- In a parallel universe, it’s still the 1990s and there was a Moore’s Law for the number of random pipes and hoses strewn across the landscape.
http://www.boredpanda.com/scifi-girl-robot-traveling-artbook-simon-stalenhag/ - China has rolled out (pun intended) a copy of the U.S. Stryker armored vehicle
http://www.janes.com/article/73292/norinco-rolls-out-vp10-8×8-vehicle-variants - Here’s a needlessly long-winded piece about the long, long history of Christian theologians, cult leaders and even Popes wrongly predicting Biblical Doomsday.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/25/yearning-for-the-end-of-the-world - A survey of 150 people shows about 1/3 of them could hand-draw common corporate logos (for companies like Burger King and Starbucks) from memory, with disturbing accuracy. (I estimate it takes 100 – 200 repetitions of the same commercial before I become cognizant of whatever is being advertised).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4813514/Only-16-people-correctly-recall-famous-logos.html - Britain is repainting its Challenger tanks with a camouflage scheme similar to what it had for its West Berlin-based tank unit in 1982. What’s old is new, and visual concealment methods don’t seem to have improved in 35 years.
https://warisboring.com/new-urban-camo-wont-save-british-tanks/ - Medical micromachines were successfully used on lab rats to deliver antibiotic loads. I don’t understand why medical nanomachines get all the attention and hype when micromachines are more technically plausible and could do many of the same things.
http://bigthink.com/design-for-good/for-the-first-time-tiny-robots-treat-infection-in-a-living-organism - An analysis of the accuracy of Gartner Hype Cycles from 2000 to 2016 is an informative catalog of failures.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles-michael-mullany - Here’s an outstanding rebuttal to Kevin Kelly’s recent “Myth of a Superhuman AI” article. I’ve never heard of the author before, his blog only has three entries, but he’s written a very thorough and convincing treatise, all the more impressive since he didn’t write it in his native language (he’s Finnish).
https://hypermagicalultraomnipotence.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/there-are-no-free-lunches-but-organic-lunches-are-super-expensive-why-the-tradeoffs-constraining-human-cognition-do-not-limit-artificial-superintelligences/ - Geneticists have uncovered the chemical steps through which magic mushrooms produce their hallucinogenic agent, psilocybin. Large scale industrial production of it could be possible, because the world badly needs more drugs.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/web/2017/08/Magic-mushroomenzyme-mystery-solved.html - A reality check for lab grown meat.
http://gizmodo.com/behind-the-hype-of-lab-grown-meat-1797383294 - A video that clearly and simply describes the operation of Mazda’s new, high-efficiency gas engine, which operates like a diesel part of the time.
https://youtu.be/9KhzMGbQXmY - Scientists and inventors are dispensable, but great artists, writers and musicians are not. (A somewhat humbling thing to remember when debating the usefulness of a STEM vs. humanities education.)
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/tim-harford-review/#.WX-QCkibyHc.facebook
Dr. George Wald shows that having a Nobel Prize doesn’t mean you know everything
This little gem comes from the 1979 Biblical Doomsday “documentary” The Late, Great Planet Earth:
‘I am one of those scientists who finds it hard to see how the human race is to bring itself and bring the human enterprise much past the year 2000.’
That dire prediction was made by famed scientist Dr. George Wald, who was by all accounts a brilliant man who won a Nobel Prize for his work.
The phrase “much past” makes Wald’s dooms-date ambiguous, though I consider it a failed prediction at this point, since we’re 17 years into new century without civilization collapsing, and without any evidence it’s about to. To the contrary, since Wald’s quoted statement, we’ve managed to add three billion more humans to the planet while also sharply reducing global rates of malnourishment and absolute poverty. Across a wide variety of metrics, the human race has grown larger, healthier, richer, and less violent, and there are no signs the trends will abate anytime soon.
Making accurate future predictions is always fraught with uncertainty, but it becomes especially conjectural when people start making predictions about things outside of their areas of expertise. Wald’s mastery of biochemistry left him with no better a grasp of the human race’s trajectory than an average person, and his inclusion in this religious doomsday documentary is an example of the “Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy, in which a person’s credentials are erroneously substituted for reasoned and fact-based argumentation.
In my recent blog entry about Richard Branson, I pointed out that predictions should not be trusted if the person making them stands to tangibly benefit if other people believe them, and to that I’ll add that predictions should not be trusted if the person making them doesn’t have relevant expertise. Moreover, name-dropping and credential-dropping should never substitute for independently verifiable facts and transparent methodologies.
