4 ms·

White Collars Turn Blue (1996)

• StrawberryFrog 17y ago
  Seems to be by Paul Krugman. He's always worth reading.
• mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  This really gives you an idea of how long 100 years has gotten. Krugman was asked to predict the state of the world in 2096, and and most of his vision is happening right now. And then there are things he didn't mention, but which have (or will shortly) become technically feasible. I think any of these are potentially more world-shifting than, say, the decline of the American suburb: - Real-time neuron-level simulation of human brains (~10 years to go) - Design of artificial proteins - Machine vision good enough to drive cars/trucks Personally, 2096 looks further away the closer we get to it.
  • StrawberryFrog 17y ago
    A lot of what you mention was raised in a recent discussion between Paul Krugman and cutting-edge Sci-fi author Charlie Stross. Here's a copy of the transcript, which is also well worth a read http://sites.google.com/site/strosskrugmantranscript/ http://sites.google.com/site/strosskrugmantranscript/ Sample Charlie Stross: It’s going to be one of these things where there is going to be a sudden step change. ... When the automatic self-driving vehicles get sufficiently good that they are less likely to be in a collision than a human driver, your premium will go up if you insist on driving manually. Yeah, that’s going to go up steeply a few years later. I think we may be seeing the end of human beings allowed to drive the public highways within 30 years
    • Retric 17y ago
      Insurgence companies are profitable with the current level of risk, so some of them would be happy and profitable to keep selling inshurance at the current rate. The only driver for machine drivers is going to be cheaper premiums and boredom. Once machines drivers become really popular we might end up with specific high speed lanes which only they can enter etc. But, it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers.
      • StrawberryFrog 17y ago
        it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers. Right, and if it starts 10 years from now that's consistent with Stross's "30 years from now". In time-scale, if not in exact outcome.
      • barrkel 17y ago
        Insurance is profitable because the risk is spread across a wide base, including risk-averse people. If the default is high-safety automatic vehicles, only the reckless and adrenaline-junkies are likely to drive, forcing up rates disproportionately.
        • Retric 17y ago
          If anything a large number of the risk adverse are going to be the last holdouts to keep driving.
        • nradov 17y ago
          There isn't a whole lot of risk spreading in car insurance. They adjust rates heavily based on age and driving record. Most of the reckless adrenaline junkies are young, and have a history of collisions and moving violations, so it's fairly easy to identify them.
          • barrkel 17y ago
            Without actually being an actuary, and having access to the raw data, it's rather hard to tell IMHO whether the rate adjustments are really sufficient to cover the risk. Since risky customers are "pay big now, maybe payout big later" - and young customers get older and more experienced - it seems to me that there may be a human tendency to slightly underprice the risk of customers who pay large premia. The analogous situation with health insurance, of course, is even more deeply skewed. Insurance companies love having healthy young people on their plans because they almost never have to pay out - young healthy people overpay by quite a bit on health insurance.
          • anamax 17y ago
    • sethg 17y ago
      When I read about step changes, I think about cell phones. I was studying in Israel during 1997-98, in a school where almost all the students were twentysomethings from the US or UK. At one point, one of the students came in with a cellphone on his belt, and he got teased for it, because carrying around a cell phone was a stereotypically Israeli thing to do. He'd gone native, so to speak. Flash forward five years, maybe less, and of course I and my wife have cellphones. Who, in the US, doesn't?
      • DannoHung 17y ago
        Carrying it on your belt was the problem. And I still tease people that carry crackberries on their belts.
        • StrawberryFrog 17y ago
          The solution is that they got small enough to pocket.
        • sethg 17y ago
          Uh-oh.
        • shrughes 17y ago
          What happens nowadays is that people will at first carry them in their pockets, but as they get further from their youth, their thighs get flabbier. Soon enough they find it more comfortable to have the phone on the belt, because their pockets are smaller.
    • mnemonicsloth 17y ago
      It's just a first impression (I'm still reading), but the discussion seems kind of sad to me. Krugman once wrote an academic paper on interstellar trade, Stross is famous on his way to notorious for far-out concepts, and they both seem to have this vaguely pessimistic view of the future. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, Stross mumbles something about "Eric Drexler's pixie dust". I guess that's a cool attitude to cop if you're a science fiction writer. Nanotechnology is so obviously too good to be true that it isn't interesting and so must be hokum. But the actual research that's now getting published -- in Science and Nature, no less -- promises that we'll probably see radical change sooner rather than later. No one in the scientific community talks about it in those terms, of course. That would be... un-serious, and in a research field that was saturated with nutjobs before it formally came into existence, that's a kiss of death. Drexler posts the article citations on his blog, though: Here's a Map of China, assembled from a fabric of interlinked single strands of DNA: http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-innovation/ http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-in... DNA Origami for nanoscale 3D structures: http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-nanotechnology/ http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n... DNA Origami Box (with locking hinged lid and DNA sequence "key") http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/ http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/ A big-picture post: http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite-nanosystems/ http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite... Software tools for protein design continue to improve: http://www.nanorex.com http://www.nanorex.com etc, etc.
      • cstross 17y ago
        WRT the "Eric Drexler's pixie dust" remark, what I meant was _not_ that molecular nanotechnology won't work and totally revolutionize materials science, structural engineering, and a bunch of other disciplines ... but in the context of the conversation we were having at the time, nanobots with quasi-magical powers have become the lazy SF writer's magic wand _du_ _jour_, sketched into fictional life with remarkable information processing and medicinal powers that go way beyond anything we're likely to see in the short term. Sort of like "electricity" or "vital force" in the fiction of the early 19th century.
