Intuitively, then, increasing the supply of educated workers should reduce inequality as it would increase wages among a broader supply of more educated workers. But that assumes the demand for educated workers will continue to rise. Problem is, recent research finds that the demand for skilled labor appears to be on the decline.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
Let us think about the “race between education and technology” idea. The Goldin-Katz story is that the high school movement helped produce a work force that could earn decent incomes in the industrial era. This is a nice just-so story, but note that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the just-so story was that industrialization was reducing the demand for skills, replacing the craftsman with the assembly-line worker.
But let us suppose that more education is needed to enable the typical worker to keep pace with changes in technology. That is, suppose we buy that there is a race between education and technology. In that case, I am pretty sure that education has to lose that race.
Change in technology is being led by Moore’s Law. The core components of computers get twice as good every couple of years. Maybe that is slowing down a bit. But even so, it is much faster than the rate of improvement in steam engines in the 19th century or electric motors in the 20th century.
As an indicator of faster technological change, look at how much more quickly smart phones achieved mass adoption in comparison with personal computers.
As an indicator of how hard it is for humans to keep up, look at computers and chess. Twenty years ago, the world’s biggest computer could not have beaten the human world champion. Now, you could to it with a laptop. Maybe even a smart phone.
The metaphor of a “race” suggests that the two participants are capable of moving at the same speed. But if you compare Moore’s Law with the highest feasible rate at which me might increase educational attainment, you realize that the two speeds are hopelessly different. Either we come up with some radical, paradigm-shifting way of improving human learning capacity (genetic engineeering? implants? Diamond Age primers?) or the machines are certain to win.
Actually, electric motors themselves reached a kind of perfection very early on. The limiting, both cost and technology, element was in the motor controllers. Since the march of the microcomputer began great strides in electric motor efficiency and functionality have been made as the motor controllers have advanced. Recent advances in power electronics appear very promising.
Contrast that to the lack of advancement and innovation in the provision of instruction colloquially called education. Regardless of the tinkering with technology, almost all instruction at all levels is still based on the slow and inefficient “sage on the stage” which has a high probability to induce “school helplessness” in the student, that is lower initiative in school subjects than in other aspects of learning.
Learning ability could possibly be there but its usage is throttled by old controllers and, unlike electric motors, the longer a student is limited by such antiquated controllers the more limited their ultimate capacity becomes.
“Change in technology is being led by Moore’s Law. The core components of computers get twice as good every couple of years.”
Processing power is really not the obvious bottleneck for progress in AI. Nobody thinks that machine visual object recognition or, say, machine translation of text between French and English is going to get twice as good every 18 months.
When people talk about automation replacing labor, what examples do they point to? ATMs, automated checkouts lanes, voice mail, text search, and factory robots, and the like. What these have in common is that they don’t rely on AI, won’t really get much better due to Moore’s law, and they’re not *new* — they’re all at least 10 (and really more like 20) years old. I really can’t think of a new job category that has been automated within the last few years, can you?
Yes, there’s computer chess. But it is absolutely not representative or transferable. There have been huge investments in computer chess playing over many decades, and the results have been awesome chess-playing computers — that literally can’t do ANYTHING besides play chess.
They can’t even play chess.
Moore’s Law is basically over. Yes, computers and smartphones will get faster and have longer battery life. But they won’t get cheaper any more. We have reached a sort of limit in semiconductor manufacturing (if you want the details, we are building all chips with 193nm wavelength light despite the feature sizes being more like 58nm or below, so we have to do multiple passes called double-patterning). It looks like 28nm will be a lower cost process than every process that came before (which is basically Moore’s Law) but will also be cheaper than every process that comes after too.
In the last 40 years we have seen a 1,000,000 reduction in the price of electronics. That will not happen in the next 40 years.
Increased supply -> Higher price
Huh? Increasing the supply of skilled labor drives the wages of skilled labor *down* unless the demand curve is not downward sloping.
The claim was Increased supply of skilled labor -> increase wages for those who were _newly_ skilled and a reduction in inequality.
The wages for skilled labor would decline but overall wages would be up because more people would earn the wages for skilled labor.
Meter reading is recently automated. On the road to truly smart meters and demand based pricing for utilities.
One wonders why McDonalds has not embraced self checkout.
A wireless network between vehicles has the potential to almost eliminate multi vehicle accidents.
There’s a long way to go with automation. Even education. Super size Khan Academy.
Yes, there are more things that could be automated, but the barriers are social rather than technical. The Khan academy could be supersized, but much of what is hypothetically achievable by Khan academy online videos would have been almost equally possible with the same content distributed on VHS tapes 30 years ago. Yes, everybody at McDonald’s could be ordering and paying via smartphone a la Uber. Same goes for waiters in restaurants (why on earth do we need somebody to take our orders via dictation, shuttle it to the kitchen, and then do the same with the bill at the end?) And those changes may indeed happen. But they won’t require any new technology that’s not already available.
One real problem in these “returns to education” discussions is that they always seem to regard all forms of education as equal. That is, the return to education in classical literature is lumped together with the return to education in physics which is lumped together with the return to education in computer science.
Today’s hint – the return to education of different areas/fields is different.