UPDATE: (8/28/2017) Coincidentally, I just came across the article, “A Nobel Doesn’t Make You an Expert: Lessons in Science and Spin.” The author (a former New York Times science editor) uses the example of James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, to show that the opinions and predictions of “experts” are often of little value when they pertain to subjects outside their areas of expertise. In 1998, Dr. Watson erroneously predicted that cancer would be cured within two years. The author also sets forth a few tips for evaluating predictions from “experts,” which partly overlap with my own and which I’ll summarize here:
- Ensure that the person’s education and professional credentials are relevant. A useful measure of a scientist’s level of expertise is the quantity and quality of the peer-reviewed papers they have produced.
- Be suspicious when experts have conflicts of interest that may bias their opinions and predictions.
- Remember that experts whose theories fall far outside the scientific mainstream are usually (but not always) wrong.
- Be very suspicious of scientists and other experts who feel aggrieved or persecuted by the mainstream of their professions. If an expert with an outlier theory also believes there is a conspiracy against him or her, it should raise a red flag in your mind.
Links:
https://undark.org/article/cornelia-dean-making-sense-of-science/
Richard Branson still isn’t in space
From December 2013:
Sometime in 2014, entrepreneur Richard Branson and his two children aim to be on the first commercial flight of SpaceShip Two, Virgin Galatic’s rocket for propelling eight people 100 kilometers above the Earth. (SOURCE)
Sadly, SpaceShip Two broke up during a test flight in October 2014, killing one of its pilots. A replacement was constructed, and as of August 2017, it is undergoing sub-orbital test flights, but Branson and his children haven’t used it or any other craft to go into space (in fact, Virgin Galactic has only had three manned spaceflights in its history, all taking place in 2004). Yet hope springs eternal, and there’s a new deadline:
One area Branson has been less keen on speaking out on recently has been his project to take people into space. Virgin Galactic, as the fledgling business is known, has been beset by technical and other difficulties, not least the fatal crash of its SpaceShipTwo in California’s Mojave Desert in October 2014.
Despite the idea proving popular with future travellers – some 500 potential customers have spent $250,000 on reserving their spot on one of its trips– it is perhaps the one business he has found the hardest to get off the ground.
After the crash, Branson said his dream of space travel may have ended. But Galactic, under boss and former NASA chief of staff George Whitesides, has regrouped, redoubled its focus on safety, and appears to be making progress.
…“The test programme is going really well, and as long as we’ve got our brave test pilots pushing it to the limit we think that after whatever it is, 12 years of hard work, we’re nearly there.”
When exactly will he be nearly there? After all, Branson himself – and some of his family – have committed to being on the first flight.
“Well we stopped giving dates,” he confesses. “But I think I’d be very disappointed if we’re not into space with a test flight by the end of the year [2017] and I’m not into space myself next year [2018] and the progamme isn’t well underway by the end of next year.” (SOURCE)
This underscores the need to always be skeptical of future predictions, even if they come from people who have been enjoying a lot of recent success and who appear to know what they’re talking about. Skepticism is doubly warranted when the predictions are self-serving and possibly designed to boost interest and investment in the person’s business ventures (i.e. – inflate the stock price of the predictor’s company, of which he is the majority shareholder). On that note, I’m a fan of Elon Musk, but I fear he might be dangerously over-reliant on self-generated hype to keep his portfolio of businesses going. At some point, his investors will lose faith in him without bona fide profits.
Links
https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/21/5830526/spaceshipone-commercial-space-flight-ten-year-anniversary
Review: “Killzone” (the PS2 game)
[Below is a review of the video game “Killzone,” which I wrote while in college, over ten years ago. While I admit it’s a little silly to hold a video game to such scrutiny, my conclusions are still valid, and this piece is significant because it was my first attempt to put part of my own future vision in writing, even if it is a critique of someone else’s vision.
This repost will be the first in a recurring series of film and video game “Reviews” that I’ll be doing to assess the feasibility of whatever futuristic elements they depict.
I’ve edited this Killzone review a little for clarity and brevity. ]
A couple days ago I finally finished the game “Killzone” for PS2, and I have some thoughts about it. First, a bit of background: “Killzone” takes place at some unspecified point in the distant future when mankind has mastered interstellar space travel and colonized two new planets, Vekta and Helghan. Vekta looks identical to Earth, while Helghan is barren and polluted.
Over the generations, the humans of Helghan–known as the Helghast–were genetically mutated by their harsh environment to the point of being barely-human freaks. The Helghast are also warlike and have a tradition of military leadership. At the start of the game, the cool Intro video shows the Helghast army invade Vekta by surprise. While the motivations for this aren’t clearly stated, after reading the “Killzone” booklet I believe it was probably done to obtain resources that Helghan lacks.
