Yes, I think what pretty much everybody agrees on is that we simply don’t know what is going to happen, that we have different versions of educated guesses.
I think, actually, where I disagree, I think there’s a lot of arrogance of prediction, a lot of arrogant prediction we won’t solve this problem, that we will not think of things for people to do. That’s certainly what you get from Martin Ford’s book The Rise of the Robots. That’s what you get from Frey and Osborne about the 47% of jobs that will be displaced. It’s basically a very bold prediction on the failure of human ingenuity and creativity to think of new things for people to do, and I would never make such a bet against humanity.
On the other hand, it’s also inaccurate to say that “It’s never been a problem before; therefore, it won’t be a problem this time.” Technological change has always been disruptive, it’s always created winners and losers, and this time could be worse or better than other times.
Let me say I’m much less pessimistic than many. I’ll tell you one reason, actually, that I think is underestimated or underemphasised in this discussion is that the rate of change matters as well. It’s not just where we’re going, it’s how fast we get there, because we can only adapt so rapidly.
If we knew, if we read today in The Guardian or The Wall Street Journal that 15 years from now no-one will be driving vehicles anymore because they’ll all be done by machinery, you’d say, “That’s good, but it’s going to create some challenges. We’d better stop training people to be lorry drivers and get them ready for other occupations,” but we could deal with that.
If it was announced that coming next Monday no-one will be driving vehicles, that would be a much bigger problem – not that it wouldn’t have the same economic benefits of safer, cheaper transportation, but we would have a lot of displaced workers to contend with.
It matters how fast things are changing, not just where they’re eventually going to go, and the evidence is not strong that they are changing extremely rapidly, in fact. The productivity statistics don’t show it, the investment statistics don’t show it. I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm and certainly there is no question that progress is occurring, but the sort of singularity thinking that we’re approaching this singularity – you can see it where just the rate of change is accelerating; it’s all Moore’s Law and stuff – that’s just not serious. There’s no serious data that support it.
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Because there are ethical, legal, power obstacles of actually implementing this.
Also, you have to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative change. My computer can run Microsoft Word 1,000 times faster than my computer could 20 years ago, but it doesn’t make it 1,000 times more productive; maybe it’s 20% more productive. The point is there’s this false equivalence drawn between computing processor cycles and productivity or output, and it’s really diminishing marginal returns.
To give you an example of this, I was at a conference and an executive from McKinsey got up and said, “Your washing machine today has more processing power than the entire Apollo moon project.” He meant this to demonstrate the great rate of change and the fantastic progress, and to me that just said, “Diminishing marginal returns.” My washing machine is not going to the moon.
- More Here
I think, actually, where I disagree, I think there’s a lot of arrogance of prediction, a lot of arrogant prediction we won’t solve this problem, that we will not think of things for people to do. That’s certainly what you get from Martin Ford’s book The Rise of the Robots. That’s what you get from Frey and Osborne about the 47% of jobs that will be displaced. It’s basically a very bold prediction on the failure of human ingenuity and creativity to think of new things for people to do, and I would never make such a bet against humanity.
On the other hand, it’s also inaccurate to say that “It’s never been a problem before; therefore, it won’t be a problem this time.” Technological change has always been disruptive, it’s always created winners and losers, and this time could be worse or better than other times.
Let me say I’m much less pessimistic than many. I’ll tell you one reason, actually, that I think is underestimated or underemphasised in this discussion is that the rate of change matters as well. It’s not just where we’re going, it’s how fast we get there, because we can only adapt so rapidly.
If we knew, if we read today in The Guardian or The Wall Street Journal that 15 years from now no-one will be driving vehicles anymore because they’ll all be done by machinery, you’d say, “That’s good, but it’s going to create some challenges. We’d better stop training people to be lorry drivers and get them ready for other occupations,” but we could deal with that.
If it was announced that coming next Monday no-one will be driving vehicles, that would be a much bigger problem – not that it wouldn’t have the same economic benefits of safer, cheaper transportation, but we would have a lot of displaced workers to contend with.
It matters how fast things are changing, not just where they’re eventually going to go, and the evidence is not strong that they are changing extremely rapidly, in fact. The productivity statistics don’t show it, the investment statistics don’t show it. I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm and certainly there is no question that progress is occurring, but the sort of singularity thinking that we’re approaching this singularity – you can see it where just the rate of change is accelerating; it’s all Moore’s Law and stuff – that’s just not serious. There’s no serious data that support it.
[---]
Because there are ethical, legal, power obstacles of actually implementing this.
Also, you have to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative change. My computer can run Microsoft Word 1,000 times faster than my computer could 20 years ago, but it doesn’t make it 1,000 times more productive; maybe it’s 20% more productive. The point is there’s this false equivalence drawn between computing processor cycles and productivity or output, and it’s really diminishing marginal returns.
To give you an example of this, I was at a conference and an executive from McKinsey got up and said, “Your washing machine today has more processing power than the entire Apollo moon project.” He meant this to demonstrate the great rate of change and the fantastic progress, and to me that just said, “Diminishing marginal returns.” My washing machine is not going to the moon.
- More Here
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