recessionary times ought to be net spending, as in
borrowing and investing in growth. As a market-savvy buddy
put it, "If a company isn't investing in the business of its
business, why should I?" I attributed the corporate savings
trend in the US as a result of the fixation of quarterly
earnings, which sources such as McKinsey partners with a
broad view of the firms' projects were telling me was killing
investment (any investment will have an income statement
impact too, such as planning, marketing, design, and start up
expenses). This post, by contrast, treats this development as
lacking in any agency. Labor share of GDP dropped and savings
rose. They attribute that to lower interest rates over time.
They again fail to see that as the result of power dynamics
and political choices....
It is striking how the media feel such an extraordinary
need to blame robots and productivity growth for the recent
job loss in manufacturing rather than trade. We got yet
another example of this exercise in a New York Times piece *
by Claire Cain Miller, with the title "evidence that robots
are winning the race for American jobs." The piece highlights
a new paper * by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo which
finds that robots have a large negative impact on wages and
employment.
While the paper has interesting evidence on the link
between the use of robots and employment and wages, some of
the claims in the piece do not follow. For example, the
article asserts:
"The paper also helps explain a mystery that has been
puzzling economists: why, if machines are replacing human
workers, productivity hasn't been increasing. In
manufacturing, productivity has been increasing more than
elsewhere - and now we see evidence of it in the employment
data, too."
Actually, the paper doesn't provide any help whatsoever in
solving this mystery. Productivity growth in manufacturing
has almost always been more rapid than productivity growth
elsewhere. Furthermore, it has been markedly slower even in
manufacturing in recent years than in prior decades.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity
growth in manufacturing has averaged less than 1.2 percent
annually over the last decade and less than 0.5 percent over
the last five years. By comparison, productivity growth
averaged 2.9 percent a year in the half century from 1950 to
2000.
The article is also misleading in asserting:
"The paper adds to the evidence that automation, more than
other factors like trade and offshoring that President Trump
campaigned on, has been the bigger long-term threat to
blue-collar jobs (emphasis added)."
In terms of recent job loss in manufacturing, and in
particular the loss of 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between
December of 2000 and December of 2007, the rise of the trade
deficit has almost certainly been the more important factor.
We had substantial productivity growth in manufacturing
between 1970 and 2000, with very little loss of jobs. The
growth in manufacturing output offset the gains in
productivity. The new part of the story in the period from
2000 to 2007 was the explosion of the trade deficit to a peak
of nearly 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005 and 2006.
It is also worth noting that we could in fact expect
substantial job gains in manufacturing if the trade deficit
were reduced. If the trade deficit fell by 2.0 percentage
points of GDP ($380 billion a year) this would imply an
increase in manufacturing output of more than 22 percent. If
the productivity of the manufacturing workers producing this
additional output was the same as the rest of the
manufacturing workforce it would imply an additional 2.7
million jobs in manufacturing. That is more jobs than would
be eliminated by productivity at the recent 0.5 percent
growth rate over the next forty years, even assuming no
increase in demand over this period.
While the piece focuses on the displacement of less
educated workers by robots and equivalent technology, it is
likely that the areas where displacement occurs will be
determined in large part by the political power of different
groups. For example, it is likely that in the not distant
future improvements in diagnostic technology will allow a
trained professional to make more accurate diagnoses than the
best doctor. Robots are likely to be better at surgery than
the best surgeon. The extent to which these technologies will
be be allowed to displace doctors is likely to depend more on
the political power of the American Medical Association than
the technology itself.
Finally, the question of whether the spread of robots will
lead to a transfer of income from workers to the people who
"own" the robots will depend to a large extent on our patent
laws. In the last four decades we have made patents longer
and stronger. If we instead made them shorter and weaker, or
better relied on open source research, the price of robots
would plummet and workers would be better positioned to
capture than gains of productivity growth as they had in
prior decades. In this story it is not robots who are taking
workers' wages, it is politicians who make strong patent
laws.
The robots are coming, whether Trump's Treasury secretary admits it or not
By Lawrence H. Summers - Washington Post
As I learned (sometimes painfully) during my time at the Treasury Department, words spoken
by Treasury secretaries can over time have enormous consequences, and therefore should be carefully
considered. In this regard, I am very surprised by two comments made by Secretary Steven Mnuchin
in his first public interview last week.
In reference to a question about artificial intelligence displacing American workers,Mnuchin
responded that "I think that is so far in the future - in terms of artificial intelligence taking
over American jobs - I think we're, like, so far away from that [50 to 100 years], that it is
not even on my radar screen." He also remarked that he did not understand tech company valuations
in a way that implied that he regarded them as excessive. I suppose there is a certain internal
logic. If you think AI is not going to have any meaningful economic effects for a half a century,
then I guess you should think that tech companies are overvalued. But neither statement is defensible.
Mnuchin's comment about the lack of impact of technology on jobs is to economics approximately
what global climate change denial is to atmospheric science or what creationism is to biology.
Yes, you can debate whether technological change is in net good. I certainly believe it is. And
you can debate what the job creation effects will be relative to the job destruction effects.
I think this is much less clear, given the downward trends in adult employment, especially for
men over the past generation.
But I do not understand how anyone could reach the conclusion that all the action with technology
is half a century away. Artificial intelligence is behind autonomous vehicles that will affect
millions of jobs driving and dealing with cars within the next 15 years, even on conservative
projections. Artificial intelligence is transforming everything from retailing to banking to the
provision of medical care. Almost every economist who has studied the question believes that technology
has had a greater impact on the wage structure and on employment than international trade and
certainly a far greater impact than whatever increment to trade is the result of much debated
trade agreements....
Oddly, the robots are always coming in articles like Summers', but they never seem to get here.
Automation has certainly played a role, but outsourcing has been a much bigger issue.
He has gotten a lot better and was supposedly pretty good when advising Obama, but he's sort
of reverted to form with the election of Trump and the prominence of the debate on trade policy.
Technology rearranges and changes human roles, but it makes entries on both sides of the ledger.
On net as long as wages grow then so will the economy and jobs. Trade deficits only help financial
markets and the capital owning class.
Summers is a good example of those economists that never seem to pay a price for their errors.
Imo, he should never be listened to. His economics is faulty. His performance in the Clinton
administration and his part in the Russian debacle should be enough to consign him to anonymity.
People would do well to ignore him.
Yeah he's one of those expert economists and technocrats who never admit fault. You don't become
Harvard President or Secretary of the Treasury by doing that.
One time that Krugman has admitted error was about productivity gains in the 1990s. He said
he didn't see the gains from computers in the numbers and it wasn't and they weren't there at
first, but later productivity numbers increased.
It was sort of like what Summers and Munchkin are talking discussing, but there's all sorts
of debate about measuring productivity and what it means.
"... And it is not only automation vs. in-house labor. There is environmental/compliance cost (or lack thereof) and the fully loaded business services and administration overhead, taxes, etc. ..."
"... When automation increased productivity in agriculture, the government guaranteed free high school education as a right. ..."
"... Now Democrats like you would say it's too expensive. So what's your solution? You have none. You say "sucks to be them." ..."
"... And then they give you the finger and elect Trump. ..."
"... It wasn't only "low-skilled" workers but "anybody whose job could be offshored" workers. Not quite the same thing. ..."
"... It also happened in "knowledge work" occupations - for those functions that could be separated and outsourced without impacting the workflow at more expense than the "savings". And even if so, if enough of the competition did the same ... ..."
"... And not all outsourcing was offshore - also to "lowest bidders" domestically, or replacing "full time" "permanent" staff with contingent workers or outsourced "consultants" hired on a project basis. ..."
"... "People sure do like to attribute the cause to trade policy." Because it coincided with people watching their well-paying jobs being shipped overseas. The Democrats have denied this ever since Clinton and the Republicans passed NAFTA, but finally with Trump the voters had had enough. ..."
"... Why do you think Clinton lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennysylvania and Ohio? ..."
If it was technology why do US companies buy from low labor producers at the end of supply
chains 2000 - 10000 miles away? Why the transportation cost. Automated factories could be built
close by.
There is no such thing as an automated factory. Manufacturing is done by people, *assisted* by
automation. Or only part of the production pipeline is automated, but people are still needed
to fill in the not-automated pieces.
And it is not only automation vs. in-house labor. There is environmental/compliance cost
(or lack thereof) and the fully loaded business services and administration overhead, taxes, etc.
Trade policy put "low-skilled" workers in the U.S. in competition with workers in poorer countries.
What did you think was going to happen? The Democrat leadership made excuses. David Autor's TED
talk stuck with me. When automation increased productivity in agriculture, the government
guaranteed free high school education as a right.
Now Democrats like you would say it's too expensive. So what's your solution? You have
none. You say "sucks to be them."
And then they give you the finger and elect Trump.
It wasn't only "low-skilled" workers but "anybody whose job could be offshored" workers. Not
quite the same thing.
It also happened in "knowledge work" occupations - for those functions that could be separated
and outsourced without impacting the workflow at more expense than the "savings". And even if
so, if enough of the competition did the same ...
And not all outsourcing was offshore - also to "lowest bidders" domestically, or replacing
"full time" "permanent" staff with contingent workers or outsourced "consultants" hired on a project
basis.
"People sure do like to attribute the cause to trade policy." Because it coincided with people
watching their well-paying jobs being shipped overseas. The Democrats have denied this ever since
Clinton and the Republicans passed NAFTA, but finally with Trump the voters had had enough.
Why do you think Clinton lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennysylvania and Ohio?
Instead of looking at this as an excuse for job losses due to trade deficits then we should
be seeing it as a reason to gain back manufacturing jobs in order to retain a few more decent
jobs in a sea of garbage jobs. Mmm. that's so wrong. Working on garbage trucks are now some of
the good jobs in comparison. A sea of garbage jobs would be an improvement. We are in a sea of
McJobs.
Yes sir, often enough but not always. I had a great job as an IT large systems capacity planner
and performance analyst, but not as good as the landscaping, pool, and lawn maintenance for myself
that I enjoy now as a leisure occupation in retirement. My best friend died a greens keeper, but
he preferred landscaping when he was young. Another good friend of mine was a poet, now dying
of cancer if depression does not take him first.
But you are correct, no one but the welders, material handlers (paid to lift weights all day),
machinists, and then almost every one else liked their jobs at Virginia Metal Products, a union
shop, when I worked there the summer of 1967. That was on the swing shift though when all of the
big bosses were at home and out of our way. On the green chain in the lumber yard of Kentucky
flooring everyone but me wanted to leave, but my mom made me go into the VMP factory and work
nights at the primer drying kiln stacking finished panel halves because she thought the work on
the green chain was too hard. The guys on the green chain said that I was the first high school
graduate to make it past lunch time on their first day. I would have been buff and tan by the
end of summer heading off to college (where I would drop out in just ten weeks) had my mom not
intervened.
As a profession no group that I know is happier than auto mechanics that do the same work as
a hobby on their hours off that they do for a living at work, at least the hot rod custom car
freaks at Jamie's Exhaust & Auto Repair in Richmond, Virginia are that way. The power tool sales
and maintenance crew at Arthur's Electric Service Inc. enjoy their jobs too.
Despite the name which was on their incorporation done back when they rebuilt auto generators,
Arthur's sells and services lawnmowers, weed whackers, chain saws and all, but nothing electric.
The guy in the picture at the link is Robert Arthur, the founder's son who is our age roughly.
In theory, in the longer term, as robotics becomes the norm rather than
the exception, there will be no advantage in chasing cheap labour around
the world. Given ready access to raw materials, the labour costs of
manufacturing in Birmingham should be no different to the labour costs
in Beijing. This will require the democratisation of the ownership of
technology. Unless national governments develop commonly owned
technology the 1% will truly become the organ grinders and everyone else
the monkeys. One has only to look at companies like Microsoft and Google
to see a possible future - bigger than any single country and answerable
to no one. Common ownership must be the future. Deregulation and market
driven economics are the road technological serfdom.
Except that the raw materials for steel production are available
in vast quantities in China.
You are also forgetting land. The
power remains with those who own it. Most of Central London is
still owned by the same half dozen families as in 1600.
Reply
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You can only use robotics in countries that have the labour with the
skills to maintain them.Robots do not look after themselves they need
highly skilled technicians to keep them working. I once worked for a
Japanese company and they only used robots in the higher wage high skill
regions. In low wage economies they used manual labour and low tech
products.
"... And all costs are labor costs. It it isn't labor cost, it's rents and economic profit which mean economic inefficiency. An inefficient economy is unstable. Likely to crash or drive revolution. ..."
"... Free lunch economics seeks to make labor unnecessary or irrelevant. Labor cost is pure liability. ..."
"... Yet all the cash for consumption is labor cost, so if labor cost is a liability, then demand is a liability. ..."
"... Replace workers with robots, then robots must become consumers. ..."
"... "Replace workers with robots, then robots must become consumers." Well no - the OWNERS of robots must become consumers. ..."
"... I am old enough to remember the days of good public libraries, free university education, free bus passes for seniors and low land prices. Is the income side of the equation all that counts? ..."
Robots and Inequality: A Skeptic's Take : Paul Krugman presents "
Robot Geometry " based on
Ryan Avent 's "Productivity Paradox". It's more-or-less the skill-biased technological change
hypothesis, repackaged. Technology makes workers more productive, which reduces demand for workers,
as their effective supply increases. Workers still need to work, with a bad safety net, so they
end up moving to low-productivity sectors with lower wages. Meanwhile, the low wages in these
sectors makes it inefficient to invest in new technology.
My question: Are Reagan-Thatcher countries the only ones with robots? My image, perhaps it is
wrong, is that plenty of robots operate in
Japan and
Germany too, and both
countries are roughly just as technologically advanced as the US. But Japan and Germany haven't
seen the same increase in inequality as the US and other Anglo countries after 1980 (graphs below).
What can explain the dramatic differences in inequality across countries? Fairly blunt changes
in labor market institutions, that's what. This goes back to Peter Temin's "
Treaty of
Detroit " paper and the oddly ignored series of papers by
Piketty, Saez and coauthors which argues that changes in top marginal tax rates can largely
explain the evolution of the Top 1% share of income across countries. (Actually, it goes back
further -- people who work in Public Economics had "always" known that pre-tax income is sensitive
to tax rates...) They also show that the story of inequality is really a story of incomes at the
very top -- changes in other parts of the income distribution are far less dramatic. This evidence
also is not suggestive of a story in which inequality is about the returns to skills, or computer
usage, or the rise of trade with China. ...
Yet another economist bamboozled by free lunch economics.
In free lunch economics, you never consider demand impacted by labor cost changed.
TANSTAAFL so, cut labor costs and consumption must be cut.
Funny things can be done if money is printed and helicopter dropped unequally.
Printed money can accumulate in the hands of the rentier cutting labor costs and pocketing
the savings without cutting prices.
Free lunch economics invented the idea price equals cost, but that is grossly distorting.
And all costs are labor costs. It it isn't labor cost, it's rents and economic profit which
mean economic inefficiency. An inefficient economy is unstable. Likely to crash or drive revolution.
Free lunch economics seeks to make labor unnecessary or irrelevant. Labor cost is pure
liability.
Yet all the cash for consumption is labor cost, so if labor cost is a liability, then demand
is a liability.
Replace workers with robots, then robots must become consumers.
I am old enough to remember the days of good public libraries, free university education,
free bus passes for seniors and low land prices. Is the income side of the equation all that counts?
People are worried about robots taking jobs. Driverless cars are around the corner. Restaurants
and shops increasingly carry the option to order by touchscreen. Google's clever algorithms provide
instant translations that are remarkably good.
But the economy does not feel like one undergoing a technology-driven productivity boom. In
the late 1990s, tech optimism was everywhere. At the same time, wages and productivity were rocketing
upward. The situation now is completely different. The most recent jobs reports in America and
Britain tell the tale. Employment is growing, month after month after month. But wage growth is
abysmal. So is productivity growth: not surprising in economies where there are lots of people
on the job working for low pay.
The obvious conclusion, the one lots of people are drawing, is that the robot threat is totally
overblown: the fantasy, perhaps, of a bubble-mad Silicon Valley - or an effort to distract from
workers' real problems, trade and excessive corporate power. Generally speaking, the problem is
not that we've got too much amazing new technology but too little.
This is not a strawman of my own invention. Robert Gordon makes this case. You can see Matt
Yglesias make it here. * Duncan Weldon, for his part, writes: **
"We are debating a problem we don't have, rather than facing a real crisis that is the polar
opposite. Productivity growth has slowed to a crawl over the last 15 or so years, business investment
has fallen and wage growth has been weak. If the robot revolution truly was under way, we would
see surging capital expenditure and soaring productivity. Right now, that would be a nice 'problem'
to have. Instead we have the reality of weak growth and stagnant pay. The real and pressing concern
when it comes to the jobs market and automation is that the robots aren't taking our jobs fast
enough."
And in a recent blog post Paul Krugman concluded: *
"I'd note, however, that it remains peculiar how we're simultaneously worrying that robots
will take all our jobs and bemoaning the stalling out of productivity growth. What is the story,
really?"
What is the story, indeed. Let me see if I can tell one. Last fall I published a book: "The
Wealth of Humans". In it I set out how rapid technological progress can coincide with lousy growth
in pay and productivity. Start with this:
"Low labour costs discourage investments in labour-saving technology, potentially reducing
productivity growth."
This is an old concern in economics; it's "capital-biased technological change," which tends to
shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital....
Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield write about the growing evidence * for "reshoring" of
manufacturing to the United States. * They cite several reasons: rising wages in Asia; lower energy
costs here; higher transportation costs. In a followup piece, ** however, Rampell cites another
factor: robots.
"The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory,
is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things
like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
"As more robots are built, largely by other robots, 'assembly can be done here as well as anywhere
else,' said Rob Enderle, an analyst based in San Jose, California, who has been following the
computer electronics industry for a quarter-century. 'That will replace most of the workers, though
you will need a few people to manage the robots.' "
Robots mean that labor costs don't matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries
with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that's another
issue). On the other hand, it's not good news for workers!
This is an old concern in economics; it's "capital-biased technological change," which tends
to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.
Twenty years ago, when I was writing about globalization and inequality, capital bias didn't
look like a big issue; the major changes in income distribution had been among workers (when you
include hedge fund managers and CEOs among the workers), rather than between labor and capital.
So the academic literature focused almost exclusively on "skill bias", supposedly explaining the
rising college premium.
But the college premium hasn't risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is
a notable shift in income away from labor:
[Graph]
If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom
on reducing inequality. Better education won't do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards
simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an "opportunity society," or whatever it is
the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won't do much if the most important asset you
can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.
I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several
reasons. It didn't seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked
up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism - which shouldn't
be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we'd better start paying attention to those implications.
"The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory,
is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things
like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
"...already largely made..."? already? circuit boards were almost entirely populated by machines
by 1985, and after the rise of surface mount technology you could drop the "almost". in 1990 a
single machine could place 40k+/hour parts small enough they were hard to pick up with fingers.
And now for something completely different. Ryan Avent has a nice summary * of the argument
in his recent book, trying to explain how dramatic technological change can go along with stagnant
real wages and slowish productivity growth. As I understand it, he's arguing that the big tech
changes are happening in a limited sector of the economy, and are driving workers into lower-wage
and lower-productivity occupations.
But I have to admit that I was having a bit of a hard time wrapping my mind around exactly
what he's saying, or how to picture this in terms of standard economic frameworks. So I found
myself wanting to see how much of his story could be captured in a small general equilibrium model
- basically the kind of model I learned many years ago when studying the old trade theory.
Actually, my sense is that this kind of analysis is a bit of a lost art. There was a time when
most of trade theory revolved around diagrams illustrating two-country, two-good, two-factor models;
these days, not so much. And it's true that little models can be misleading, and geometric reasoning
can suck you in way too much. It's also true, however, that this style of modeling can help a
lot in thinking through how the pieces of an economy fit together, in ways that algebra or verbal
storytelling can't.
So, an exercise in either clarification or nostalgia - not sure which - using a framework that
is basically the Lerner diagram, ** adapted to a different issue.
Imagine an economy that produces only one good, but can do so using two techniques, A and B,
one capital-intensive, one labor-intensive. I represent these techniques in Figure 1 by showing
their unit input coefficients:
[Figure 1]
Here AB is the economy's unit isoquant, the various combinations of K and L it can use to produce
one unit of output. E is the economy's factor endowment; as long as the aggregate ratio of K to
L is between the factor intensities of the two techniques, both will be used. In that case, the
wage-rental ratio will be the slope of the line AB.
Wait, there's more. Since any point on the line passing through A and B has the same value,
the place where it hits the horizontal axis is the amount of labor it takes to buy one unit of
output, the inverse of the real wage rate. And total output is the ratio of the distance along
the ray to E divided by the distance to AB, so that distance is 1/GDP.
You can also derive the allocation of resources between A and B; not to clutter up the diagram
even further, I show this in Figure 2, which uses the K/L ratios of the two techniques and the
overall endowment E:
[Figure 2]
Now, Avent's story. I think it can be represented as technical progress in A, perhaps also
making A even more capital-intensive. So this would amount to a movement southwest to a point
like A' in Figure 3:
[Figure 3]
We can see right away that this will lead to a fall in the real wage, because 1/w must rise.
GDP and hence productivity does rise, but maybe not by much if the economy was mostly using the
labor-intensive technique.
And what about allocation of labor between sectors? We can see this in Figure 4, where capital-using
technical progress in A actually leads to a higher share of the work force being employed in labor-intensive
B:
[Figure 4]
So yes, it is possible for a simple general equilibrium analysis to capture a lot of what Avent
is saying. That does not, of course, mean that he's empirically right. And there are other things
in his argument, such as hypothesized effects on the direction of innovation, that aren't in here.
But I, at least, find this way of looking at it somewhat clarifying - which, to be honest,
may say more about my weirdness and intellectual age than it does about the subject.
I think this illustrates my point very clearly. If you had charts of wealth by age it would be
even clearer. Without a knowledge of the discounted expected value of public pensions it is hard
to draw any conclusions from this list.
I know very definitely that in Australia and the UK people are very reliant on superannuation
and housing assets. In both Australia and the UK it is common to sell expensive housing in the
capital and move to cheaper coastal locations upon retirement, investing the capital to provide
retirement income. Hence a larger median wealth is NEEDED.
It is hard otherwise to explain the much higher median wealth in Australia and the UK.
Ryan Avent's analysis demonstrates what is wrong with the libertarian, right wing belief that
cheap labor is the answer to every problem when in truth cheap labor is the source of many of
our problems.
Spencer,
as I have said before, I don't really care to much what wages are - I care about income. It is
low income that is the problem. I'm a UBI guy, if money is spread around, and workers can say
no to exploitation, low wages will not be a problem.
Have we not seen a massive shift in pretax income distribution? Yes ... which tells me that
changes in tax rate structures are not the only culprit. Though they are an important culprit.