This is where you, the player, come in. You play a soldier named “Templar,” serving in Vekta’s ground forces (called the “ISA”). As the game progresses, three other character join your team: Luger is the woman, Rico is the heavy weapons guy and Hakha is the Helghast/human “hybrid.” Among them, Templar is the natural leader and all-around balanced fighter while the other three have specific combat specialties. By the midpoint of the game, you have the option of playing as any character you wish at each level. I thought this was a pretty cool touch because each character has unique abilities and weapons that make the levels a different experience depending on whom you choose. Anyway, you blow away a bunch of Helghast and save the planet–from the first invasion wave.
Along with the the selectable player option, I also liked how “Killzone” was neither too short (“Max Payne 2”) nor too long (“Halo 2”). However, there were some areas needing serious improvement. The gameplay could be awkward: You can’t jump period, making it impossible for your big, soldier self to clear small obstacles like a Jersey Wall; grenades are almost impossible to aim and take about 10 seconds to throw and detonate; climbing ladders is an ordeal; and aiming the sniper rifle gives new definition to the word “tedious.” While the A.I. is an O.K. challenge, the enemies aren’t varied enough and there are only like three different types of Helghast soldiers. Your fellow A.I. squad mates are of inconsistent help during gameplay. The game’s story was also pretty boring. Overall, “Killzone” is playable but falls short of what it could have been.
I also noticed some crude demographic stereotypes in the game. On your team, for instance, the leader is Templar: the handsome younger white guy. Luger, being a woman, is weaker in terms of health and physical strength and has to rely on her sniper pistol and sneaking skills as she runs around in her skin tight black jumpsuit killing bad guys. Rico, being the only “colored” person on the team (he looks Latino), is big, tough, dumb, vulgar, and slow, and fittingly starts each mission with a big machinegun/rocket launcher while his teammates have smaller, more precise weapons. Hakha’s bald head and pale skin cast him as the stereotypical older white man, and he predictably uses received pronunciation, quotes passages from literature to the rest of the team, and knows the most about computer and electronics systems.
“Killzone” also presents an extremely incongruous vision of the future. Let’s begin: We are told at the beginning of the game that humans have inhabited Helghan and Vekta for several generations, which I’ll very conservatively assume means “50 years.” Thus, 50 years before the start of “Killzone,” mankind had already 1) mastered faster than light space travel and 2) built spacecraft cheaply enough to allow mass numbers of people to be transported to Vekta and Helghan. The requisite scientific breakthroughs for these two technological advancements will almost certainly not arrive before the middle of the 21st century, and in fact may prove totally elusive. Considering the facts and estimates in this paragraph, we are left to conclude that “Killzone,” at the very earliest, takes place 100 years in the future–2106 A.D.
Problematically, the world of “Killzone” ignores all of the other scientific breakthroughs and new technologies that will also be made by 2106. For instance, all of the weapons used in the game are simply 20th-century firearms, but with cool-looking exteriors that make them look advanced when in fact they’re not. By 100 years from now, small arms will certainly be much more advanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if directed energy weapons or EMP-powered railguns had totally superseded firearms. I also expect small arms to come with built-in sensors, computers and actuators that allow the guns to sense which target their shooter wanted to hit, and to automatically aim themselves at it. All you would have to do is aim at someone’s body, pull the trigger, and the gun would make sure the bullet went directly through the person’s brain or heart. Not just that, but through the part of the organ that caused the most damage and the most immediate incapacitation. The gun’s computer would also automatically shuffle between different types of ammunition to inflict maximum damage on the target and could also automatically adjust the velocity of the projectile. As a result, the small arms of 2106 will require almost no training to be used effectively. And if they incorporated nanotechnology, future guns might be able to make their own bullets and conduct self-repairs and maintenance, meaning the weapons would be self-cleaning and would last almost forever.
But the more fundamental problem with “Killzone” is that humans will be obsolete on the battlefield by 2106. Think about it. Even the most hardcore, well-armed, futuristic supersoldier still needs hours a day to eat, sleep and take care of other personal needs. He or she still feels pain, questions orders, makes mistakes, and is subject to irrational and unpredictable emotions. A machine, on the other hand, would suffer from none of these faults. Machines are also expendable whereas humans are not, meaning that it would be easier politically to wage a war if a nation’s casualties were solely machines. A human still needs at least 16 years of growth and development to be physically and mentally able to handle the demands of combat, followed by months or even years of specialized military training. A combat machine could be built in an afternoon and then programmed with its military training in a few minutes. Clearly the future of warfare belongs to machines. By 2106, fighting machines will make war a cruelly unfair environment for human beings, where only the most desperate or foolhardy members of our species will dare set foot. Without direct human participation, the battlefield will become totally devoid of all the camaraderie, honor and bravery that stand today as the few positive attributes of war, and warfare will complete its evolution towards becoming a totally cold and anonymous endeavor.
