Slashdot Mirror
Krugman: Is the Computer Revolution Coming To a Close?
ninguna writes "According to Paul Krugman: 'Gordon argues, rightly in my view, that we've really had three industrial revolutions so far, each based on a different cluster of technologies. The analysis in Gordon's paper links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions:
IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830.
IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900.
IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.
What Gordon then does is suggest that IR #3 has already mostly run its course, that all our mobile devices and all that are new and fun but not that fundamental. It's good to have someone questioning the tech euphoria; but I've been looking into technology issues a lot lately, and I'm pretty sure he's wrong, that the IT revolution has only begun to have its impact.' Is Krugman right, will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830.
IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900.
IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.
What Gordon then does is suggest that IR #3 has already mostly run its course, that all our mobile devices and all that are new and fun but not that fundamental. It's good to have someone questioning the tech euphoria; but I've been looking into technology issues a lot lately, and I'm pretty sure he's wrong, that the IT revolution has only begun to have its impact.' Is Krugman right, will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
No
that IR 4 is robotics. Not that robotics are a continuation of IT.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That must be why he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
He is wrong. He has a lack of understanding of technology. We will see things like computers that are wearable in headset form and which can read our minds. We will eventually have something like telepathy, where the wearable computer can read your thoughts and transmit them to other people without need for converting them to text or voice. We will see augmented reality, which the people at slashdot may be familiar with but most people probably will not. Augmented reality will let us leave virtual notes on top of buildings. We will all have cars that drive themselves.
In terms of technology, we're just beginning to see what is coming.
Look, that was maybe good for a chuckle the first time somebody pointed it out. But that was a long time ago. You don't need to trumpet this crap each time a headline contains a question mark. Just answer the question, without throwing out the too-obvious "Betteridge's law" reference. It's almost getting as bad as the stupid "obligatory XKCD" links that dipshits will post here.
Times change. Yeah, it sucks when nobody needs a chimney sweep or a set of encyclopedias. For those of us flexible enough to try a different career, there will always be opportunities to succeed. Robot repairman maybe?
I bet we have 10 more years left in the cell phone/computer era.
Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.
All of those other revolutions experienced a plateau of sorts after they reached their respective technological maturity. Those other revolutions weren't geometrically improving their efficiency or drastically changing in their application towards the latter half of their life cycles.
As a result, I'm pretty sure if you were to speak to any specialist in their respective fields during the ends of those time periods that they would have felt comfortable predicting where their technology would stand 30 or 40 years out. Can anyone reasonably do that with respect to computers and what they will have to offer 3 or 4 decades from now?
The only the silicon part of the revolution is slowing down. The software revolution has barely begun, especially after being set back ten years or so during the Microsoft dark ages. What the future holds can scarcely be imagined today. Think of it this way: we already have more processing available on a single, $50, add in card than a modest sized mammalian brain. It isn't our hardware that sucks, it's our algorithms.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Gordon's Paper has been thoroughly investigated by Roger Pielke Jnr at the Breakthrough Institute.
Gordon's smoothing of growth fails to show the variability and creates a picture of trends that are not really there. A quote from the article linked above:
In short, there is no evidence of a stair step reduction in the growth rate of US per capita GDP in either dataset. The US BEA and Census data shows essentially no change (a linear trend, blue line, shows a statistically insignificant downward tick) whereas the Maddison data shows a bit of an increase (red line). The data is sensitive to the time period chosen – for instance, from 1970 the BEA/Census data shows an increase in the annual rate of per capita GDP growth. I can find no evidence of a post-1950 secular decline in per capita economic growth in the United States, and in fact, there is evidence that growth rates have accelerated a bit from 1970.
I think the products listed are generalized in a way to make the arguement. In the first wave, he lists (energy source, technology), aka (steam, locamotive). The second wave is (electricity and petroleum, and technologies and industries enabled). The third breaks the naming methodology and list just technologies. Of course certain forms of technologies are reaching the end of their economic impact. Another way to have stated the third wave is not in terms of products, but the technology that enabled the products. Have we exhausted the economic impact of the transistor? Even with the existing items. Electricity, petroleum and steam are nowhere near the end of their impact, so I find it hard to even state that phase 1 and phase 2 are over. In fact, when you add the problems of mainstream coal, nuclear and economic viability of solar, you could say that petroleum remains one of the most crucial factors to economic growth, and that's stage 2 according to the article.
What you mea is what he says to jive with your political view. Otherwis why would you hate somene who has been pretty much correct? Read his blog starting in 98.
What we ahve is an expert that gets demonized because loud mother poundits with wide audiences don't like what he says, even though nhis track records is excellent.
That is what matters. Not you , or my, political views. If you, or I, or anyone, don't change are views when new and accurate data come sin, then we might as well start living in the dark ages.
Sorry, but when someone applies an economic theory to a situation to forecast an outcome, and the outcome is pretty much correct, then that person is probably correct. YOU need to change your perspective.
We see this a lot more now then ever. The republican echo machine gets turned up louder and louder every time someone can show that a social policy works. Look at the 2012 election. The statistic from actual experts all showed it wasn't going to really be a close race. And when the actual experts where correct, all the people who were loud to be heard, but not actual experts, were stunned. Did they say 'maybe I was wrong?' no. The turned up their echo chamber even louder letting the same experts make all kinds of stupid reason why they where wrong, how it wasn't there fault, and the republican media just agreed.
tT's a fucking disgrace. You are better then that, please apply rational and critical thinking.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.
While I agree that awarding President Obama the Nobel peace prize before he had been in office long enough to accomplish anything was a bit emberrassing (for all parties, I suspect), that has nothing to do with what he was saying. He was saying in effect, that some right-wing wingnut with "socialism is slavery" as their signature line dismissing Paul Krugman as a political hack and only an economist as a 'distant second' is misinformation at best, and given the track record of the American right in recent years, probably closer to an outright lie. Krugman may be politically active, but having won the nobel prize for economics, he is most certainly an economist of note, whose opinions are worth considering whether or not we personally agree with them.
And by the way, as one who lived many years in countries with socialized medicine, as well as in the United States, I would say the system in America, where your health is tied directly to your employment status, is much closer to slavery than any of western European "socialist" systems, but I digress.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
Sorry, someone had to say it.
I can't figure out what Gordon is arguing, what Krugman is arguing and what ninguna is arguing. So I can't say who is right.
However, the very young tablet market, where apps which take advantage are still immature, and the growing excitement about developing new tablets and apps for them [1] and the Raspberry Pi along with copycat boards are showing there is a lot of energy still in the sector and very likely that energy will generate some major economic effects. It's like the Desktop "PC" ( microcomputer) and servers made up the third industrial revolution and the "SoC" is making up the fourth.
[1] Kind of reminds my of the pre PC microcomputer days.
I didn't know Krugman did clickbait. Anyway yeah robots will put us all out of work. I vote we start smashing up the looms right now while there's still time to prevent this bleak future from ever happening. Science, technology and progress are all scary after all.
I don't have a problem with the fact that his views differ from mine. I have a problem with dishonesty of a Nobel prize winning economist who misuses his column to push his own political agenda. It's easy to google many instances of deliberate twisting of facts and outright lies ("ACA will decrease rather than increase the deficit"), all without exemption leaning in the same political direction. If he was on MSNBC or Fox News it would be no problem. It is the pretense that his writing is a serious economic analysis distilled for popular reading rather than obvious and automatic pushing of a political agenda regardless of the facts that bothers me.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The poster can't read, or summarize.
