6 ms·

If I Had a Hammer

45 points by wallflower 13y ago

davidf18 13y ago
Over 60 years ago Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the "man being replaced by machine" problem in his * 1952 * novel, "Player Piano."
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  The quote from Erik Brynjolfsson in this article is also right out of the Unabomber manifesto on the dystopian future where machines make our decisions for us, and the masses are ruled by a handful of elites who have access to the control of these systems.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I think Ned Ludd had a few things to say as well, back in 1779 or thereabouts[1]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
coldcode 13y ago
The flaw in this argument is that although the power of the machines is making advances appear faster to make humans less important, the power of humans to use the advances for no good is increasing at the same rate. Thus Google knows when you are going on a trip but someone hacks Target for millions of credit cards in a way no one notices for weeks. Technology is a two edged sword.
- allochthon 13y ago
  I don't think this point contradicts anything Friedman said: Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before ...
VLM 13y ago
I read the article and skimmed the comments and all of the economic comments almost intentionally avoided discussing monetary velocity as a concept. Oh they'd dance around it but never directly discuss it. Its not terribly controversial, so I don't see why. The modern numbers are utterly dismal, maybe thats why? Too much of a downer? During an economic depression, a growing fraction of the population is removed from the "real" economic system and market, they start to use Tide detergent, lotto tickets, drugs, cases of cola as their new economic system and currency. In a similar way, as the fraction of the population still involved in the interchange of information decreases, despite all the article hand wringing, its pretty simple, they'll just drop out. Hard/impossible to say what the new system and currency will be. People will just stop. The future of the "knowledge worker" looks a lot like ... travel agent. So, put it together, and in a post-knowledge worker economy, they'll always be a small number of elite knowledge workers, and always be some jobs that are not financially viable to automate away (not many, of course), but overall society will just wander on over to something else and look at knowledge work / service work as something from the past... thats what grandpa used to do before all of them got downsized, or whatever. The article is much ado about nothing, in the long run. Currently there exists a service / knowledge economy, at least for a small segment of the population, and its going away, just like every other segment eventually mostly goes away. OK. That and watching the political ax grinding was moderately entertaining. "If we all just held our hands around the campfire and sang, then ..."
projectileboy 13y ago
I always liked Thomas Friedman's writing on foreign policy issues back in the day, but his work on globalization and technology always sounds incomplete and amateurish. I think Mr. Friedman would do himself a favor if he actually spent some time learning to code and hacking on an Arduino board or something so that he could start to develop more intuition on what can and cannot easily be done with technology, and where globalization fits in and where it doesn't.
- gahahaha 13y ago
  His writings on foreign policy and economics is also incompetent garbage. One datapoint is his support for the Iraq war. But really why he still has a column in the NYT is a mystery.
  - curtis 13y ago
    I do not want to be in the business of defending Thomas Friedman, but I think his opinions on the Iraq might have been more nuanced than he is usually given credit for. For example: NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST THOMAS FRIEDMAN THEN: "Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960s. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U. S. and its allies remove the lid. Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won, and it will say one of two things. "It could say, 'Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany--a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you've just removed.' "Or the envelope could say, 'You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia--an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists, and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new Saddam.' "In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the way he is. In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is what it is. Those are two very different problems. And we will know which we've won only when we take off the lid. The conservatives and neocons, who have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this question, because they don't know, either." --The New York Times, January 26, 2003 (See http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220 http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220)
cowsandmilk 13y ago
I often wonder when the tipping point for white-collar specialists being replaced by machines will occur. Watson replacing doctors in making diagnoses has received a lot of attention, but there are many other fields. The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? We already have moved to replacing lawyers with computers for discovery, I would be even more pleased in negotiations to only have to change items flagged by machines than the sometimes incompetent lawyers I've had to deal with.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  > The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? When the cost-risk equation comes out in favor of the computers.
- VLM 13y ago