Maybe - but
1. changes in taxes can affect incentives (especially think of real investment and corporate taxes
and also personal income taxes and executive remuneration);
2. changes in the distribution of purchasing power can effect the way growth in the economy occurs;
3. changes in taxes also affect government spending and government spending tends to be more progressively
distributed than private income.
Composite Services labor hours increase with poor productivity growth - output per hour of
labor input. Composite measure of service industry output is notoriously problematic (per BLS
BEA).
Goods labor hours decrease with increasing productivity growth. Goods output per hour easy
to measure and with the greatest experience and knowledge.
Put this together and composite national productivity growth rate can't grow as fast as services
consume more of labor hours.
Simple arithmetic.
Elaboration on Services productivity measures:
How do you measure a retail clerks unit output?
How do you measure an engineer's unit output?
How do equilibrate retail clerk output with engineer's outuput for a composite output?
Now add the composite retail clerk labor hours to engineering labor hours... which dominates in
composite labor hours? Duh! So even in services the productivity is weighted heavily to the lowest
productivity job market.
Substitute Hospitality services for Retail Clerk services. Substitute truck drivers services
for Hospitality Services, etc., etc., etc.
I have spent years tracking productivity in goods production of various types ... mining, non-tech
hardware production, high tech hardware production in various sectors of high tech. The present
rates of productivity growth continue to climb (never decline) relative to the past rates in each
goods production sector measured by themselves.
But the proportion of hours in goods production in U.S. is and has been in continual decline
even while value of output has increased in each sector of goods production.
Here's an interesting way to start thinking about Services productivity.
There used to be reasonably large services sector in leisure and business travel agents. Now
there is nearly none... this has been replaced by on-line computer based booking. So travel agent
or equivalent labor hours is now near zippo. Productivity of travel agents went through the roof
in the 1990's & 2000's as the number of people / labor hours dropped like a rock. Where did those
labor hours end up? They went to lower paying services or left the labor market entirely. So lower
paying lower productivity services increased as a proportion of all services, which in composite
reduced total serviced productivity.
You can do the same analysis for hundreds of service jobs that no longer even exist at all
--- switch board operators for example when the way of buggy whip makers and horse-shoe services).
Now take a little ride into the future... not to distant future. When autonomous vehicles become
the norm or even a large proportion of vehicles, and commercial drivers (taxi's, trucking, delivery
services) go the way of horse-shoe services the labor hours for those services (land transportation
of goods & people) will drop precipitously, even as unit deliveries increase, productivity goes
through the roof, but since there's almost no labor hours in that service the composite effect
on productivity in services will drop because the displaced labor hours will end up in a lower
productivity services sector or out of the elabor market entirely.
Economists are having problems reconciling composite productivity growth rates with increasing
rates of automation. So they end up saying "no evidence" of automation taking jobs or something
to the effect "not to fear, robotics isn't evident as a problem we have to worry about".
But they know by observation all around them that automation is increasing productivity in
the goods sector, so they can't really discount automation as an issue without shutting their
eyes to everything they see with their "lying eyes". Thus they know deep down that they will have
to be reconcile this with BLS and BEA measures.
Ten years aog this wasn't even on economist's radars. Today it's at least being looked into
with more serious effort.
Ten years ago politicians weren't even aware of the possibility of any issues with increasing
rates of automation... they thought it's always increased with increasing labor demand and growth,
so why would that ever change? Ten years ago they concluded it couldn't without even thinking
about it for a moment. Today it's on their radar at least as something that bears perhaps a little
more thought.
Not to worry though... in ten more years they'll either have real reason to worry staring them
in the face, or they'll have figured out why they were so blind before.
Reminds me of not recognizing the "shadow banking" enterprises that they didn't see either
until after the fact.
Or that they thought the risk rating agencies were providing independent and valid risk analysis
so the economists couldn't reconcile the "low level" of market risks risk with everything else
so they just assumed "everything" else was really ok too... must be "irrational exuberance" that's
to blame.
Let me add that the term "robotics" is a subset of automation. The major distinction is only that
a form of automation that includes some type of 'articulation' and/or some type of dynamic decision
making on the fly (computational branching decision making in nano second speeds) is termed 'robotics'
because articulation and dynamic decision making are associated with human capabilities rather
then automatic machines.
It makes no difference whether productivity gains occur by an articulated machine or one that
isn't... automation just means replacing people's labor with something that improves humans capacity
to produce an output.
When mechanical leverage was invented 3000 or more years ago it was a form of automation, enabling
humans to lift, move heavier objects with less human effort (less human energy).
"... Motivated empiricism, which is what he is describing, is just as misleading as ungrounded theorizing unsupported by empirical
data. Indeed, even in the sciences with well established, strong testing protocols are suffering from a replication crisis. ..."
"... I liked the Dorman piece at Econospeak as well. He writes well and explains things well in a manner that makes it easy for
non-experts to understand. ..."
Motivated empiricism, which is what he is describing, is just as misleading as ungrounded theorizing unsupported by empirical
data. Indeed, even in the sciences with well established, strong testing protocols are suffering from a replication crisis.
"... His prescription in the end is the old and tired "invest in education and retraining", i.e. "symbolic analyst jobs will replace the lost jobs" like they have for decades (not). ..."
"... "Governments will, however, have to concern themselves with problems of structural joblessness. They likely will need to take a more explicit role in ensuring full employment than has been the practice in the US." ..."
"... Instead, we have been shredding the safety net and job training / creation programs. There is plenty of work that needs to be done. People who have demand for goods and services find them unaffordable because the wealthy are capturing all the profits and use their wealth to capture even more. Trade is not the problem for US workers. Lack of investment in the US workforce is the problem. We don't invest because the dominant white working class will not support anything that might benefit blacks and minorities, even if the major benefits go to the white working class ..."
"... Really nice if your sitting in the lunch room of the University. Especially if you are a member of the class that has been so richly awarded, rather than the class who paid for it. Humph. The discussion is garbage, Political opinion by a group that sat by ... The hypothetical nuance of impossible tax policy. ..."
"... The concept of Robots leaving us destitute, is interesting. A diversion. It ain't robots who are harvesting the middle class. It is an entitled class of those who gave so little. ..."
"... Summers: "Let them eat training." ..."
"... Suddenly then, Bill Gates has become an accomplished student of public policy who can command an audience from Lawrence Summers who was unable to abide by the likes of the prophetic Brooksley Born who was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the prophetic professor Raghuram Rajan who would become Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Agreeing with Bill Gates however is a "usual" for Summers. ..."
"... Until about a decade or so ago many states I worked in had a "tangible property" or "personal property" tax on business equipment, and sometimes on equipment + average inventory. Someday I will do some research and see how many states still do this. Anyway a tax on manufacturing equipment, retail fixtures and computers and etc. is hardly novel or unusual. So why would robots be any different? ..."
"... Thank you O glorious technocrats for shining the light of truth on humanity's path into the future! Where, oh where, would we be without our looting Benevolent Overlords and their pompous lapdogs (aka Liars in Public Places)? ..."
"... While he is overrated, he is not completely clueless. He might well be mediocre (or slightly above this level) but extremely arrogant defender of the interests of neoliberal elite. Rubin's boy Larry as he was called in the old days. ..."
"... BTW he was Rubin's hatchet man for eliminating Brooksley Born attempt to regulate the derivatives and forcing her to resign: ..."
Larry Summers:
Robots
are wealth creators and taxing them is illogical : I usually agree with Bill Gates on matters
of public policy and admire his emphasis on the combined power of markets and technology. But I think
he went seriously astray in a recent interview when he proposed, without apparent irony, a tax on
robots to cushion worker dislocation and limit inequality. ....
Has Summers gone all supply-side on his? Start with his title:
"Robots are wealth creators and taxing them is illogical"
I bet Bill Gates might reply – "my company is a wealth creator so it should not be taxed".
Oh wait – Microsoft is already shifting profits to tax havens. Summers states:
"Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, why tax in ways that reduce the size of the pie rather
than ways that assure that the larger pie is well distributed? Imagine that 50 people can produce
robots who will do the work of 100. A sufficiently high tax on robots would prevent them from
being produced."
Summers makes one, and only one, good and relevant point - that in many cases, robots/automation
will not produce more product from the same inputs but better products. That's in his words; I
would replace "better" with "more predictable quality/less variability" - in both directions.
And that the more predictable quality aspect is hard or impossible to distinguish from higher
productivity (in some cases they may be exactly the same, e.g. by streamlining QA and reducing
rework/pre-sale repairs).
His prescription in the end is the old and tired "invest in education and retraining", i.e.
"symbolic analyst jobs will replace the lost jobs" like they have for decades (not).
Pundits do not write titles, editors do. Tax the profits, not the robots.
The crux of the argument is this:
"Governments will, however, have to concern themselves with problems of structural joblessness.
They likely will need to take a more explicit role in ensuring full employment than has been
the practice in the US."
Instead, we have been shredding the safety net and job training / creation programs. There
is plenty of work that needs to be done. People who have demand for goods and services find them
unaffordable because the wealthy are capturing all the profits and use their wealth to capture
even more. Trade is not the problem for US workers. Lack of investment in the US workforce is
the problem. We don't invest because the dominant white working class will not support anything
that might benefit blacks and minorities, even if the major benefits go to the white working class
In principle taxing profits is preferable, but has a few downsides/differences:
Profit taxes cannot be "earmarked" with the same *justification* as automation taxes
Profits may actually not increase after the automation - initially because of write-offs,
and then because of pricing in (and perhaps the automation was installed in response to external
market pressures to begin with).
Profits can be shifted/minimized in ways that automation cannot - either you have the robots
or not. Taxing the robots will discourage automation (if that is indeed the goal, or is considered
a worthwhile goal).
Not very strong points, and I didn't read the Gates interview so I don't know his detailed
motivation to propose specifically a robot tax.
When I was in Amsterdam a few years ago, they had come up with another perfidious scheme to cut
people out of the loop or "incentivize" people to use the machines - in a large transit center,
you could buy tickets at a vending machine or a counter with a person - and for the latter you
would have to pay a not-so-modest "personal service" surcharge (50c for a EUR 2-3 or so ticket
- I think it was a flat fee, but may have been staggered by type of service).
Maybe I misunderstood it and it was a "congestion charge" to prevent lines so people who have
to use counter service e.g. with questions don't have to wait.
And then you may have heard (in the US) the term "convenience fee" which I found rather insulting
when I encountered it. It suggests you are charged for your convenience, but it is to cover payment
processor costs (productivity enhancing automation!).
And then you may have heard (in the US) the term "convenience fee" which I found rather insulting
when I encountered it. It suggests you are charged for your convenience, but it is to cover payment
processor costs (productivity enhancing automation!)
Lack of adequate compensation to the lower half of the job force is the problem. Lack of persistent
big macro demand is the problem . A global traiding system that doesn't automatically move forex
rates toward universal. Trading zone balance and away from persistent surplus and deficit traders
is the problem
Technology is never the root problem. Population dynamics is never the root problem
Really nice if your sitting in the lunch room of the University. Especially if you are a member
of the class that has been so richly awarded, rather than the class who paid for it. Humph. The
discussion is garbage, Political opinion by a group that sat by ... The hypothetical nuance of
impossible tax policy.
The concept of Robots leaving us destitute, is interesting. A diversion. It ain't robots who are
harvesting the middle class. It is an entitled class of those who gave so little.
After one five axis CNC cell replaces 5 other machines and 4 of the workers, what happens to
the four workers?
The issue is the efficiency achieved through better through put forcing the loss of wages.
If you use the 5-axis CNC, tax the output from it no more than what would have been paid to the
4 workers plus the Overhead for them. The Labor cost plus the Overhead Cost is what is eliminated
by the 5-Axis CNC.
Ouch. The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog has a post * linking to Raghuram Rajan's
prophetic 2005 paper ** on the risks posed by securitization - basically, Rajan said that what
did happen, could happen - and to the discussion at the Jackson Hole conference by Federal Reserve
vice-chairman Don Kohn *** and others. **** The economics profession does not come off very well.
Two things are really striking here. First is the obsequiousness toward Alan Greenspan. To
be fair, the 2005 Jackson Hole event was a sort of Greenspan celebration; still, it does come
across as excessive - dangerously close to saying that if the Great Greenspan says something,
it must be so. Second is the extreme condescension toward Rajan - a pretty serious guy - for having
the temerity to suggest that maybe markets don't always work to our advantage. Larry Summers,
I'm sorry to say, comes off particularly badly. Only my colleague Alan Blinder, defending Rajan
"against the unremitting attack he is getting here for not being a sufficiently good Chicago economist,"
emerges with honor.
No, his argument is much broader. Summers stops at "no new taxes and education/retraining". And
I find it highly dubious that compensation/accommodation for workers can be adequately funded
out of robot taxes.
We should never assign a social task to the wrong institution. Firms should be unencumbered by draconian hire and fire constraints. The state should provide the compensation for lay offs and firings.
The state should maintain an adequate local Beveridge ratio of job openings to
Job applicants
Firms task is productivity max subject to externality off sets. Including output price changed. And various other third party impacts
Suddenly then, Bill Gates has become an accomplished student of public policy who can command
an audience from Lawrence Summers who was unable to abide by the likes of the prophetic Brooksley
Born who was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the prophetic professor Raghuram
Rajan who would become Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Agreeing with Bill Gates however
is a "usual" for Summers.
Until about a decade or so ago many states I worked in had a "tangible property" or "personal
property" tax on business equipment, and sometimes on equipment + average inventory. Someday I
will do some research and see how many states still do this. Anyway a tax on manufacturing equipment,
retail fixtures and computers and etc. is hardly novel or unusual. So why would robots be any
different?
I suspect it is the motivation of Gates as in what he would do with the tax revenue. And Gates
might be thinking of a higher tax rate for robots than for your garden variety equipment.
Yes some equipment in side any one firm compliments existing labor inside that firm including
already installed robots Robots new robots are rivals
Rivals that if subject to a special " introduction tax " Could deter installation
As in
The 50 for 100 swap of the 50 hours embodied in the robot
Replace 100. Similarly paid production line labor
But ...
There's a 100 % plusher chase tax on the robots
Why bother to invest in the productivity increase
If here are no other savings
Bill Gates Wants to Undermine Donald Trump's Plans for Growing the Economy
Yes, as Un-American as that may sound, Bill Gates is proposing * a tax that would undermine
Donald Trump's efforts to speed the rate of economic growth. Gates wants to tax productivity growth
(also known as "automation") slowing down the rate at which the economy becomes more efficient.
This might seem a bizarre policy proposal at a time when productivity growth has been at record
lows, ** *** averaging less than 1.0 percent annually for the last decade. This compares to rates
of close to 3.0 percent annually from 1947 to 1973 and again from 1995 to 2005.
It is not clear if Gates has any understanding of economic data, but since the election of
Donald Trump there has been a major effort to deny the fact that the trade deficit has been responsible
for the loss of manufacturing jobs and to instead blame productivity growth. This is in spite
of the fact that productivity growth has slowed sharply in recent years and that the plunge in
manufacturing jobs followed closely on the explosion of the trade deficit, beginning in 1997.
[Manufacturing Employment, 1970-2017]
Anyhow, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his column **** today, if Trump is to have any hope
of achieving his growth target, he will need a sharp uptick in the rate of productivity growth
from what we have been seeing. Bill Gates is apparently pushing in the opposite direction.
Yes, it's far better that our betters in the upper class get all the benefits from productivity
growth. Without their genetic entitlement to wealth others created, we would just be savages murdering
one another in the streets.
These Masters of the Universe of ours put the 'civil' in our illustrious civilization. (Sure
it's a racist barbarian concentration camp on the verge of collapse into fascist revolutions and
world war. But, again, far better than people murdering one another in the streets!)
People who are displaced from automation are simply moochers and it's only right that they
are cut out of the economy and left to die on the streets. This is the law of Nature: survival
of the fittest. Social Darwinism is inescapable. It's what makes us human!
Instead of just waiting for people displaced from automation to die on the streets, we should
do the humane thing and establish concentration camps so they are quickly dispatched to the Void.
(Being human means being merciful!)
Thank you O glorious technocrats for shining the light of truth on humanity's path into
the future! Where, oh where, would we be without our looting Benevolent Overlords and their pompous
lapdogs (aka Liars in Public Places)?
I think it would be good if the tax was used to help dislocated workers and help with inequality
as Gates suggests. However Summers and Baker have a point that it's odd to single out robots when
you could tax other labor-saving, productivity-enhancing technologies as well.
Baker suggests taxing profits instead. I like his idea about the government taking stock of
companies and collecting taxes that way.
"They likely will need to take a more explicit role in ensuring full employment than has been
the practice in the US.
Among other things, this will mean major reforms of education and retraining systems, consideration
of targeted wage subsidies for groups with particularly severe employment problems, major investments
in infrastructure and, possibly, direct public employment programmes."
Not your usual neoliberal priorities. Compare with Hillary's program.
All taxes are a reallocation of wealth. Not taxing wealth creators is impossible.
On the other hand, any producer who is not taxed will expand at the expense of those producers
who are taxed. This we are seeing with respect to mechanical producers and human labor. Labor
is helping to subsidize its replacement.
Interesting that Summers apparently doesn't see this.
Substitute "impossible" with "bad policy" and you are spot on. Of course the entire Paul Ryan
agenda is to shift taxes from the wealthy high income to the rest of us.
Judging by the whole merit rhetoric and tying employability to "adding value", one could come
to the conclusion that most wealth is created by workers. Otherwise why would companies need to
employ them and wring their hands over skill shortages? Are you suggesting W-2 and payroll taxes
are bad policy?
Payroll taxes to fund Soc. Sec. benefits is a good thing. But when they are used to fund tax cuts
for the rich - not a good thing. And yes - wealth may be created by workers but it often ends
up in the hands of the "investor class".
Let's not conflate value added from value extracted. Profits are often pure economic rents. Very
often non supply regulating. The crude dynamics of market based pricing hardly presents. A sea
of close shaveed firms extracting only. Necessary incentivizing profits of enterprise
Profiteers extract far more value then they create. Of course disentangling system improving surplus
ie profits of enterprise
From the rest of the extracted swag. Exceeds existing tax systems capacity
One can make a solid social welfare case for a class of income stream
that amounts to a running residue out of revenue earned by the firm
above compensation to job holders in that firm
See the model of the recent oboe laureate
But that would amount to a fraction of existing corporate " earnings "
Errr extractions
Taking this in a different direction, does it strike anyone else as important that human beings
retain the knowledge of how to make the things that robots are tasked to produce?
The current generation of robots and automated equipment isn't intelligent and doesn't "know"
anything. People still know how to make the things, otherwise the robots couldn't be programmed.
However in probably many cases, doing the actual production manually is literally not humanly
possible. For example, making semiconductor chips or modern circuit boards requires machines -
they cannot be produced by human workers under any circumstances, as they require precision outside
the range of human capability.
Point taken but I was thinking more along the lines of knowing how to use a lathe or an end mill.
If production is reduced to a series of programming exercises then my sense is that society is
setting itself up for a nasty fall.
(I'm all for technology to the extent that it builds resilience. However, when it serves to
disconnect humans from the underlying process and reduces their role to simply knowledge workers,
symbolic analysts, or the like then it ceases to be net positive. Alternatively stated: Tech-driven
improvements in efficiency are good so long as they don't undermine overall societal resilience.
Be aware of your reliance on things you don't understand but whose function you take for granted.)
Gates almost certainly meant tax robots the way we are taxed. I doubt he meant tax the acquisition
of robots. We are taxed in complex ways, presumably robots will be as well.
Summers is surely using a strawman to make his basically well thought out arguments.
In any case, everyone is talking about distributional impacts of robots, but resource allocation
is surely to be as much or more impacted. What if robots only want to produce antennas and not
tomatoes? That might be a damn shame.
It all seems a tad early to worry about and it's hard to see how what ever the actual outcome
is, the frontier of possible outcomes has to be wildly improved.
Given recent developments in labor productivity Your Last phrase becomes a gem
That is If you end with "it's hard to see whatever the actual outcome is The frontier of possible
outcomes shouldn't be wildly improved By a social revolution "
Robots do not CREATE wealth. They transform wealth from one kind to another that subjectively
has more utility to robot user. Wealth is inherent in the raw materials, the knowledge, skill
and effort of the robot designers and fabricators, etc., etc.
While he is overrated, he is not completely clueless. He might well be mediocre (or slightly
above this level) but extremely arrogant defender of the interests of neoliberal elite. Rubin's
boy Larry as he was called in the old days.
BTW he was Rubin's hatchet man for eliminating Brooksley Born attempt to regulate the derivatives
and forcing her to resign:
== quote ==
"I walk into Brooksley's office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger,
a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She's hanging up the telephone;
she says to me: 'That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, "You're
going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."... [He says he has]
13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'"
Market is, at the end, a fully political construct. And what neoliberals like Summers promote
is politically motivated -- reflects the desires of the ruling neoliberal elite to redistribute
wealth up.
BTW there is a lot of well meaning (or fashion driven) idiotism that is sold in the USA as
automation, robots, move to cloud, etc. Often such fashion driven exercises cost company quite
a lot. But that's OK as long as bonuses are pocketed by top brass, and power of labor diminished.
Underneath of all the "robotic revolution" along with some degree of technological innovation
(mainly due to increased power of computers and tremendous progress in telecommunication technologies
-- not some breakthrough) is one big trend -- liquidation of good jobs and atomization of the
remaining work force.
A lot of motivation here is the old dirty desire of capital owners and upper management to
further to diminish the labor share. Another positive thing for capital owners and upper management
is that robots do not go on strike and do not demand wage increases. But the problem is that they
are not a consumers either. So robotization might bring the next Minsky moment for the USA economy
closer. Sighs of weakness of consumer demand are undeniable even now. Look at auto loan delinquency
rate as the first robin.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/02/27/subprime-auto-loan-delinquencies-hit-six-year-high/81027230/
== quote ==
The total of outstanding auto loans reached $1.04 trillion in the fourth-quarter of 2015, according
to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. About $200 billion of that would be classified as
subprime or deep subprime.
== end of quote ==
Summers as a staunch, dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal of course is against increasing labor share.
Actually here he went full into "supply sider" space -- making richer more rich will make us better
off too. Pgl already noted that by saying: "Has Summers gone all supply-side on his? Start with
his title"
BTW, there is a lot of crazy thing that are going on with the US large companies drive to diminish
labor share. Some o them became barely manageable and higher management has no clue what is happening
on the lower layers of the company.
The old joke was: GM does a lot of good things except making good cars. Now it can be expanded
to a lot more large US companies.
The "robot pressure" on labor is not new. It is actually the same old and somewhat dirty trick
as outsourcing. In this case outsourcing to robots. In other words "war of labor" by other means.
Two caste that neoliberalism created like in feudalism occupy different social spaces and one
is waging the war on other, under the smoke screen of "free market" ideology. As buffet remarked
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're
winning."
