Technological unemployment: Difference between revisions

You would think that this could only ever be a temporary effect: the entrepreneurial possibilities created by freeing labour from one occupation to do something else must mean, in the long run, ''there can be no technological unemployment''. History tells us that. But it couldn’t persuade {{author|Daniel Susskind}}, who wrote a new book with an old message: [[this time is different]].<ref>We say to him what we [[The Singularity is Near - Book Review|said a decade]] ago to {{author|Ray Kurzweil}}: “... it’s easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we’re only six months from the new decade, [''note: that was the '''last''' decade.''] but, being as [[path-dependent]] as it is, the [[evolution|evolutionary process]] is notoriously bad at making predictions — until the results are in.” ''Then'' it’s awesome.</ref>

To the [[JC]]s’ simplistic way of looking at it, to believe the contrary is to be afflicted by, at least, a lack of imagination — and really, a lack of ''wisdom'' — the kind you can only get from the school of ''life''. And, in any case, the whole edifice of technological development is founded on a different premise: that there is more than one way to skin a cat, and the history of technology is the accidental discovery of whole new ways of not just skinning old cats, but then figuring out what to do with the skins, and the cats.  

The history of the world so far: we solve old problems, usually by accident. Old problem goes away and in its place we find a range up untapped, hitherto unimagined ''possibilities''.  

Machines aren’t awfully good at imagining hitherto unforeseeable possibilities, let alone creatively exploiting them. And no, being good at Go or Chess doesn’t falsify that observation.<ref>Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this the “ludic fallacy”. {{google2|Ludic|Fallacy}}.</ref> Machines are good at doing what someone has already figured out needs to be done, now, only ''faster''. They require configuration, programming and implementation. Machines are [[A faster horse - technology article|faster horses]]. They won’t imagine an alternative future for you. Not even clever, [[Artificial intelligence|artificially intelligent]], seemingly [[magic|magical machines]].

And if there were only way you ever could do things, and we had already found it, you technologists, futurologists and millenarians can get your coats. But that’s plainly nonsense.  

Did DARPA, when it invested the internet, have ''Gangnam Style'' in mind? Did Steve Jobs anticipate all the applications to which you could put an iPhone? Has the internet, or the smartphone, destroyed, or ''created'', humanoid commercial activity?

Technology certainly threatens those who seek to [[operationalise]] labour — who look to take the easy, algorithmic bits, that could and, really (if [[reg tech]] was any good), ''already should'' be done by robots — cheapen it and send it off to distant shores to processing by inexpensive young muppets<ref>I mean no disrespect to said young muppets, only to their muppetmasters: their very strategy is to find cheap, uncomplaining operatives possessed of basic literacy and a pulse. They do not want bright young things, because bright young things get ''ideas''.</ref> Because that is a transparently stupid strategy in the first place.  

[[Operationalisation]] is the process of trying to render the cosmic mundane — it is to ''ask'' to be superseded by robots, as you drive your business model, and your margins, into the ground.

But, yet, yet, yet: one thing we know [[technology]] will do is lower the barriers to interaction and communication. And one thing we know that the great huddled masses of mercantile foot-soldiers like to do is ''talk'' — as ''much'' as possible, and about ''as little of moment'' as possible, in as elliptical a way as possible. Visit [[LinkedIn]], or [[Twitter]] — hell, just listen to anything that comes out of the [[middle-management]] layer of any decent sized firm if you really need persuading of this.  

There is an equilibrium of sorts between the need to get stuff done and the need to vent your own opinions and, until that [[Tim Berners-Lee|Berners-Lee]] fellow ''ruined'' everything, it was set quite delicately at a place where, for most of us, while achieving anything was hard, finding people to listen to your opinions was even harder, so we spent most of our time in morose silence slugging away at a hard rock-face with an old, soft-bristled, toothbrush. We had collected enough chips of slate to keep our employers happy and take a bit home to keep the hungry mouths around the Formica table passably filled with tinned foods. The only people around to hear our plaintive discursions about the ills of the modern world were those spouses and children, their mouths so crammed with baked beans as to be unable even to reply. The divorce rate was stratospheric.

 

I’m getting a bit carried away, aren’t I.  But not entirely: see left for what Google’s ngram viewer makes of the relationship between marital harmony and a fulfilled online life. But while [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law Andy (and his successors) have been givething, it is not just Bill who has been takething away]. The [[middle management]] layer has been doing its bit too, by — well, basically by ''inventing'' itself to occupy the space occupied by the crickets. And it we take it that the productivity tools came on line from the mid 1980s — personal computers, the [[fax]], [[e-mail]] and then this glorious thing called the [[world wide web]].