Here's the link to Krugman's column: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/
And this means that in a sense we are moving toward something like my intelligent-robots world; many, many tasks are becoming machine-friendly. This in turn means that Gordon is probably wrong about diminishing returns to technology.
Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story.
Anyway, interesting stuff to speculate about — and not irrelevant to policy, either, since so much of the debate over entitlements is about what is supposed to happen decades from now.
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.
- NYTimes, 2002
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
Red herring.com (1998)
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion
In July 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) "didn't do any subprime lending, because they can't: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn't meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income." (New York Times, July 18, 2008)
How did Krugman get it so wrong?
As a physician, I see the future, and it's increasingly moving away from me and towards the computer. There will still be a role for us, but it will be in the areas where big data doesn't come up the obvious answer. As humans, we suck at reliably following algorithms. For a lot of medical conditions, following an algorithm reliably will give much better results than the haphazard method in which it is practiced now. Let the computer do that and let us practice the art of medicine where we don't know the correct answer yet.
Gordon Moore? Gordon Brown? Gordon Ramsey? Gordon the Green Engine? Any chance of a clue for those of us who don't mix in Paul's social circles?
He's also a former adviser to Enron.
Take from it what you will.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Human labor is cheap, feed them a few scraps and they will work just to survive. It's those whose living depends on ephermal things like "intellectual property" for survival who will suffer the most.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
who misuses his column to push his own political agenda.
He writes a column in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times. Pray tell how exactly he's misusing them by pushing his own political preferences in the opinion section?
Your comment would have some validity if he were writing in the Science or Economics section, but he ain't. And this is even before we go into the fact that most of his political opinions are the logical consequence of his economic beliefs to the best of his academic ability.
As the GP said, you are really taking issue with his opinions not matching yours and simply trying to disguise them as a high level objection on non-existent grounds.
The industrial revolution is driven by man's ability to harness energy. So far that's all been fossil fuel and has limited what we can do - and how fast we can do it.
That phase of the industrial revolution is still going strong and has nothing to do with electronics, electricity or computers. Those developments are a completely different strand of development, and (themselves) have barely started, either.
The next phase of human-kinds development is when we break out, past the limitations (both of availability and rate of generation) of fossil fuels into a new era where there is MORE energy available to each human. Probably several times more energy.
However, if you really want to talk about computers, then we're still in the pre-condensing boiler stage. We can make computing devices that seem pretty powerful (because we have nothing better to compare them with), but they're not particularly powerful, complex or scalable. Also, it's debatable whether there is anything on the horizon (quantum, possibly - but it seems to be a hellishly complicated way to do things and needs a lot of supporting structure, compared to, say, the human brain) to take us to the next phase.
So, no. We have NOT come to the end of IR3, we're still firmly stuck in the first industrial revolution, probably for another 50 - 100 years until we get our asses into gear and get past fossil fuels. Computing also seems firmly stuck on the bottom rung, with no promising technologies to move up, past the limitations of current semiconductor processors and logic-gate based architectures.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You have either never read Krugman and are making stuff up, or you have and are deliberately lying. That is all.
Soylent Green.
There is an elegant way to solve the problem of the concentration of wealth issue to the exclusion of general society.
Tax the robots at 70%
Then take that money, and funnel it into education, the arts, and a basic living wage to the masses.
Problems with people becoming breeding factories? Reduce the basic wage payments given for each child born over +2 by 50% then 75%, then nothing over 4.
With a higher level of education, our scientific advancement will increase, further increasing our wealth in general. Since the tax on robots leaves a 30% profit for the rich, they are rewarded for keeping the machines going. and paying for the administration of the machines to those who still earn a wage.
The formulas can be tweaked, should there be a new frontier opened up such as space, and money may in fact become only representations of pure resources and energy if technology such as a nano lathe becomes reality. (Being able to assemble anything from the atom up)
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Let's see, he cuts off IR#1 at 1830, which pretty much misses the entire steamship revolution and the invention of so many consumer goods of the 19th century, not to mention, the facilitation of mass immigration to the USA by all those steamships, the openning of the west due to practical railroads.
Then, he cuts off the next IR at 1900, and thus misses aircraft, the widespread adoption of the telephone and radio, and consumer appliances.
And then, having decided that aircraft, telephones, radio and steamships were useless, he says that the next 60 years of IT will mean absolutely nothing.
I would be inclined to think he is totally wrong.
This is my sig.
will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
Let me remind people here that this is, in the long run, a good thing (TM). Machines putting people out of work enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week and a society where people are majoritarily middle class.
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England and leadto asinine ideologies such as fascism, luddism and socialism elsewhere. These ideologies were misguided attempts to compensate for this momentous labour force disruption by addressing the wrong aspects of the industrial revolution (democracy, machines and capital respectively).
Internal combustion engine: European invention.
Indoor toilet: European invention
Wireless communication: European invention
As for the others, I can;t be bothered googling them all.
So IR#1 = Steam, Railroads
IR#3 = Buying Railroad Tycoon on Steam.
What part of "Opinion Pages" is difficult for you to understand? Fucking retard.
And by the way, the American Independence happened in 1776 during IR1. nearly 100 years before the 30 year long IR2.
To quote a very old British Telecom advert: "People will always need plates".
To suggest that automation is the end of the line for human input is ridiculous. If anything, there are MORE jobs per person now than there ever have been. In fact, the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls - which tells you a lot about manual labour, and why the US likes to lock people up more than just about any country in the world.
The jobs will change, of course, but when the horse-drawn taxicabs of London were replaced with the internal combustion engine, there were less stable-boys but a lot more drivers, cleaners, repairers, tool-makers etc. to go with that.
And, because of the way tax and the human mind works, the government will create a job for you or secure your job against automation for a LONG time yet. They don't want you out-of-work, or bored because robots are doing everything for you leaving you to "play" all day long.
If I was to call out the names of all the people - actual people - involved in the production, billing, delivery, installation and maintenance of even a simple office, I'd still be here tomorrow. That *wasn't* true a hundred years ago or longer.
The more we create things, the more people are needed to design them, litigate them, design the machines that produce them, assemble and operate and maintain and supervise the machines that use them, provide quality control, testing, fill out the paperwork, manage the orders, ship out the product, deliver it, assemble it, install it, train people on it, handle complaints from it, etc.
If anything, we'll hit a point where we *have* to automate because there are too many humans in the loop and that means we can't do things fast enough, and we'll be hindered - not by the unions and the unemployed - but by the number of employed. Hell, it's already nearly impossible to deliver a parcel during the day any more - the stay-at-home mother is no longer prevalant in society, and now schools even have to provide day-care and evening-care for families who have to go to work (which means more people work in those schools, too!).
An unemployed person is likely to get rarer long before it becomes the norm. It's hovering at around 4% in the UK at the moment, which is a fairly ordinary, stable country. That's nowhere *near* the highest and not far from the lowest it's ever been.
And no matter what gadget comes along, until we have complete independence on earning money because of the facilities available to all (when unemployment will no longer matter, anyway), there will always be someone needed to design it, build it, ship it, clean it, or even just test it. And most jobs in the world are actually "menial" jobs that require no skill (hell, that's one of the prime reasons that people come off benefits in my country - they say the jobs they are FORCED to go into after X amount of time on state benefits are too menial given their qualifications).