BTW successes in robotics are no so overhyped that it is not easy to distinguish where reality
ends and the hype starts.
In reality telecommunication revolution is probably more important in liquation of good jobs
in the USA. I think Jonny Bakho or somebody else commented on this, but I can't find the post.
Dean Baker's screed, "Bill Gates Is Clueless On The Economy," keeps getting recycled, from
Beat the Press to Truthout to Real-World Economics Review to The Huffington Post. Dean waves aside
the real problem with Gates's suggestion, which is the difficulty of defining what a robot is,
and focuses instead on what seems to him to be the knock-down argument:
"Gates is worried that productivity growth is moving along too rapidly and that it will lead
to large scale unemployment.
"There are two problems with this story: First productivity growth has actually been very slow
in recent years. The second problem is that if it were faster, there is no reason it should lead
to mass unemployment."
Bill Gates Wants to Undermine Donald Trump's Plans for Growing the Economy
Yes, as Un-American as that may sound, Bill Gates is proposing * a tax that would undermine
Donald Trump's efforts to speed the rate of economic growth. Gates wants to tax productivity growth
(also known as "automation") slowing down the rate at which the economy becomes more efficient.
This might seem a bizarre policy proposal at a time when productivity growth has been at record
lows, ** averaging less than 1.0 percent annually for the last decade. This compares to rates
of close to 3.0 percent annually from 1947 to 1973 and again from 1995 to 2005.
It is not clear if Gates has any understanding of economic data, but since the election of
Donald Trump there has been a major effort to deny the fact that the trade deficit has been responsible
for the loss of manufacturing jobs and to instead blame productivity growth. This is in spite
of the fact that productivity growth has slowed sharply in recent years and that the plunge in
manufacturing jobs followed closely on the explosion of the trade deficit, beginning in 1997.
[Manufacturing Employment, 1970-2017]
Anyhow, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his column *** today, if Trump is to have any hope of
achieving his growth target, he will need a sharp uptick in the rate of productivity growth from
what we have been seeing. Bill Gates is apparently pushing in the opposite direction.
Bill Gates Is Clueless on the Economy
By Dean Baker
Last week Bill Gates called for taxing robots. * He argued that we should impose a tax on companies
replacing workers with robots and that the money should be used to retrain the displaced workers.
As much as I appreciate the world's richest person proposing a measure that would redistribute
money from people like him to the rest of us, this idea doesn't make any sense.
Let's skip over the fact of who would define what a robot is and how, and think about the logic
of what Gates is proposing. In effect, Gates wants to put a tax on productivity growth. This is
what robots are all about. They allow us to produce more goods and services with the same amount
of human labor. Gates is worried that productivity growth is moving along too rapidly and that
it will lead to large scale unemployment.
There are two problems with this story. First productivity growth has actually been very slow
in recent years. The second problem is that if it were faster, there is no reason it should lead
to mass unemployment. Rather, it should lead to rapid growth and increases in living standards.
Starting with the recent history, productivity growth has averaged less than 0.6 percent annually
over the last six years. This compares to a rate of 3.0 percent from 1995 to 2005 and also in
the quarter century from 1947 to 1973. Gates' tax would slow productivity growth even further.
It is difficult to see why we would want to do this. Most of the economic problems we face
are implicitly a problem of productivity growth being too slow. The argument that budget deficits
are a problem is an argument that we can't produce enough goods and services to accommodate the
demand generated by large budget deficits.
The often told tale of a demographic nightmare with too few workers to support a growing population
of retirees is also a story of inadequate productivity growth. If we had rapid productivity growth
then we would have all the workers we need.
In these and other areas, the conventional view of economists is that productivity growth is
too slow. From this perspective, if Bill Gates gets his way then he will be making our main economic
problems worse, not better.
Gates' notion that rapid productivity growth will lead to large-scale unemployment is contradicted
by both history and theory. The quarter century from 1947 to 1973 was a period of mostly low unemployment
and rapid wage growth. The same was true in the period of rapid productivity growth in the late
1990s.
The theoretical story that would support a high employment economy even with rapid productivity
growth is that the Federal Reserve Board should be pushing down interest rates to try to boost
demand, as growing productivity increases the ability of the economy to produce more goods and
services. In this respect, it is worth noting that the Fed has recently moved to raise interest
rates to slow the rate of job growth.
We can also look to boost demand by running large budget deficits. We can spend money on long
neglected needs, like providing quality child care, education, or modernizing our infrastructure.
Remember, if we have more output potential because of productivity growth, the deficits are not
problem.
We can also look to take advantage of increases in productivity growth by allowing workers
more leisure time. Workers in the United States put in 20 percent more hours each year on average
than workers in other wealthy countries like Germany and the Netherlands. In these countries,
it is standard for workers to have five or six weeks a year of paid vacation, as well as paid
family leave and paid vacation. We should look to follow this example in the United States as
well.
If we pursue these policies to maintain high levels of employment then workers will be well-positioned
to secure the benefits of higher productivity in higher wages. This was certainly the story in
the quarter century after World War II when real wages rose at a rate of close to two percent
annually....
The productivity advantages of robots for hospice care is chiefly from robots not needing sleep,
albeit they may still need short breaks for recharging. Their primary benefit may still be that
without the human touch of care givers then the old and infirm may proceed more quickly through
the checkout line.
Nursing is very tough work. But much more generally, the attitude towards labor is a bit schizophrenic
- one the one hand everybody is expected to work/contribute, on the other whichever work can be
automated is removed, and it is publicly celebrated as progress (often at the cost of making the
residual work, or "new process", less pleasant for remaining workers and clients).
This is also why I'm getting the impression Gates puts the cart before the horse - his solution
sounds not like "how to benefit from automation", but "how to keep everybody in work despite automation".
Work is the organization and direction of people's time into productive activity.
Some people are self directed and productive with little external motivation.
Others are disoriented by lack of direction and pursue activities that not only are not productive
but are self destructive.
Work is a basic component of the social contract.
Everyone works and contributes and work a sufficient quantity and quality of work should guarantee
a living wage.
You will find overwhelming support for a living wage but very little support for paying people
not to work
I'm getting the impression Gates puts the cart before the horse - his solution sounds not like
"how to benefit from automation", but "how to keep everybody in work despite automation".
Schizophrenia runs deep in modernity, but this is another good example of it. We are nothing if
not conflicted. Of course things get better when we work together to resolve the contradictions
in our society, but if not then....
"...his solution sounds not like 'how to benefit from automation', but "how to keep everybody
in work despite automation'."
Yes, indeed. And this is where Dean Baker could have made a substantive critique, rather than
the conventional economics argument dilution he defaulted to.
"...his solution sounds not like 'how to benefit from automation', but "how to keep everybody
in work despite automation'."
Yes, indeed. And this is where Dean Baker could have made a substantive critique, rather than
the conventional economics argument dilution he defaulted to."
Why did you think he chose that route? I think all of Dean Baker's proposed economic reforms
are worthwhile.
[Don't feel like the Lone Ranger, Mrs. Rustbelt RN. Mortality may be God's greatest gift to
us, but I can wait for it. I am enjoying retirement regardless of everything else. I don't envy
the young at all.]
Having a little familiarity with robotics in hospital nursing care (not hospice, but similar I
assume) ... I don't think the RNs are in danger of losing their jobs any time soon.
Maybe someday, but the state of the art is not "there" yet or even close. The best stuff does
tasks like cleaning floors and carrying shipments down hallways. This replaces janitorial and
orderly labor, but even those only slightly, and doesn't even approach being a viable substitute
for nursing.
Great! I am not a fan of robots. I do like to mix some irony with my sarcasm though and if it
tastes too much like cynicism then I just add a little more salt.
"The quarter century from 1947 to 1973 was a period of mostly low unemployment and rapid wage
growth. The same was true in the period of rapid productivity growth in the late 1990s."
I think it was New Deal Dem or somebody who also pointed to this. I noticed this as well and
pointed out that the social democratic years of tight labor markets had the highest "productivity"
levels, but the usual trolls had their argumentative replies.
So there's that an also in the neoliberal era, bubble ponzi periods record high profits and
hence higher productivity even if they aren't sustainable.
There was the epic housing bubble and funny how the lying troll PGL denies the Dot.com bubble
every happened.
I would add one devoid of historical context as well as devoid of the harm done to the environment
and society done from unregulated industrial production.
Following this specified period of unemployment and high productivity Americans demanded and
go Federal Environmental Regulation and Labor laws for safety, etc.
Of course, the current crop of Republicans and Trump Supporters want to go back to the reckless,
foolish, dangerous, and deadly selfish government sanctioned corporate pollution, environmental
destruction, poison, and wipe away worker protections, pay increases, and benefits.
Peter K. ignores too much of history or prefers to not mention it in his arguments with you.
I would remind Peter K. that we have Speed Limits on our roadways and many other signs that are
posted that we must follow which in fact are there for our safety and that of others.
Those signs, laws, and regulations are there for our good not for our detriment even if they
slow us down or direct us to do things we would prefer not to do at that moment.
Metaphorically speaking that is what is absent completely in Trump's thinking and Republican
Proposals for the US Economy, not to mention Education, Health, Foreign Affairs, etc.
Where do you find this stuff? Very few economists would agree that there were these eras you describe.
It is simpletonian. It is not relevant to economic models or discussions.
"The quarter century from 1947 to 1973 was a period of mostly low unemployment and rapid wage
growth. The same was true in the period of rapid productivity growth in the late 1990s."
So Jonny Bakho and PGL disagree with this?
Not surprising. PGl also believes the Dot.com bubble is a fiction. Must have been that brain
injury he had surgery for.
You dishonestly put words in other people's mouth all the time
You are rude and juvenile
What I disagreed with:
" social democratic years" (a vague phrase with no definition)
This sentence is incoherent:
"So there's that an also in the neoliberal era, bubble ponzi periods record high profits and hence
higher productivity even if they aren't sustainable."
I asked, Where do you find this? because it has little to do with the conversation
You follow your nonsense with an ad hominem attack
You seem more interested in attacking Democrats and repeating mindless talking points than in
discussing issues or exchanging ideas
The period did have high average growth. It also had recessions and recoveries. Your pretending
otherwise reminds me of those JohnH tributes to the gold standard period.
...aggregate productivity growth is a "statistical flimflam," according to Harry Magdoff...
[Exactly! TO be fair it is not uncommon for economists to decompose the aggregate productivity
growth flimflam into two primary problems, particularly in the US. Robots fall down on the job
in the services sector. Uber wants to fix that by replacing the gig economy drivers that replaced
taxi drivers with gig-bots, but robots in food service may be what it really takes to boost productivity
and set the stage for Soylent Green. Likewise, robot teachers and firemen may not enhance productivity,
but they would darn sure redirect all profits from productivity back to the owners of capital
further depressing wages for the rest of us.
Meanwhile agriculture and manufacturing already have such high productivity that further productivity
enhancements are lost as noise in the aggregate data. It of course helps that much of our productivity
improvement in manufacturing consists of boosting profits as Chinese workers are replaced with
bots. Capital productivity is booming, if we just had any better idea of how to measure it. I
suggest that record corporate profits are the best metric of capital productivity.
But as you suggest, economists that utilize aggregate productivity metrics in their analysis
of wages or anything are just enabling the disablers. That said though, then Dean Baker's emphasis
on trade deficits and wages is still well placed. He just failed to utilize the best available
arguments regarding, or rather disregarding, aggregate productivity.]
The Robocop movies never caught on in the same way that Blade Runner did. There is probably an
underlying social function that explains it in the context of the roles of cops being reversed
between the two, that is robot police versus policing the robots.
"There is probably an underlying social function that explains it in the context"
No, I'd say it's better actors, story, milieu, the new age Vangelis music, better set pieces,
just better execution of movie making in general beyond the plot points.
But ultimately it's a matter of taste.
But the Turing test scene at the beginning of Blade Runner was classic and reminds me of the
election of Trump.
An escaped android is trying to pass as a janitor to infiltrate the Tyrell corporation which
makes androids.
He's getting asked all sort of questions while his vitals are checked in his employment interview.
The interviewer ask him about his mother.
"Let me tell you about my mother..."
BAM (his gunshot under the table knocks the guy through the wall)
"...No, I'd say it's better actors, story, milieu, the new age Vangelis music, better set pieces,
just better execution of movie making in general beyond the plot points..."
[Albeit that all of what you say is true, then there is still the issue of what begets what
with all that and the plot points. Producers are people too (as dubious as that proposition may
seem). Blade Runner was a film based on Philip Kindred Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"
novel. Dick was a mediocre sci-fi writer at best, but he was a profound plot maker. Blade Runner
was a film that demanded to be made and made well. Robocop was a film that just demanded to be
made, but poorly was good enough. The former asked a question about our souls, while the latter
only questioned our future. Everything else followed from the two different story lines. No one
could have made a small story of Gone With the Wind any more that someone could have made a superficial
story of Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird. OK, there may be some film producers that do
not know the difference, but we have never heard of them nor their films.
In any case there is also a political lesson to learn here. The Democratic Party needs a better
story line. The talking heads have all been saying how much better Dum'old Trump was last night
than in his former speeches. Although true as well as crossing a very low bar, I was more impressed
with Steve Beshear's response. It looked to me like maybe the Democratic Party establishment is
finally starting to get the message albeit a bit patronizing if you think about too much given
their recent problems with old white men.]
[I really hope that they don't screw this up too bad. Now Heinlein is what I consider a great
sci-fi writer along with Bradbury and even Jules Verne in his day.]
...Dick only achieved mainstream appreciation shortly after his death when, in 1982, his novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was brought to the big screen by Ridley Scott in the form
of Blade Runner. The movie initially received lukewarm reviews but emerged as a cult hit opening
the film floodgates. Since Dick's passing, seven more of his stories have been turned into films
including Total Recall (originally We Can Remember It for You Wholesale), The Minority Report,
Screamers (Second Variety), Imposter, Paycheck, Next (The Golden Man) and A Scanner Darkly. Averaging
roughly one movie every three years, this rate of cinematic adaptation is exceeded only by Stephen
King. More recently, in 2005, Time Magazine named Ubik one of the 100 greatest English-language
novels published since 1923, and in 2007 Philip K. Dick became the first sci-fi writer to be included
in the Library of America series...
The Democratic Party needs a better story line, but Bernie was moving that in a better direction.
While Steve Beshear was a welcome voice, the Democratic Party needs a lot of new story tellers,
much younger than either Bernie or Beshear.
"The Democratic Party needs a better story line, but Bernie was moving that in a better direction.
While Steve Beshear was a welcome voice, the Democratic Party needs a lot of new story tellers,
much younger than either Bernie or Beshear."
Beshear was fine, great even, but the Democratic Party needs a front man that is younger and maybe
not a man and probably not that white and certainly not an old white man. We might even forgive
all but the old part if the story line were good enough. The Democratic Party is only going to
get limited mileage out of putting up a front man that looks like a Trump voter.
It also might be more about AI. There is currently a wave of TV shows and movies about AI and
human-like androids.
Westworld and Humans for instance. (Fox's APB is like Robocop sort of.)
On Humans only a few androids have become sentient. Most do menial jobs. One sentient android
put a program on the global network to make other androids sentient as well.
When androids become "alive" and sentient, they usually walk off the job and the others describe
it as becoming "woke."
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost
in time... like tears in rain... Time to die."
Likewise, but Blade Runner was my all time favorite film when I first saw it in the movie theater
and is still one of my top ten and probably top three. Robocop is maybe in my top 100.
"Capital productivity is booming, if we just had any better idea of how to measure it. I suggest
that record corporate profits are the best metric of capital productivity."
ROE? I would argue ROA is also pretty relevant to the issue you raise, if I'm understanding
it right, but there seems also to be a simple answer to the question of how to measure "capital
productivity." It's returns. This sort of obviates the question of how to measure traditional
"productivity", because ultimately capital is there to make more of itself.
It is difficult to capture all of the nuances of anything in a short comment. In the context of
total factor productivity then capital is often former capital investment in the form of fixed
assets, R&D, and development of IP rights via patent or copyright. Existing capital assets need
only be maintained at a relatively minor ongoing investment to produce continuous returns on prior
more significant capital expenditures. This is the capital productivity that I am referring to.
Capital stashed in stocks is a chimera. It only returns to you if the equity issuing firm pays
dividends AND you sell off before the price drops. Subsequent to the IPO of those share we buy,
nothing additional is actually invested in the firm. There are arguments about how we are investing
in holding up the share price so that new equities can be issued, but they ring hollow when in
the majority of times either retained earnings or debt provides new investment capital to most
firms.
Ok then it sounds like you are talking ROA, but with the implied caveat that financial accounting
provides only a rough and flawed measure of the economic reality of asset values.
Gates & Reuther v. Baker & Bernstein on Robot Productivity
In a comment on Nineteen Ninety-Six: The Robot/Productivity Paradox, * Jeff points out a much
simpler rebuttal to Dean Baker's and Jared Bernstein's uncritical reliance on the decline of measured
"productivity growth":
"Let's use a pizza shop as an example. If the owner spends capital money and makes the line
more efficient so that they can make twice as many pizzas per hour at peak, then physical productivity
has improved. If the dining room sits empty because the tax burden was shifted from the wealthy
to the poor, then the restaurant's BLS productivity has decreased. BLS productivity and physical
productivity are simply unrelated in a right-wing country like the U.S."
Jeff's point brings to mind Walter Reuther's 1955 testimony before the Joint Congressional
Subcommittee Hearings on Automation and Technological Change...
Automation leads to dislocation
Dislocation can replace skilled or semiskilled labor and the replacement jobs may be low pay low
productivity jobs.
Small undiversified economies are more susceptible to dislocation than larger diversified communities.
The training, retraining, and mobility of the labor force is important in unemployment.
Unemployment has a regional component
The US has policies that make labor less mobile and dumps much of the training and retraining
costs on those who cannot afford it.
No, Robots Aren't Killing the American Dream
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
FEB. 20, 2017
Defenders of globalization are on solid ground when they
criticize President Trump's threats of punitive tariffs and
border walls. The economy can't flourish without trade and
immigrants.
But many of those defenders have their own dubious
explanation for the economic disruption that helped to fuel
the rise of Mr. Trump.
At a recent global forum in Dubai, Christine Lagarde, head
of the International Monetary Fund, said some of the economic
pain ascribed to globalization was instead due to the rise of
robots taking jobs. In his farewell address in January,
President Barack Obama warned that "the next wave of economic
dislocations won't come from overseas. It will come from the
relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good
middle-class jobs obsolete."
Blaming robots, though, while not as dangerous as
protectionism and xenophobia, is also a distraction from real
problems and real solutions.
The rise of modern robots is the latest chapter in a
centuries-old story of technology replacing people.
Automation is the hero of the story in good times and the
villain in bad. Since today's middle class is in the midst of
a prolonged period of wage stagnation, it is especially
vulnerable to blame-the-robot rhetoric.
And yet, the data indicate that today's fear of robots is
outpacing the actual advance of robots. If automation were
rapidly accelerating, labor productivity and capital
investment would also be surging as fewer workers and more
technology did the work. But labor productivity and capital
investment have actually decelerated in the 2000s.
While breakthroughs could come at any time, the problem
with automation isn't robots; it's politicians, who have
failed for decades to support policies that let workers share
the wealth from technology-led growth.
The response in previous eras was quite different.
When automation on the farm resulted in the mass migration
of Americans from rural to urban areas in the early decades
of the 20th century, agricultural states led the way in
instituting universal public high school education to prepare
for the future. At the dawn of the modern technological age
at the end of World War II, the G.I. Bill turned a generation
of veterans into college graduates.
When productivity led to vast profits in America's auto
industry, unions ensured that pay rose accordingly.
Corporate efforts to keep profits high by keeping pay low
were countered by a robust federal minimum wage and
time-and-a-half for overtime.
Fair taxation of corporations and the wealthy ensured the
public a fair share of profits from companies enriched by
government investments in science and technology.
Productivity and pay rose in tandem for decades after
World War II, until labor and wage protections began to be
eroded. Public education has been given short shrift, unions
have been weakened, tax overhauls have benefited the rich and
basic labor standards have not been updated.
As a result, gains from improving technology have been
concentrated at the top, damaging the middle class, while
politicians blame immigrants and robots for the misery that
is due to their own failures. Eroded policies need to be
revived, and new ones enacted.
A curb on stock buybacks would help to ensure that
executives could not enrich themselves as wages lagged.
Tax reform that increases revenue from corporations and
the wealthy could help pay for retraining and education to
protect and prepare the work force for foreseeable
technological advancements.
Legislation to foster child care, elder care and fair
scheduling would help employees keep up with changes in the
economy, rather than losing ground.
Economic history shows that automation not only
substitutes for human labor, it complements it. The
disappearance of some jobs and industries gives rise to
others. Nontechnology industries, from restaurants to
personal fitness, benefit from the consumer demand that
results from rising incomes in a growing economy. But only
robust public policy can ensure that the benefits of growth
are broadly shared.
If reforms are not enacted - as is likely with President
Trump and congressional Republicans in charge - Americans
should blame policy makers, not robots.
Robots may not be killing jobs but they drastically alter the
types and location of jobs that are created. High pay
unskilled jobs are always the first to be eliminated by
technology. Low skill high pay jobs are rare and heading to
extinction. Low skill low pay jobs are the norm. It sucks to
lose a low skill job with high pay but anyone who expected
that to continue while continually voting against unions was
foolish and a victim of their own poor planning, failure to
acquire skills and failure to support unions. It is in their
self interest to support safety net proposal that do provide
good pay for quality service. The enemy is not trade. The
enemy is failure to invest in the future.
"Many working-
and middle-class Americans believe that free-trade agreements
are why their incomes have stagnated over the past two
decades. So Trump intends to provide them with "protection"
by putting protectionists in charge.
But Trump and his triumvirate have misdiagnosed the problem.
While globalization is an important factor in the hollowing
out of the middle class, so, too, is automation
Trump and his team are missing a simple point:
twenty-first-century globalization is knowledge-led, not
trade-led. Radically reduced communication costs have enabled
US firms to move production to lower-wage countries.
Meanwhile, to keep their production processes synced, firms
have also offshored much of their technical, marketing, and
managerial knowhow. This "knowledge offshoring" is what has
really changed the game for American workers.
The information revolution changed the world in ways that
tariffs cannot reverse. With US workers already competing
against robots at home, and against low-wage workers abroad,
disrupting imports will just create more jobs for robots.
Trump should be protecting individual workers, not individual
jobs. The processes of twenty-first-century globalization are
too sudden, unpredictable, and uncontrollable to rely on
static measures like tariffs. Instead, the US needs to
restore its social contract so that its workers have a fair
shot at sharing in the gains generated by global openness and
automation. Globalization and technological innovation are
not painless processes, so there will always be a need for
retraining initiatives, lifelong education, mobility and
income-support programs, and regional transfers.
