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A New Survey Shows Consumers Are Not That Freaked Out By Tech (fastcompany.com)
Lippincott, a global creative consultancy, asked 2,000 "leading edge" consumers in the U.S. whether they were excited to welcome our robot overlords or terrified of them. A report on FastCompany adds: Some of their findings go against conventional wisdom, like the belief that consumers are scared about the future. Turns out 80 percent said they are excited about changes in technology. Some 78 percent feel more powerful and in control of their lives thanks to the support from smart machines, artificial intelligence, and robotics. There is some anxiety about the incursion of tech into our lives, with over 40 percent reporting that they are scared about changes to the economy, society, culture, and the government. Despite that, 64 percent of them still expect that the world will be better in 10 years than it is today.
The vast majority of 'consumers' have no idea what's going on 'under the hood' of the hardware and software tech they're using and how the corporations that tech interacts with (or 'is ultimately controlled by', if you prefer), and if they did have a thorough understanding I guarantee you they'd be far less than 'happy' about it, they'd own less tech, and (with any luck at all) there'd be a strong outcry for vast, far-reaching reforms in the areas of product testing, product reliability, privacy, and security. I can also guarantee you that this would also very much include so-called 'self driving cars' and other areas of so-called 'machine intelligence' (I refuse to call it 'AI'). Corporations have no real legal, moral, or ethical responsibility for full disclosure about their products and practices to the public, and as a result people are lied to by way of omission every single day, all in the name of the Almighty Profit.
P.S. Dewey didn't beat Truman, even if the survey said he did.
Same with us in IT. Over time there's more layers. Just the other day someone was helping me diagnose app performance problems on a given server. She discovered a problem in the virtual-server-to-physical-server translation layer, related to the file system.
She was slinging server virtualization terms that were new to me. There's a new layer on the block and I know diddly squat about the details.
And we have to rely ever more on JavaScript libraries to get the eye-candy UI's executives want to see in web pages, including "responsive" for diff device sizes. I'd like to dig into how those libraries work, but I got too many other projects; so I have to blindly trust those libraries.
I was just reading about nostalgia for the Commodore-64 days among techies where one had almost full control of applications from machine-language and each pixel in the UI. I can see that other techies are also a bit unnerved by "layer-ification".
More turtles will hop on the stack, get used to it. Most of us IT mortals can only master a handful of turtles. Eventually even the Sheldon-memory-level techies won't be able to keep up on all IT turtles.
Table-ized A.I.
Automation taking enough jobs to destabilize society is a real possibility. It can be a good thing when machines do most the grunt work.
However, if the wealth generated by machines is not sufficiently distributed, there will be major unrest. And idle people tend to get into trouble.
There may be plenty of work in monitoring machines, people with problems, politicians, etc., but our society is not set up to allocate resources to such tasks.
I don't know if the solution is "socialism" and make-work projects, or something else not fully defined yet. We can theorize until the cows come home, but it's new territory and nobody really knows the best societal solutions.
Change is always painful for at least some, and it's coming faster than ever.
Table-ized A.I.