For every computer putting a man out of a job, that computer generates 5-10 jobs elsewhere, even if it's only the guy who cleans it and the guy who sells him the special cleaner to do that job with.
I agree. I think that the next "Industrial Revolution" will be robotic factories producing robots for other tasks/industries.
Now, will the robotic-built robots be single purpose or general purpose? I don't know. But general purpose robots would lead (I believe) to another "hacker" revolution. The same as the general purpose computer did.
I forget more about the computer revolution every time I sneeze than Krugman will ever know. It's just beginning. Live 10 more years and a computer will drive you anywhere in North America and hump you on the way. We're about to wipe out 'higher' education as we've known it for centuries. Piers Morgan may not get voted off the island via Whitehouse petition but the fact that were having a global debate with Internet petitions to our respective governments isn't funny. We're still puttering along with a couple megabits of capacity in most of the Western world. Gibibit+ will enable use cases we haven't even suspected yet. The second or third next atavist-stan we get ourselves mired in will be fought in-part with armed autonomous bipedal robots. Media is being fundamentally changed on a daily basis. The interval between now and when Krugman's paper goes Newsweek and becomes a glorified blog is probably a lot shorter than the remainder of Krugman's career as a columnist.
Krugman needs to stick to his welfare state statism.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The next revolution is construction at the atomic level without needing buttloads of chemistry to create things in a roundabout way.
The number of new materials we cannot even guess at will make life better and longer, and should also facilitate manipulators on a scale to patch and repair cells. It will also aid DNA experimenting to program life, and provide delivery of specialized DNA injections to particular cells.
Plus you'll finally get that hyper-lifelike robot to fuck, thouh human behavior (not counting remote control) is still a little off.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
the PPACA is not as good as it can be but parts of it do fix big issues and other parts do start the move of Health Care being tied to your job to it being on it's own.
and it's better then the mitt plan that is basically have a pre-existing condition then your doctor is ER and they will bill you and try to get as much as they can.
Computer Desktops were relatively new in the 80's and popularized in the 90's and I was just fascinated by them but I stopped in the middle of last decade and i was just satisfied with the multicore chips by intel and amd. I don't think it's worth sacrificing the earth or our health over these new junky technology products like the ipad, iphone, or any pc tablet like the windows surface for that matter it's just too damn much. China is a complete polluted shit hole because of this. I think we are all getting ourselves mentally tired with all these technology distractions. One day the tech bobble will burst or an emf bomb.
What Krugman is missing, I think, is the distinction between progress in the technical items themselves, vs. finding out what can be done with them, especially finding out what can be done with them once they're ubiquitous. We can't really know until a generation has grown up with them. Those of us here on Slashdot, nerds though we be, aren't steeped in them the way the kids being born now will be, for the very reason that the stuff is special to us. That's not to minimize what we can accomplish with it, but the coming generation of kids will never know what it's like not to have network access, not to have ready access to processing power, not to be constantly in touch with everyone they know. They will be able to find things to do with it that don't occur to us, because the underlying technology will be mundane to them. We've got at least twenty years until this revolution is over.
Consider one example of the "what can be done once a technology is ubiquitous" thing: FedEx. It and its competitors have significantly changed the businesses in the developed world operate, but when it was founded, all the technology that it was based on was well-established -- small jet cargo aircraft and wide geographical coverage of airports that can operate them.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
I don't have a problem with the fact that his views differ from mine. I have a problem with dishonesty of a Nobel prize winning economist who misuses his column to push his own political agenda. It's easy to google many instances of deliberate twisting of facts and outright lies ("ACA will decrease rather than increase the deficit"), all without exemption leaning in the same political direction. If he was on MSNBC or Fox News it would be no problem. It is the pretense that his writing is a serious economic analysis distilled for popular reading rather than obvious and automatic pushing of a political agenda regardless of the facts that bothers me.
If you weren't completely wrong you'd have a point. His economic analysis is actually pretty spot-on, happens to agree pretty closely with the Democrats, and you just disagree with it. It's basic on sound economic theory (which differs from yours). And the ACA does decrease the deficit compared to the previous status quo.
E pluribus unum
Not to mention defending Obamacare as a cost saving program,
Which it is. There is nothing as inefficient as the current system we have. We pay twice as much as any other country in the world for no better outcome.
openly lying about Ryan's voucher program
The only person lying about Ryan's program was Ryan, since it wasn't even a program. There were unspecified massive cuts in his program, the equivalent of the slashdot 1)... 2)... 3)??? 4) Profit!
Surprisingly the press fell for it much as you did too, with no one questioning what exactly step 3) would consist of. Krugman speculated that it would consist of massive cuts to social programs and thus indeed kill people, if we were to take Ryan at his word.
He has zero credibility left except perhaps with deluded dailykos crowd.
He provides confidential advice to governments all over the world, has a column in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world, is a professor in one of the best universities in the country and is the winner of the Nobel prize of economics. Yeap, I can see the zero credibility all over the place.
deluded dailykos crowd.
You are projecting here. You might disagree with everything he says, but the dude has credibility up the wazoo.
For example, I think Alan Greenspan. is a hack and at least 50% responsible for the current mess we are in (Bush being the other 50%) but I have no problem admitting that the guy's opinion still carries a lot of weight in many circles. More than I wish it did, but that's tangential to the point.
You on the other hand don't seem to be able to make the simple distinction between what you wish the world was and what it is. Hence you delude yourself into believing that Krugman is irrelevant.
The development of modern computing and telecommunications is not an industrial revolution of the type characterized by IR #1 and IR #2, and this is where Gordon's assumptions falter and Krugman's skepticism gains traction.
The "I" in this case refers to Information not Industry, and it is the 2nd one. The 1st one was the development of the printing press. From this standpoint, IR #1 (the printing press and movable type) took centuries for it's impact to be fully realized. The depth and breadth of it's influence on western civilization is difficult to measure in "simple" macroeconomic terms. Likewise, IR #2 (the electronic digitization of information) is a revolution that is so fundamental in nature that I don't believe it lends itself to being mapped as cleanly as Gordon implies.
Krugman starts the conversation in a couple of good spots: robotics and it's impact on GDP, and the potential of Big Data to drive decision making. What about desktop manufacturing (aka 3D printing)? MOOC? Genomics? Realtime translation?
In fact the more that I think about it, the more I think that Gordon has successfully found an important trend, but has the wrong story to explain it. The first two Industrial revolutions owe their economic impacts to advances in our energy metabolism as a species. Gordon's IR#1 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy using steam. Gordon's IR#2 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into electricity using steam turbines, and into mechanical energy using internal combustion. Economic benefits from the digital revolution has much more to do with efficiency and productivity, and almost nothing to do with finding new sources of energy to exploit. Indeed we're using more energy than ever to push information around, but each joule expended has had a significant ROI from an economic standpoint. Consider Just In Time production techniques, which are dependent on the ability to rapidly gather and disseminate information up and down the manufacturing supply chain. There's not a whole hell of a lot more efficiency that we're going to wring out of JIT. In fact, Japan's Tsunami disaster demonstrated that we are now SO optimized from an industrial standpoint that natural disasters in one part of the world can have nearly immediate impacts across the global economy. In other words, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on the productivity gains that digital information can provide to the industrial economy.
