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Creatures of the Screen, or Heroes in Life?

2/11/2014

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While many are happily seduced by the wonders and innovations of our contemporary high-tech life, others see danger lurking in our ever-growing reliance on digital technology. Nicholas Carr has a solid piece in a recent Atlantic Monthly about the hazards of progressive automation. One major development he explores is the unintended consequences of airplane autopilot systems. Carr discusses two recent fatal crashes, one a Continental Commuter flight flying between Newark and Buffalo that killed all 49 passengers and crew and the other an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris that crashed into the Atlantic killing all 228 on board. In both cases, the autopilot disconnected, forcing the pilot to take control. And in both cases the pilots reacted by taking the wrong action and actually causing their planes to lose velocity and crash. So it seems that while autopilot systems have contributed to greater air safety over time, they have also contributed to pilot errors and new types of accidents. 
 
Studies show that pilots, and others whose work has been largely automated, become complacent. Workers develop a kind of blind confidence that computers will operate perfectly, and this attitude fails to acknowledge the dangers that increasingly complex computer systems, as they interact with each other, may malfunction. Workers, in effect, become computer monitors, Carr argues. They become less aware of the processes they oversee and often less attentive to the tasks they actually have to do.  Automation can also make workers just plain rusty in performing ordinary tasks so that, when the computer system malfunctions or fails, workers make mistakes. Skills decline when they go unpracticed and workers can actually forget how jobs are supposed to be done. “Knowing,” Carr reminds us, “requires doing.” By separating workers from the work, ends are achieved without workers grappling with the means. “Computer automation severs the ends from the means,” Carr explains. And he claims “it’s the work itself—the means—that make us who we are.” 

Automation, in effect, changes who we are. We become passive, unengaged “creatures of the screen.” I recall the overwhelming public embrace of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger after his spectacular and highly skilled landing of a US Airways plane on the Hudson, which saved the lives of all 155 passengers on board. He was proclaimed a “hero” and showered with honors. But I do not think it was simply "The Miracle on the Hudson” that drew people’s
attention to him and made him into a popular hero. Rather it was the back story—the story of how he had been a strong advocate for safety all his life, he maintained his own skills and practiced alertness. He understood the
limitations of the automated systems he used, and above all he worked hard to live with the integrity, humility, and value system that defined his life and his work. The reviewer of Sully’s autobiography in The Washington Post summed up public perception well:

“Sullenberger’s all-American life story is so compelling that it screams to be required reading for all young people, or anybody else who needs confirmation that courage, dignity and extraordinary competence can still be found in this land.... [A] remarkable life story.”

Carr’s question in the end is the right one: “Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?” Are we to become “creatures of the screen” or are we to maintain our full humanity, each of us heroes in our own way, by continuing to know and to learn by doing rather than letting our machines work on the assumption that the human being is probably the weakest link in any given system.

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Myth of the Ultimate Machine Age: The Genie and the Bottle

6/25/2013

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There’s a semi-apocryphal story about Norbert Wiener, the brilliant, visionary MIT mathematician. It is said that he used to walk around the halls of the campus with his eyes closed and a finger on the wall to ensure that he did not lose his way. One day traveling what is fondly known as the “Infinite Corridor,” which stretches 825 feet from the main lobby of MIT’s central building west to east through 5 major buildings in all housing classrooms and offices. On one particular day, one of the classrooms in session  happened to have its door open and Norbert Wiener simply entered the classroom  and walked completely  around the perimeter and out the door again as he made his way toward his destination—to the silent amazement (and amusement) of the professor as well as
his students. 

Recently the New York Times published an excerpt from a long-lost article that Norbert Wiener wrote in 1949. Originally solicited by the oddball Sunday Times editor, Lester Markel,it was mysteriously either lost by Markel or abandoned by Wiener, or both. In any event, a researcher recently found the  among Wiener’s papers at the MIT archives. In the piece Wiener  about “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be.” He expounded  future automated systems well beyond what then existed and about smart computers and smart gauges that would integrate one machine with another machine various manufacturing processes.

Although he did not foresee the economic shift in the value of information versus manufacturing, the revolution he did envision was profound and his predictions dire: “These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the
present basis of industry, and for reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty. . . Moreover if we move in the direction of  making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us. In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are  opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.”