It probably looks petty for me to spend so much effort lambasting “Killzone” because it’s just a video game. That is certainly true, but the fact remains that games like “Killzone” embody and reinforce the ill-informed visions of the future held by most people, and I believe that critiquing the game is the most immediate way I can help people examine their own ideas. I think few people realize how unrealistically our future is portrayed in popular culture. Things like “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and “Halo 1 & 2” have created the preposterous misconception that the universe is filled with humanoid, alien intelligent life forms that are all +/- 50 years our same level of technology. Considering 1) the age of the Universe (13.5 billion years old), 2) the fact that the planets are oldest at its center of the Universe and youngest at its fringes thanks to the Big Bang, 3) the fact that 3.5 billion years separated the appearance of the first primitive bacteria to the evolution of intelligent life on Earth, and 4) that chance that cosmic events have seriously altered the pace of Earthly evolution, we can conclude that the Universe is certainly populated with intelligent species of vastly different levels of technology.
To have human space explorers discover an intelligent alien species close to our level of technology is akin to having you randomly pick a name out of a three-inch thick phone directory and finding out that that person shares your same year, date, hour, minute, and second of birth. It is overwhelmingly likely that you will instead randomly pick someone who is different from you, and similarly, it is overwhelmingly likely that alien civilizations we encounter will be vastly older or younger than we are and thus either vastly stronger or weaker than we. So this recurring sci-fi trope where humans are fighting future space wars with aliens is ludicrous: any war with an alien species is certain to be very lopsided in favor of one side, and hence very short. This is actually where “Killzone” gets a bit of credit, since the plot has humans from different planets fighting one another. Sadly, I can see that as realistic even in 2106.
I also take issue with “Killzone” and most other sci-fi portraying the racial makeup of our descendants as being essentially the same as it is in contemporary America: The majority are white people, with smaller, roughly equally sized minorities of blacks, Asians and Hispanics. NO. Eighty percent of the current world population is nonwhite, and in the future, once Third World areas have closed the economic and technology gap with the West, we will see the world’s true racial character more vividly in everyday life. Multiracial people will also be much more common.
Another demographic shift very rarely portrayed in future sci-fi is the graying of the population. Average human lifespans have been increasing steadily for more than 100 years, and there is no reason to expect this trend to abate. By 2106, expect average people to be living to 120, if not indefinitely. Moreover, they will be stay active much longer thanks to better medical technologies. The means to slow, halt and reverse the effects of age will probably be achieved. “Killzone,” like all other Sci-Fi depictions of the future, fails to recognize the societal implications of these new technologies. Older people will look and feel DECADES younger than they are chronologically.
Will future technology make the sexes equal?
Much is made in the media about the prevalence of sexism and sex-based inequality in the world. In the long run, won’t technology close whatever gaps there are and solve these problems? Consider:
- Job automation will eliminate the gender pay gap. Today, men make more money than women in almost every type of occupation. However, if machines end up taking over 100% of all gainful jobs (“gainful” = someone else is willing to pay for the product of your labor; so volunteer jobs are excluded), then all humans will be earning $0 and there will be no gender pay gap.
- Job automation will also eliminate the gender labor force participation rate gap and gender unemployment rate gap. Today, men are overall more likely to work outside the home, but they’re also more likely to be unemployed. Again, since no humans will have gainful jobs in the future, this disparity will vanish.
- Robot labor will eliminate the gender household chore gap. Tasks like washing laundry and cooking food generally fall harder on women in households, but if each house has a robot servant, none of the humans have to do anything, and this gap also disappears. Robot servants could also act as babysitters and free up time for their parents (though I’d imagine they’d have little real need for this since they wouldn’t have real jobs anymore), which would benefit women more since they also shoulder a heavier share of looking after their children than men do.
- If there is any educational gap* in the future, it will become much less significant because level of education will no longer parlay to a job or salary. High school graduates will earn the same as particle physics Ph.D’s: Nothing. And without boring but high-paying STEM jobs to look forward to, more men might pursue degrees in the Humanities, which today are dominated by females. (*Arguably, the educational gap has already closed in the U.S. and women are, by some metrics, the more educated sex.)