So Gordon is wrong, but about the right things.
Indeed, the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots, and that will be everybody. The reason you don't have a robot at home is because they are expensive, but in a world in which smart machines can build lots of things for very little money, they can build robots for very little money, and everybody will have them.
Does that sound like scifi? Actually, you can already have a 3D printer at home and manufacture more 3D printers with it. There are some electronic parts and motors you still need to order, but those are cheap generic components.
Is there a Nobel Prize in Economics!?
That's news. When did the undead Nobel return from his grave to create it?
Rethinking email
1) What he labels as "the first industrial revolution" wasn't the first, and it only occurred for much its length in the UK, he drags down earlier eras by not adjusting for geography in the same way he does for eras he focuses on. The first European technological revolution begins in the 1500's, a period of time where wages double in real terms in urban centers and then double again. It would take another 130 years to double a third time.
2) The second industrial revolution does not produce increased GDP in the form of steam engines until the 1840's by which time the telegraph is a major part of the information infrastructure to run railroads, so his IR#1, first, is really IR#2 and for most of the world is 1830-1860.
3) Much of the period of so-called IR#2 is during the long depression. As with previous waves of industrialization or technological revolution, city centers grow rapidly, as it is much cheaper per person to extend infrastructure, and there are higher profits. The electrical economy does not penetrate much of even developed countries, as measured by penetration of electrical devices and their costs, until 1930-1950.
4) In developed countries the rebound from WWII was the period of fastest GDP growth.
In productivity terms, the information revolution was not visible until the mid-1990s, and there are still large productivity wins.
Krugman is late to the party, and falls into the "lump of work" fallacy. The real problem here is that if there is a roughly constant standard of living as a target, the amount of work to be done will drop, and it will be less well paying. The only way to produce more work is to increase the demands on society. This will be opposed by those for whom the present standard is enough, and who enjoy its higher levels of benefit, but this is largely a political problem, for which political will is required. Economics can help ease transition forward, but it cannot generate political will from nothing.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
The Nobel Peace Prize is political by definition. Think about it.
Calling the Nobel technocrat prizes political just because the Nobel political prize is political is fallacious.
What do you do in a World where robots can build and repair themselves? What use would the majority of humans be when computers and robots can do the majority of work?
Sure sounds like some scifi scenario right up until the first AI is turned on, so yes eventually robots will someday replace humans entirely, as they have been doing so in a limited fashion for years already.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"that IR 4 is robotics. Not that robotics are a continuation of IT."
I disagree. That is to say, I think robotics will be one part of it. But only a part.
Here is where I see revolutions happening today:
(1) Robotics. Just to get this one out of the way. But to those who say "AI", I would say bollocks. We have learned how to make robots much better, and more efficient and effective, but in my opinion that has only served to illustrate that all these tasks are possible without what most people thought of as "AI" two decades ago. They are almost invariably specific-task-oriented and dumb as posts. There is still little or no "AI" in the classical sense of some kind of general intelligence.
(2) Medicine. I have been reading some of the journals and some of the new stuff is nothing short of amazing. And it keeps on coming.
(3) Biology and genetics. Do I really have to elaborate on this one? But we should proceed carefully. There is possibility of disaster if things are not handled responsibly.
(4) Physics. I think past the Higgs we will learn a few new principles, and open up some new areas of technology.
There are more. But I think at least these 4 will be involved in the next "revolution", which I argue is still largely on its way, not "past" at all.
I think IR #3 is a bit too nebulous and abstract to be useful... I can't imagine how you top "information age" or what could ever possibly come next.
Instead I think you really need to think in terms of a tech tree with more specific items such as cheap high density batteries, memristers, large scale 3d stacking / optical or plasmon gates, room temp superconductors, optical frequency fourier antennas, quantum computers with thousands of entangled qbits, tabletop fusion, warp drives..etc are likely to dominate the landscape of future changes vs general themes.
I think a mistake is made when you confuse the effects of diminishing first order returns on information and information processing technology from the more important secondary effects it has on the worlds industries and feedbacks on information technology itself.
For example faster Internet or a faster computer at this point would continue to provide ever diminishing returns to the average consumer.
Likewise the always connected mobile computers and communications provide limited little additional value over traditional fixed hardwired systems.
When you end your analysis with this narrow view of technology itself you are blind to what is really going on in terms of aggregate effects on all of industry.
All advances in pharmaceuticals / chemistry / material science is fully contingent on complex large scale computation.
Astronomy and basic research.
Computational biology and insanely cheap + fast sequencing is just now starting to go apeshit..
Automation in design, manufacturing and logistics of all kinds throughout all of industry.
Facebook, mobile phones, twitter and assorted consumer gadgets are red herrings... They are just noise that never really mattered.
At a certain level understanding of economics leads inevitably to an ethical imperative for political activism, or being a jerk by letting things go to hell without doing anything about it. By the way, the idea isn't his: he's just playing a riff off of Robert J. Gordon's essay. Now that I'm done with your ad hominem, I may as well comment on the fine article.
In enterprise systems design we've been running out of real problems for about four years. Once you integrate virtualization, modern 10Gbps or faster networks, multicore processors, vast RAM and SSD I/O you're down to working around glitchy legacy software and interpreting the niceties of licensing agreements. The premium names still draw premium prices for these things, but in 2013 that ends as almost all of the redundancy and reliability they provided to justify the premium is replaced with software redundancy on commodity hardware, as happened in SANs over two years ago. Every year the fraction of businesses that need exactly three geographically isolated physical servers grows. You need "big data" or "HPC" problems to find a hardware bone with meat on it still, and those are coming more rare than the people who solve this sort of problem. There are only so many of Twitter, Facebook and CERN. This probably means a career change for me and many others as we become redundant, so I'm not exactly thrilled with it but it is what it is.
Desktops and laptops have been "good enough" with great software for over seven years, or old software for four or five. Sure, gamers still buy premium systems - as do high-end engineers and others with special needs. But drilling down into system specs to deliver the best cost/benefit ratio for an office worker or typical home browser? No. You can buy a PC with 32GB of RAM, a 6-core processor and decent GPU at Costco for next to nothing. You literally can't get it wrong. Or you can SSD upgrade the one you have already, and blow the dust out and it will do what you need until the electrolyte in the capacitors gives out. The computer in your pocket has far more processor and storage than most people would need. It needs the screen size, but you can attach some of them to any HDMI monitor or 1080p HDTV now for a bigger screen and as many pixels as your laptop or desktop has. That smartphone would have been considered a supercomputer not so long ago, and quite a good PC later even than that. Laptop makers could probably sell one more trip around the upgrade treadmill by offering 4K resolution and touchscreen capability. Probably a half-lap actually.
So yes, the growth in tech is over at least in the US. With each generation of innovation the people who need or want it grow more scarce. It's diminishing returns. Sooner or later it ends.
Experts are still needed to wrangle this hardware into a usable state as the software situation is dire and redundant networking remains an occult science. Crudware is inscrutably still a problem. Security and services are still viable markets. But as far as getting any more utility from faster processors, more RAM, faster storage, better batteries and so on... not so much. Mobile devices are where it's at now, and they're disposable. TV repairmen had this problem too, once upon a time.