  I was recently informed by an acquaintance that "lawyer work" decades ago was mostly about being a low to mid level manager over a herd of paralegals who did all the work by hand. As the market has collapsed, lawyers do all their own electronic searching and often data entry by themselves... The market has crushed the profession. Most likely that will eventually play out with doctors, probably economically enforced. Sure, doc, do whatever your medical judgement thinks best, if you want to work for free... but we're only paying on claims if your medical judgment matches "watson". So overproduce new docs for awhile to crater salaries, only pay claims if their work matches a computer model, and what we used to call a "nurse" will be the new "doctor". This also helps with doc-in-a-box facilities, which could now literally be a doc-in-a-box instead of a nurse-in-a-box or PA as implemented now. Eventually, being a "pharmacist" will mean being the minimum wage drone who stocks a semi-smart vending machine, or maybe it'll mean being the minimum wage drone answering the 800-number support line outsourced to the Philippines. I could see the same thing happening with accountants and HR and perhaps marketing.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers themselves? If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate. I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour, farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes, why is that?
allochthon 13y ago
I think he makes some interesting points. I do not think they are that amateurish. Like it or not, we're rapidly sliding into an era where human productivity is going off the charts. Unintended consequences are unavoidable. Nobody really knows what to do about it.
bambax 13y ago
> Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer, like I.B.M.’s Deep Blue. Donner replied: “I would bring a hammer.” Okay, but why not bring a gun to a chess match against a human? That would be an excellent winning strategy (cf. the Gordian Knot).
- ritchiea 13y ago
  I think a hammer would be sufficient in that case as well, unless of course your opponent brings the gun.
lvs 13y ago
Golly gee, things are changing too fast for Thomas Friedman and his readers!
ID_HOME 13y ago
tl;dr: Jew writes extremely condescending short story of the last 10 years, contemplates socialism and licks his chops imagining all the socioeconomic data that will soon be at his fingertips.
EliRivers 13y ago
because employers now have so much easier, cheaper access to above-average software Yet they consistently don't choose it. Much as in the following case... All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns, instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve what isn’t working — whether it is eye surgery techniques... That's an excellent example of another thing that won't happen, mainly because it already doesn't happen; medicine is a field where there are many, many examples of hard-data demonstrating better techniques, well-known, that nonetheless don't spread. Atul Gawande discusses it, amongst other interesting things, in his book "Better"; I namechecked that book mainly because, as well as discussing this, it's quite a fun read and a good starting point for principles that carry across all fields, but it's by no means the only source.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then write a 3-part book series on the coming flood, the power of water, and the wondrous new water-world awaiting all of us. A bit breathless, a bit over-done, a bit over-cooked, and a bit over-hyped. But he has a point. We are on the verge of some new golden age. Perhaps a new machine age. I tend to think we're seeing the beginnings of a transition to a machine lifeform-dominated Earth. Probably take 200-400 years to fully play out. People aren't just going to become obsolete -- they're going to become irrelevant and non-existent. Seeing pictures of an old-fashioned plain human like us, in another 400 years, will be as quaint to future man as seeing pictures of neanderthals in a science magazine is to us. The interesting thing is just how awake the average person is to the amount of change happening. When the Industrial Age happened, there were huge factories, great cities being built, and all sorts of physically giant things to look at and note that yes, something new was happening. With the new age, we're looking at changes in Silicon, machine learning, maybe robotics. There aren't going to be giant robots leveling cities in the near future (thankfully!) or anti-gravity machines taking us to Mars in a few hours (sadly!). Instead we're seeing massive changes, on a tiny scale, about what it means to be human. This article is for the cheerleaders. HN is for the cheerleaders, like us. But I wonder if the average person is even going to notice.
- ilaksh 13y ago
  People will notice eventually because your relationship to advanced AI is going to determine your relevance. And 400 years is wishful thinking. The new lifeforms may arrive well within two or three decades.
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  A bit of a hack? I find that this article has "self-irony" if there's such a thing - the fact that the writer works for the preeminent American newspaper completely refutes the premise of the article. Mediocrity will forever have a place in this world, if Thomas Friedman still has a job.
ChristianMarks 13y ago
If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY Times? A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs: Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity. Then Sebastian Thrun admitted that Udacity had a "lousy product" in this interview: http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-u... Friedman is a cheerleader for employers. Employees are warned that average isn't good enough. One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.
- sehr 13y ago
  Shocking! Former Stanford professor doesn't see the same results & progress with remedial state students. The entire concept of MOOC's must be doomed. Basing an entire industry's future off of the shortcomings of one man's idea and expectations is a bit silly.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- bertil 13y ago