- The gender wealth gap would also fade away over time thanks to estates being divided up among multiple heirs who couldn’t expand their fortunes since the whole economy would be controlled by machines. For example, let’s say Gramps builds up a net worth of $1 million and then dies in the year 2100, which is the same year the human unemployment rate finally hits 100% and machines have taken over all gainful jobs. Gramps’ fortune is divided equally among his wife (Granny) and three adult children (Alan, Belinda, and Chuck). None of them have jobs, so the money is a (temporary) Godsend. Granny uses her $250k for medical and nursing home expenses, and all her doctors and aides are machines, so the money effectively flows out of human control. Granny spends a little each year until she dies with close to $0 left. Alan wastes his $250k on frivolous stuff like fancy restaurant meals and gambling within three years, and again, all the workers at the establishments he goes to are machines. Belinda uses her money to buy a more expensive house, which effectively “locks in” her $250k as home equity and a permanent net worth increase, but she finds it impossible to get any richer than that since neither she nor her husband can get paying jobs. Machines do everything important, and all they can do is collect welfare, spend time with their kids, pursue hobbies, and take free online courses (taught either by machines or human volunteers). Belinda and her husband eventually spend most of their money on medical bills, and when they die, the amount of money they pass to their kids is much less than what they got from Gramps. Chuck uses his $250k to finally indulge his lifelong dream to start a bar/restaurant. He has a perfect business plan, a menu crafted by professional chefs, a prime location, very tasteful decor, and top-of-the-line robot chefs and waiters. Food critics give “Chuck’s Bar” rave reviews, as do average patrons on platforms like Yelp. However, Chuck has a problem: One block away, there’s an identical bar/restaurant, but instead of being owned by a human, it’s owned by an intelligent robot named “RoboChuck.” Because RoboChuck is a machine, he isn’t materialistic, doesn’t need to sleep or take breaks, is cool with using a small closet in his restaurant for a residence instead of buying a house, and is fine working 24/7 for a $10,000 yearly salary. As a result, “RoboChuck’s” has lower overhead costs and can sell the exact same food and drinks as “Chuck’s” at lower prices. No matter how hard Chuck works, he can’t make up for his inherent inferiority to RoboChuck, nor can he find a way to ameliorate the extra costs that he personally inflicts on his business. Because of the price difference, customers gradually drift away to RoboChuck’s. In spite of his talent, dedication, and seemingly perfect business plan, Chuck’s bar/restaurant goes bankrupt after a few years, and he loses all $250k of his inheritance with it. His landlord and all of his creditors are machines. After that, Chuck bitterly grasps the reality of the new economy and takes up watercolor painting in his government-provided apartment. In an economy where machines do all the real work, human net worth invariably goes to $0, unless backstopped by some government-mandated wealth redistribution (i.e. – machine earnings are taxed and given to humans as welfare payments). Net worth inequalities between human males and females would disappear.
Have machines created an “employment crisis”?
Dovetailing off of yesterday’s blog entry (“Teaching more people to code isn’t a good jobs strategy”), I’d like to examine an assumption implicit in the first passage I quoted:
‘[Although] I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these [software] platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing.’
It’s a little unclear what “employment crisis” the author is talking about since the U.S. unemployment rate is a very healthy 4.4%, but it probably refers to three things scattered throughout the article:
- Skills obsolescence among older workers. As people age, the skills they learned in college and early in their careers get less useful because technologies and processes change, but the people fail to adapt. Accordingly, their value as employees declines, along with their pay and job security. This phenomenon is nothing new: in Prehistoric times, the same “career arc” existed, with people becoming progressively less useful as hunters and parents upon reaching middle age. Older workers faced the same problems in more recent historical eras when work entailed farming and then factory labor. That being the case, does it make sense to describe today’s skills obsolescence as a “crisis”? “Just the way things are” is more fitting.
- Stagnation of real median wages in the U.S. Adjusted for inflation, the median American household wage has barely increased since the 1970s. First, this isn’t in the strictest sense of the word an “employment crisis” since it relates to wages and not the availability of employment. “Pay crisis” might be a better term. Second, much of the stagnation in median pay evaporates once you consider that the average American household has steadily shrunk since the 1970s: Single-parent households have become more common, and in such families, there is only one breadwinner. Knowing whether someone is talking about median wages per worker or median wages per household is crucial. Third, this only counts as a crisis if you ignore the fact that many things have gotten cheaper and/or better since the 1970s (cars, personal electronics, many forms of entertainment, housing except in some cities), so the same salary can support a higher standard of living now. Most of that owes to technological improvement.
Note the data stop in 2012, when the U.S. economy was still recovering from the Great Recession - Automation of human jobs. Towards the end of the article, it becomes clear this is what the author is really thinking about. He cites research done by academics Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee as proof that machines have been hollowing out the middle class and reducing incomes and the number of jobs. I didn’t look at the source material, but the article says they made those comments in 2013, which means their analysis was probably based on economic data that stopped in 2012, in the miserable hangover of the Great Recession when people we openly questioning whether the economy would ever get back on its feet. I remember it well, and specifically, I remember futurists citing Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s research as proof that the job automation inflection point had been reached during the Great Recession, explaining why the unemployment rate was staying stubbornly high and would never go down again. Well they were wrong, as today’s healthy unemployment numbers and rising real wages demonstrate. So if the article’s author thinks that job automation is causing “our employment crisis,” then he has failed to present proof the latter exists at all.
