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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?"
that IR 4 is robotics. Not that robotics are a continuation of IT.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
It's almost getting as bad as the stupid "obligatory XKCD" links that dipshits will post here.
I'm sure there is an obligatory xkcd link out there to better illustrate that.
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Well it's a lazy journalistic crutch and needs to be mocked at every opportunity.
I hate sigs.
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.
He's also a former adviser to Enron.
Take from it what you will.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
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.
So IR#1 = Steam, Railroads
IR#3 = Buying Railroad Tycoon on Steam.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, Krugman's Nobel prize was awarded for destroying a "straw man" argument. Again, politics degraded the prestige of the award.
I've read every one of Krugman's books, and it baffles me how a supposedly well-educated person can come up with this stuff. (I read a LOT of Economics books, and it isn't just Krugman, unfortunately.) I strongly object to him stating that he is going to use Economic reasoning to make a point, then substitute, ex-cathedra, some political justification that cannot be supported by the argument.
Here is where I'm coming from:
First of all, I assume six rules of General Semantics (as simplified by Ken Keyes, Jr In his book,"Taming your Mind" http://www.amazon.com/Taming-Your-Mind-Ken-Keyes/dp/0960068872/ref=sr_1_53?ie=UTF8&qid=1356574942&sr=8-53&keywords=ken+keyes+jr).
The rules are:
"Up to a point" (Assumes that nothing is absolute; that things are true, false, black, white, etc., Up to a point at which the assumption no longer holds.)
"To me" (Assumes that there is a personal dimension to the formation of every opinion, and the interpretation of every fact.)
"As far as I know" (Assumes that there is a limit to the amount of knowledge about anything, and any opinon is only valid subject to the discovery of further evidence.)
And, "What", "When" and "Where" indexes (Assumes that any topic or opinion is mutable in meaning, depeding on context.)
I also place arguments into categories:
Economic Philosophy (arguments about what Economics should be)
Economic Science (arguments derived from observation, logic, statistics, etc.)
Economic Technology (arguments describing how to achieve specific Economic results)
The only arguments that really interest me fall into the Science category, but you need to be aware of the influencing other two categories in order to evaluate them.
In Krugman's case, his Philosophical stance is "left-of-Keynes/pro-Socialist". If you evaluate his arguments from the point of view that this is correct, then his arguments hold water in most cases. However, modern Science shows Keynes and Socialism to have deleterious effects on the smooth functioning of economic behavior. It takes much intervention to make the technological results appear, and they are usually only temporary. Modern Economists have figured out that Keyenes' "General Theory" is, in fact, a very limited "special theory". To make it work (or to get the "desired" results) requires intervention of the sort that interferes with personal liberty and free choice. This mis-allocates resources and diminishes wealth and prosperity.
Since Krugman is no dummy, I have to assume that he is aware of all this and his insistence on forwarding flawed solutions is based on his political beliefs rather than Economics. It is immoral to borrow legitimate authority in one area and use it for a personal agenda to the detriment of others (IMO), and that puts Krugman in category of "Liars" and "Con men" as far as I am concerned.