  I won’t try to defend Friedman, but I believe you misunderstood what Thrun was trying to say: he is a very conceptually accurate guy, and him saying it is a bad ‘product’ doesn't mean the general concept is flawed, but that his ambition to market the whole of superior education as a video class has, with testing proven to show issues, with engagement in particular. He is far from abandoning the idea, but reacted by switching Udacity towards a for-pay, vocation certification platform. Having the best professors use video (or radio) to openly broaden the audience of their abstract teachings is a concept that has been widely tried since, well, I’d say 1530 with the College de France, but the recordings where a bit different then — anyway: it’s the principle of almost every high-brow show. Those tend to have less of an audience than we’d like, or need considerable adaptation — but Udacity was one attempt that was remarkable in mainly one way: how little the class was adapted for anything but highly intelligent and motivated twenty-somethings with fresh brains. Look at what Dan Ariely is doing for an great example of how to preserve the internet support and have an engagement comparable to a physical class.
hawkharris 13y ago
In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. Automation is what I love most about programming. Most of the time, when you encounter a tedious, dull process, you can come up with creative ways to make your machine do the work. It's one of the few occupations in which boredom represents opportunity.
- to3m 13y ago
  http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php
  - hawkharris 13y ago
    That app is pretty clever, and it plays off of valid criticisms of the author. :) Friedman has a talent for writing as well as glueing together disparate concepts to support his arguments. It's fair to say that in some articles, he says very little, very well.
hooande 13y ago
Automation bashing had become so boring. ”Us vs them” its a go to media cliche. Machines, automated or otherwise, are made to help us. We want every thing to be automated. The purpose of business and technology is to improve lives, not to employ people. No one starts a company with the intention of creating jobs. People want to solve problems, make money or bring useful new ideas to life. Startup founders want to do whatever has to be done in order to execute their vision, with humans, machines, trained animals or whatever. Automation improves our position as species and we need to get behind it instead of viewing it a competitive threat. As they say in pickup basketball, ”Same team!” It's true that automation has a disproportionate effect on different levels of society. But that's more about humans than it its about machines. There are a lot of people working on technical solutions now and sooner or later people will get to work on social solutions that address some of Friedman's concerns. We're a long way from a fully automated society and we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes.
- bertil 13y ago
  > we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes. I would argue, having lived in countries that lead automation rates, that we already are at a point were large groups of the population cannot find work with their qualification, and never will: farmers, miners and forest workers had to convert to become factory workers, but most of those are now outsourced or automated; at the moment, there isn’t a job in Western countries for someone who has difficulty learning how to read. Some people genuinely can’t grasp any abstract concepts: I taught in jail for a while, to people who couldn’t for the life of them generalise “Two apples plus three apples equals five apples; two sheets of paper plus three…” and remained baffled by ‘addition’ as an abstraction. Keep in mind: some of those guys fashioned working radios and distilleries from scratch. Similarly, I have talked to taxi drivers who couldn’t understand it was in their interest to switch to Uber, how the trust mechanism worked with the app (they thought the dispatcher could better tell on the phone if the client was shifty), to say nothing of choosing a path based on a congestion map. I love my Roomba and my waching-maching, but without the cleaning jobs, what are immigrants to Western country going to do? Take care of elderly people to whom they can’t speak? I fully agree with your point that automation is good for all, but we might have to face before the end of our careers a point where a vast majority of the population has to be considered handicapped, “mentally” for lack of a better word, out of the workforce and entirely subsidised. At the moment, even a coder, hard working and of average skill, cannot find a job where I am: I know a handful of guys who can make functional, useful apps all by themselves (say: scanning barcode, interrogate database to tell if a product is ethical, handle shopcart, and all that with a great design; sports tracking). They make a hundred of euros from those on the first month, but that’s it: I tell them to treat those as portfolios to get interviews, and they do. I have no idea what goes wrong during those, but their repeated failures to sign anything is bigger than one HR being in a bad mood. What I see is a world in 15-20 years where 3% of the population designs things; 12% have menial jobs, mainly manning security and healthcare bot-based systems and 85% cannot work. Spain or even Berlin already have a modern economy with 30% unemployment: subsidies, black-market service jobs, low rents… it looks somewhat stable, if shocking. Clay Shirky had an interesting point about that, in an essay called “Gin, TV series and Wikipedia” or something like that — where he assumed there is a sacrificed generation, and the next learns. I have a hard time seeing millenials be anything but creatives with a YouTube channel. Maybe that’s worth it.
Guthur 13y ago
> ...labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability > ...lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital labor > ...guaranteeing every American a basic income What all these say to me is a an unwillingness to actually advance the social dynamic that has been in place for 100s of the years. The hierarchy of serfdom. Why when you have the possibility of removing drudge like work with automation would you actually want to actively retain it. Why when a society of plenty is possible would you want to limit it's benefits for a few and give only a basic income to the rest. Why would you try to define someone with a menial task when you could aim to help them bring more worth to society and themselves with a more fulfilling and beneficial activity. Not saying there are easy answers to any these questions but trying to maintain the status quo is not an approach that benefits everyone.