For the record, I do believe that machines will someday put the vast majority of humans–perhaps 100% of us–out of gainful work. When they finally do that, we will have an “employment crisis.” However, I have yet to see proof that machines have started destroying jobs faster than new ones are created, so speaking of an automation-driven “employment crisis” should be done in the future tense (which the author doesn’t). Right now, “our employment crisis,” like so many other “crises” reported in the media, simply doesn’t exist.
Links
Teaching more people to code isn’t a good jobs strategy
Amongst the sea of spilled ink about America’s purported “STEM shortage,” and policy proposals to address this disaster by training preschoolers to code, this article stands out as one of the best counterpoints I’ve seen:
‘[Although] I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these [software] platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing.’ (SOURCE)
OUCH! The article goes on describe how lower-skilled computer programming jobs are being outsourced to India, leaving a pool of higher-skilled jobs here in the U.S., which will get more cutthroat as time passes.
I’ll add the following:
- Computer coding is a dry, difficult job that few people are suited for. It requires tremendous patience, good math skills, a willingness to work brutal hours to get promoted, and it provides few (if any) opportunities for self-expression or emotionally interacting with clients. You sit in a cubicle looking at numbers and letters on a computer screen, tediously typing away and testing your software program over and over to work out the kinks. The notion that America can expand its white-collar workforce by incentivizing more people to become computer programmers rests on the flawed assumption that human beings are perfectly interchangeable widgets lacking innate strengths, weaknesses and preferences that together limit their job options. The vast majority of people just aren’t cut out to spend eight hours a day poring over computer code.
- Wages will decrease if labor supply increases. As with any other profession, computer programmer salaries are determined by supply and demand. If the STEM Shortage Chicken Littles get their way and the number of American computer programmers sharply increases, then median wages will decrease unless there’s an equivalent rise in demand for their services. Lower pay will make an already dull and difficult job not worth it for many coders, and people will start fleeing for other jobs, counterbalancing the inflow of new coders.
If we do think that there’s a shortage of computer programmers in America, then there’s a fair case to be made that the best way to fix it is to focus on retaining existing talent rather than trying to attract new entrants to the field. Complaints about age discrimination against older workers, low pay, and overly demanding work schedules seem pervasive if the news articles out of Silicon Valley are to be believed, and are supported by high rates of turnover in computer programming companies.
Links
- https://qz.com/987170/coding-is-not-fun-its-technically-and-ethically-complex/
- http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/07/09/teaching-young-americans-to-be-code-monkeys/
- https://www.fastcompany.com/3058251/why-learning-to-code-wont-save-your-job
- https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/05/there-is-in-fact-a-tech-talent-shortage-and-there-always-will-be/
- http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/18/441122285/learning-to-code-in-preschool
- https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm#tab-8
Bloomberg: Electric cars could be as cheap as gas-powered cars by 2025
Bloomberg New Energy Finance just released an analysis, “Electric Vehicle Outlook 2017,” that estimates all-electric cars will get as cheap as traditional gas-powered cars sometime between 2025 and 2030. Importantly, the estimate assumes that government subsidies for electric cars are discontinued by that time, so the future price figures are market rates.
Bloomberg thinks electric car prices will drop thanks to price-lowering economies of scale and to competition among carmakers. It doesn’t assume any technological breakthroughs like new batteries that can store twice as much energy. This is good: making predictions about the future that hinge on a technological breakthrough that may or may not actually happen is always a bad idea, and will get you thinking something like the Singularity is right around the corner.
The Bloomberg Executive Summary is here: https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF_EVO_2017_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
Interestingly, the analysis also concludes that better electric cars will make plug-in hybrids obsolete since the latter are more mechanically complex and hence more expensive. A shortage of at-home car charging stations will also limit the potential customer base for electric cars, and cause electric cars as a share of the total passenger vehicle fleet to stabilize at about 50% by 2040. I wish I had access to the full report, so I can only guess that the at-home car charging problem will be most acute for poorer people who can’t afford to install them or who live in rental properties that lack them.
Links:
- https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/27/an-electric-car-future-is-coming-just-more-slowly-than-predicted/
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rise-electric-cars-kill-gas-150000844.html
Ray Kurzweil on the future of capitalism and the boring world of 2027
Futurist, transhumanist, and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil just did a short interview regarding his views on the future of jobs and some other topics. You can see it here:
My thoughts:
0:12 – Kurzweil nods to the Boring Truth of our age: The clash of ideologies ended in the 20th century (except for the ongoing sideshow that is non-viable Islamism vs. everyone else), and there’s consensus among academics and leaders in the industrialized world that having a mixed economy and some social welfare programs is close to the optimal setup for a country. In the West, conservatives and liberals push and pull, but within narrow boundaries. Similarly, the new political faultlines pit “nationalists” against “globalists,” but no one in the former camp wants to completely forsake trade. There really is a lot less drama today than the news media makes you think.