Would that our writers and our thinkers and our leaders of corporations today, instead of blithely hailing the onslaught of robots and marveling at increased productively and the brilliance of our technology, had some of the compassion and wisdom that Wiener possessed in 1949.


  

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Jobs and Technology: The Long View

11/7/2011

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After several years of debate about the job market, whether we need to create new jobs and save old ones through stimulus or pull back on spending and go for austerity, it’s good to escape that well-worn debate and find a new perspective, one that approaches the unemployment problem with a longer lens. Two MIT professors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have takena different look at why the unemployment problem has become such a chronic one. They find a major culprit in the progress of various digital technologies.

In Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee team up to argue that the root cause of the unemployment problem is that we are in the early stage of a “Great Restructuring.” The long-held correlation between job growth and economic growth is no longer valid, the authors contend. It is technology—its widespread use across all industries, especially in the last decade or so—that has precipitated a major “displacement” of jobs. The recession simply accelerated the pace, making the connection between the stagnation in the job market and technology more obvious as the job losses rose and high unemployment has persisted.  GDP, they point out, continues to rise while median income stagnates. And since the end of the recession, companies have increased their spending on equipment and software by 26% but payrolls have remained basically flat.

What’s more, there’s a growing disparity between the rate at which machines improve and the rate at which humans can change, a disparity which will only make things worse in the future. Moore’s Law continues to prevail for hardware, which saw processing speeds improve by a factor of 1000 from 1988 to 2003. During the same period, however, software algorithms improved by a factor of 43,000. Brynjolfsson and McAfee believe that such improvement rates have brought us to the inflection point where huge strides can be achieved very quickly. They cite Watson winning on Jeopardy! and Google’s self-driving cars as prime examples of recent breakthroughs that seemed decades away even a few years ago.

The authors identify three structural changes that have been unfolding for more than a decade and that are creating more unemployment problems:

(1)    Technology is replacing the jobs of lower skilled workers, with everything from robots that manufacture cars to voice-recognition software that answers telephones and resolves customer problems. Even in low-wage countries like China, robots are taking over the jobs of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The electronics company Foxconn plans to buy one million robots over the next three years to replace most of its workforce. The company currently has 10,000 robots and expects to have 300,000 within the next year.

(2)    Digitization means write once, read many, and this has created the “superstar” effect, where individuals and corporations benefit from the replication of everything from hit songs to advanced intellectual property. As a result single individuals can have a huge impact—and reap equally huge rewards—through their skills and decisions. The superstars overpower some very good competition that just can’t get to the top. It’s becoming a winner-take-all marketplace.

(3)    The division between labor and capital is also shifting.  As the input of human labor decreases in a particular business process, the owners of the capital equipment gain a proportionately larger amount of the bargaining power and the income. As a result, for example, corporate profits have rebounded and risen dramatically since the end of the recession.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee arguethat the digital frontier we have entered represents the third industrial revolution, after steam and electricity. Those who will succeed in this new frontier may well, the authors claim, be the ones who compete not against  the machine but with the machine. Learning how to use computers to improve organizations and to make sure that workers have the right skills for the future are key. The authors also advise people to cultivate the skills that computers will not be able to master, including leadership, team building, complex communications, and creativity. Entrepreneurs should find opportunities that take advantage of cheaper technology and (it is implied) cheaper mid-skilled unemployed workers to create new business models, bringing together people and computers in new and unexpected ways and creating new marketplaces.

The two researchers had originally begun their joint research on a book that would explore the opportunities for innovation in the “Digital Frontier.” The last part of their book does return to that theme, offering visions of entrepreneurial success. They also supply a social roadmap (with no less than 19 points!) for revamping education and government to support innovative and fast-changing organizations. Still even they admit that there are limits to their visions. Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur and not all entrepreneurial businesses create lots of jobs, especially today,  presumably because of the widespread use of more technology and fewer people in those businesses.

After such compelling arguments about the deep economic restructuring that is going on because of technology, I find it hard to be as optimistic as the authors about reviving the job market. The nineteen points are broad ranging. They include some oft-discussed issues such as investing in our educational system to improve it in various ways and revamping the visa system to encourage skilled workers and people with advanced to degrees to remain in this country. Other less common and very good ideas include teaching entrepreneurial thinking at all levels of education and creating databases and sets of standardized business processes for new entrepreneurs to use. Still, the progress of technology has left so many people in the dust at this point that it’s hard to even calculate how long and hard the road to employment recovery might be.  
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