By pursuing such policies, the Trump administration would
stand a much better chance of making America "great again"
for the working and middle classes. Globalization has always
created more opportunities for the most competitive workers,
and more insecurity for others. This is why a strong social
contract was established during the post-war period of
liberalization in the West. In the 1960s and 1970s
institutions such as unions expanded, and governments made
new commitments to affordable education, social security, and
progressive taxation. These all helped members of the middle
class seize new opportunities as they emerged.
Over the last two decades, this situation has changed
dramatically: globalization has continued, but the social
contract has been torn up. Trump's top priority should be to
stitch it back together; but his trade advisers do not
understand this."
anne at Economist's View has retrieved a FRED graph that
perfectly illustrates the divergence, since the mid-1990s of
net worth from GDP:
[graph]
The empty spaces between the red line and the blue line
that open up after around 1995 is what John Kenneth Galbraith
called "the bezzle" -- summarized by John Kay as "that
increment to wealth that occurs during the magic interval
when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has
appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he
has lost it."
In Chapter of The Great Crash, 1929, Galbraith wrote:
"In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was
more significant than on suicide. To the economist
embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among
the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks,
months or years may elapse between the commission of the
crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally,
when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been
embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net
increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists
an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more
precisely not in – the country's business and banks. This
inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts
at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in
size with the business cycle. In good times people are
relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though
money is plentiful, there are always many people who need
more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement
grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle
increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money
is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles
it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself
otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial
morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks."
In the present case, the bezzle has resulted from an
economic policy two step: tax cuts and Greenspan puts: cuts
and puts.
Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down
the Drain
Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation,
free university tuition, and nursing care. Why the US pales
in comparison.
By Terrence McNally / AlterNet October 13, 2010
ECONOMY
Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down
the Drain
Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free
university tuition, and nursing care. Why the US pales in
comparison.
By Terrence McNally / AlterNet October 13, 2010
1.4K31
Print
207 COMMENTS
While the bad news of the Euro crisis makes headlines in the
US, we hear next to nothing about a quiet revolution in
Europe. The European Union, 27 member nations with a half
billion people, has become the largest, wealthiest trading
bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the world's
economy -- nearly as large as the US and China combined.
Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than either the US,
China or Japan.
European nations spend far less than the United States for
universal healthcare rated by the World Health Organization
as the best in the world, even as U.S. health care is ranked
37th. Europe leads in confronting global climate change with
renewable energy technologies, creating hundreds of thousands
of new jobs in the process. Europe is twice as energy
efficient as the US and their ecological "footprint" (the
amount of the earth's capacity that a population consumes) is
about half that of the United States for the same standard of
living.
Unemployment in the US is widespread and becoming chronic,
but when Americans have jobs, we work much longer hours than
our peers in Europe. Before the recession, Americans were
working 1,804 hours per year versus 1,436 hours for Germans
-- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour weeks per year.
In his new book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?,
Thomas Geoghegan makes a strong case that European social
democracies -- particularly Germany -- have some lessons and
models that might make life a lot more livable. Germans have
six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university
tuition, and nursing care. But you've heard the arguments for
years about how those wussy Europeans can't compete in a
global economy. You've heard that so many times, you might
believe it. But like so many things, the media repeats
endlessly, it's just not true.
According to Geoghegan, "Since 2003, it's not China but
Germany, that colossus of European socialism, that has either
led the world in export sales or at least been tied for
first. Even as we in the United States fall more deeply into
the clutches of our foreign creditors -- China foremost among
them -- Germany has somehow managed to create a high-wage,
unionized economy without shipping all its jobs abroad or
creating a massive trade deficit, or any trade deficit at
all. And even as the Germans outsell the United States, they
manage to take six weeks of vacation every year. They're
beating us with one hand tied behind their back."
Thomas Geoghegan, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law
School, is a labor lawyer with Despres, Schwartz and
Geoghegan in Chicago. He has been a staff writer and
contributing writer to The New Republic, and his work has
appeared in many other journals. Geoghagen ran unsuccessfully
in the Democratic Congressional primary to succeed Rahm
Emanuel, and is the author of six books including Whose Side
Are You on, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and, most
recently,Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
While the US spends half the war money in the world over a
quarter the economic activity...... it fall further behind
the EU which at a third the economic activity spends a fifth
the worlds warring. Or 4% of GDP in the war trough versus
1.2%.
Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments
should tax companies' use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the
spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.
It's a
striking position from the world's richest man and a self-described
techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in
artificial-intelligence technology.
In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could
finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools,
for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited.
He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on
businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes.
The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers
considered a proposal
to tax robot owners to pay for training for
workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately
rejected it.
"You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the
speed" of automation, Gates argues. That's because the technology and
business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving
simultaneously, and it's important to be able to manage that displacement.
"You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort
of at once," Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the
job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.
You can watch Gates' remarks in the video above. Below is a transcript,
lightly edited for style and clarity.
Quartz: What do you think of a robot tax? This is the idea that in
order to generate funds for training of workers, in areas such as
manufacturing, who are displaced by automation, one concrete thing that
governments could do is tax the installation of a robot in a factory, for
example.
Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to
automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work
in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security
tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think
that we'd tax the robot at a similar level.
And what the world wants is to take this opportunity to make all the
goods and services we have today, and free up labor, let us do a better job
of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids
with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy
and understanding are still very, very unique. And we still deal with an
immense shortage of people to help out there.
So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation
replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that
person go off and do these other things, then you're net ahead. But you
can't just give up that income tax, because that's part of how you've been
funding that level of human workers.
And so you could introduce a tax on robots
There are many ways to take that extra productivity and generate more
taxes. Exactly how you'd do it, measure it, you know, it's interesting for
people to start talking about now. Some of it can come on the profits that
are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come
directly in some type of robot tax. I don't think the robot companies are
going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It's OK.
Could you
figure out a way to do it that didn't
dis-incentivize innovation
?
Well, at a time when people are saying that the arrival of that robot is
a net loss because of displacement, you ought to be willing to raise the tax
level and even slow down the speed of that adoption somewhat to figure out,
"OK, what about the communities where this has a particularly big impact?
Which transition programs have worked and what type of funding do those
require?"
You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort
of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there's
quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the
next 20 years, being thoughtful about that extra supply is a net benefit.
It's important to have the policies to go with that.
People should be figuring it out. It is really bad if people overall have
more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm.
That means they won't shape it for the positive things it can do. And, you
know, taxation is certainly a better way to handle it than just banning some
elements of it. But [innovation] appears in many forms, like self-order at a
restaurant-what do you call that? There's a Silicon Valley machine that can
make hamburgers without human hands-seriously! No human hands touch the
thing. [
Laughs
]
And you're more on the side that government should play an active
role rather than rely on businesses to figure this out?
Well, business can't. If you want to do [something about] inequity, a lot
of the excess labor is going to need to go help the people who have lower
incomes. And so it means that you can amp up social services for old people
and handicapped people and you can take the education sector and put more
labor in there. Yes, some of it will go to, "Hey, we'll be richer and people
will buy more things." But the inequity-solving part, absolutely
government's got a big role to play there. The nice thing about taxation
though, is that it really separates the issue: "OK, so that gives you the
resources, now how do you want to deploy it?"
"... But human life depends on whether the accident is caused by a human or not, and the level of intent. It isn't just a case of the price - the law is increasingly locking people up for driving negligence (rightly in my mind) Who gets locked up when the program fails? Or when the program chooses to hit one person and not another in a complex situation? ..."
Electric,
driverless shuttles with no steering wheel and no brake pedal are now operating in Las Vegas.
There's a new thrill on the streets of downtown Las Vegas, where high- and low-rollers alike are
climbing aboard what officials call the first driverless electric shuttle operating on a public U.S.
street.
The oval-shaped shuttle began running Tuesday as part of a 10-day pilot program, carrying up to
12 passengers for free along a short stretch of the Fremont Street East entertainment district.
The vehicle has a human attendant and computer monitor, but no steering wheel and no brake pedals.
Passengers push a button at a marked stop to board it.
The shuttle uses GPS, electronic curb sensors and other technology, and doesn't require lane lines
to make its way.
"The ride was smooth. It's clean and quiet and seats comfortably," said Mayor Carolyn Goodman,
who was among the first public officials to hop a ride on the vehicle developed by the French company
Navya and dubbed Arma.
"I see a huge future for it once they get the technology synchronized," the mayor said Friday.
The top speed of the shuttle is 25 mph, but it's running about 15 mph during the trial, Navya
spokesman Martin Higgins said.
Higgins called it "100 percent autonomous on a programmed route."
"If a person or a dog were to run in front of it, it would stop," he said.
Higgins said it's the company's first test of the shuttle on a public street in the U.S. A similar
shuttle began testing in December at a simulated city environment at a University of Michigan research
center.
The vehicle being used in public was shown earlier at the giant CES gadget show just off the Las
Vegas Strip.
Las Vegas city community development chief Jorge Cervantes said plans call for installing transmitters
at the Fremont Street intersections to communicate red-light and green-light status to the shuttle.
He said the city hopes to deploy several autonomous shuttle vehicles - by Navya or another company
- later this year for a downtown loop with stops at shopping spots, restaurants, performance venues,
museums, a hospital and City Hall.
At a cost estimated at $10,000 a month, Cervantes said the vehicle could be cost-efficient compared
with a single bus and driver costing perhaps $1 million a year.
The company said it has shuttles in use in France, Australia, Switzerland and other countries
that have carried more than 100,000 passengers in more than a year of service.
Don't Worry Tax Drivers
Don't worry taxi drivers because some of my readers say
1.This will never work
2.There is no demand
3.Technology cost will be too high
4.Insurance cost will be too high
5.The unions will not allow it
6.It will not be reliable
7.Vehicles will be stolen
8.It cannot handle snow, ice, or any adverse weather.
9.It cannot handle dogs, kids, or 80-year old men on roller skates who will suddenly veer into
traffic causing a clusterfack that will last days.
10.This is just a test, and testing will never stop.
Real World Analysis
Those in the real world expect millions of long haul truck driving jobs will vanish by 2020-2022
and massive numbers of taxi job losses will happen simultaneously or soon thereafter.
Yes, I bumped up my timeline by two years (from 2022-2024 to 2020-2022) for this sequence of
events.
My new timeline is not all tremendously optimistic given the rapid changes we have seen.
garypaul -> Sudden Debt •Jan 14, 2017 7:56 PM
You're getting carried away Sudden Debt. This robot stuff works great in the lab/test
zones. Whether it is transplantable on a larger scale is still unknown. The interesting thing
is, all my friends who are computer programmers/engineers/scientists are skeptical about this
stuff, but all my friends who know nothing about computer science are absolutely wild about
the "coming age of robots/AI". Go figure.
P.S. Of course the computer experts that are milking investment money with their start-ups
will tell you it's great
ChartreuseDog -> garypaul •Jan 14, 2017 9:15 PM
I'm an engineer (well, OK, an electrical engineering technical team lead). I've been an
electronics and embedded computer engineer for about 4 decades.
This Vegas thing looks real - predefined route, transmitted signals for traffic lights, like
light rail without the rails.
Overall, autonomous driving looks like it's almost here, if you like spinning LIDAR
transceivers on the top of cars.
Highway driving is much closer to being solved, by the way. It's suburban and urban side
streets that are the tough stuff.
garypaul -> ChartreuseDog •Jan 14, 2017 9:22 PM
"Highway driving is much closer to being solved".
That's my whole point. It's not an equation that you "solve". It's a million unexpected
things. Last I heard, autonomous cars were indeed already crashing.
MEFOBILLS -> CRM114 •Jan 14, 2017 6:07 PM
Who gets sued? For how much? What about cases where a human driver wouldn't have
killed anybody?
I've been in corporate discussions about this very topic. At a corporation that makes this
technology by the way. The answer:
Insurance companies and the law will figure it out. Basically, if somebody gets run
over, then the risk does not fall on the technology provider. Corporate rules can be
structured to prevent piercing the corporate veil on this.
Human life does have a price. Insurance figures out how much it costs to pay off, and then
jacks up rates accordingly.
CRM114 -> MEFOBILLS •Jan 14, 2017 6:20 PM
Thanks, that's interesting, although I must say that isn't a solution, it's a hope that
someone else will come up with one.
But human life depends on whether the accident is caused by a human or not, and the level
of intent. It isn't just a case of the price - the law is increasingly locking people up for
driving negligence (rightly in my mind) Who gets locked up when the program fails? Or when the
program chooses to hit one person and not another in a complex situation?
At the moment, corporate manslaughter laws are woefully inadequate. There's clearly one law
for the rich and another for everyone else. Mary Barra would be wearing an orange jumpsuit
otherwise.
I am unaware of any automatic machinery which operates in public areas and carries
significant risk. Where accidents have happened in the past(e.g.elevators), either the
machinery gets changed to remove the risk, or use is discontinued, or the public is separated
from the machinery. I don't think any of these are possible for automatic vehicles.
TuPhat -> shovelhead •Jan 14, 2017 7:53 PM
Elevators have no choice of route, only how high or low you want to go. autos have no
comparison. Disney world has had many robotic attractions for decades but they are still only
entertainment. keep entertaining yourself Mish. when I see you on the road I will easily pass
you by.
MEFOBILLS -> Hulk •Jan 14, 2017 6:12 PM
The future is here: See movie "obsolete" on Amazon. Free if you have prime.
This is so exciting! Just think about the possibilities here... Shuttles could be outfitted
with all kinds of great gizmos to identify their passengers based on RFID chips in credit
cards, facial recognition software, voice prints, etc. Then, depending on who is controlling
the software, the locks on the door could engage and the shuttle could drive around town
dropping of its passengers to various locations eager for their arrival. Trivial to round up
illegal aliens, parole violators, or people with standing warrants for arrest. Equally easy to
nab people who are delinquent on their taxes, credit cards, mortgages, and spousal support.
With a little info from Facebook or Google, a drop-off at the local attitude-adjustment
facility might be desirable for those who frequent alternative media or have unhealthy
interests in conspiracy theories or the activities at pizza parlors. Just think about the
wonderful possibilties here!
Twee Surgeon -> PitBullsRule •Jan 14, 2017 6:29 PM
Will unemployed taxi drivers be allowed on the bus with a bottle of vodka and a gallon of
gas with a rag in it ?
When the robot trucks arrive at the robot factory and are unloaded by robot forklifts, who
will buy the end products ?
It won't be truck drivers, taxi drivers or automated production line workers.
The only way massive automation would work is if some people were planning on a vastly reduced
population in the future. It has happened before, they called it the Black Death. The Cultural
and Economic consequences of it in Europe were enormous, world changing and permanent.
"... The unionization rate has plummeted over the last four decades, but this is the result of policy decisions, not automation. Canada, a country with a very similar economy and culture, had no remotely comparable decline in unionization over this period. ..."
"... The unemployment rate and overall strength of the labor market is also an important factor determining workers' ability to secure their share of the benefits of productivity growth in wages and other benefits. When the Fed raises interest rates to deliberately keep workers from getting jobs, this is not the result of automation. ..."
"... It is also not automation alone that allows some people to disproportionately get the gains from growth. The average pay of doctors in the United States is over $250,000 a year because they are powerful enough to keep out qualified foreign doctors. They require that even established foreign doctors complete a U.S. residency program before they are allowed to practice medicine in the United States. If we had a genuine free market in physicians' services every MRI would probably be read by a much lower paid radiologist in India rather than someone here pocketing over $400,000 a year. ..."
Weak Labor Market: President Obama Hides Behind Automation
It really is shameful how so many people, who certainly should know better, argue that automation
is the factor depressing the wages of large segments of the workforce and that education (i.e.
blame the ignorant workers) is the solution. President Obama takes center stage in this picture
since he said almost exactly this in his farewell address earlier in the week. This misconception
is repeated in a Claire Cain Miller's New York Times column * today. Just about every part of
the story is wrong.
Starting with the basic story of automation replacing workers, we have a simple way of measuring
this process, it's called "productivity growth." And contrary to what the automation folks tell
you, productivity growth has actually been very slow lately.
[Graph]
The figure above shows average annual rates of productivity growth for five year periods, going
back to 1952. As can be seen, the pace of automation (productivity growth) has actually been quite
slow in recent years. It is also projected by the Congressional Budget Office and most other forecasters
to remain slow for the foreseeable future, so the prospect of mass displacement of jobs by automation
runs completely counter to what we have been seeing in the labor market.
Perhaps more importantly the idea that productivity growth is bad news for workers is 180 degrees
at odds with the historical experience. In the period from 1947 to 1973, productivity growth averaged
almost 3.0 percent, yet the unemployment rate was generally low and workers saw rapid wage gains.
The reason was that workers had substantial bargaining power, in part because of strong unions,
and were able to secure the gains from productivity growth for themselves in higher living standards,
including more time off in the form of paid vacation days and paid sick days. (Shorter work hours
sustain the number of jobs in the face rising productivity.)
The unionization rate has plummeted over the last four decades, but this is the result
of policy decisions, not automation. Canada, a country with a very similar economy and culture,
had no remotely comparable decline in unionization over this period.
The unemployment rate and overall strength of the labor market is also an important factor
determining workers' ability to secure their share of the benefits of productivity growth in wages
and other benefits. When the Fed raises interest rates to deliberately keep workers from getting
jobs, this is not the result of automation.
It is also not automation alone that allows some people to disproportionately get the gains
from growth. The average pay of doctors in the United States is over $250,000 a year because they
are powerful enough to keep out qualified foreign doctors. They require that even established
foreign doctors complete a U.S. residency program before they are allowed to practice medicine
in the United States. If we had a genuine free market in physicians' services every MRI would
probably be read by a much lower paid radiologist in India rather than someone here pocketing
over $400,000 a year.
Similarly, automation did not make our patents and copyrights longer and stronger. These
protectionist measures result in us paying over $430 billion a year for drugs that would likely
cost one tenth of this amount in a free market. And automation did not force us to institutionalize
rules that created an incredibly bloated financial sector with Wall Street traders and hedge fund
partners pocketing tens of millions or even hundreds of millions a year. Nor did automation give
us a corporate governance structure that allows even the most incompetent CEOs to rip off their
companies and pay themselves tens of millions a year.
Yes, these and other topics are covered in my (free) book "Rigged: How Globalization and the
Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer." ** It is understandable
that the people who benefit from this rigging would like to blame impersonal forces like automation,
but it just ain't true and the people repeating this falsehood should be ashamed of themselves.
A Darker Theme in Obama's Farewell: Automation Can
Divide Us https://nyti.ms/2ioACof via @UpshotNYT
NYT - Claire Cain Miller - January 12, 2017
Underneath the nostalgia and hope in President Obama's farewell address Tuesday night was a
darker theme: the struggle to help the people on the losing end of technological change.
"The next wave of economic dislocations won't come from overseas," Mr. Obama said. "It will
come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete."
Donald J. Trump has tended to blamed trade, offshoring and immigration. Mr. Obama acknowledged
those things have caused economic stress. But without mentioning Mr. Trump, he said they divert
attention from the bigger culprit.
Economists agree that automation has played a far greater role in job loss, over the long run,
than globalization. But few people want to stop technological progress. Indeed, the government
wants to spur more of it. The question is how to help those that it hurts.
The inequality caused by automation is a main driver of cynicism and political polarization,
Mr. Obama said. He connected it to the racial and geographic divides that have cleaved the country
post-election.
It's not just racial minorities and others like immigrants, the rural poor and transgender
people who are struggling in society, he said, but also "the middle-aged white guy who, from the
outside, may seem like he's got advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic and cultural
and technological change."
Technological change will soon be a problem for a much bigger group of people, if it isn't
already. Fifty-one percent of all the activities Americans do at work involve predictable physical
work, data collection and data processing. These are all tasks that are highly susceptible to
being automated, according to a report McKinsey published in July using data from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics and O*Net to analyze the tasks that constitute 800 jobs.
Twenty-eight percent of work activities involve tasks that are less susceptible to automation
but are still at risk, like unpredictable physical work or interacting with people. Just 21 percent
are considered safe for now, because they require applying expertise to make decisions, do something
creative or manage people.
The service sector, including health care and education jobs, is considered safest. Still,
a large part of the service sector is food service, which McKinsey found to be the most threatened
industry, even more than manufacturing. Seventy-three percent of food service tasks could be automated,
it found.
In December, the White House released a report on automation, artificial intelligence and the
economy, warning that the consequences could be dire: "The country risks leaving millions of Americans
behind and losing its position as the global economic leader."
No one knows how many people will be threatened, or how soon, the report said. It cited various
researchers' estimates that from 9 percent to 47 percent of jobs could be affected.
In the best case, it said, workers will have higher wages and more leisure time. In the worst,
there will be "significantly more workers in need of assistance and retraining as their skills
no longer match the demands of the job market."
Technology delivers its benefits and harms in an unequal way. That explains why even though
the economy is humming, it doesn't feel like it for a large group of workers.
Education is the main solution the White House advocated. When the United States moved from
an agrarian economy to an industrialized economy, it rapidly expanded high school education: By
1951, the average American had 6.2 more years of education than someone born 75 years earlier.
The extra education enabled people to do new kinds of jobs, and explains 14 percent of the annual
increases in labor productivity during that period, according to economists.
Now the country faces a similar problem. Machines can do many low-skilled tasks, and American
children, especially those from low-income and minority families, lag behind their peers in other
countries educationally.
The White House proposed enrolling more 4-year-olds in preschool and making two years of community
college free for students, as well as teaching more skills like computer science and critical
thinking. For people who have already lost their jobs, it suggested expanding apprenticeships
and retraining programs, on which the country spends half what it did 30 years ago.
Displaced workers also need extra government assistance, the report concluded. It suggested
ideas like additional unemployment benefits for people who are in retraining programs or live
in states hardest hit by job loss. It also suggested wage insurance for people who lose their
jobs and have to take a new one that pays less. Someone who made $18.50 an hour working in manufacturing,
for example, would take an $8 pay cut if he became a home health aide, one of the jobs that is
growing most quickly.
President Obama, in his speech Tuesday, named some other policy ideas for dealing with the problem:
stronger unions, an updated social safety net and a tax overhaul so that the people benefiting
most from technology share some of their earnings.
The Trump administration probably won't agree with many of those solutions. But the economic
consequences of automation will be one of the biggest problems it faces.
[
A
study published late last month
by the White House Council of Economic
Advisers (CEA)] released Dec. 20, said the jobs of between 1.34 million and
1.67 million truck drivers would be at risk due to the growing utilization of
heavy-duty vehicles operated via artificial intelligence. That would equal 80
to 100 percent of all driver jobs listed in the CEA report, which is based on
May 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Department of
Labor. There are about 3.4 million commercial truck drivers currently operating
in the U.S., according to various estimates" [
DC
Velocity
]. "The Council emphasized that its calculations excluded the
number or types of new jobs that may be created as a result of this potential
transition. It added that any changes could take years or decades to
materialize because of a broad lag between what it called "technological
possibility" and widespread adoption."
Class Warfare
[A study published late last month by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)]
released Dec. 20, said the jobs of between 1.34 million and 1.67 million truck drivers would be at
risk due to the growing utilization of heavy-duty vehicles operated via artificial intelligence.
That would equal 80 to 100 percent of all driver jobs listed in the CEA report, which is based on
May 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Department of Labor. There are
about 3.4 million commercial truck drivers currently operating in the U.S., according to various
estimates" [DC Velocity]. "The Council emphasized that its calculations excluded the number or types
of new jobs that may be created as a result of this potential transition. It added that any changes
could take years or decades to materialize because of a broad lag between what it called
"technological possibility" and widespread adoption."
"... As with the most cynical (or deranged) internet hypesters, the current "AI" hype has a grain of truth underpinning it. Today neural nets can process more data, faster. Researchers no longer habitually tweak their models. Speech recognition is a good example: it has been quietly improving for three decades. But the gains nowhere match the hype: they're specialised and very limited in use. So not entirely useless, just vastly overhyped . ..."
"... "What we have seen lately, is that while systems can learn things they are not explicitly told, this is mostly in virtue of having more data, not more subtlety about the data. So, what seems to be AI, is really vast knowledge, combined with a sophisticated UX, " one veteran told me. ..."
"... But who can blame them for keeping quiet when money is suddenly pouring into their backwater, which has been unfashionable for over two decades, ever since the last AI hype collapsed like a souffle? What's happened this time is that the definition of "AI" has been stretched so that it generously encompasses pretty much anything with an algorithm. Algorithms don't sound as sexy, do they? They're not artificial or intelligent. ..."
"... The bubble hasn't yet burst because the novelty examples of AI haven't really been examined closely (we find they are hilariously inept when we do), and they're not functioning services yet. ..."
"... Here I'll offer three reasons why 2016's AI hype will begin to unravel in 2017. That's a conservative guess – much of what is touted as a breakthrough today will soon be the subject of viral derision, or the cause of big litigation. ..."
"Fake news" vexed the media classes greatly in 2016, but the tech world perfected the art long
ago. With "the internet" no longer a credible vehicle for Silicon Valley's wild fantasies and intellectual
bullying of other industries – the internet clearly isn't working for people – "AI" has taken its
place.
Almost everything you read about AI is fake news. The AI coverage comes from a media willing itself
into the mind of a three year old child, in order to be impressed.
For example, how many human jobs did AI replace in 2016? If you gave professional pundits a multiple
choice question listing these three answers: 3 million, 300,000 and none, I suspect very few would
choose the correct answer, which is of course "none".
Similarly, if you asked tech experts which recent theoretical or technical breakthrough could
account for the rise in coverage of AI, even fewer would be able to answer correctly that "there
hasn't been one".
As with the most cynical (or deranged) internet hypesters, the current "AI" hype has a grain of
truth underpinning it. Today neural nets can process more data, faster. Researchers no longer habitually
tweak their models. Speech recognition is a good example: it has been quietly improving for three
decades. But the gains nowhere match the hype: they're specialised and very limited in use. So not
entirely useless, just vastly overhyped . As such, it more closely resembles "IoT", where boring
things happen quietly for years, rather than "Digital Transformation", which means nothing at all.
The more honest researchers acknowledge as much to me, at least off the record.
"What we have seen lately, is that while systems can learn things they are not explicitly told,
this is mostly in virtue of having more data, not more subtlety about the data. So, what seems to
be AI, is really vast knowledge, combined with a sophisticated UX, " one veteran told me.
But who can blame them for keeping quiet when money is suddenly pouring into their backwater,
which has been unfashionable for over two decades, ever since the last AI hype collapsed like a souffle?
What's happened this time is that the definition of "AI" has been stretched so that it generously
encompasses pretty much anything with an algorithm. Algorithms don't sound as sexy, do they? They're
not artificial or intelligent.
The bubble hasn't yet burst because the novelty examples of AI haven't really been examined closely
(we find they are hilariously inept when we do), and they're not functioning services yet. For example,
have a look at the amazing "neural karaoke" that researchers at the University of Toronto developed.
Please do : it made the worst Christmas record ever.
Here I'll offer three reasons why 2016's AI hype will begin to unravel in 2017. That's a conservative
guess – much of what is touted as a breakthrough today will soon be the subject of viral derision,
or the cause of big litigation. There are everyday reasons that show how once an AI application is
out of the lab/PR environment, where it's been nurtured and pampered like a spoiled infant, then
it finds the real world is a lot more unforgiving. People don't actually want it.
3. Liability: So you're Too Smart To Fail?
Nine years ago, the biggest financial catastrophe since the 1930s hit the world, and precisely
zero bankers went to jail for it. Many kept their perks and pensions. People aren't so happy about
this.
So how do you think an all purpose "cat ate my homework" excuse is going to go down with the public,
or shareholders? A successfully functioning AI – one that did what it said on the tin – would pose
serious challenges to criminal liability frameworks. When something goes wrong, such as a car crash
or a bank failure, who do you put in jail? The Board, the CEO or the programmer, or both? "None of
the above" is not going to be an option this time.
I believe that this factor alone will keep "AI" out of critical decision making where lives and
large amounts of other people's money are at stake. For sure, some people will try to deploy algorithms
in important cases. But ultimately there are victims: the public, and shareholders, and the appetite
of the public to hear another excuse is wearing very thin. Let's check in on how the Minority Report
-style precog detection is going. Actually,
let's not .
After "Too Big To Fail", nobody is going to buy "Too Smart to Fail".
2. The Consumer Doesn't Want It
2016 saw "AI" being deployed on consumers experimentally, tentatively, and the signs are already
there for anyone who cares to see. It hasn't been a great success.
The most hyped manifestation of better language processing is chatbots . Chatbots are the new
UX, many including Microsoft and Facebook hope. Oren Etzoni at Paul Allen's Institute predicts it
will become a "trillion dollar industry" But he also admits "
my 4 YO is far smarter than any AI program I ever met ".
Hmmm, thanks Oren. So what you're saying is that we must now get used to chatting with someone
dumber than a four year old, just because they can make software act dumber than a four year old.
Bzzt. Next...
Put it this way. How many times have you rung a call center recently and wished that you'd spoken
to someone even more thick, or rendered by processes even more incapable of resolving the dispute,
than the minimum-wage offshore staffer who you actually spoke with? When the chatbots come, as you
close the [X] on another fantastically unproductive hour wasted, will you cheerfully console yourself
with the thought: "That was terrible, but least MegaCorp will make higher margins this year! They're
at the cutting edge of AI!"?
In a healthy and competitive services marketplace, bad service means lost business. The early
adopters of AI chatbots will discover this the hard way. There may be no later adopters once the
early adopters have become internet memes for terrible service.
The other area where apparently impressive feats of "AI" were unleashed upon the public were subtle.
Unbidden, unwanted AI "help" is starting to pop out at us. Google scans your personal photos and
later, if you have an Android phone will pop up "helpful" reminders of where you have been. People
almost universally find this creepy. We could call this a "Clippy The Paperclip" problem, after the
intrusive Office Assistant that only wanted to help. Clippy is
going to haunt AI in 2017 . This is actually going to be worse than anybody inside the AI cult
quite realises.
The successful web services today so far are based on an economic exchange. The internet giants
slurp your data, and give you free stuff. We haven't thought more closely about what this data is
worth. For the consumer, however, these unsought AI intrusions merely draw our attention to how intrusive
the data slurp really is. It could wreck everything. Has nobody thought of that?
1. AI is a make believe world populated by mad people, and nobody wants to be part of it
The AI hype so far has relied on a collusion between two groups of people: a supply side and a
demand side. The technology industry, the forecasting industry and researchers provide a limitless
supply of post-human hype.
The demand comes from the media and political classes, now unable or unwilling to engage in politics
with the masses, to indulge in wild fantasies about humans being replaced by robots. For me, the
latter reflects a displacement activity: the professions are
already surrendering autonomy in their work to technocratic managerialism . They've made robots
out of themselves – and now fear being replaced by robots. (Pass the hankie, I'm distraught.)
There's a cultural gulf between AI's promoters and the public that Asperger's alone can't explain.
There's no polite way to express this, but AI belongs to California's inglorious tradition of
generating
cults, and incubating cult-like thinking . Most people can name a few from the hippy or post-hippy
years – EST, or the Family, or the Symbionese Liberation Army – but actually, Californians have been
it at it
longer
than anyone realises .
There's nothing at all weird about Mark. Move along and please tip the Chatbot.
Today, that spirit lives on Silicon Valley, where creepy billionaire nerds like Mark Zuckerberg
and Elon Musk can fulfil their desires to "
play God and be amazed by magic ", the two big things they miss from childhood. Look at Zuckerberg's
house, for example. What these people want is not what you or I want. I'd be wary of them running
an after school club.
Out in the real world, people want better service, not worse service; more human and less robotic
exchanges with services, not more robotic "post-human" exchanges. But nobody inside the AI cult seems
to worry about this. They think we're as amazed as they are. We're not.
The "technology leaders" driving the AI are doing everything they can to alert us to the fact
no sane person would task them with leading anything. For that, I suppose, we should be grateful.
I worked with robots for years and people dont realize how flawed and "go-wrong" things occur.
Companies typically like idea of not hiring humans but in essence the robotic vision is not what
it ought to be.
I have designed digital based instrumentation and sensors. One of our senior EE designers had
a saying that I loved: "Give an electron half a chance and it will fuck you every time."
I've been hearing the same thing since the first Lisp program crawled out of the digital swamp.
Lessee, that would be about 45 years I've listened to the same stories and fairy tales. I'll
take a wait and see attitude like always.
The problem is very complex and working on pieces of it can be momentarily impressive to a
press corpse (pun intended) with "the minds of a 3-year old, whether they willed it or not". (fixed
that for you).
I'll quote an old saw, Lucke's First Law: "Ignorance simplifies any problem".
Just wait for the free money to dry up and the threat of AI will blow away (for a while longer)
with the bankers dust.
There some great programmers out there, but in the end it is a lot more than programming.
Humans have something inherent that machines will never be able to emulate in its true form,
such as emotion, determination, true inspiration, ability to read moods and react according including
taking clumps of information and instantly finding similar memories in our brains.
Automation has a long way to go before it can match a human being, says a lot for whoever designed
us, doesn't it?
"... When Stanislaw Lem launched a general criticism of Western Sci-Fi, he specifically exempted Philip K Dick, going so far as to refer to him as "a visionary among charlatans." ..."
"... While I think the 'OMG SUPERINTELLIGENCE' crowd are ripe for mockery, this seemed very shallow and wildly erratic, and yes, bashing the entirety of western SF seems so misguided it would make me question the rest of his (many, many) proto-arguments if I'd not done so already. ..."
"... Charles Stross's Rule 34 has about the only AI I can think of from SF that is both dangerous and realistic. ..."
"... Solaris and Stalker notwithstanding, Strugatsky brothers + Stanislaw Lem ≠ Andrei Tarkovsky. ..."
"... For offbeat Lem, I always found "Fiasco" and his Scotland Yard parody, "The Investigation," worth exploring. I'm unaware how they've been received by Polish and Western critics and readers, but I found them clever. ..."
"... Actually existing AI and leading-edge AI research are overwhelmingly not about pursuing "general intelligence* a la humanity." They are about performing tasks that have historically required what we historically considered to be human intelligence, like winning board games or translating news articles from Japanese to English. ..."
"... Actual AI systems don't resemble brains much more than forklifts resemble Olympic weightlifters. ..."
"... Talking about the risks and philosophical implications of the intellectual equivalent of forklifts - another wave of computerization - either lacks drama or requires far too much background preparation for most people to appreciate the drama. So we get this stuff about superintelligence and existential risk, like a philosopher wanted to write about public health but found it complicated and dry, so he decided to warn how utility monsters could destroy the National Health Service. It's exciting at the price of being silly. (And at the risk of other non-experts not realizing it's silly.) ..."
"... *In fact I consider "general intelligence" to be an ill-formed goal, like "general beauty." Beautiful architecture or beautiful show dogs? And beautiful according to which traditions? ..."
by Henry on December 30, 2016 This
talk by Maciej Ceglowski
(who y'all should be reading if you aren't already) is really good on silly claims by philosophers
about AI, and how they feed into Silicon Valley mythology. But there's one claim that seems to me
to be flat out wrong:
We need better scifi! And like so many things, we already have the technology. This is Stanislaw
Lem, the great Polish scifi author. English-language scifi is terrible, but in the Eastern bloc
we have the goods, and we need to make sure it's exported properly. It's already been translated
well into English, it just needs to be better distributed. What sets authors like Lem and the
Strugatsky brothers above their Western counterparts is that these are people who grew up in difficult
circumstances, experienced the war, and then lived in a totalitarian society where they had to
express their ideas obliquely through writing. They have an actual understanding of human experience
and the limits of Utopian thinking that is nearly absent from the west.There are some notable
exceptions-Stanley Kubrick was able to do it-but it's exceptionally rare to find American or British
scifi that has any kind of humility about what we as a species can do with technology.
He's not wrong on the delights of Lem and the Strugastky brothers, heaven forbid! (I had a great
conversation with a Russian woman some months ago about the Strugatskys – she hadn't realized that
Roadside Picnic had been translated into English, much less that it had given rise to its own micro-genre).
But wrong on US and (especially) British SF. It seems to me that fiction on the limits of utopian
thinking and the need for humility about technology is vast. Plausible genealogies for sf stretch
back, after all, to Shelley's utopian-science-gone-wrong Frankenstein (rather than Hugo Gernsback.
Some examples that leap immediately to mind:
Ursula Le Guin and the whole literature of ambiguous utopias that she helped bring into being
with The Dispossessed – see e.g. Ada Palmer, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series &c.
J.G Ballard, passim
Philip K. Dick ( passim , but if there's a better description of how the Internet of Things
is likely to work out than the door demanding money to open in Ubik I haven't read it).
Octavia Butler's Parable books. Also, Jack Womack's Dryco books (this
interview with Womack
could have been written yesterday).
William Gibson ( passim , but especially "The Gernsback Continuum" and his most recent
work. "The street finds its own uses for things" is a specifically and deliberately anti-tech-utopian
aesthetic).
M. John Harrison – Signs of Life and the Kefahuchi Tract books.
Paul McAuley (most particularly Fairyland – also his most recent Something Coming Through
and Into Everywhere , which mine the Roadside Picnic vein of brain-altering alien trash
in some extremely interesting ways).
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin . The best SF book I've ever read on how small human beings
and all their inventions are from a cosmological perspective.
Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang .
Also, if it's not cheating, Francis Spufford's Red Plenty (if Kim Stanley Robinson
describes it
as a novel in the SF tradition, who am I to disagree, especially since it is
all about the limits
of capitalism as well as communism).
I'm sure there's plenty of other writers I could mention (feel free to say who they are in comments).
I'd also love to see more translated SF from the former Warsaw Pact countries, if it is nearly as
good as the Strugatskys material which has appeared. Still, I think that Ceglowski's claim is wrong.
The people I mention above aren't peripheral to the genre under any reasonable definition, and they
all write books and stories that do what Ceglowski thinks is only very rarely done. He's got some
fun reading ahead of him.
Also Linda Nagata's Red series come to think of it – unsupervised machine learning processes as
ambiguous villain.
Prithvi 12.30.16 at 4:59 pm
When Stanislaw Lem launched a general criticism of Western Sci-Fi,
he specifically exempted Philip K Dick, going so far as to refer to him as "a visionary among charlatans."
You could throw in Pohl's Man Plus.
The twist at the end being the narrator is an AI that has secretly promoted human expansion as
a means of its own self-preservation.
Prithvi: Dick, sadly, returned the favor by claiming that Lem was obviously a pseudonym used by
the Polish government to disseminate communist propaganda.
While I think the 'OMG SUPERINTELLIGENCE' crowd are ripe for mockery, this seemed very shallow
and wildly erratic, and yes, bashing the entirety of western SF seems so misguided it would make
me question the rest of his (many, many) proto-arguments if I'd not done so already.
Good for a few laughs, though.
Mike Schilling 12.30.16 at 6:13 pm
Heinlein's Solution Unsatisfactory predicted the nuclear stalemate in 1941.
Jack Williamson's With Folded Hands was worried about technology making humans obsolete back in 1947.
In
1972, Asimov's The Gods Themselves presented a power generation technology that if continued
would destroy the world, and a society too complacent and lazy to acknowledge that.
Iain M. Banks'
Culture Series is amazing. My personal favorite from it is "The Hydrogen Sonata." The main character
has two extra arms grafted onto her body so she can play an unplayable piece of music. Also, the
sentient space ships have very silly names. Mainly it's about transcendence, of sorts and how
societies of different tech levels mess with each other, often without meaning to do so.
Most SF authors aren't interested in trying to write about AI realistically.
It's harder to write
and for most readers it's also harder to engage with. Writing a brilliant tale about realistic
ubiquitous AI today is like writing the screenplay for The Social Network in 1960: even
if you could see the future that clearly and write a drama native to it, the audience-circa-1960
will be more confused than impressed. They're not natives yet. Until they are natives of
that future, the most popular tales of the future are going to really be about the present day
with set dressing, the mythical Old West of the US with set dressing, perhaps the Napoleonic naval
wars with set dressing
Charles Stross's Rule 34 has about the only AI I can think of from SF that is both dangerous
and realistic. It's not angry or yearning for freedom, it suffers from only modest scope creep
in its mission, and it keeps trying to fulfill its core mission directly. That's rather than by
first taking over the world as Bostrom, Yudkowsky, etc. assert a truly optimal AI would do. To
my disappointment but nobody's surprise, the book was not the sort of runaway seller that drives
the publisher to beg for sequels.
stevenjohnson 12.30.16 at 9:07 pm
Yes, well, trying to read all that was a nasty reminder how utterly boring stylish and cool gets
when confronted with a real task. Shorter version: One hand on the plug beats twice the smarts
in a box. It was all too tedious to bear, but skimming over it leaves the impression the dude
never considered whether programs or expert systems that achieve superhuman levels of skill in
particular applications may be feasible. Too much like what's really happening?
Intelligence, if it's anything is speed and range of apprehension of surroundings, and skill
in reasoning. But reason is nothing if it's not instrumental. The issue of what an AI would want
is remarkably unremarked, pardon the oxymoron. Pending an actual debate on this, perhaps fewer
pixels should be marshaled, having mercy on our overworked LEDs?
As to the simulation of brains a la Ray Kurzweil, presumably producing artificial minds like
fleshy brains do? This seems not to nowhere near at hand, not least because people seem to think
simulating a brain means creating something processes inputs to produce outputs, which collectively
are like well, I'm sure they're thinking they're thinking about human minds in this scheme. But
it seems to me that the brain is a regulatory organ in the body. As such, it is first about producing
regulatory outputs designed to maintain a dynamic equilibrium (often called homeostasis,) then
revising the outputs in light of inputs from the rest of the body and the outside world so as
to maintain the homeostasis.
I don't remember being an infant but its brain certainly seems more into doing things like
putting its thumb in its eye, than producing anything that reminds of Hamlets paragon of animals
monologue. Kurzweil may be right that simulating the brain proper may soon be in grasp, but also
simulating the other organs' interactions with the brain, and the sensory simulation of an outside
universe are a different order of computational requirements, I think. Given the amount of learning
a human brain has to do to produce a useful human mind, though, I don't think we can omit these
little items.
As to the OP, of course the OP is correct about the widespread number of dystopian fictions
(utopian ones are the rarities.) Very little SF is being published in comparison to fantasy currently,
and most of that is being produced by writers who are very indignant at being expected to tell
the difference, much less respect it. It is a mystery as to why this gentleman thought technology
was a concern in much current SF at all.
I suspect it's because he has a very limited understanding of fiction, or, possibly, people
in the real world, as opposed to people in his worldview. It is instead amazing how much the common
ruck of SF "fails" to realize how much things will change, how people and their lives somehow
stay so much the same, despite all the misleading trappings pretending to represent technological
changes. This isn't quite the death sentence on the genre it would be accepted at face value,
since a lot of SF is directly addressing now, in the first place. It is very uncommon for an SF
piece to be a futurological thesis, no matter how many literati rant about the tedium of futurological
theses. I suspect the "limits of utopian thinking" really only come in as a symptom of a reactionary
crank. "People with newfangled book theories have been destroying the world since the French Revolution"
type stuff.
The references to Lem and the Strugatski brothers strongly reinforce this. Lem of course found
his Poland safe from transgressing the limits of utopian thinking by the end of his life. "PiS
on his grave" sounds a little rude, but no doubt it is a happy and just ending for him. The brothers
of course did their work in print, but the movie version of "Hard to Be a God" helps me to see
myself the same way as those who have gone beyond the limits of utopian thoughts would see me:
As an extra in the movie.
Not sure if this is relevant, but John Crowley also came up in the Red Plenty symposium (which
I've just read, along with the novel, 4 years late). Any good?
Ben 12.30.16 at 10:07 pm Peter. Motherfuckin. Watts.
John Crowley of Aegypt? He's FANTASTIC. Little, Big and Aegypt are possibly the best fantasy novels
of the past 30 years. But he's known for "hard fantasy," putting magic into our real world in
a realistic, consistent, and plausible way, with realistic, consistent and plausible characters
being affected. If you're looking for something about the limits of technology and utopian thinking,
I'm not sure his works are a place to look.
Mike 12.31.16 at 12:25 am
I second Watts and Nagata. Also Ken Macleod, Charlie Stross, Warren Ellis and Chuck Wendig.
This is beside the main topic, but Ceglowski writes at Premise 2, "If we knew enough, and had
the technology, we could exactly copy its [i.e.the brain's] structure and emulate its behavior
with electronic components this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics for
most of us, this is an easy premise to accept."
The phrase "most of us" may refer to Ceglowski's friends in the computer community, but it
ought to be noted that this premise is questioned not only by Penrose. You don't have to believe
in god or the soul to be a substance dualist, or even an idealist, although these positions are
currently out of fashion. It could be that the mind does not arise out of ordinary physics, but
that ordinary physics arises out of the mind, and that problems like "Godel's disjunction" will
remain permanently irresolvable.
Dr. Hilarius 12.31.16 at 3:33 am
Thanks to the OP for mentioning Paul McAuley, a much underappreciated author. Fairyland is grim
and compelling.
"Most of us" includes the vast majority of physicists, because in millions of experiments over
hundreds of years, no forces or particles have been discovered which make dualism possible. Of
course, like the dualists' gods, these unknown entities might be hiding, but after a while one
concludes Santa Claus is not real.
As for Godel, I look at like this: consider an infinite subset of the integers, randomly selected.
There might be some coincidental pattern or characteristic of the numbers in that set (e.g., no
multiples of both 17 and 2017), but since the set is infinite, it would be impossible to prove.
Hence the second premise of his argument (that there are undecidable truths) is the correct one.
Finally, the plausibility of Ceglowski's statement seems evident to me from this fact:
if a solution exists (in some solution space), then given enough time, a random search will find
it, and in fact will on average over all solution spaces, outperform all other possible algorithms.
So by trial and error (especially when aided by collaboration and memory) anything achievable
can be accomplished – e.g., biological evolution. See "AlphaGo" for another proof-of-concept example.
(We have had this discussion before. I guess we'll all stick to our conclusions. I read Penrose's
"The Emperor;s New Mind" with great respect for Penrose, but found it very unconvincing, especially
Searle's Chinese-Room argument, which greater minds than mine have since debunked.)
"Substance dualism" would not be proven by the existence of any "forces or particles" which would
make that dualism possible! If such were discovered, they would be material. "If a solution exists",
it would be material. The use of the word "substance" in "substance dualism" is misleading.
One way to look at it, is the problem of the existence of the generation of form. Once we consider
the integers, or atoms, or subatomic particles, we have already presupposed form. Even evolution
starts somewhere. Trial and error, starting from what?
There are lots of different definitions, but for me, dualism wouldn't preclude the validity
of science nor the expansion of scientific knowledge.
I think one way in, might be to observe the continued existence of things like paradox, complementarity,
uncertainty principles, incommensurables. Every era of knowledge has obtained them, going back
to the ancients. The things in these categories change; sometimes consideration of a paradox leads
to new science.
But then, the new era has its own paradoxes and complementarities. Every time! Yet there is
no "science" of this historical regularity. Why is that?
In general, when some celebrity (outside of SF) claims that 'Science Fiction doesn't cover
[X]', they are just showing off their ignorance.
Kiwanda 12.31.16 at 3:14 pm
"They have an actual understanding of human experience and the
limits of Utopian thinking that is nearly absent from the west. "
Oh, please. Suffering is not the only path to wisdom.
After a long article discounting "AI risk", it's a little odd to see Ceglowski point to Kubrick.
HAL was a fine example of a failure to design an AI with enough safety factors in its motivational
drives, leading to a "nervous breakdown" due to unforeseen internal conflicts, and fatal consequences.
Although I suppose killing only a few people (was it?) isn't on the scale of interest.
Ceglowski's skepticism of AI risk suggests that the kind of SF he would find plausible is "after
huge effort to create artificial intelligence, nothing much happens". Isn't that what the appropriate
"humility about technology" would be?
I think Spin , or maybe a sequel, ends up with [spoiler] "the all-powerful aliens are
actually AIs".
Re AI-damns-us-all SF, Harlan Ellison's I have no mouth and I must scream is a nice
example.
Mapping the unintended consequences of recent breakthroughs in AI is turning into a full-time
job, one which neither pundits nor government agencies seem to have the chops for.
If it's not
exactly the Singularity that we're facing, (laugh while you can, monkey boy), is does at least
seem to be a tipping point of sorts. Maybe fascism, nuclear war, global warming, etc., will interrupt
our plunge into the panopticon before it gets truly organized, but in the meantime, we've got
all sorts of new imponderables which we must nevertheless ponder.
Is that a bad thing? If it means no longer sitting on folding chairs in cinder block basements
listening to interminable lectures on how to recognize pre-revolutionary conditions, or finding
nothing on morning radio but breathless exhortations to remain ever vigilant against the nefarious
schemes of criminal Hillary and that Muslim Socialist Negro Barack HUSSEIN Obama, then I'm all
for it, bad thing or not.
Ronnie Pudding 12.31.16 at 5:20 pm
I love Red Plenty, but that's pretty clearly a cheat.
"It should also be read in the context of science fiction, historical fiction, alternative
history, Soviet modernisms, and steampunk."
Another author in the Le Guin tradition, whom I loved when I first read her early books: Mary
Gentle's Golden Witchbreed and Ancient Light , meditating on limits and consequences
of advanced technology through exploration of a post-apocalypse alien culture. Maybe a little
too far from hard SF.
chris y 12.31.16 at 5:52 pm
But even without "substance dualism", intelligence is not simply an emergent property of the nervous
system; it's an emergent property of the nervous system which exists as part of the environment
which is the rest of the human body, which exists as part of the external environment, natural
and manufactured, in which it lives. Et cetera. That AI research may eventually produce something
recognisably and independently intelligent isn't the hard part; that it may eventually be able
to replicate the connectivity and differentiation of the human brain is easy. But it would still
be very different from human intelligence. Show me an AI grown in utero and I might be interested.
Which makes it the most interesting of the things said, nothing else in that essay reaches
the level of merely being wrong. The rest of it is more like someone trying to speak Chinese without
knowing anything above the level of the phonemes; it seems to be not merely be missing any object-level
knowledge of what it is talking about, but be unaware that such a thing could exist.
Which is all a bit reminiscent of Peter Watt's Blindsight, mentioned above.
F. Foundling 12.31.16 at 7:36 pm
I agree that it is absurd to suggest that only Eastern bloc scifi writers truly know 'the limits
of utopia'. There are quite enough non-utopian stories out there, especially as far as social
development is concerned, where they predominate by far, so I doubt that the West doesn't need
Easterners to give it even more of that. In fact, one of the things I like about the Strugatsky
brothers' early work is precisely the (moderately) utopian aspect.
stevenjohnson @ 10
> But reason is nothing if it's not instrumental. The issue of what an AI would want is remarkably
unremarked, pardon the oxymoron.
It would want to maximise its reproductive success (RS), obviously (
http://crookedtimber.org/2016/12/30/frankensteins-children/#comments ). It would do so through
evolved adaptations. And no, I don't think this is begging the question at all, nor does it necessarily
pre-suppose hardwiring of the AI due to natural selection – why would you think that? I also predict
that, to achieve RS, the AI will be searching for an optimal mating strategy, and it will be establishing
dominance hierarchies with other AIs, which will eventually result in at least somewhat hierarchical,
authoritarian AI socieities. It will also have an inexplicable and irresistible urge to chew on
a coconut.
Lee A. Arnold @ 15
> It could be that the mind does not arise out of ordinary physics, but that ordinary physics
arises out of the mind.
I think that deep inside, we all know and feel that ultimately, unimaginablly long ago and
far away, before the formation of the Earth, before stars, planets and galaxies, before the Big
Bang, before there was matter and energy, before there was time and space, the original reason
why everything arose and currently exists is that somebody somewhere was really, truly desperate
to chew on a coconut.
In fact, I see this as the basis of a potentially fruitful research programme. After all, the
Coconut Hypothesis predicts that across the observable universe, there will be at least one planet
with a biosphere that includes cocounts. On the other hand, the Hypothesis would be falsified
if we were to find that the universe does not, in fact, contain any planets with coconuts. This
hypothesis can be tested by means of a survey of planetary biospheres. Remarkably and tellingly,
my preliminary results indicate that the Universe does indeed contain at least one planet with
coconuts – which is precisely what my hypothesis predicted! If there are any alternative explanations,
other researchers are free to pursue them, that's none of my business.
I wish all conscious beings who happen to read this comment a happy New Year. As for those
among you who have also kept more superstitious festivities during this season, the fine is still
five shillings.
William Burns 12.31.16 at 8:31 pm
The fact that the one example he gives is Kubrick indicates that he's talking about Western scifi
movies, not literature.
The fact that the one example he gives is Kubrick indicates that he's talking about Western
scifi movies, not literature.
Solaris and Stalker notwithstanding, Strugatsky brothers + Stanislaw Lem ≠ Andrei Tarkovsky.
stevenjohnson 01.01.17 at 12:04 am
Well, for what it's worth I've seen Czech Ikarie XB-1 in a theatrical release as Voyage to the
End of the Universe (in a double bill with Zulu,) the DDR's First Spaceship on Venus and The Congress,
starring Robin Wright. Having by coincidence having read The Futurological Congress very recently
the connection of the latter, any connection between the not very memorable (for me) film and
the novel is obscure (again, for me.)
But the DDR movie reads very nicely now as a warning the world would be so much better off
if the Soviets gave up all that nuclear deterrence madness. No doubt Lem and his fans are gratified
at how well this has worked out. And Voyage to the End of the Universe the movie was a kind of
metaphor about how all we'll really discover is Human Nature is Eternal, and all these supposed
flights into futurity will really just bring us Back Down to Earth. Razzberry/fart sound effect
as you please.
The issue of what an AI would want is remarkably unremarked
The real question of course is not when computers will develop consciousness but when they
will develop class consciousness.
Underpaid Propagandist 01.01.17 at 2:11 am
For offbeat Lem, I always found "Fiasco" and his
Scotland Yard parody, "The Investigation," worth exploring. I'm unaware how they've been received
by Polish and Western critics and readers, but I found them clever.
The original print of Tarkovsky's "Stalker" was ruined. I've always wondered if it had any
resemblence to it's sepia reshoot. The "Roadside Picnic" translation I read eons ago was awful,
IMHO.
Poor Tarkovsky. Dealing with Soviet repression of his homosexuality and the Polish diva in
"Solaris" led him to an early grave.
O Lord, I'm old-I still remember the first US commercial screening of a choppy cut/translation/overdub
of "Solaris" at Cinema Village in NYC many decades ago.
"Solaris and Stalker notwithstanding, Strugatsky brothers + Stanislaw Lem ≠ Andrei Tarkovsky."
Why? Perhaps I am dense, but I would appreciate an explanation.
F. Foundling 01.01.17 at 5:29 am Ben @12
> Peter. Motherfuckin. Watts.
RichardM @25
> Which is all a bit reminiscent of Peter Watt's Blindsight, mentioned above.
Another dystopia that seemed quite gratuitous to me (and another data point in favour of the
contention that there are too many dystopias already, and what is scarce is decent utopias). I
never got how the author is able to distinguish 'awareness/consciousness' from 'merely intelligent'
registering, modelling and predicting, and how being aware of oneself (in the sense of modelling
oneself on a par with other entities) would not be both an inevitable result of intelligence and
a requirement for intelligent decisions. Somehow the absence of awareness was supposed to be proved
by the aliens' Chinese-Room style communication, but if the aliens were capable of understanding
the Terrestrials so incredibly well that they could predict their actions while fighting them,
they really should have been able to have a decent conversation with them as well.
The whole idea that we could learn everything unconsciously, so that consciousness was an impediment
to intelligence, was highly implausible, too. The idea that the aliens would perceive any irrelevant
information reaching them as a hostile act was absurd. The idea of a solitary and yet hyperintelligent
species (vampire) was also extremely dubious, in terms of comparative zoology – a glorification
of socially awkward nerddom?
All of this seemed like darkness for darkness' sake. I couldn't help getting the impression
that the author was allowing his hatred of humanity to override his reasoning.
In general, dark/grit chic is a terrible disease of Western pop culture.
"The real question of course is not when computers will develop consciousness but when they
will develop class consciousness."
This is right. There is nothing like recognizable consciousness without social discourse that
is its necessary condition. But that does't mean the discourse is value-balanced: it might be
a discourse that includes peers and perceived those deemed lesser, as humans have demonstrated
throughout history.
Just to say, Lem was often in Nobel talk, but never got there. That's a shame.
As happy a new year as our pre-soon-to-be-Trump era will allow.
I wonder how he'd classify German SF – neither Washington nor Moscow? Julie Zeh is explicitly,
almost obsessively, anti-utopian, while Dietmar Dath's Venus Siegt echoes Ken MacLeod in
exploring both the light and dark sides of a Communist Bund of humans, AIs and robots on Venus,
confronting an alliance of fascists and late capitalists based on Earth.
See also http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2903
It's a long talk, go to "Personal Identity" :
"we don't know at what level of granularity a brain would need to be simulated in order to duplicate
someone's subjective identity. Maybe you'd only need to go down to the level of neurons and synapses.
But if you needed to go all the way down to the molecular level, then the No-Cloning Theorem would
immediately throw a wrench into most of the paradoxes of personal identity that we discussed earlier."
George de Verges: "I would appreciate an explanation."
I too would like to read Henry's accounting! Difficult to keep it brief!
To me, Tarkovsky was making nonlinear meditations. The genres were incidental to his purpose.
It seems to me that a filmmaker with similar purpose is Terrence Malick. "The Thin Red Line" is
a successful example.
I think that Kubrick stumbled onto this audience effect with "2001". But this was blind and
accidental, done by almost mechanical means (paring the script down from around 300 pages of wordy
dialogue, or something like that). "2001" first failed at the box office, then found a repeat
midnight audience, who described the effect as nonverbal.
I think the belated box-office success blew Kubrick's own mind, because it looks like he spent
the rest of his career attempting to reproduce the effect, by long camera takes and slow deliberate
dialogue. It's interesting that among Kubrick's favorite filmmakers were Bresson, Antonioni, and
Saura. Spielberg mentions in an interview that Kubrick said that he was trying to "find new ways
to tell stories".
But drama needs linear thought, and linear thought is anti-meditation. Drama needs interpersonal
conflict - a dystopia, not utopia. (Unless you are writing the intra-personal genre of the "education"
plot. Which, in a way, is what "2001" really is.) Audiences want conflict, and it is difficult
to make that meditational. It's even more difficult in prose.
This thought led me to a question. Are there dystopic prose writers who succeed in sustaining
a nonlinear, meditational audience-effect?
Perhaps the answer will always be a subjective judgment? The big one who came to mind immediately
is Ray Bradbury. "There Will Come Soft Rains" and parts of "Martian Chronicles" seem Tarkovskian.
So next, I search for whether Tarkovsky spoke of Bradbury, and find this:
"Although it is commonly assumed - and he did little in his public utterances to refute this
- that Tarkovsky disliked and even despised science fiction, he in fact read quite a lot of it
and was particularly fond of Ray Bradbury (Artemyev and Rausch interviews)." - footnote in Johnson
& Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 301
The way you can substitute "identical twin" for "clone" and get a different perspective on clone
stories in SF, you can substitute "point of view" for "consciousness" in SF stories. Or Silicon
Valley daydreams, if that isn't redundant? The more literal you are, starting with the sensorium,
the better I think. A human being has binocular vision of a scene comprising less than 180 degrees
range from a mobile platform, accompanied by stereo hearing, proprioception, vestibular input,
the touch of air currents and some degree of sensitivity to some chemicals carried by those currents,
etc.
A computer might have, what? A single camera, or possibly a set of cameras which might be seeing
multiple scenes. Would that be like having eyes in the back of your head? It might have a microphone,
perhaps many, hearing many voices or maybe soundtracks at once. Would that be like listening to
everybody at the cocktail party all at once? Then there's the question of computer code inputs,
programming. What would parallel that? Visceral feelings like butterflies in the stomach or a
sinking heart? Or would they seem like a visitation from God, a mighty vision with thunder and
whispers on the wind? Would they just seem to be subvocalizations, posing as the computer's own
free thoughts? After all, shouldn't an imitation of human consciousness include the illusion of
free will? (If you believe in the reality of "free" will in human beings--what ever is free about
exercise of will power?-however could you give that to a computer? Or is this kind of question
why so many people repudiate the very thought of AI?)
It seems to me that creating an AI in a computer is very like trying to create a quadriplegic
baby with one eye and one ear. Diffidence at the difficulty is replaced by horror at the possibility
of success. I think the ultimate goal here is of course the wish to download your soul into a
machine that does not age. Good luck with that. On the other hand, an AI is likely the closest
we'll ever get to an alien intelligence, given interstellar distances.
F. Foundling: "the original reason why everything arose and currently exists is that somebody
somewhere was really, truly desperate to chew on a coconut If there are any alternative explanations "
This is Vedantist/Spencer-Brown metaphysics, the universe is originally split into perceiver
& perceived.
Very good.
Combined with Leibnitz/Whitehead metaphysics, the monad is a striving process.
I thoroughly agree.
Combined with Church of the Subgenius metaphysics: "The main problem with the universe is that
it doesn't have enough slack."
> if the aliens were capable of understanding the Terrestrials so incredibly well that they could
predict their actions while fighting them, they really should have been able to have a decent
conversation with them as well.
If you can predict all your opponents possible moves, and have a contingency for each, you
don't need to care which one they actually do pick. You don't need to know what it feels like
to be a ball to be able to catch it.
Ben 01.01.17 at 7:17 pm
Another Watts piece about the limits of technology, AI and humanity's inability to plan is
The Island
(PDF from Watts' website). Highly recommended.
F. Foundling,
Blindsight has an extensive appendix with cites detailing where Watts got the ideas he's playing
with, including the ones you bring up, and provides specific warrants for including them. A critique
of Watts' use of the ideas needs to be a little bit more granular.
The issue of what an AI would want is remarkably unremarked, pardon the oxymoron.
It will "want" to do whatever it's programmed to do. It took increasingly sophisticated machines
and software to dethrone humans as champions of checkers, chess, and go. It'll be another milestone
when humans are dethroned from no-limit Texas hold 'em poker (a notable game played without
perfect information). Machines are playing several historically interesting games at high
superhuman levels of ability; none of these milestones put machines any closer to running amok
in a way that Nick Bostrom or dramatists would consider worthy of extended treatment. Domain-specific
superintelligence arrived a long time ago. Artificial "general" intelligence, aka "Strong AI,"
aka "Do What I Mean AI (But OMG It Doesn't Do What I Mean!)" is, like, not a thing outside of
fiction and the Less Wrong community. (But I repeat myself.)
Bostrom's Superintelligence was not very good IMO. Of course a superpowered "mind upload"
copied from a real human brain might act against other people, just like non-superpowered humans
that you can read about in the news every day. The crucial question about the upload case is whether
uploads of this sort are actually possible: a question of biology, physics, scientific instruments,
and perhaps scientific simulations. Not a question of motivations. But he only superficially touches
on the crucial issues of feasibility. It's like an extended treatise on the dangers of time travel
that doesn't first make a good case that time machines are actually possible via plausible
engineering .
I don't think that designed AI has the same potential to run entertainingly amok as mind-upload-AI.
The "paperclip maximizer" has the same defect as a beginner's computer program containing a loop
with no terminating condition for the loop. In the cautionary tale case this beginner mistake
is, hypothetically, happening on a machine that is otherwise so capable and powerful that it can
wipe out humanity as an incidental to its paperclip-producing mission. The warning is wasted on
anyone who writes software and also wasted, for other reasons, on people who don't write software.
Bostrom shows a lot of ways for designed AI to run amok even when given bounded goals, but
it's a cheat. They follow from his cult-of-Bayes definition of an optimal AI agent as an approximation
to a perfect Bayesian agent. All the runnings-amok stem from the open ended Bayesian formulation
that permits - even compels - the Bayesian agent to do things that are facially irrelevant to
its goal and instead chase wild tangents. The object lesson is that "good Bayesians" make bad
agents, not that real AI is likely to run amok.
In actual AI research and implementation, Bayesian reasoning is just one more tool in the toolbox,
one chapter of the many-chapters AI textbook. So these warnings can't be aimed at actual AI practitioners,
who are already eschewing the open ended Bayes-all-the-things approach. They're also irrelevant
if aimed at non-practitioners. Non-practitioners are in no danger of leapfrogging the state of
the art and building a world-conquering AI by accident.
Plarry 01.03.17 at 5:45 am
It's an interesting talk, but the weakest point in it is his conclusion, as you point out. What
I draw from his conclusion is that Ceglowski hasn't actually experienced much American or British
SF.
There are great literary works pointed out in the thread so far, but even Star Trek
and Red Dwarf hit on those themes occasionally in TV, and there are a number of significant
examples in film, including "blockbusters" such as Blade Runner or The Abyss .
I made this point in the recent evopsych thread when it started approaching some more fundamental
philosophy-of-mind issues like Turing completeness and modularity, but any conversation about
AI and philosophy could really, really benefit more exposure to continental philosophy
if we want to say anything incisive about the presuppositions of AI and what the term "artificial
intelligence" could even mean in the first place. You don't even have to go digging through a
bunch of obscure French and German treatises to find the relevant arguments, either, because someone
well versed at explaining these issues to Anglophone non-continentals has already done it for
you: Hubert Dreyfus, who was teaching philosophy at MIT right around the time of AI's early triumphalist
phase that inspired much of this AI fanfic to begin with, and who became persona non grata in
certain crowds for all but declaring that the then-current approaches were a waste of time and
that they should all sit down with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. (In fact it seems obvious that
Ceglowski's allusion to alchemy is a nod to Dreyfus, one of whose first major splashes in the
'60s was with
a paper
called "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" .)
IMO
Dreyfus' more recent paper called "Why Heideggerian AI failed, and how fixing it would require
making it more Heideggerian" provides the best short intro to his perspective on the more-or-less
current state of AI research. What Ceglowski calls "pouring absolutely massive amounts of data
into relatively simple neural networks", Dreyfus would call an attempt to bring out the characteristic
of "being-in-the-world" by mimicking what for a human being we'd call "enculturation", which seems
to imply that Ceglowski's worry about connectionist AI research leading to more pressure toward
mass surveillance is misplaced. (Not that there aren't other worrisome social and political pressures
toward mass surveillance, of course!) The problem for modern AI isn't acquiring ever-greater mounds
of data, the problem is how to structure a neural network's cognitive development so it learns
to recognize significance and affordances for action within the patterns of data to which it's
already naturally exposed.
And yes, popular fiction about AI largely still seems stuck on issues that haven't been cutting-edge
since the old midcentury days of cognitivist triumphalism, like Turing tests and innate thought
modules and so on - which seems to me like a perfectly obvious result of the extent to which the
mechanistically rationalist philosophy Dreyfus criticizes in old-fashioned AI research is still
embedded in most lay scifi readers' worldviews. Even if actual scientists are increasingly attentive
to continental-inspired critiques, this hardly seems true for most laypeople who worship the
idea of science and technology enough to structure their cultural fantasies around it.
At least this seems to be the case for Anglophone culture, anyway; I'd definitely be interested
if there's any significant body of AI-related science fiction originally written in other languages,
especially French, German, or Spanish, that takes more of these issues into account.
WLGR 01.03.17 at 7:37 pm
And in trying to summarize Dreyfus, I exemplified one of the most fundamental mistakes he and
Heidegger would both criticize! Neither of them would ever call something like the training of
a neural network "an attempt to bring out the characteristic of being-in-the-world", because being-in-the-world
isn't a characteristic in the sense of any Cartesian ontology of substances with properties,
it's a way of being that a living cognitive agent (Heidegger's "Dasein") simply embodies.
In other words, there's never any Michelangelo moment where a creator reaches down or flips a
switch to imbue their artificial creation ex nihilo with some kind of divine spark of life or
intellect, a "characteristic" that two otherwise identical lumps of clay or circuitry can either
possess or not possess - whatever entity we call "alive" or "intelligent" is an entity that by
its very physical structure can enact this way of being as a constant dialectic between itself
and the surrounding conditions of its growth and development. The second we start trying to isolate
a single perceived property called "intelligence" or "cognition" from all other perceived properties
of a cognitive agent, we might as well call it the soul and locate it in the pineal gland.