This is going to be an unpopular post as well as TL;DR and will probably moderated to death. I'm OK with that. But it's true. For most people and situations computation has come "good enough" for quite some time and is now well into overkill. Like improving the iPad display past "retina" resolution there is no true further progress to be had if further improvement is beyond our ability to perceive the difference. Moore's Law made it all the way to The End.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.
Giving Obama the peace prize was a bribe so he wouldn't bomb them. We hadn't started a war in a while and were itching to do so, and the Nobel was just to delay the inevitable.
Yep!
In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize
-- you're correct that it's not the same as The Nobel Prize.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
This is the guy who advocated the housing bubble as a remedy for the dotcom bubble. His policy prescription is always spend more, tax more, borrow more, regulate more. He has nothing at all to offer on this subject.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls
Pray tell, where did you pull that one out of? Do you know how much prisoners earn per hour, and what is it that they do? Substantial proportion of GDP, my ass.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
And even if it would, the rich will never abide huge taxes. They like being rich and intend to stay that way, and will not hesitate to use their wealth to achieve their political ends. Robin hood taxes will never fly, no matter how badly the lower classes want it.
The tax rate for top earners in 1940 was 78%, so they've abided it before.
"IR #2 [...] running water, indoor toilets [...]"
What the heck ?? people have had runningg water waaay before we steam engines were used. ... even the Indus Civilisation in 3000 AC have had them. and the Greeks, and the Sumerians, and ...
and indoor toilets
I'm pretty sure the full impact of the internal combustion engine wasn't known in 1900.
The reason IR#1 and #3 are paltry in comparison to #3 is because #1 is before American independence and the only true and original free democracy.
I am not sure that an electoral system that force you to choose between the two biggest parties is the best definition of democracy. US democracy is certainly better that the bad joke that is European Union democracy, but it could be improved a lot toward pluralism.
Wireless communication: If you mean WiFi, Australian invention/commercialisation, CSIRO made it work.
The real issue isn't robots taking jobs it is robots taking jobs when there are unemployed people. If everyone is employed you have to automate at least partially to increase productivity. So why is automation increasing while we have so many unemployed? The answer lies in the monetary system Krugman advocates which is a Central Bank making cheap credit available.
I worked as an engineer for a company that built automation equipment. When we did a study for a company to determine if it made sense to automate there were two big factors that we had to take into account. First is the labor rate and the second is the interest rate. The higher the labor rate and the lower the interest rate the more favorable the decision to automate was.
If we had an interest rate set by a free market it would be based on the supply of funds available to loan and the demand for those funds. This provides a natural way to regulate a sustainable rate of automation. When there is low unemployment and savings are high interest rates are low and labor rates are high. This is a good time to automate. When there is high unemployment and low savings labor rates will be low and interest rates high. It will make it more advantageous for companies to hire people than automate.
Right now we have high unemployment and low savings. But we also have a central bank keeping rates artificially low. This makes it advantageous for companies to automate when the real economics don't support it. Also these companies will find out as they ramp up automation and production there won't be enough people with money to buy their products. This is the same thing that happened with the housing market bubble and collapse.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
IR#1 wasn't over until IR#2 was well under way; internal combustion engines took over benefits of railroads.
IR#2 wasn't over until IR#3 was well under way; computers, world wide web.
I would argue IR#4 exists.... mobile devices, social networking, genetically engineered products, is a completely separate IR.
And IR #5; intelligent computers, autonomous vehicles, robotic assistants, artificial lifeforms, nanotech, digital experts (electronic delivery men, politicians, secretaries, police, workmen, ditch diggers, garbage collectors, firefighters, referees, judges, lawyers, doctors, engineers, programmers, artists, ....) as good (or better) at the job than humans are yet to come.
It will also aid DNA experimenting to program life
I guess you want a pet greasel.
Plus you'll finally get that hyper-lifelike robot to fuck, thouh human behavior (not counting remote control) is still a little off.
A man's ideal woman can be programmed in a couple lines of code, as long as you have an automatic kitchen somewhere.
The Peace Prize, the only one awarded from Norway by Nobel's wishes is highly political due to the retards in the committee who think it should be awarded as an incentive to act in its spirit instead of a recognition of actual accomplishment. It's no coincidence that the EU got the prize now as relations between many of the members are heavily strained and not 5 years ago when it was all flowers and sunshine. Unfortunately this has lead to many embarrassing awards when the recipients don't do anything worthy of the prize, or even contrary to it. It has been more than suggested that the recent awards to Obama and EU is ass kissing to further some of their member's international political careers. The committee currently consists only of ex-politicians, lead by a former prime minister. The other Nobel prizes awarded from Sweden are much, much less political.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As gas been posted above, the "Nobel prize in economics" is not really a Nobel prize.
I'd divide the current revolution into several stages:
1. The computer revolution - electronics over mechanics
2. The Internet revolution - connecting the world together
3. The mobile revolution - always online, anywhere
4. The bandwidth revolution - zero cost information
I think we're just seeing the tip of the last one, I'm feeling I'm on the verge of it with my 60/60 Mbit line that in the not so distant future fiber connections will be the norm rather than the exception and for all practical purposes people will have all the bandwidth they need. That you won't care if someone is borrowing 100 Mbps on your wireless of your 1 Gbps line. Or if you have 100 Mbps of torrent seeds in the background. Maybe I have just a tiny SSD and rent HDD space at my fiber provider like a SAN, or maybe I have all my stuff in the cloud (well not me, but... people) or whatever. I certainly don't think we've stopped changing yet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think the answer to whether the computer "revolution" has run its course is no for two reasons: (1) Shift in paradigm, and (2) Applications.
For the first few decades, the focus was on two aspects - making computers easier and faster. Easier via interfaces (and devices) and via algorithm improvements, and faster was mostly higher clock speeds, pipelining, etc. Only relatively recently, has the push been on distributed/parallel computing (which is different from "cloud" computing) - formulating problems in a way that parallel computing can greatly reduce execution time. Most languages have very manual ways (i.e. great programming effort) to use multiple processors. Additionally, the state of distributed algorithms and optimization is starting to get more focus now. But we have a long way to go.
The other is the applications of computing - most of the computer revolution was focused on end users (which, relatively, focused on the well-off/rich people). Apart from a few government/research groups, massive improvements in computing resources have not been used to tackle "hard" problems - sociological, economical, policy decisions, etc. We saw a bit of that in the elections - figuring out how people will vote. But there is so much more to do there.
As to whether robots/automation will make human labor irrelevant (even educated people) - I hope so. Not because I am against education; I am all for people getting smarter. But right now, survival seems to be the driving motivator for people having jobs - work or starve. I might be overly optimistic, but I think life would get much better if people had the freedom to do what they loved without fearing starvation. Some people think that if you don't have the stick, people would just sit around in their underwear and watch TV all day. I disagree. I know lots of smart people who won't take risks and follow their passion because they need to put food on their table, or need health insurance or something along those lines (I am guilty of that as well). But I believe that if people are allowed to follow their passion, you will find a much improved society. The great leaps and bounds in society took place because people didn't have to spend every second wondering about survival or getting eaten. If everyone had to hunt for each meal, we would be much further back in technology, arts, etc. I believe that if you remove the threat to survival, people can do wonderful things. (Just to be clear: I am not a commie saying that all wealth has to be distributed. If you want a yacht, work for it - build your own or get money. But you shouldn't have to worry about starving in case your yacht business doesn't take off. The worst that might happen is you still have a basic standard of living - not a mansion, but you don't need to fear frostbite).