    • tocomment 17y ago
      I think we might have the technology for cars to drive themselves in 15-20 especially if there is demand for it. However I just don't see a way to get from here to there. Even with a working system, what company could produce it and take on that kind of product liability?
      • nradov 17y ago
        In the US it will probably have to be pushed forward by the federal government. Once the technology is good enough to significantly cut crash death rates then it becomes a public health issue. I expect they will establish some sort of certification program for automatically driven cars. And manufacturers will receive liability protection for certified products.
      • 0x44 17y ago
        The kind of company with a fat contract with the US Military.
• nico 17y ago
  Spot on! Seems like things are happening a little faster though.
• jcdreads 17y ago
  Interesting that he completely failed to predict the possibility of political punditry as an economist's day job. (Or, in the closing sentence, did he...?)
  • sethg 17y ago
    I think you have it backwards. Being a tenured economics professor is Krugman's day job. Nobody makes a living writing New York Times op-ed pieces, even though Krugman may be more famous now for his op-eds than for his academic work.
• brandnewlow 17y ago
  The implications for journalists from this piece are fun. According to this, the jobs will be shifting more and more back to old-school, face-to-face shoe leather reporting. Suburban-based newspapers will shrink but stick around and remain profitable once they hit the right size due to having a monopoly. In cities, however, there will be a dozen outlets each going after different tribes of metropolitans with some overlap, similar to how a place like Chicago once had dozens of papers each serving different immigrant communities.
• sachinag 17y ago
  I love that Esther Dyson beat Chris Anderson to "free" by a good 13 years.
• erlanger 17y ago
  There's nothing particularly astonishing about predicting that history will repeat itself...
• sipior 17y ago
  One potential problem with the scenario outlined here by Krugman is the assumption that an economy organised principally around information will precipitate the devaluing of that knowledge. What's true for oil and steel is not necessarily true for information (a generic categorisation if there ever was one), and Krugman draws this analogy far too glibly. If anything, possessing information makes it easier to acquire more and more valuable information; the technological exponentiation we are living through today makes that point clearly. If information does not obey the basic rule of scarcity that physical goods do, it seems unreasonable to assume automatically that the effect of "information abundance" on the economy will be analogous to a glut of oil or grain. A lot is also made of the outsourcing of "knowledge workers"; hardly a new phenomenon, even in 1996. And it will almost certainly still exist in 2096. But the inequities in living standards and expectations that makes outsourcing practical currently is steadily being eradicated by the gradual improvement in economic conditions which outsourcing itself helps to make possible. In some sense, the condition is probably self-throttling. The presumptive end of all this is a high-entropy state, where there is no strong "potential difference" between economies to make outsourcing worthwhile: it would eventually become pointless for everyone. I don't imagine we'll reach that point by 2096, though :-)
  • jimbokun 17y ago
    "But the inequities in living standards and expectations that makes outsourcing practical currently is steadily being eradicated by the gradual improvement in economic conditions which outsourcing itself helps to make possible." In effect, it is an arbitrage opportunity where you have a large number of well educated people with a low standard of living, combined with cost of living differences compared to western countries. Certainly, over the next 100 years such arbitrage opportunities should abate, as people around the world with valued skills have similar standards and costs of living, and thus demand similar wages. We seem to be seeing the beginnings of that process already.
• biohacker42 17y ago
  Astonishing? Soaring resource prices - he makes no mention of the currency explosion that led to inflated prices. Or that right now oil demand is back to 2005 levels. But in the long term his is obviously right because finite resources are finite. How's that an amazing prediction? The environment as property. Is he talking about plain old private property? Or pollution regulations, or cap and trade? Those things were all on the table in 1996. And today Obama is still having a lot of trouble with even symbolic cap and trade. The rebirth of the big city - Urbanization is not a new trend, and despite what happened to Detroit, it was never in recess, certainly not outside of America. The devaluation of higher education - This simply has not come true at all. I hope the ivy league bubble bursts at someone point, but I think we're still decades away from that. The celebrity economy. - Andy Warhol said it better.
  • jimbokun 17y ago
    "How's that an amazing prediction?" Hyperbole, but amazing in the sense that it's very different from the kinds of things "everyone" was saying in 1996. What he said are very much the things "everyone" is saying now. So, maybe or maybe not great prediction of what will be happening 100 years from 1996. But an excellent prediction of the 2009 zeitgeist.
  • sgoranson 17y ago
    Fair points, but I thought his predictions on intellectual property issues changing the music industry were pretty astonishing for 1996.
  • run4yourlives 17y ago
    The devaluation of higher education This is going to happen sooner rather than later. University education at this point is simply a trend - something that everyone does. You can see this not in the sciences as much as in the standard arts programs that 70% of the graduate population possess. The cost of these programs keep climbing, and the average wage does not. Eventually, the tipping point will be reached and there will be more people in the middle class that cannot afford university without the promise of the high paying job that it gives - which it doesn't if a degree is commonplace. Even better, European countries often fund their universities to almost 100%. When tax revenue drops off, these funds will eventually be cut. You can see this happening in Canada today. Not many people are going to pay $70K for a four year program to become a career receptionist. Even less when it's perfectly clear that a high school educated trades apprentice can make a lot more.
• jimbokun 17y ago
  I'm glad I did not see the author's name until I got to the bottom. It totally would have changed how I considered the content.
• TweedHeads 17y ago
  "Free copies of content are going to be what you use to establish your fame. Then you go out and milk it" Piracy is your friend.