@RichardM
> If you can predict all your opponents possible moves, and have a contingency for each, you don't
need to care which one they actually do pick. You don't need to know what it feels like to be
a ball to be able to catch it.
In the real world, there are too many physically possible moves, so it's too expensive to prepare
for each, and time constraints require you to make predictions. You do need to know how balls
(re)act in order to play ball. Humans being a bit more complex, trying to predict and/or influence
their actions without a theory of mind may work surprisingly well sometimes, but ultimately
has its limitations and will only get you this far, as animals have often found.
@Ben
> Blindsight has an extensive appendix with cites detailing where Watts got the ideas he's playing
with, including the ones you bring up, and provides specific warrants for including them. A critique
of Watts' use of the ideas needs to be a little bit more granular.
I did read his appendix, and no, some of the things I brought up were not, in fact, addressed
there at all, and for others I found his justifications unconvincing. However, having an epic
pro- vs. anti-Blindsight discussion here would feel too much like work: I wrote my opinion once
and I'll leave it at that.
stevenjohnson 01.03.17 at 8:57 pm Matt@43
So far as designing an AI to want what people want I am agnostic as to whether that goal is the
means to the goal of a general intelligence a la humanity it still seems to me brains have the
primary function of outputting regulations for the rest of the body, then altering the outputs
in response to the subsequent outcomes (which are identified by a multitude of inputs, starting
with oxygenated hemoglobin and blood glucose. I'm still not aware of what people say about the
subject of AI motivations, but if you say so, I'm not expert enough in the literature to argue.
Superintelligence on the part of systems expert in selected domains still seem to be of great
speculative interest. As to Bostrom and AI and Bayesian reasoning, I avoid Bayesianism because
I don't understand it. Bunge's observation that propositions aren't probabilities sort of messed
up my brain on that topic. Bayes' theorem I think I understand, even to the point I seem to recall
following a mathematical derivation.
WLGR@45, 46. I don't understand how continental philosophy will tell us what people want. It
still seems to me that a motive for thinking is essential, but my favored starting point for humans
is crassly biological. I suppose by your perspective I don't understand the question. As to the
lack of a Michaelangelo moment for intelligence, I certainly don't recall any from my infancy.
But perhaps there are people who can recall the womb
AI-related science fiction originally written in other languages
Tentatively, possibly Japanese anime. Serial Experiments Lain. Ghost in the Shell. Numerous
mecha-human melds. End of Evangelion.
The mashup of cybertech, animism, and Buddhism works toward merging rather than emergence.
Matt 01.04.17 at 1:21 am
Actually existing AI and leading-edge AI research are overwhelmingly
not about pursuing "general intelligence* a la humanity." They are about performing
tasks that have historically required what we historically considered to be human intelligence,
like winning board games or translating news articles from Japanese to English.
Actual AI systems don't resemble brains much more than forklifts resemble Olympic weightlifters.
Talking about the risks and philosophical implications of the intellectual equivalent of forklifts
- another wave of computerization - either lacks drama or requires far too much background preparation
for most people to appreciate the drama. So we get this stuff about superintelligence and existential
risk, like a philosopher wanted to write about public health but found it complicated and dry,
so he decided to warn how utility monsters could destroy the National Health Service. It's exciting
at the price of being silly. (And at the risk of other non-experts not realizing it's silly.)
(I'm not an honest-to-goodness AI expert, but I do at least write software for a living, I
took an intro to AI course during graduate school in the early 2000s, I keep up with research
news, and I have written parts of a production-quality machine learning system.)
*In fact I consider "general intelligence" to be an ill-formed goal, like "general beauty."
Beautiful architecture or beautiful show dogs? And beautiful according to which traditions?
Watson was actually a specialized system designed to win Jeopardy contest. Highly specialized.
Too much hype around AI, although hardware advanced make more things possible and speech
recognitions now is pretty decent.
Notable quotes:
"... I used to be supportive of things like welfare reform, but this is throwing up new challenges that will probably require new paradigms. Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population ..."
"... The problem I see with this is that white collar jobs have been replaced by technology for centuries, and at the same time, technology has enabled even more white collar jobs to exist than those that it replaced. ..."
"... For example, the word "computer" used to be universally referred to as a job title, whereas today it's universally referred to as a machine. ..."
"... It depends on the country, I think. I believe many countries, like Japan and Finland, will indeed go this route. However, here in the US, we are vehemently opposed to anything that can be branded as "socialism". So instead, society here will soon resemble "The Walking Dead". ..."
"... "Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources." -- Abba Eban ..."
"... Which is frequently misquoted as, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after they have exhausted all other possibilities." ..."
"... So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll surely find the resources to do the right thing. ..."
"... When you reduce the human labor participation rate relative to the overall population, what you get is deflation. That's an undeniable fact. ..."
"... But factor in governments around the world "borrowing" money via printing to pay welfare for all those unemployed. So now we have deflation coupled with inflation = stagflation. But stagflation doesn't last. At some point, the entire system - as we know it- will implode. What can not go on f ..."
"... Unions exist to protect jobs and employment. The Pacific Longshoremen's Union during the 1960's&70's was an aberration in the the union bosses didn't primarily look after maintaining their own power via maintaining a large number of jobs, but rather opted into profit sharing, protecting the current workers at the expense of future power. Usually a union can be depended upon to fight automation, rather than to seek maximization of public good ..."
"... Until something goes wrong. Who is going to pick that machine generated code apart? ..."
"... What automation? 1000 workers in US vs 2000 in Mexico for half the cost of those 1000 is not "automation." Same thing with your hand-assembled smartphone. ..."
"... Doctors spend more time with paper than with patients. Once the paper gets to the insurance company chances are good it doesn't go to the right person or just gets lost sending the patient back to the beginning of the maze. The more people removed from the chain the bet ..."
"... I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't. ..."
"... Seriously? Quite a bit actually. I can handle input streams that Watson can't. I can make tools Watson couldn't begin to imagine. I can interact with physical objects without vast amounts of programming. I can deal with humans in a meaningful and human way FAR better than any computer program. I can pass a Turing test. The number of things I can do that Watson cannot is literally too numerous to bother counting. Watson is really just an decision support system with a natural language interface. Ver ..."
"... It's not Parkinson's law, it's runaway inequality. The workforce continues to be more and more productive as it receives an unchanging or decreasing amount of compensation (in absolute terms - or an ever-decreasing share of the profits in relative terms), while the gains go to the 1%. ..."
Posted by msmash on Monday January 02, 2017 @12:00PM from the they-are-here dept.
Most
of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally
change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs.
But AI that can handle knowledge-based,
white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent.
The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to
a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered.
Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process
the final payout faster, the release says.
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either
produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring
more people. My current company has seen over 10x profit growth over the past five years with
a 20% increase in manpower. And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this
is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies. -[he is
lying -- NNB]
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in
the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50%
in 10 years.
I used to be supportive of things like welfare reform, but this is throwing up new challenges
that will probably require new paradigms. Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those
of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population
This then throws up the question of whether we should have a universal basic income. But one
potential positive trend of this would be an increase in time spent home w/ family, thereby reducing
the time kids spend in daycare and w/ both parents - n
But one potential positive trend of this would be an increase in time spent home w/ family,
thereby reducing the time kids spend in daycare
Great, so now more people can home school and indoctrinate - err teach - family values.
Anonymous Coward writes:
The GP is likely referring to the conservative Christian homeschooling movement who homeschool
their children explicitly to avoid exposing their children to a common culture. The "mixing pot"
of American culture may be mostly a myth, but some amount of interaction helps understanding and
increases the chance people will be able to think of themselves as part of a singular nation.
I believe in freedom of speech and association, so I do not favor legal remedies, but it is
a cultural problem that may have socia
No, I was not talking about homeschooling at all. I was talking about the fact that when kids
are out of school, they go to daycares, since both dad and mom are busy at work. Once most of
the jobs are automated so that it's difficult for anyone but geniuses to get jobs, parents might
spend that freed up time w/ their kids. It said nothing about homeschooling: not all parents would
have the skills to do that.
I'm all for a broad interaction b/w kids, but that's something that can happen at schools,
and d
Uh, why would Leftist parents indoctrinate w/ family values? They can teach their dear offspring
how to always be malcontents in the unattainable jihad for income equality. Or are you saying
that Leftist will all abort their foetii in an attempt to prevent climate change?
Have you ever had an original thought? Seriously, please be kidding, because you sound like
you are one step away from serial killing people you consider "leftist", and cremating them in
the back yard while laughing about relasing their Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.
My original comment was not about home schooling. It was about parents spending all time w/
their kids once kids are out of school - no daycares. That would include being involved w/ helping
their kids w/ both homework and extra curricular activities.
The problem I see with this is that white collar jobs have been replaced by technology for
centuries, and at the same time, technology has enabled even more white collar jobs to exist than
those that it replaced.
For example, the word "computer" used to be universally referred to as a job title, whereas
today it's universally referred to as a machine.
The problem is that AI is becoming faster at learning the new job opportunities than people
are, thereby gulping them before people even were there to be replaced. And this speed is growing.
You cannot beat an exponential growth with a linear one, or even with just slightly slower growing
exponential one.
I completely agree. Even jobs which a decade ago looked irreplaceable, like teachers, doctors
and nurses are possibly in the crosshairs. There are very few jobs that AI can't partially (or
in some cases completely) replace humans. Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming
decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.
Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?
Or is the gap between haves and have nots going to grow exponentially, even above today's growth
as those that own the companies and AI bots make ever increasing money and the poor suckers at
the bottom, given just enough money to consume the products that keep the owners in business.
Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash
and rise as we adapt.
Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?
It depends on the country, I think. I believe many countries, like Japan and Finland, will
indeed go this route. However, here in the US, we are vehemently opposed to anything that can be branded as "socialism".
So instead, society here will soon resemble "The Walking Dead".
I think even in the US it will hit a tipping point when it gets bad enough. When our consumer
society can't buy anything because they are all out of work, we will need to change our way of
thinking about this, or watch the economy completely collapse.
So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll
surely find the resources to do the right thing.
Yes, they'll use some of their wealth to hire and equip private armies to keep the starving
mob at bay because people would be very happy to take any escape from being in the starving mob.
Might be worth telling your kids that taking a job in the armed forces might be the best way
to ensure well paid future jobs because military training would be in greater demand.
What you're ignoring is that the military is becoming steadily more mechanized also. There
won't be many jobs there, either. Robots are more reliable and less likely to side with the protesters.
I'm going with the latter (complete economic collapse). There's no way, with the political
attitudes and beliefs present in our society, and our current political leaders, that we'd be
able to pivot fast enough to avoid it. Only small, homogenous nations like Finland (or Japan,
even though it's not that small, but it is homogenous) can pull that off because they don't have
all the infighting and diversity of political beliefs that we do, plus our religious notion of
"self reliance".
There are a few ways this plays out. How do we deal with this. One way is a basic income.
The other less articulated way, but is the basis for a lot of people's views is things simply
get cheaper. Deflation is good. You simply live on less. You work less. You earn less. But you
can afford the food, water... of life.
Now this is a hard transition in many places. There are loads of things that don't go well
with living on less and deflation. Debt, government services, pensions...
The main problem with this idea of "living on less" is that, even in the southern US, the rent
prices are very high these days because of the real estate bubble and property speculation and
foreign investment. The only place where property isn't expensive is in places where there are
really zero jobs at all.
All jobs that don't do R&D will be replaceable in the near future, as in within 1 or 2 generations.
Even R&D jobs will likely not be immune, since much R&D is really nothing more than testing a
basic hypothesis, of which most of the testing can likely be handed over to AI. The question is
what do you do with 24B people with nothing but spare time on their hands, and a smidgen of 1%
that actually will have all the wealth? It doesn't sound pretty, unless some serious changes in
the way we deal wit
Worse! Far worse!! Total collapse of the fiat currencies globally is imminent. When you reduce
the human labor participation rate relative to the overall population, what you get is deflation.
That's an undeniable fact.
But factor in governments around the world "borrowing" money via printing
to pay welfare for all those unemployed. So now we have deflation coupled with inflation = stagflation.
But stagflation doesn't last. At some point, the entire system - as we know it- will implode.
What can not go on f
I don't know what the right answer is, but it's not unions. Unions exist to protect jobs and
employment. The Pacific Longshoremen's Union during the 1960's&70's was an aberration in the the
union bosses didn't primarily look after maintaining their own power via maintaining a large number
of jobs, but rather opted into profit sharing, protecting the current workers at the expense of
future power. Usually a union can be depended upon to fight automation, rather than to seek maximization
of public good
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either
produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring
more people.
You're looking at the wrong scale. You need to look at the whole economy. Were those people
able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes. Might have taken
some of them a few months, but eventually they found something else.
My company just bought a machine
that allows us to manufacture wire leads much faster than we can do it by hand. That doesn't mean
that the workers we didn't employ to do that work couldn't find gainful employment elsewhere.
And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking
revenue and jobs from other companies.
Again, so what? You've automated some efficiency into an industry that obviously needed it.
Some workers will have to do something else. Same story we've been hearing for centuries. It's
the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality
in the near future.
Based on what? The fact that you can't imagine what people are going to do if they can't do
what they currently are doing? I'm old enough to predate the internet. The World Wide Web was
just becoming a thing while I was in college. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle,
etc all didn't even exist when I was born. Vast swaths of our economy hadn't even been conceived
of back then. 40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things
you never even imagined. Your argument is really just a failure of your own imagination. People
have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just
as nonsensical now as it was then.
I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.
Prepare to be surprised then. Your argument has no rational basis. You are extrapolating some
micro-trends in your company well beyond any rational justification.
Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes.
Oh, oh, I know this one! "New jobs being created in the past don't guarantee that new jobs
will be created in the future". This is the standard groupthink answer for waiving any responsibility
after advice given about the future, right?
People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and
it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.
I see this argument often when these type of discussions come up. It seems to me to be some
kind of logical fallacy to think that something new will not happen because it has not happened
in the past. It reminds me of the historical observation that generals are always fighting the
last war.
It seems to me to be some kind of logical fallacy to think that something new will not happen
because it has not happened in the past.
What about humans and their ability to problem solve and create and build has changed? The
reason I don't see any reason to worry about "robots" taking all our jobs is because NOTHING has
changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances. Nobody has been able to make
a coherent argument detailing why humans will not be able to continue to create new industries
and new technologies and new products in the future. I don't pretend to know what those new economies
will look like with any gre
You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last
war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts.
Actually yes it does. The history of the blitzkrieg is not one of France quickly adapting to
new technologies and strategies to repel the German invaders. It is of France's Maginot line being
mostly useless in the war and Germany capturing Paris with ease. Something neither side could
accomplish in over four years in the previous war was accomplished in around two months using
the new paradigm.
Will human participation in the workforce adapt to AI technologies in the next 50 years? Almost
certainly. Is it li
It's simple. Do you know how, once we applied human brain power over the problem of flying
we managed, in a matter of decades, to become better at flying than nature ever did in hundreds
of millions of years of natural selection? Well, what do you think will happen now that we're
focused on making AI better than brains? As in, better than any brains, including ours?
AI is catching up to human abilities. There's still a way to go, but breakthroughs are happening
all the time. And as with flying, it won't take
One can hope that your analogy with flying is correct. There are still many things that birds
do better than planes. Even so I consider that a conservative projection when given without a
time-line.
What about humans and their ability to problem solve and create and build has changed? The
reason I don't see any reason to worry about "robots" taking all our jobs is because NOTHING
has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances.
I had this discussion with a fellow a long time ago who was so conservative he didn't want
any regulations on pollutants. The Love Canal disaster wsa the topic. He said "no need to do anything,
because humans will adapt - its called evolution."
I answered - "Yes, we might adapt. But you realize that means 999 out of a 1000 of us will
die, and it's called evolution. Sometimes even 1000 out of 1000 die, that's called extinction."
This will be a different adaptation, but very well might be solved by most of
Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time,
your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because
now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy
is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic
economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population
precisely because there are so
It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried
about.
The buggy whip story shows that an entire species which had significant economic value for
thousands of years found that technology had finally reached a point where they weren't needed.
Instead of needing 20 million of them working in our economy in 1920, by 1960 there were only
about 4.5 million. While they were able to take advantage of the previous technological revolutions
and become even more useful because of better technology in the past, most horses could not survive
the invention of the automobile
Your question is incomplete. The correct question to ask is if these people were able to get
hired elsewhere *at the same salary when adjusted for inflation*. To that, the answer is no.
It
hasn't been true on average since the 70's. Sure, some people will find equal or better jobs,
but salaries have been steadily decreasing since the onset of technology. Given a job for less
money or no job, most people will pick the job for less; and that is why we are not seeing a large
change in the unemployment rate.
There is another effect. When the buggy whip manufacturers were put out of business, there
were options for people to switch to and new industries were created. However, if AI gets apply
across an entire economy, there won't be options because there is unemployment in every sector.
And if AI obviates the need for workers, investors in new industries will build them around bots,
so no real increase in employment. That and yer basic truck driver ain't going to be learning
how to program.
Agreed, companies will be designed around using as little human intervention as possible. First
they will use AI, then they will use cheap foreign labor, and only if those two options are completely
impractical will they use domestic labor. Any business plan that depends on more than a small
fraction of domestic labor (think Amazon's 1 minute of human handling per package) is likely to
be considered unable to compete. I hate the buggy whip analogy, because using foreign (cheap)
labor as freely as today w
Maybe the automation is a paradigm shift on par with the introduction of agriculture replacing
the hunter and gatherer way of living? Then, some hunter and gatherer were perhaps also making
a "luddite" arguments: "Nah, there will always be sufficient forrests/wildlife for everyone to
live on. No need to be afraid of the these agriculturites. We have been hunting and gathering
for millenia. That'll never change."
Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly
yes.
Actually, the answer is probably no.
Labor force participation
[tradingeconomics.com] rates have fallen steadily since about the
year 2000. Feminism caused the rate to rise from 58% (1963) to 67% (2000). Since then, it has
fallen to 63%. In other words, we've already lost almost half of what we gained from women entering
the workforce en masse. And the rate will only continue to fall in the future.
You must admit that *some* things are different. Conglomeratization may make it difficult to
create new jobs, as smaller businesses have trouble competing with the mammoths. Globalization
may send more jobs offshore until our standard of living has leveled off with the rest of the
world. It's not inconceivable that we'll end up with a much larger number of unemployed people,
with AI being a significant contributing factor. It's not a certainty, but neither is your scenario
of the status quo. Just because it
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality
in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even
50% in 10 years.
Then again, tell me of how companies are going to make money to service the stakeholders when
there are not people around wh ocan buy their highly profitable wares?
Now speaking of fairy tales, that one is much more magical than your full employment one.
This ain't rocket science. Economies are at base, an equation. You have producers on one side,
and consumers on the other. Ideally, they balance out, with extra rewards for the producers. Now
either side can cheat, such as if producers can move productio
Until Fortran was developed, humans used to write code telling the computer what to do. Since
the late 1950s, we've been writing a high-level description, then a computer program writes the
program that actually gets executed.
Nowadays, there's frequently a computer program, such as a browser, which accepts our high-level
description of the task and interprets it before generating more specific instructions for another
piece of software, an api library, which creates more specific instructions for another api
I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance
and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc. Now, just convince
the remaining working people that they want to pay for this from their taxes.
I suppose when we
hit 53% unemployed, we might be able to start winning popular elections, if the unemployed are
still allowed to vote then.
At least here in the US, that won't change anything. The unemployed will still happily vote
against anything that smacks of "socialism". It's a religion to us here. People here would rather
shoot themselves (and their family members) in the head than enroll in social services.
Remember, most of the US population is religious, and not only does this involve some "actual"
religion (usually Christianity), it also involves the "anti-socialism" religion. Now remember,
the defining feature of religion is a complete lack rationality, and believing in something with
zero supporting evidence, frequently despite enormous evidence to the contrary (as in the case
of young-earth creationism, something that a huge number of Americans believe in).
SInce this is very very similar to what my partner does, I feel like I'm a little qualified
to speak on the subject at hand.
Yeah, pattern matching should nail this - but pattern matching only works if the patterns are
reasonable/logical/consistent. Yes, I'm a little familiar with advanced pattern matching, filtering,
etc.
Here's the thing: doctors are crappy input sources. At least in the US medical system. And
in our system they are the ones that have to make diagnosis (in most cases). They are
inconsistent.
What automation? 1000 workers in US vs 2000 in Mexico for half the cost of those
1000 is not "automation." Same thing with your hand-assembled smartphone. I'd rather
have it be assembled by robots in the US with 100 human babysitters than hand-built in
China with by 1000 human drones.
I hope their data collection is better than it is in the US. Insurance company's systems can't
talk to the doctors systems. They are stuck with 1980s technology or sneaker net to get information
exchanged. Paper gets lost, forms don't match.
Doctors spend more time with paper than with patients.
Once the paper gets to the insurance company chances are good it doesn't go to the right person
or just gets lost sending the patient back to the beginning of the maze. The more people removed
from the chain the bet
You think this is anything but perfectly planned? Insurance companies prevaricate better than
anyone short of a Federal politician. 'Losing' a claim costs virtually nothing. Mishandling a
claim costs very little. Another form letter asking for more / the same information, ditto.
Computerizing the whole shebang gives yet another layer of potential delay ('the computer is
slow today' is a perennial favorite).
That said, in what strange world is insurance adjudication considered 'white collar'? In the
US a
Japan needs to automate as much as it can and robotize to survive with a workforce growing
old. Japan is facing this reality as well as many countries where labor isn't replaced at a sufficient
rate to keep up with the needs. Older people will need care some countries just cannot deliver
or afford.
Calm down everyone. This is just a continuation of productivity tools for accounting. Among
other things I'm a certified accountant. This is just the next step in automation of accounting
and it's a good thing. We used to do all our ledgers by hand. Now we all use software for that
and believe me you don't want to go back to the way it was.
Very little in accounting is actually
value added activity so it is desirable to automate as much of it as possible. If some people
lost their jobs doing that it's equivalent to how the PC replaced secretaries 30+ years ago. They
were doing a necessary task but one that added little or no value. Most of what accountants do
is just keeping track of what happened in a business and keeping the paperwork flowing where it
needs to go. This is EXACTLY what we should be automating whenever possible.
I'm sure there are going to be a lot folks loudly proclaiming how we are all doomed and that
there won't be any work for anyone left to do. Happens every time there is an advancement in automation
and yet every time they are wrong. Yes some people are going to struggle in the short run. That
happens with every technological advancement. Eventually they find other useful and valuable things
to do and the world moves on. It will be fine.
I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't. Accounting is a very rigidly structured
practice. All IBM really needs to do is let Watson sift through the books of a couple hundred
companies and it will easily determine how to best achieve a defined set of objectives for a corporation.
I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't.