Is that the best you can do? There's nothing wrong with the first quotation or the third. The second prediction was made in in 1998, for God's sake. Good thing you posted as an AC: how many incorrect predictions have you made?
Fair enough.
Still, the second prediction is worth quoting in full. The premise "Most people have nothing to say to each other..." is so near, and yet so far, from web 2.0 that it's just delicious. To be able to say something so wrong (in hindsight) is an achievement beyond most of us. It must rank with the all time great failed predictions.
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
In the context of 1870 - 1900, no I didn't mean WiFi. I meant radio, invented by David Edward Hughes in 1879.
Here's my summary of skimming through this mess: Krugman is a hack and a liar who is always wrong. He's predicting computers will make no further improvements, so that is clearly wrong. Computers are just getting started.
Hmm. I don't know what it is about Paul Krugman that makes people so rabid, but Krugman is actually arguing that the computer revolution is just getting started (against Gordon, who's arguing the opposite). So if the Krugman haters are sure he's wrong about everything, then the logical conclusion is: computers are finished.
I'm sure everyone here basically agrees with Krugman that the computer revolution is not over. Computers will automate more and more things. This flamefest was just pointless.
The much more interesting econo-blog discussion is: if robots can replace humans, and robots can make more robots, then it appears the Luddites may turn out to be right 200 years later: wages will fall. This hasn't happened yet, but outsourcing gives us a partial taste of what this looks like. The interesting question is, what to do about this? Note that taxing robot labor the same way human labor is taxed helps address this issue, but how do you tax robot wages when they aren't paid? And the really interesting question: has this revolution partially begun and is it behind the increasing inequality in advanced countries?
It was happening before MS and it wasn't just Apple. My high school had Microbee and Sperry computers as well, and a lot of students had Commodore or Atari computers at home. Things like the Microbee didn't cost much in relative terms and had multi-user capability with CP/M (you could log off and then someone else could log in with a different environment and not see your stuff) instead of that cut down clone that became MSDOS.
Microsoft rode the wave. They didn't make the wave. The weren't even the most capable things on that wave, they just had some capital after selling stuff to Apple and then IBM, then made their fortune by, rightly or wrongly, stabbing IBM in the back.
Don't tell me the computer revolution is slowing down when Microsoft has just released Windows 8. Krugman obviously is out of touch with the computer industry and must be living in a cave, to be unaware of this life changing, revolutionary breakthrough. Windows 8 alone will throw the computer industry back into the dark ages, allowing the growth cycle to start all over again, reigniting the industry.
This ad space for rent.
Of course, if they are going to award a Nobel prize in Economics, then intelectual honesty would suggest that the committee consider a prize in Astrology as well.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The Nobel Prize for Economics isn't a normal Nobel Prize. Technically it's the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". It's been recognized by the Nobel committee and awarded in the same ceremony as the science prizes, but it's actually awarded by the central bank of Sweden.
It's not as political as the Peace Prize, but it's not as scientific as the other prizes either. Since the criteria are decided solely by the Swedish central bank an argument can be made that it leans "pro-central banking" and a look at its history would seem to indicate that this is true.
His prize was for work he did 30 years ago. It can be argued, and I think successfully, that he's left that work far behind and has taken up activism. Many of his current writings are in direct conflict with his academic work of the past. I sincerely doubt that anything he's done since he started writing op-eds for the NYT would come anywhere near qualifying him for a Nobel.
Give him credit where it is due. People don't have anything to say to each other. It's just that little fact hasn't stopped them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The first quote would seem to put the lie to the statement that "He has been consistently correct about the financial crisis" unless you're arguing that he was correct in arguing in favor of it.
Right, and the whole issue here, missed by the discussion above, is that these "revolutions" were nothing more than increases in productivity. Meaning real output per human hour worked. To start with, I'm not even sure how recent technology supports that at all- a better mobile device would appear to merely expand your hours rather than help you work faster or better than at a desktop. And that's to say nothing of the fact that most of the world has less than 12% unit labor costs. Meaning you could replace every employed human with a free-to-operate robot or computer, and you've just shaved a whole 12% off the cost of a widget.
Point being, the article is spot on. Barring free energy or free raw materials, we will not see the same productivity gains in the future as the identified revolutions.
Actual productivity gains trail the revolution by a great deal, technological revolutions tend to lead in making labor more fungible first: this allows concentration of labor and capital. There is a period of emmiseration as capital concentration takes hold, and then there are a series of reactions against it. This pattern is true of both the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. The tech revolution, which many – my self included – see as separate from the purely industrial waves, allowed globalization, which made labor far more fungible on the global level, Old labor pools fell in their ability to charge a local rent. Now having reached a peak of that, the reaction is setting in. Not that it will be pretty, but this is normal for human development. For comparison, the ag revolution took about 11,000 years to return to the lifespan and standard of health of the middle mesolithic.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Hollerith punch cards, a belt driven wooden gear system, and a water wheel? Also whats up slashdot, everyone has been acting like big scary robots just appeared in 2012, when they are almost as old as the PC and have been used in production for decades.
Damn! I was a freshman in highschool 20 years ago (sigh thats depressing) and in one of my freshman technical classes (think shop mixed with computers) we were programming robots with simple point n click position recording software ... where have you people been?
Ask the French how well that has worked out for them.
Additionally, just because a law has been passed before, does not mean it should be passed again. Prohibition was rather popular at the time, but the damage it did to this country we are still getting over.
I am John Hurt.
There seem to be one or two commenters here who can't parse that Krugman is answering "no" to his own question. He's disagreeing with Gordon. He thinks the computer revolution is not over, that it will stay strong because of robotics. And that this will decrease the demand for human work, especially for unskilled labor, but increasingly in areas that we currently think of as skilled labor. What happens when all the drivers get replaced with automated trucks? And all the garbage men with robotic garbage trucks? And fireman with firefighting robots? And police officers with robocops? And librarians with the internet? And so on. Eventually chronic unemployment will lead to a crisis, one assumes.
What Krugman is talking about will happen, but far off into the future. The amounts of money that will be floating around at that time will be so vast that human food, clothing and shelter will be a much smaller portion of the economy. Many people will own a little bit of stock and be able to eke out a meager existence just from the quarterly dividends, plus their food stamps and medical/utility stipends. If you're lucky you'll be either part of the 1% of truly wealthy owners or the 10% of people with marketable skills -- engineers, doctors, actors, writers, models, sex workers, henchmen, to the extent that their jobs have not been automated. For the remainder, they will have to hustle. The average person's "job" will be to watch and promulgate advertising, to write online recommendations, and parlay this work into a few extra dollars. "My location is Whorlmart!" Put that on Faceboot for 24 hours straight and get paid a buck, for example. But the real economy won't involve human consumers at all. It will be mostly companies buying each other, renting space from each other, selling raw materials and finished products to each other. This is Dystopia 101 for crying out loud. Hopefully 1990's-era Sandra Bullock will be there, to offer help with the three seashells at the very least.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I once plotted all the major inventions by time, and didn't really see clustered causes, but did see clustered time areas of rapid innovation. I saw an expected bulge roughly around 1910, but I was surprised by the size of the invention bulge centered roughly around the 1950's, at least in terms of when they started impacted our lives (not nec. first creation).