1:50 – The reasons for the rise of welfare states in the early 20th century are more complex than that, but Kurzweil makes a good point that they wouldn’t have been sustainable had there not been the economic surpluses made possible by Industrialization. If you take the long view like Kurzweil does, and you assume that technology keeps improving, the concomitant economic surpluses keep growing, and social welfare programs grow in an intelligent manner, then a future where all humans are on the dole and few if any people work is indeed the logical endpoint.
3:06 – Uh-oh. Kurzweil makes predictions that will be true in “a decade.” So by 2027, 3D printers will be able to make “at low cost, all of the physical things we need,” including large Lego-like pieces of building materials that you will be able to “snap together” to make your own house. Vertical farms will also be making “very high-quality” food at “very low prices” by 2027. Yikes. I’m skeptical of the 3D printed house prediction because the construction industry and consumers have failed to even embrace modular buildings (there’s a great report on this here: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/reinventing-construction-through-a-productivity-revolution). The notion that something even more radical like 3D printed Lego houses will become common in just ten years bucks the trend way too much. Also, I don’t see how an average person in 2027 will be able to assemble his or her house from giant Legos considering: 1) the need to pour solid concrete foundations will still exist, 2) local governments are highly unlikely to relax building codes to allow unlicensed, inexperienced people to build houses, and 3) few people have the skills to even put such Lego pieces together, particularly with enough accuracy to ensure the surfaces are truly level and plumb. Maybe what Kurzweil is trying to say is that, in 2027, there will be some construction companies that will specialize in building cheap, prefabricated houses comprised partly of 3D printed components. Plausible, but only a tiny bit different from how things are today. As for vertical farms, they’ve proven to be much more expensive to run than normal “flat” farms and haven’t caught on thanks to basic economics. If Kurzweil knows of some way that they can make food at “very low prices” in just ten years, then he should quit his job at Google and pursue it full-time since it will be worth billions of dollars. And he should also ask himself whether it would be more efficient and profitable to use that secret method to improve “flat” farms. For example, if Kurzweil thinks vertical farm costs will drop thanks to cheap, 3D printed building techniques, then won’t the same techniques also make it possible to cheaply build greenhouses over standard cropfields? If farm robots will eliminate labor costs at vertical farms, won’t they do the same at flat farms? Why would the vertical farms benefit more?
4:09 – Kurzweil observes (as he has in the past) that most of the Earth’s surface is sparsely populated, meaning there is ample room for humans to spread out. While true, it’s important to remember the reasons why: Beachfront property in Florida is more aesthetically appealing and provides more opportunities for recreation than a plot of land in the middle of Nebraska. The climate in San Francisco is more conducive to human life than that of Minot, North Dakota. Humans are also social animals (particularly when young), meaning they like to live in places where there are other people. The high (and still rising) rates of suicide and substance abuse in rural America attest to the ill effects of isolation and lack of varied things to do. He doesn’t say it in this interview, but I know from his books that his response would be something like “future technologies will substitute for all that,” meaning virtual reality will be as real as The Matrix someday, so hanging out on virtual reality Miami Beach while you’re actually lying in a VR pod in your living room will feel as real as hanging out on the real Miami Beach with your actual body. Whether or not sufficiently advanced brain-computer interfaces can be made to do that is an open question, but for sure, I doubt the technology will exist by 2027, or even 2057.
5:00 – Kurzweil predicts that, by 2027, virtual reality and “virtual avatars” will be so good that many people won’t need to live in cities anymore, and he seems to suggest there will be a detectable change to the global urbanization trend. Thanks to virtual reality, people will be able to work and play from anywhere, so they’ll choose to live outside of cities to save money. I think this is a prime example of a prediction that Kurzweil can’t possibly get wrong, and that is also almost useless. As he admits around this part of the interview, many of his colleagues at Google already work remotely, and most of us know someone who works from home. It doesn’t take a futurist or economist to see that the practice is getting more popular, so it’s a simple assumption that it will be more common by, say, 2027. Technologies related to computing, videoconferencing, and virtual reality are all obviously improving, and it’s just common sense that they will make it easier for people to work remotely. And while the number of people living in cities is growing, so is the number of people living outside of them in the suburbs and exurbs. By 2027, the suburban/exurban population could be growing faster than the truly urban population, which Kurzweil could cite as proof his prediction was right. So on close analysis, Kurzweil’s prediction is nothing more than a simple synthesis of three long-running trends in America that most adults are already aware of through direct experience. It will be almost impossible for him to be wrong, but the prediction about the future is so general and so incrementally different from today that it has no real value.