45 points by wallflower 13y ago

Over 60 years ago Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the "man being replaced by machine" problem in his * 1952 * novel, "Player Piano."

dobbsbob 13y ago
The quote from Erik Brynjolfsson in this article is also right out of the Unabomber manifesto on the dystopian future where machines make our decisions for us, and the masses are ruled by a handful of elites who have access to the control of these systems.
mindcrime 13y ago
I think Ned Ludd had a few things to say as well, back in 1779 or thereabouts[1]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

coldcode 13y ago

The flaw in this argument is that although the power of the machines is making advances appear faster to make humans less important, the power of humans to use the advances for no good is increasing at the same rate. Thus Google knows when you are going on a trip but someone hacks Target for millions of credit cards in a way no one notices for weeks. Technology is a two edged sword.

allochthon 13y ago
I don't think this point contradicts anything Friedman said: Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before ...

VLM 13y ago

I read the article and skimmed the comments and all of the economic comments almost intentionally avoided discussing monetary velocity as a concept. Oh they'd dance around it but never directly discuss it. Its not terribly controversial, so I don't see why. The modern numbers are utterly dismal, maybe thats why? Too much of a downer? During an economic depression, a growing fraction of the population is removed from the "real" economic system and market, they start to use Tide detergent, lotto tickets, drugs, cases of cola as their new economic system and currency. In a similar way, as the fraction of the population still involved in the interchange of information decreases, despite all the article hand wringing, its pretty simple, they'll just drop out. Hard/impossible to say what the new system and currency will be. People will just stop. The future of the "knowledge worker" looks a lot like ... travel agent. So, put it together, and in a post-knowledge worker economy, they'll always be a small number of elite knowledge workers, and always be some jobs that are not financially viable to automate away (not many, of course), but overall society will just wander on over to something else and look at knowledge work / service work as something from the past... thats what grandpa used to do before all of them got downsized, or whatever. The article is much ado about nothing, in the long run. Currently there exists a service / knowledge economy, at least for a small segment of the population, and its going away, just like every other segment eventually mostly goes away. OK. That and watching the political ax grinding was moderately entertaining. "If we all just held our hands around the campfire and sang, then ..."