The 50's "cluster" had these involved:
Atomic weapons
Electronic computer (mainframe)
Vaccines
TV
Jet travel
Transistor
Table-ized A.I.
Krugman is wrong about...a lot of things, he is very good on trade policy (which is how he won his Nobel) but his Nobel on trade policy doesn't make him an expert on anything else. The media seems to think otherwise, but he has 0 fiscal policy experience, 0 technology experience, etc, etc. He is pretty incompetent in those regards. Computing has a good ways to go, I do think that the upgrade cycles will be getting longer on tablets and phones soon though. I don't know why people seem to think the upgrade cycle of those devices will somehow never get longer like the PC's cycle did.
Yes, I too am in favor of regulating the distribution of Bath Salts. Or at least a tax.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
History is a continuous series of events. While grouping such events in phases, revolutions, periods, epochs or otherwise arbitrary simplifications may be of great help in understanding history, doing so may result in oversimplifications resulting in a display of incompetence.
0x or or snor perron?!
There really is/was only one industrial revolution. There doesn't seem to be any point in water down what was already a fairly arbitrary definition. Hunanity has been popping out revolution after revolution for the past 20k years (or more). Steel really changed things for humanity. So did animal husbandry, So did mass communication. So did fire. So did interchangable parts. The industrial revolution is when industrialization changed things for us in a significant way. Just because we had another advancement that changed humanity doesn't mean we ditched industrialization and then re-invented it again. Pick a new label already. Look at the laundry list that makes up IR #2. Are you kidding me? Even 'Dance Dance' qualifies as it's own revolution. Seems to me this is one of those convesations people have when they are baked out of their mind (NTTAWWT).
Every recession in the last 80 years or so has been marked by the US top marginal tax rate falling to a low, right before the attendant stock market crash.
The GFC was preceded by US top marginal tax rates being the lowest they've been at any point in history.
Except that they didn't abide it, as it was even easier to avoid then than it is now. Sure you can have a high "in theory" rate but that's meaningless if no one is paying it.
78% kicked in at $2,000,000. The average income was $1315 (for which the rate was 4%).
The US government raised $892,000,000 in individual income taxes in 1940. if people were actually paying that top rate then it would take 600 of them to cover the entire personal income tax revenue of the US at the time, which should indicate no one was paying that rate.
... energy - particularly alternative energies, such as nuclear and solar. That will be what the next technological trends will be about
Tax the robots at 70%
What do you mean "robot"?
Is a Roomba a robot? Is a dishwasher a robot? What about a thermostat? There are so many ways that machine automate jobs, no one could possibly find a way to classify a machine as a "robot" or not.
Just FYI, there was a time early in the industrial revolution when steam engines didn't have mechanical valve actuators. There was a person with the task of opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves at the right times. In the sense that a job was eliminated by a machine, the camshaft in your car's engine could be called a robot.
Tax robots and the only jobs you will create will be for lawyers to find arguments to label machines as "not robots".
How we manage a transition from a jobs based economy, to a post-scarcity society will be very interesting.
We are already doing that, with government-paid benefits. Every industrial country provides a lot of social services to the citizens. The transition is a bit too advanced at this point, since most governments are struggling with debt right now.
The big problem will be how to automate government. I don't see public servants relinquishing their privileges any time soon, but an automated society implies necessarily in an automated government. If the jobs public servants do were more automated, like industrial jobs have become, the governments would be able to provide social services at much lower cost.
Anyone know anything? Mail me!
Clue: it's serious!
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Those are not mutually exclusive. There is a point where the revolution itself comes to an end, but its consequences often take much longer to establish themselves. The French or American Revolutions are certainly long over, but their impact was long-lasting and many of their consequences did not show up immediately. Same for the industrial revolution, which might be over, but automation still was a big topic in the factories of the 70s.
I agree that the fundamental change has happened. Smaller, faster computers open up new areas, but they don't do paradigm changes. The difference between a world where a "computer" is a woman in a war office doing math calculations by hand and a world where a "computer" is a machine sitting on many office desktops is much larger than the difference between that world and one where the computer has evolved into a notebook.
I would say that the Internet is still part of the revolution - interconnectivity is a major change to the way we use computers. But neither Facebook nor the iPad are revolutionary. Evolutionary, yes. Revolutionary, no.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Krugman is a big fat idiot. If he wrote novels, they'd be dumber than Rand's. If he made movies, they'd be dumber than Michael Moore's.
Everybody talking offspring, percentages, and human ghettos can please get back to their real jobs. You are all seedling despots ready to sell out humanity, even if you don't know it yet.
The technology revolution we're up against is going to be so sweeping and the power and self-reliance of an individual will be so great that the question of dependency upon federal robo-credits or robo-biscuits will be moot. We will all be cyber-camping and living on impervious cyber-homesteads in fifty years. Energy, labor, and orgasms will be provided by your own fleet of robotic thingies. Technology beyond our wildest dreams will be as convenient as running water. We'll have figured out all kinds of awesome things about providing for our basic needs. In most of the world, the concept of inequality will be associated with totally bizarre things that our current value systems can't make sense of. (Kinda like how people in the year 1900 wouldn't understand why we fret over the right to internet access.) Everyone else will live in tacky McMansions and act like Real Housewives.
I'd view robotics, even with an AI flavor, as the natural continuation of IT, and suggest that 3d printing or nanotechnologies are good candidates for IR4.
I don't think we need to spend effort in predicting the future trends or finding patterns in the past and projecting it into future. You don't need to calculate when exactly a wave comes or where it comes. Live in present, see what is happening around, respond when a wave comes, catch it and ride it as it happens. Synchronize with nature and be spontaneous. That is enough to make a meaning of your life. All predictions are childish attempts to show off oneself as better visionary than common people. I can see a kid in Paul Krugman and in Gordon. Absolutely average people made more of their life just by responding to what is happening in the present, and by not fretting about every short-term thing and not worrying about the future. Evolution takes its course. You just have to play along not in front of it. Infact, the desire to own or control the future is what makes you totally miss the present. Most likely you miss the future as well due to accuracy risk in the predictions.
ZOMG it's the apotheosis of the last 400 years of technology.
It's all well and good to replace the bulk of work with robots but then you either have a massive angry poor population and will need to impose birth restrictions among other things.
Or all those jobless people become supported by the robots and people don't need to work. That poses problems because wealth becomes meaningless (the rich won't be happy about that) and you still need to impose restrictions. Not everyone can just have a new tv whenever they want or travel whenever. We don't have unlimited resources. A lot of people are pretty simple. With no work how will they fill up their day? They may breed more which also cause resource problems so we need to still restrict births and it limits the need for medical advances. Too many births and longer lives again put a strain on everything.
I think people in the west think we have more resources than we do because they live in the best parts of the world and get first dibs on everything. So unless we're ready to bring back Hitler's ideals we have too many problems to fix before robots can do everything. Even the west is looking at some big energy cost rises in the near future. This robot utopia may come eventually but I really doubt it'll happen in our life time even if you're a child unless we solve some much bigger problems first.
Thankfully Krugman does state that most of the robots stuff etc is "interesting stuff to speculate about". But, I do agree that IR3 has only just begun - plus you cannot judge the impact of it until it is actually done... we still have graphene and so much more that can be done... the internet is barely a toddler....
Well the author didn't mention anything that happened between 1900-1960. We developed the skill to fly. Nobody knows what's coming up next....