6:35 – He says we will use 3D printers to make clothes, without giving a date for when the prediction will come to pass (by 2027?). Regardless of when or if it happens, this has always struck me as a useless application of 3D printers. Today, I can buy a pack of six new cotton undershirts from Wal-Mart for $15, and they will last for years before falling apart. I can go to a local thrift store and buy durable, surprisingly good-looking used clothes that are 75% discounted from their original prices, and which will also last me many years. I can go on Craigslist right now and find people in my area who are giving away clothes for free. There is no evidence at all that our existing textile technology is deficient making clothes, or that our “standards of living” will meaningfully improve if we started making clothes with futuristic 3D printers. Even if we assume 3D printers are so superior at making clothes that they’re (almost) “free,” how much better is that than the present condition? Clothes are already free or trivially cheap. Lowering the price farther might free up enough money for you to buy a slightly bigger morning coffee at Starbucks, but that’s it. The only real beneficiaries would be fashion-obsessed people who shudder at the thought of wearing the same outfit twice and want their 3D printer to spit out some zany new creation each morning. Yay for the coming empowerment of vain people.
8:10 – Kurzweil cites changes to the nature of jobs over the last 100 years (workforce transformed from hard labor on the farm and factory to doing computer stuff in office buildings) as proof that there will always be jobs for humans in the future. While humans have always managed to move up the skills ladder and create new, gainful work for themselves as machines took over the less skilled jobs, there’s no reason to think the trend will continue forever. His argument also gets muddled when he equates people in college with people who have jobs. Studying poetry or art in college isn’t the same thing as being gainfully employed. Moreover, its a common fate for such students to have problems finding employment after college, and for them to settle for jobs that are unsatisfactory because they pay little, or because they have nothing to do with what they studied (think of the waitress with the Literature B.A.). I think it’s much safer to predict that “Humans in the future will be able to find things to do with their days but they won’t necessarily get paid much money or any money at all for what they do, and automation will be good overall for humans since it will eliminate unpleasant drudge work.”
The religious qualities of Singularitarianism
Aeon has a good article about the religious undertones to Singularitarianism. (FYI, “Singularitarianism” is the belief that the Technological Singularity will happen in the future. While Singularitarians can’t agree if it will be good or bad for humans, they do agree that we should do whatever we can until then to nudge it towards a positive outcome.) This passage sums up the article’s key points:
‘A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or ‘end of days’ (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it’s an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI.’
Having spent years reading futurist books, interacting with futurists on social media, and even going to futurist conferences, I’ve come to view Singularitarians as a subcategory of futurists, who are defined by their belief in the coming Singularity and by the religious qualities of their beliefs. Not only do they indulge in fantastical ruminations about what the future will be like thanks to the Singularity, but they use rhetorical hand-waving–usually by invoking “exponential acceleration of technology” or something like that–to explain how we’ll get there from our present state. This sharply contrasts with other futurists who are rigidly scientific and make predictions by carefully identifying and extrapolating existing trends, which in turn almost always results in slower growth future scenarios.
A sizable minority of Singularitarians I’ve encountered also seem to be mentally ill and/or poor, and the thought of an upending of daily life and of the existing socioeconomic order, and the thought of an end to human suffering thanks to advanced technologies appeal to them for obvious reasons. Their belief in the Singularity truly is like the psychological salve of religion, so challenge them at your own risk.
Singularitarians could also be thought of as a subcategory of Transhumanists, the latter being people who believe in using technology to upgrade human beings past their natural limitations (such as intelligence, lifespan, physical strength, etc.). If you believe that the Singularity will bring with it the ability for humans to upload their minds into computers and live forever, then you are by default a Transhumanist. And you’re a doubleplus Transhumanist if you go a step farther and make a value judgement that such an “upgrade” will be good for humans.
With those distinctions made clear, let me say that I am a futurist and a Transhumanist, but I am not a Singularitarian. I plan to explain my reasons in depth in a future blog post, but for now let me summarize by saying I don’t see evidence of exponential improvement in artificial intelligence or nanomachines, which are the two pillars upon which the Singularity hypothesis rests. And even if an artificial intelligence became smarter than humans and gained the ability to rapidly improve itself, something called the “complexity brake” would slow its progress enough for humans to have some control over it or to at least comprehend what it was doing. Many Singularitarians believe in scenarios where the Singularity unfolds over the course of literally a few days, with a machine exceeding human intelligence at the beginning, and all of planet Earth being transformed into a wonderland of carbon nanotube structures, robots, humans sleeping in Matrix pods, and perhaps some kind of weird spiritual transcendence by the end. The transformation is predicted to be so abrupt that humans will have no time to react or to even fully understand what’s happening around them.
Links
- https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism