Science, Technology & Health: October 2011 Archives
As technology continues to improve, more and more people will be permanently displaced from the workforce and will be unable to contribute meaningfully to the economy. In January I first wrote about the relationship between unemployment and technology.
As technology continues to improve, more and more workers will be displaced by automated systems. Manufacturing won't be the only sector affected: how many tax preparation jobs have been eliminated by TurboTax? Sales jobs by Amazon?Using intelligence as a proxy for a person's general capability to contribute to the economy, we would expect that as technology improves the people who will be affected first will be those who are working jobs that require the least capability. Let's call the red line the displacement line: it represents the minimum amount of capability a person must have in order to be able to do a job that cannot be done by an automated system.
Economic indicators validate my prediction.
Since the end of the recession in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.Corporations are doing fine. The companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are expected to report record profits this year, a total $927 billion, estimates FactSet Research. And the authors point out that corporate profit as a share of the economy is at a 50-year high.
Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count, the first time that has happened over a decade since the Depression.
This employment shift will not be smooth and continuous -- employment numbers may rebound for a while -- but the shift is inexorable. Those with capital (the shareholders of the corporations who own the technology) will continue earning, but those who depend on the value of their labor to survive will be slowly squeezed.
If the trend continues it will necessarily lead to either a giant social-welfare apparatus supported by the machines and the few who control them, or civilization will collapse. Or maybe both!
Wow: if this doesn't touch your heart then you have no soul. Mother forgoes cancer treatment to save unborn child.
She sent 159 text messages about her pregnancy to her brother in the months that followed. Many were joyful but then the bone-chilling messages came in during the predawn hours. She said severe headaches and double vision tortured her while tremors wracked her entire body."I'm worried about this baby," she texted.
"I hope I live long enough to have this baby," said another message. "Bubba, if anything happens to me, you take this child." ...
At her family's encouragement, she visited a number of doctors. In July, a CT scan revealed that she had head and neck cancer.
Now she had to choose between her life and her baby's life. Phillips said she agonized only for a while before deciding against taking potentially lifesaving chemotherapy in hopes that she would soon hold a healthy baby in her arms.
Read the rest.
(HT: Townhall.)
Rant from a Googler about how Google fails at platforms.
A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me. ...
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.
Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.
It's nice to hear that Google has some weaknesses as a company! I've always been shocked that I can't write apps that interface with Google products as I've so easily done for Facebook.
Victor Davis Hanson nails modern environmentalism.
Solyndra and Van Jones are the metaphors of these times, reminding us of the corruption of the very notion of "green." In the age of Al Gore, it has eroded from a once noble ideal of conservation to a tawdry profit- and job-scam for assorted hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. Without the lofty hype and shake-down, most otherwise would have had to find productive jobs. Tragically, "green" is the new refuge of scoundrels.
It's sad that environmentalists have done so much to ruin and discredit the cause by turning it into a scheme to enrich themselves and empower socialism and fascism.