projectileboy 13y ago

I always liked Thomas Friedman's writing on foreign policy issues back in the day, but his work on globalization and technology always sounds incomplete and amateurish. I think Mr. Friedman would do himself a favor if he actually spent some time learning to code and hacking on an Arduino board or something so that he could start to develop more intuition on what can and cannot easily be done with technology, and where globalization fits in and where it doesn't.

gahahaha 13y ago
His writings on foreign policy and economics is also incompetent garbage. One datapoint is his support for the Iraq war. But really why he still has a column in the NYT is a mystery.
- curtis 13y ago
  I do not want to be in the business of defending Thomas Friedman, but I think his opinions on the Iraq might have been more nuanced than he is usually given credit for. For example: NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST THOMAS FRIEDMAN THEN: "Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960s. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U. S. and its allies remove the lid. Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won, and it will say one of two things. "It could say, 'Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany--a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you've just removed.' "Or the envelope could say, 'You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia--an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists, and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new Saddam.' "In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the way he is. In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is what it is. Those are two very different problems. And we will know which we've won only when we take off the lid. The conservatives and neocons, who have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this question, because they don't know, either." --The New York Times, January 26, 2003 (See http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220 http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220)

cowsandmilk 13y ago

I often wonder when the tipping point for white-collar specialists being replaced by machines will occur. Watson replacing doctors in making diagnoses has received a lot of attention, but there are many other fields. The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? We already have moved to replacing lawyers with computers for discovery, I would be even more pleased in negotiations to only have to change items flagged by machines than the sometimes incompetent lawyers I've had to deal with.

w1ntermute 13y ago
> The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? When the cost-risk equation comes out in favor of the computers.
VLM 13y ago
I was recently informed by an acquaintance that "lawyer work" decades ago was mostly about being a low to mid level manager over a herd of paralegals who did all the work by hand. As the market has collapsed, lawyers do all their own electronic searching and often data entry by themselves... The market has crushed the profession. Most likely that will eventually play out with doctors, probably economically enforced. Sure, doc, do whatever your medical judgement thinks best, if you want to work for free... but we're only paying on claims if your medical judgment matches "watson". So overproduce new docs for awhile to crater salaries, only pay claims if their work matches a computer model, and what we used to call a "nurse" will be the new "doctor". This also helps with doc-in-a-box facilities, which could now literally be a doc-in-a-box instead of a nurse-in-a-box or PA as implemented now. Eventually, being a "pharmacist" will mean being the minimum wage drone who stocks a semi-smart vending machine, or maybe it'll mean being the minimum wage drone answering the 800-number support line outsourced to the Philippines. I could see the same thing happening with accountants and HR and perhaps marketing.
- grey-area 13y ago
  I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers themselves? If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate. I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour, farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes, why is that?

allochthon 13y ago

I think he makes some interesting points. I do not think they are that amateurish. Like it or not, we're rapidly sliding into an era where human productivity is going off the charts. Unintended consequences are unavoidable. Nobody really knows what to do about it.

bambax 13y ago

> Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer, like I.B.M.’s Deep Blue. Donner replied: “I would bring a hammer.” Okay, but why not bring a gun to a chess match against a human? That would be an excellent winning strategy (cf. the Gordian Knot).

ritchiea 13y ago
I think a hammer would be sufficient in that case as well, unless of course your opponent brings the gun.

lvs 13y ago

Golly gee, things are changing too fast for Thomas Friedman and his readers!

ID_HOME 13y ago

tl;dr: Jew writes extremely condescending short story of the last 10 years, contemplates socialism and licks his chops imagining all the socioeconomic data that will soon be at his fingertips.

EliRivers 13y ago

because employers now have so much easier, cheaper access to above-average software Yet they consistently don't choose it. Much as in the following case... All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns, instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve what isn’t working — whether it is eye surgery techniques... That's an excellent example of another thing that won't happen, mainly because it already doesn't happen; medicine is a field where there are many, many examples of hard-data demonstrating better techniques, well-known, that nonetheless don't spread. Atul Gawande discusses it, amongst other interesting things, in his book "Better"; I namechecked that book mainly because, as well as discussing this, it's quite a fun read and a good starting point for principles that carry across all fields, but it's by no means the only source.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then write a 3-part book series on the coming flood, the power of water, and the wondrous new water-world awaiting all of us. A bit breathless, a bit over-done, a bit over-cooked, and a bit over-hyped. But he has a point. We are on the verge of some new golden age. Perhaps a new machine age. I tend to think we're seeing the beginnings of a transition to a machine lifeform-dominated Earth. Probably take 200-400 years to fully play out. People aren't just going to become obsolete -- they're going to become irrelevant and non-existent. Seeing pictures of an old-fashioned plain human like us, in another 400 years, will be as quaint to future man as seeing pictures of neanderthals in a science magazine is to us. The interesting thing is just how awake the average person is to the amount of change happening. When the Industrial Age happened, there were huge factories, great cities being built, and all sorts of physically giant things to look at and note that yes, something new was happening. With the new age, we're looking at changes in Silicon, machine learning, maybe robotics. There aren't going to be giant robots leveling cities in the near future (thankfully!) or anti-gravity machines taking us to Mars in a few hours (sadly!). Instead we're seeing massive changes, on a tiny scale, about what it means to be human. This article is for the cheerleaders. HN is for the cheerleaders, like us. But I wonder if the average person is even going to notice.

ilaksh 13y ago
People will notice eventually because your relationship to advanced AI is going to determine your relevance. And 400 years is wishful thinking. The new lifeforms may arrive well within two or three decades.
ojbyrne 13y ago
A bit of a hack? I find that this article has "self-irony" if there's such a thing - the fact that the writer works for the preeminent American newspaper completely refutes the premise of the article. Mediocrity will forever have a place in this world, if Thomas Friedman still has a job.

ChristianMarks 13y ago

If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY Times? A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs: Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity. Then Sebastian Thrun admitted that Udacity had a "lousy product" in this interview: http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-u... Friedman is a cheerleader for employers. Employees are warned that average isn't good enough. One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.

sehr 13y ago
Shocking! Former Stanford professor doesn't see the same results & progress with remedial state students. The entire concept of MOOC's must be doomed. Basing an entire industry's future off of the shortcomings of one man's idea and expectations is a bit silly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
bertil 13y ago
I won’t try to defend Friedman, but I believe you misunderstood what Thrun was trying to say: he is a very conceptually accurate guy, and him saying it is a bad ‘product’ doesn't mean the general concept is flawed, but that his ambition to market the whole of superior education as a video class has, with testing proven to show issues, with engagement in particular. He is far from abandoning the idea, but reacted by switching Udacity towards a for-pay, vocation certification platform. Having the best professors use video (or radio) to openly broaden the audience of their abstract teachings is a concept that has been widely tried since, well, I’d say 1530 with the College de France, but the recordings where a bit different then — anyway: it’s the principle of almost every high-brow show. Those tend to have less of an audience than we’d like, or need considerable adaptation — but Udacity was one attempt that was remarkable in mainly one way: how little the class was adapted for anything but highly intelligent and motivated twenty-somethings with fresh brains. Look at what Dan Ariely is doing for an great example of how to preserve the internet support and have an engagement comparable to a physical class.

hawkharris 13y ago

In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. Automation is what I love most about programming. Most of the time, when you encounter a tedious, dull process, you can come up with creative ways to make your machine do the work. It's one of the few occupations in which boredom represents opportunity.

to3m 13y ago
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php
- hawkharris 13y ago
  That app is pretty clever, and it plays off of valid criticisms of the author. :) Friedman has a talent for writing as well as glueing together disparate concepts to support his arguments. It's fair to say that in some articles, he says very little, very well.

hooande 13y ago

Automation bashing had become so boring. ”Us vs them” its a go to media cliche. Machines, automated or otherwise, are made to help us. We want every thing to be automated. The purpose of business and technology is to improve lives, not to employ people. No one starts a company with the intention of creating jobs. People want to solve problems, make money or bring useful new ideas to life. Startup founders want to do whatever has to be done in order to execute their vision, with humans, machines, trained animals or whatever. Automation improves our position as species and we need to get behind it instead of viewing it a competitive threat. As they say in pickup basketball, ”Same team!” It's true that automation has a disproportionate effect on different levels of society. But that's more about humans than it its about machines. There are a lot of people working on technical solutions now and sooner or later people will get to work on social solutions that address some of Friedman's concerns. We're a long way from a fully automated society and we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes.

bertil 13y ago
> we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes. I would argue, having lived in countries that lead automation rates, that we already are at a point were large groups of the population cannot find work with their qualification, and never will: farmers, miners and forest workers had to convert to become factory workers, but most of those are now outsourced or automated; at the moment, there isn’t a job in Western countries for someone who has difficulty learning how to read. Some people genuinely can’t grasp any abstract concepts: I taught in jail for a while, to people who couldn’t for the life of them generalise “Two apples plus three apples equals five apples; two sheets of paper plus three…” and remained baffled by ‘addition’ as an abstraction. Keep in mind: some of those guys fashioned working radios and distilleries from scratch. Similarly, I have talked to taxi drivers who couldn’t understand it was in their interest to switch to Uber, how the trust mechanism worked with the app (they thought the dispatcher could better tell on the phone if the client was shifty), to say nothing of choosing a path based on a congestion map. I love my Roomba and my waching-maching, but without the cleaning jobs, what are immigrants to Western country going to do? Take care of elderly people to whom they can’t speak? I fully agree with your point that automation is good for all, but we might have to face before the end of our careers a point where a vast majority of the population has to be considered handicapped, “mentally” for lack of a better word, out of the workforce and entirely subsidised. At the moment, even a coder, hard working and of average skill, cannot find a job where I am: I know a handful of guys who can make functional, useful apps all by themselves (say: scanning barcode, interrogate database to tell if a product is ethical, handle shopcart, and all that with a great design; sports tracking). They make a hundred of euros from those on the first month, but that’s it: I tell them to treat those as portfolios to get interviews, and they do. I have no idea what goes wrong during those, but their repeated failures to sign anything is bigger than one HR being in a bad mood. What I see is a world in 15-20 years where 3% of the population designs things; 12% have menial jobs, mainly manning security and healthcare bot-based systems and 85% cannot work. Spain or even Berlin already have a modern economy with 30% unemployment: subsidies, black-market service jobs, low rents… it looks somewhat stable, if shocking. Clay Shirky had an interesting point about that, in an essay called “Gin, TV series and Wikipedia” or something like that — where he assumed there is a sacrificed generation, and the next learns. I have a hard time seeing millenials be anything but creatives with a YouTube channel. Maybe that’s worth it.

Guthur 13y ago

> ...labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability > ...lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital labor > ...guaranteeing every American a basic income What all these say to me is a an unwillingness to actually advance the social dynamic that has been in place for 100s of the years. The hierarchy of serfdom. Why when you have the possibility of removing drudge like work with automation would you actually want to actively retain it. Why when a society of plenty is possible would you want to limit it's benefits for a few and give only a basic income to the rest. Why would you try to define someone with a menial task when you could aim to help them bring more worth to society and themselves with a more fulfilling and beneficial activity. Not saying there are easy answers to any these questions but trying to maintain the status quo is not an approach that benefits everyone.