I wasn't trying to be funny. These kinds of stories are a problem that should be addressed.
120 years passed between the start of the first industrial revolution and the start of the second. Only 90 years passed between the start of the second and the start of the third. I think the gap has now shrunk to the point where the start of the fourth (widespread use of robotics, digital manufacturing, dramatic extension of human lifespan) is actually overlapping the tail end of the third.
-deane
At the end of the article, Krugman makes a joke about Skynet taking over and destroying humanity. Whether or not you agree with him, economically or politically, the guy is a true nerd, having written papers on economics of interstellar travel and being drawn into economics after reading Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
That is all.
I'm not sure why anyone would care about "nytimes.com" let alone some guy who blogs there. What the hell is a nytimes anyway?
Seastead this.
Do you really think that they paid 78% of their income to the government as taxes?
Even if you take out that 78% was the marginal rate, i.e. 78% of everything over $1million (or whatever it was) there were still tax shelters that they could use to reduce their gross income.
Do you really think that now is the only time there are/were rich people influencing the government for breaks?
This is the scary bit of technology's Pandora's box: 24/7 citizen surveillance has become reliable, easy, and most importantly: cheap.
The real legacy of 9/11 will turn out to be the justification of the police state - at least up until all the history books are digitized to allow for Orwellian revision and omission.
I think the next big technology revolution will be the use of molecular biotechnology.
...that's the phony baloney, Group of Thirty dood, who is forever posing as a "liberal" while primarily coming down on the side of the central banksters and speculators.
http://www.group30.org/members.shtml
I remember Krugman claimed the incredibly spiking oil prices of 2008 --- obviously from speculating on the InterContinental Exchange and a few others --- was simply due to "supply and demand." (Holy mother of godzilla!!!!)
The very same Krugman who claimed there wasn't any housing bubble, and who recently claimed the QEI, II and whatever weren't for the banksters, and the banksters really didn't want the Fed to take all those worthless credit derivatives (a k a "toxic assets") off their books, and replace them with interest-bearing gov't bonds no less! (Holy mother of godzilla!!!!)
The very same Krugman who recently gave a talk before the EPI, just prior to that $8 billion loss from JPMorgan's London "whale trader," claiming that the banks were in solid shape! (Holy mother of godzilla!!!! Even the acting Comptroller for the Currency recognizes that the five top banksters, which have 95% of the credit derivatives, listed as assets, has 97% of said credit derivatives being credit default swaps, or unregulated insurance responsible for the last economic meltdown!!!)
Yup, Americans definitely worship at the Church of Complete Ignorance.....
And in evitably we'll become basically a society of thinkers or explorers, it is the fundamental end-game of human society. The problem getting there will be how do we deal with the massive third-world population that is only now seeing the 2nd and 3rd revolution mashed together into one confusing amalgamation.
For technical reasons I would point out most of Europe and the world uses a parliamentary system which is based around strategic party mechanisms. In other words, the US' 2-party system is strange but democratic and has no effect on republicanism. Parliamentary systems are undemocratic as coalitions inside the parliament have to be formed which is anti-democratic but very republican.
So, unless you live in a similar democracy to the US you are certainly not in a truer democracy than the US.
This is so pathetic, and worse, it's becoming the norm in story submissions. Facts by the quarter teaspoon. The only thing keeping me here is the death of the paragraph in the post-Twitter apocalypse.
There was a story by a sad soul concluding that Microsoft Word might actually be better for his purposes than Google Docs or Libre Office.
Slashdot is the new Microsoft Word. Tolerable enough to plug our noses and viewpoints, but no cause for pride.
the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls
Pray tell, where did you pull that one out of? Do you know how much prisoners earn per hour, and what is it that they do? Substantial proportion of GDP, my ass.
Although the GDP from prison labor is not great (the number of employed prisoners is small relative to the whole U.S. labor force), you should realize that your question is nonsensical. The contribution to the GDP is the value of what the prisoners produce. That value would be the same no matter how little they were paid. And in fact the average value of an hour of a prisoner's labor in 1998 was almost $15 (over $20 in today's money), despite prisoners being poorly motivated and compensated.
See The Economics of Inmate Labor Participation.
BTW: that a prisoner in a workshop produces on average $20 of wealth per hour, suggests how grotesquely inadequate the current minimum wage law of $7.50 really is.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Paul Krugman is the laughing stock of the majority of economists. his elitist Keynesian views don't hold water and he refuses to debate serious economists.
IR #4 is the genetics revolution. Free information over the web in enlightening, but it is only revolutionary when it gets transferred into bits--atoms that comprise some kind of hardware or physical actions by a human.
Do you really think that now is the only time there are/were rich people influencing the government for breaks?
When did I ever say that? Please don't try to put words in my mouth that I clearly never said.
And the bottom 50% of the population own just 1% of the country's wealth. Just sayin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/households-wealth-american-1-percent_n_1687015.html
What was your point again?
For technical reasons I would point out most of Europe and the world uses a parliamentary system which is based around strategic party mechanisms. In other words, the US' 2-party system is strange but democratic and has no effect on republicanism.
Let me go further with bipartism. It is created by electoral system where a single person (president, member of parliament) is elected from a given territory. That cause many citizen that have no representant because they are a local minority. In the worst case scenario, you can have party A that makes 49% in all territories, party B makes 51% in all territories, and you get a parliament where 100% of members represent 51% of the population. This is a flawed democracy
For instance, in french last parliamentary elections, we had 94% of parliament members representing 68% of the citizen that voted. If you count the citizen that did not vote, 94% of MP represent 38% of the citizen. Do you agree there is a problem here?
The fix is known: an electoral system where you vote for a list of candidate for the whole nation, not for a single candidate in your local territory
That rate was paid by almost nobody, except maybe someone who won the lottery. There used to be a lot more deductions - like interest payments of all kinds, not just home mortgage interest.
I loved that show as a kid
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
I think the OP is right...as these IR's need to also be judged on what changes happen AROUND them as well. The big thing about railroads wasn't that "trains are neat", it was the westward expansion, decrease in travel time between great distances, etc.. Now that makind is used to being connected in whatever fashion they choose, real changes will start occuring with the digital age at the core. Large areas of "older" technologies are being wisked away pretty rapidly by new stuff...anyone care if they miss their shows on TV anymore? Nope, if I didn't save it on my DVR I can still go find it on Hulu/Netflix or somesuch any way. As cars get better at driving themselves and IBM's Watson continues to mature beyond stomping on the Jeopardy champion, things should get quite interesting!
Krugman is right when he doubts Gordon's premise that we are somehow coming to the close of a third phase of the Industrial Revolution. However, Krugman is not a futurist, and though he claims that he has "been looking into technology a lot lately", he does not understand technology. Nor is he a "contemporary anthropologist" in the sense of understanding human behavioral patterns in the face of rapid change in the way that individuals and societies adapt and exploit informational tools in an economic context. His economic theory alone is too one-sided, and he should stick to his knitting and work on the half-baked assumptions behind some of the controversial notions that he advances in his chosen field. Krugman clearly aspires to be some kind of seminal social thinker and relishes the notion that his opinions might be sought out by the middle class and talk show pundits in addition to his academic peers. But his aspirations to graduate from economic theorist to social thinker are just that: aspirations. He had best stick to his 'day job' -- and do a better job at it !