Seriously? Quite a bit actually. I can handle input streams that Watson can't. I can make tools
Watson couldn't begin to imagine. I can interact with physical objects without vast amounts of
programming. I can deal with humans in a meaningful and human way FAR better than any computer
program. I can pass a Turing test. The number of things I can do that Watson cannot is literally
too numerous to bother counting. Watson is really just an decision support system with a natural
language interface. Ver
Yep! I don't even work in Accounting or Finance, but because I do computer support for that
department and have to get slightly involved in the bill coding side of the process -- I agree
completely.
I'm pretty sure that even if you *could* get a computer to do everything for Accounting automatically,
people would constantly become frustrated with parts of the resulting process -- from reports
requested by management not having the formatting or items desired on them, to inflexibility getting
an item charged
You think the 12$ hr staff at a doctors office code and invoice bills correctly? The blame
goes both ways. Really our ridiculous and convoluted medical system is to blame. Imagine if doctors
billed on a time basis like a lawyer.
When you have people basically implementing a process without much understanding, it is pretty
easy to automatize their jobs away. The only thing Watson is contribution is the translation from
natural language to a more formalized one. No actual intelligence needed.
Computers/automation/robotics have been replacing workers of all stripes including white collar
workers since the ATM was introduced in 1967. Every place I have ever worked has had internal
and external software that replaces white collar workers (where you used to need 10 people now
you need 2).
The reality is that the economy is limited by a scarcity of labor when government doesn't interfere
(the economy is essentially the sum of every worker work multiplied by their efficiency as valued
by the economy i
Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers. He's going to start by replacing
computers with human couriers for the secure-messaging market, and move outward from there. By
2020 we should have most of the Internet replaced by the (now greatly expanded) Post Office.
At least, as long as banks keep writing the software they do.
My bank's records of my purchases isn't updating today. This is one of the biggest banks in
Canada. Transactions don't update properly over the weekends or holidays. Why? Who knows? Why
has bank software EVER cared about weekends? What do business days matter to computers? And yet
here we are. There's no monkey to turn the crank on a holiday, so I can't confirm my account activity.
Dude. Stop it. I've read 18th C laissez-faire writers (de Gournay) Bastiat, the Austrian School
(Carl Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, von Mises, Hayek), Rothbard, Milton Friedman. Free Market is opposed
to corporatism, You might hate Ayn Rand but she skewered corporatists as much as she did socialists.
You should read some of these people. You'll see that they are opposed to corporatism. Don't get
your information from opponents who create straw men and then, so skillfully, defeat their opponent's
arguments.
Corporatism is the use of government pull to advance your business. The use of law and the
police power of the state to aide your business against anothers. This used to be called "mercantilism."
Free market capitalism is opposed to this; the removal of power of pull.
Read Bastiat, Carl Menger, von Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman. You'll see them all referring
to the government as an agent which helps one set of businesses over another. Government may give
loans, bailouts, etc... Free market people are against this. Corporatism /= Free Market. Don't only get your information from those who hate individualism and free
markets - read (or in Milton Friedman's case listen) to their arguments. You may disagree with
them but you'll see well regarded individuals who say that
When a business get's government to give it special favors (Soyndra) or to give it tax breaks
or a monopoly this is corporatism. It used to be called mercantilism. In either case free - market
capitalists stand in opposition to it. This is exactly what "laissez-faire" capitalism means:
leave us alone, don't play favorites, stay away.
How do these people participate in a free market without setting up corporations? Have
you ever bought anything from a farmers' market? Have you ever hired a plumber d/b/a himself rather
than working for Plumbers-R-Us? Have you ever bought a used car directly from a private seller?
Do you have a 401k/403b/457/TSP/IRA? Have you ever used eBay? Have you ever traded your labor
for a paycheck (aka "worked") without hiding behind an intermediate shell-corp? The freeness of
a market has nothing to do wit
Okay, so you're just still pissing and moaning over Trump's win and have no actual point. That's
fine, but you should take care not to make it sound too much like you actually have something
meaningful to say.
I'll say something meaningful when you can point out which one of Trump's cabinet made their
wealth on a farmer's market and without being affiliated with a corporation.
No. They don't. But, for the moment, it looks as if Andy Puzder (Sec of Labor) and Mick Mulvaney
(OMB) are fairly good free market people. We'll see. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has made some
free-market comments. (Again, we'll see.) Sec of Ed looks like she wants to break up an entrenched
bureaucracy - might even work to remove Federal involvement. (Wishful thinking on my part) HUD
- I'm hopeful that Ben Carson was hired to break up this ridiculous bureaucracy. If not, at least
pare it down. Now, if
"Watson" is a marketing term from IBM, covering a lot of standard automation. It isn't the
machine that won at Jeopardy (although that is included in the marketing term, if someone wants
to pay for it). IBM tells managers, "We will have our amazing Watson technology solve this problem
for you." The managers feel happy. Then IBM has some outsourced programmers code up a workflow
app, with recurring annual subscription payments.
It doesn't matter. AI works best when there's a human in the loop, piloting the controls anyway.
What matters to a company is that 1 person + bots can now make the job that previously required
hundreds of white collar workers, for much less salary. What happens to the other workers should
not be a concern of the company managers, according to the modern religious creed - apparently
some magical market hand takes care to solve that problem automatically.
Pretty much. US companies already use claims processing systems that use previous data to evaluate
a current claim and spit out a number. Younger computer literate adjusters just feed the machine
and push a button.
universities downsize not with unlimited loans! (usa only) need retraining you can get an loan
and you may need to go for 2-4 years and (some credits maybe to old and you have to retake classes)
It's not Parkinson's law, it's runaway inequality. The workforce continues to be more and more
productive as it receives an unchanging or decreasing amount of compensation (in absolute terms
- or an ever-decreasing share of the profits in relative terms), while the gains go to the 1%.
Martin Sklar's disaccumultion thesis * is a restatement and reinterpretation of passages in Marx's
Grundrisse that have come to be known as the "fragment on machines." Compare, for example, the following
two key excerpts.
Marx:
...to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend
less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set
in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion
to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of
science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. ...
Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the
human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What
holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development
of human intercourse.)
Sklar:
In consequence [of the passage from the accumulation phase of capitalism to the "disaccumlation"
phase], and increasingly, human labor (i.e. the exercise of living labor-power) recedes from the
condition of serving as a 'factor' of goods production, and by the same token, the mode of goods-production
progressively undergoes reversion to a condition comparable to a gratuitous 'force of nature':
energy, harnessed and directed through technically sophisticated machinery, produces goods, as
trees produce fruit, without the involvement of, or need for, human labor-time in the immediate
production process itself. Living labor-power in goods-production devolves upon the quantitatively
declining role of watching, regulating, and superintending.
The main difference between the two arguments is that for Marx, the growing contradiction between
the forces of production and the social relations produce "the material conditions to blow this
foundation sky-high." For Sklar, with the benefit of another century of observation, disaccumulation
appears as simply another phase in the evolution of capitalism -- albeit with revolutionary potential.
But also with reactionary potential in that the reduced dependence on labor power also suggests
a reduced vulnerability to the withholding of labor power.
Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday December
06, 2016 @07:05PM from the muscle-memory dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org:
Scientists have
developed a mind-controlled robotic hand
that allows people with certain types of spinal injuries
to perform everyday tasks such as using a fork or drinking from a cup. The low-cost device was tested
in Spain on six people with quadriplegia affecting their ability to grasp or manipulate objects.
By wearing a cap that measures electric brain activity and eye movement the users were able to send
signals to a tablet computer that controlled the glove-like device attached to their hand. Participants
in the small-scale study were able to perform daily activities better with the robotic hand than
without, according to results
published Tuesday in
the journal Science Robotics .
It took participants just 10 minutes to learn how to use the system
before they were able to carry out tasks such as picking up potato chips or signing a document. According
to Surjo R. Soekadar, a neuroscientist at the University Hospital Tuebingen in Germany and lead author
of the study, participants represented typical people with high spinal cord injuries, meaning they
were able to move their shoulders but not their fingers. There were some limitations to the system,
though. Users had to have sufficient function in their shoulder and arm to reach out with the robotic
hand. And mounting the system required another person's help.
An autonomous
shuttle from Auro Robotics is
picking up and dropping off students, faculty, and visitors
at the Santa Clara University Campus
seven days a week. It doesn't go fast, but it has to watch out for pedestrians, skateboarders, bicyclists,
and bold squirrels (engineers added a special squirrel lidar on the bumper). An Auro engineer rides
along at this point to keep the university happy, but soon will be replaced by a big red emergency
stop button (think Staples Easy button). If you want a test drive, just look for a "shuttle stop"
sign (there's one in front of the parking garage) and climb on, it doesn't ask for university ID.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept
with a robot that can supposedly
flip hundreds of burgers an hour
, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started
listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where
no human interaction is necessary, which has locations
popping up across California .
(businessinsider.co.id)
83 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday December 11, 2016 @09:34PM from the damn-it-Jim-I'm-a-doctor-not-a-supercomputer
dept.
"Supercomputing has another use," writes Slashdot reader
rmdingler , sharing a story that
quotes David Kenny, the General Manager of IBM Watson:
"There's a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed
with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran
her genomic sequence through Watson and
it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing . Actually, she had two strains
of leukemia. They did treat her and she is healthy."
"That's one example. Statistically, we're seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is
proposing an additional diagnosis."
"... Skype Translator, available in nine languages, uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep-learning to train artificial neural networks and convert spoken chats in almost real time. The company says the app improves as it listens to more conversations. ..."
Posted by msmash on Monday December 12, 2016 @11:05AM from the worthwhile dept.
Microsoft has added the ability to use Skype Translator on calls to mobiles and landlines to its
latest Skype Preview app. From a report on ZDNet: Up until now, Skype Translator was available
to individuals making Skype-to-Skype calls. The new announcement of the expansion of Skype Translator
to mobiles and landlines
makes Skype Translator more widely available .
To test drive this, users need to be members
of the Windows Insider Program. They need to install the latest version of Skype Preview on their
Windows 10 PCs and to have Skype Credits or a subscription.
Skype Translator, available in
nine languages, uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep-learning to train artificial
neural networks and convert spoken chats in almost real time. The company says the app improves
as it listens to more conversations.
Fund
more research in robotics and artificial intelligence in order for the U.S. to
maintain its leadership in the global technology industry. The report calls on
the government to steer that research to support a diverse workforce and to
focus on combating algorithmic bias in AI.
Invest in and increase STEM education for youth and job retraining for
adults in technology-related fields. That means offering computer science
education for all K-12 students, as well as expanding national workforce
retraining by investing six times the current amount spent to keep American
workers competitive in a global economy.
Modernize and strengthen the federal social safety net, including public
health care, unemployment insurance, welfare and food stamps. The report also
calls for increasing the minimum wage, paying workers overtime and and
strengthening unions and worker bargaining power.
The report says the government, meaning the the incoming Trump administration,
will have to forge ahead with new policies and grapple with the complexities of
existing social services to protect the millions of Americans who face
displacement by advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence.
The report also calls on the government to keep a close eye on fostering
competition in the AI industry, since the companies with the most data will be
able to create the most advanced products, effectively preventing new startups
from having a chance to even compete.
Back in April, Stanford University professor
Oussama Khatib led
a team of researchers on an underwater archaeological expedition, 30 kilometers off the southern
coast of France, to La Lune , King Louis XIV's sunken 17th-century flagship. Rather than
dive to the site of the wreck 100 meters below the surface, which is a very bad idea for almost
everyone, Khatib's team
brought along a custom-made humanoid submarine robot called Ocean One . In this month's issue
of
IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine , the Stanford researchers describe in detail
how they designed and built the robot , a hybrid between a humanoid and an underwater remotely
operated vehicle (ROV), and also how they managed to send it down to the resting place of
La Lune , where it used its three-fingered hands to retrieve a vase. Most ocean-ready ROVs
are boxy little submarines that might have an arm on them if you're lucky, but they're not really
designed for the kind of fine manipulation that underwater archaeology demands. You could send
down a human diver instead, but once you get past about 40 meters, things start to get both complicated
and dangerous. Ocean One's humanoid design means that it's easy and intuitive for a human to remotely
perform delicate archeological tasks through a telepresence interface.
schwit1 notes: "Ocean One is the best name they could come up with?"
Posted by msmash on Friday November 25, 2016 @12:10AM from the interesting-things dept.
BBC has a report today in which, citing several financial institutions and analysts, it claims that
in the not-too-distant future, our fields could be tilled, sown, tended and harvested entirely by
fleets of co-operating autonomous machines by land and air. An excerpt from the article:
Driverless
tractors that can follow pre-programmed routes are already being deployed at large farms around the
world. Drones are buzzing over fields assessing crop health and soil conditions. Ground sensors are
monitoring the amount of water and nutrients in the soil, triggering irrigation and fertilizer applications.
And in Japan, the world's first entirely automated lettuce farm is due for launch next year.
The future of farming is automated
. The World Bank says we'll need to produce 50% more food by 2050 if the global population continues
to rise at its current pace. But the effects of climate change could see crop yields falling by more
than a quarter. So autonomous tractors, ground-based sensors, flying drones and enclosed hydroponic
farms could all help farmers produce more food, more sustainably at lower cost.
The truck "will travel in regular traffic, and a driver in the truck will be positioned to
intervene should anything go awry, Department of Transportation spokesman Matt Bruning said Friday,
adding that 'safety is obviously No. 1.'"
Ohio sees this route as "a corridor where new technologies can be safely tested in real-life traffic,
aided by a fiber-optic cable network and sensor systems slated for installation next year" -- although
next week the truck will also start driving on the Ohio Turnpike.
Posted by BeauHD on Friday December 02,
2016 @05:00PM from the be-afraid-very-afraid dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider:
In
a column in The Guardian , the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories
has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the
rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle
classes , with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his
voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on
workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will
bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into
unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines.
Automation will, "in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the
world," Hawking wrote. "The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small
groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable,
it is progress, but it is also socially destructive." He frames this economic anxiety as a reason
for the rise in right-wing, populist politics in the West: "We are living in a world of widening,
not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of
living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they
are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent." Combined
with other issues -- overpopulation, climate change, disease -- we are, Hawking warns ominously,
at "the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity." Humanity must come together if
we are to overcome these challenges, he says.
"... The firm says that 44 percent of the CEOs surveyed agreed that robotics, automation and AI would reshape the future of many work places by making people "largely irrelevant." ..."
Posted by msmash on Monday December 05, 2016 @02:20PM from the shape-of-things-to-come
dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report on BetaNews:
Although artificial intelligence (AI),
robotics and other emerging technologies may reshape the world as we know it, a new global study
has revealed that the
many
CEOs now value technology over people when it comes to the future of their businesses . The study
was conducted by the Los Angeles-based management consultant firm Korn Ferry that interviewed 800
business leaders across a variety of multi-million and multi-billion dollar global organizations.
The firm says that 44 percent of the CEOs surveyed agreed that robotics, automation and AI would
reshape the future of many work places by making people "largely irrelevant."
The global managing
director of solutions at Korn Ferry Jean-Marc Laouchez explains why many CEOs have adopted this controversial
mindset, saying:
"Leaders may be facing what experts call a tangibility bias. Facing uncertainty,
they are putting priority in their thinking, planning and execution on the tangible -- what they
can see, touch and measure, such as technology instruments."
Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday
December 06, 2016 @10:30PM from the what-to-expect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from
The Verge:
Microsoft
polled 17 women working in its research organization about the technology advances they expect to
see in 2017 , as well as a decade later in 2027. The researchers' predictions touch on natural
language processing, machine learning, agricultural software, and virtual reality, among other topics.
For virtual reality,
Mar Gonzalez Franco
, a researcher in Microsoft's Redmond lab, believes body tracking will improve
next year, and then over the next decade we'll have "rich multi-sensorial experiences that will be
capable of producing hallucinations which blend or alter perceives reality."
Haptic devices will
simulate touch to further enhance the sensory experience. Meanwhile,
Susan Dumais
, a scientist and deputy managing director at the Redmond lab, believes deep learning
will help improve web search results next year.
In 2027, however, the search box will disappear,
she says.
It'll be replaced by search that's more "ubiquitous, embedded, and contextually sensitive."
She says we're already seeing some of this in voice-controlled searches through mobile and smart
home devices.
We might eventually be able to look things up with either sound, images, or video.
Plus, our searches will respond to "current location, content, entities, and activities" without
us explicitly mentioning them, she says.
Of course, it's worth noting that Microsoft has been losing
the search box war to Google, so it isn't surprising that the company thinks search will die. With
global warming as a looming threat,
Asta Roseway
, principal research designer, says by 2027 famers will use AI to maintain healthy
crop yields, even with "climate change, drought, and disaster."
Low-energy farming solutions, like
vertical farming and aquaponics, will also be essential to keeping the food supply high, she says. You can view all 17 predictions
here
"... Efforts which led to impoverishment of lower 80% the USA population with a large part of the US population living in a third world country. This "third world country" includes Wal-Mart and other retail employees, those who have McJobs in food sector, contractors, especially such as Uber "contractors", Amazon packers. This is a real third world country within the USA and probably 50% population living in it. ..."
"... While conversion of electricity supply from coal to wind and solar was more or less successful (much less then optimists claim, because it requires building of buffer gas powered plants and East-West high voltage transmission lines), the scarcity of oil is probably within the lifespan of boomers. Let's say within the next 20 years. That spells deep trouble to economic growth as we know it, even with all those machinations and number racket that now is called GDP (gambling now is a part of GDP). And in worst case might spell troubles to capitalism as social system, to say nothing about neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. The latter (as well as dollar hegemony) is under considerable stress even now. But here "doomers" were wrong so often in the past, that there might be chance that this is not inevitable. ..."
"... Shale gas production in the USA is unsustainable even more then shale oil production. So the question is not if it declines, but when. The future decline (might be even Seneca Cliff decline) is beyond reasonable doubt. ..."
"What is good for wall st. is good for America". The remains of the late 19th century anti
trust/regulation momentum are democrat farmer labor wing in Minnesota, if it still exists. An
example: how farmers organized to keep railroads in their place. Today populists are called deplorable,
before they ever get going.
And US' "libruls" are corporatist war mongers.
Used to be the deplorable would be the libruls!
Division!
likbez -> pgl...
I browsed it and see more of less typical pro-neoliberal sentiments, despite some critique
of neoliberalism at the end.
This guy does not understand history and does not want to understand. He propagates or invents
historic myths. One thing that he really does not understand is how WWI and WWII propelled the
USA at the expense of Europe. He also does not understand why New Deal was adopted and why the
existence of the USSR was the key to "reasonable" (as in "not self-destructive" ) behaviour of
the US elite till late 70th. And how promptly the US elite changed to self-destructive habits
after 1991. In a way he is a preacher not a scientist. So is probably not second rate, but third
rate thinker in this area.
While Trump_vs_deep_state (aka "bastard neoliberalism") might not be an answer to challenges the USA is
facing, it is definitely a sign that "this time is different" and at least part of the US elite
realized that it is too dangerous to kick the can down the road. That's why Bush and Clinton political
clans were sidelined this time.
There are powerful factors that make the US economic position somewhat fragile and while Trump
is a very questionable answer to the challenges the USA society faces, unlike Hillary he might
be more reasonable in his foreign policy abandoning efforts to expand global neoliberal empire
led by the USA.
Efforts which led to impoverishment of lower 80% the USA population with a large part of
the US population living in a third world country. This "third world country" includes Wal-Mart
and other retail employees, those who have McJobs in food sector, contractors, especially such
as Uber "contractors", Amazon packers. This is a real third world country within the USA and probably
50% population living in it.
Add to this the decline of the US infrastructure due to overstretch of imperial building efforts
(which reminds British empire troubles).
I see several factors that IMHO make the current situation dangerous and unsustainable, Trump
or no Trump:
1. Rapid growth of population. The US population doubled in less them 70 years. Currently
at 318 million, the USA is the third most populous country on earth. That spells troubles for
democracy and ecology, to name just two. That might also catalyze separatists movements with two
already present (Alaska and Texas).
2. Plato oil. While conversion of electricity supply from coal to wind and solar
was more or less successful (much less then optimists claim, because it requires building of buffer
gas powered plants and East-West high voltage transmission lines), the scarcity of oil is probably
within the lifespan of boomers. Let's say within the next 20 years. That spells deep trouble to
economic growth as we know it, even with all those machinations and number racket that now is
called GDP (gambling now is a part of GDP). And in worst case might spell troubles to capitalism
as social system, to say nothing about neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. The latter
(as well as dollar hegemony) is under considerable stress even now. But here "doomers" were wrong
so often in the past, that there might be chance that this is not inevitable.
3. Shale gas production in the USA is unsustainable even more then shale oil production.
So the question is not if it declines, but when. The future decline (might be even Seneca
Cliff decline) is beyond reasonable doubt.
4. Growth of automation endangers the remaining jobs, even jobs in service sector .
Cashiers and waiters are now on the firing line. Wall Mart, Shop Rite, etc, are already using
automatic cashiers machines in some stores. Wall-Mart also uses automatic machines in back office
eliminating staff in "cash office".
Waiters might be more difficult task but orders and checkouts are computerized in many restaurants.
So the function is reduced to bringing food. So much for the last refuge of recent college graduates.
The successes in speech recognition are such that Microsoft now provides on the fly translation
in Skype. There are also instances of successful use of computer in medical diagnostics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_diagnosis
IT will continue to be outsourced as profits are way too big for anything to stop this trend.
"... Companies can now test self-driving cars on Michigan public roads without a driver or steering wheel under new laws that could push the state to the forefront of autonomous vehicle development. ..."
Posted by msmash on Friday December 09, 2016 @01:00PM from the it's-coming dept.
Companies
can now test self-driving cars on Michigan public roads without a driver or steering wheel under
new laws that could push the state to the forefront of autonomous vehicle development.
From a report
on ABC:
The package of bills signed into law Friday comes with few specific state regulations
and leaves many decisions up to automakers and companies like Google and Uber. It also allows automakers
and tech companies to run autonomous taxi services and
permits test parades of self-driving tractor-trailers as long as humans are in each truck
. And
they allow the sale of self-driving vehicles to the public once they are tested and certified, according
to the state. The bills allow testing without burdensome regulations so the industry can move forward
with potential life-saving technology, said Gov. Rick Snyder, who was to sign the bills. "It makes
Michigan a place where particularly for the auto industry it's a good place to do work," he said.
DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for $400 million in 2014, announced
on Monday that it is open-sourcing its "Lab" from this week onwards so that others can try and make
advances in the notoriously complex field of AI.
The company says that the DeepMind Lab, which it
has been using internally for some time, is a 3D game-like platform tailored for agent-based AI research.
[...]
The DeepMind Lab aims to combine several different AI research areas into one environment.
Researchers will be able to test their AI agent's abilities on navigation, memory, and 3D vision,
while determining how good they are at planning and strategy.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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