Like me, he is a fan of Neal Stephenson’s illustrated primer as described in The Diamond Age. Diamandis writes,
Your AI companion will have unlimited access to information on the cloud and will deliver it at the optimal speed to each student in an engaging, fun way. This AI will demonetize and democratize education, be available to everyone for free (just like Google), and offering the best education to the wealthiest and poorest children on the planet equally.
AI is a tool and a weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further.
So far, computers have been economic complements to high cognitive ability. Harari extrapolates that trend. He thinks that it leads to a loss of autonomy for the great mass of people who lack the highest cognitive ability.
George Gilder, in Life After Google, takes the opposite point of view.
A commenter pointed me to this Dan Wang essay.
I think that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I view the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.
. . .The decline of industrial work makes it harder to accumulate process knowledge. If a state has lost most of its jobs for electrical engineers, civil engineers, or nuclear engineers, then fewer young people will enter into these fields. Technological development slows down, and it turns into a self-reinforcing cycle of decline.
I think that if you polled economists, you would find many who agree with all of the following.
1. Our manufacturing sector is definitely not too big.
2. Our financial sector is definitely not too small.
3. Industrial policy is a bad idea.
Odd that. Although I would be one of them.
Peter Diamandis writes,
By 2024, we are connecting every person on Earth to the web with bandwidths far beyond what Fortune 500 CEOs and heads of nations had daily access to just a couple of decades back.
. . .With plans for wide-scale deployment in 2020, 5G will be 100X faster than 4G, and 10X faster than your average broadband connection.
From his email newsletter. Years ago, I predicted that the last mile would be wireless, but I thought that it would come from mesh networks, not from cell carriers, balloons, and space-based networks, which is where Diamandis sees this coming from.
Incidentally, these folks were not as aggressive in their predictions for 5G wireless. They discuss the obvious implication that once 5G does become ubiquitous consumers won’t need cable or FIOS anymore.
It also strikes me that all this bandwidth will invite bandwidth-hungry apps to soak it up. Virtual reality, video-conferencing, and video calls come to mind.
I was away for a couple of weeks, and I left behind scheduled-ahead posts for that period.
1. I usually have about a 3-day lag between writing and posting, but the lag was longer during the vacation. Also, I was frequently without Wi-Fi or cell service, so I could not keep up with comments well at all.
2. The Canadian Rockies are justifiably a bucket-list destination, although my wife and I don’t maintain a bucket list. We enjoyed the secondary sites much more than the main tourist attractions, in part because the latter were uncomfortably crowded.
3. We could really feel the emergence of the middle classes of East Asia and India. The proportion of tourists from those areas seemed roughly comparable to their share of world population. You will know that Africa and Latin America have developed when you can say the same thing about tourists from there.
4. I thought about sex a lot. No, it’s not that kind of a vacation spot. But the one book I read was Mona Charen’s Sex Matters, which is a critical history of the feminist and sexual revolutions. Now that I have sorted out my own thinking about the battles of social norms concerning sex, I have a new essay on the topic.
Interviewed by Sean Illing for Vox. A couple of excerpts:
I believe that market capitalism, as we’ve come to understand it, was actually tied to a particular period of time where certain coincidences were present. There’s a coincidence between the marginal product of one’s labor and one’s marginal needs to consume at a socially appropriate level. There’s also the match between an economy mostly consisting of private goods and services that can be taxed to pay for the minority of public goods and services, where the market price of those public goods would be far below the collective value of those goods.
Beyond that, there’s also a coincidence between the ability to train briefly in one’s youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we’ve typically called a career or profession, and I believe that many of those coincidences are now breaking, because they were actually never tied together by any fundamental law.
. . .A friend of mine said to me, “The modern airport is the perfect metaphor for the class warfare to come.” And I asked, “How do you see it that way?” He said, “The rich in first and business class are seated first so that the poor may be paraded past them into economy to note their privilege.” I said, “I think the metaphor is better than you give it credit for, because those people in first and business are actually the fake rich. The real rich are in another terminal or in another airport altogether.”
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I would describe the interview as a set of very interesting threads, which to my frustration are left dangling. I don’t know whether the fault lies with Eric, the interviewer, or the editor.
Timothy Taylor is on the case. He quotes from Kaushik Basu:
“One notable point is that the main garment firms in Bangladesh are large—especially compared to those in India, owing largely to different labor laws. All labor markets need regulation. But, in India, the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act imposes heavy restrictions on firms’ ability to contract workers and expand their labor force, ultimately doing more harm than good. The law was enacted a few months before the August 1947 independence of India and Pakistan from British imperial rule, meaning that both new countries inherited it. But Pakistan’s military regime, impatient with trade unions from the region that would become Bangladesh, repealed it in 1958.
“Thus, having been born without the law, Bangladesh offered a better environment for manufacturing firms to achieve economies of scale and create a large number of jobs. And though Bangladesh still needs much stronger regulation to protect workers from occupational hazards, the absence of a law that explicitly curtails labor-market flexibility has been a boon for job creation and manufacturing success.”
According to Romem, between 2005 and 2016, those moving into the San Francisco area had median household incomes averaging $12,639 a year more than the households of the families moving out, $70,015 to $57,376.
Conversely, in the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent), families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 — $7,229 less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448.
It’s a long essay, worth reading in its entirety. Edsall’s focus is on the evolution of the political coalition that makes up the Democratic Party. But I find the economic phenomenon interesting. The data support the Handle Hypothesis that urbanization has become a winners-take-most game. The article by Issi Romem that Edsall refers to is also worth reading. Romem writes,
Why do the expensive coastal metros exhibit positive income sorting? These metros are expensive because they have restricted their supply of new housing even as they continue to generate strong demand for it.
Kevin Erdmann and many others have been saying this for quite some time.
Related: Pew reports,
In 2001, 13 percentage points separated the shares of white and African-American renter households that were burdened: 26 and 39 percent, respectively. . .By 2015, the share of African-American-led renter households that were burdened had risen to 46 percent
Rent-burdened is defined as spending more than 30 percent of a household’s income on rent. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I think that the political threat to the Democratic Party is minimal. Group identity seems to overcome anything. The Democrats can be anti-Israel and still get most of the Jewish vote. Their policies make housing less affordable and drive African-Americans out of Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, but they still get most of the black vote.
Sponsored by ANA, Japan’s only 5-star airline, the winning team of the ANA Avatar XPRIZE will combine state-of-the-art technologies to demonstrate a robotic avatar that allows an untrained operator to complete a diverse series of tasks, from simple to complex, in a physical environment at least 100km away. Avatars must demonstrate the ability to execute tasks across a variety of real-world scenarios. In the future, avatar applications could help provide critical care and deploy immediate emergency response in natural disaster scenarios, stretching the boundaries of what is possible, and maximizing the impact of skill and knowledge-sharing.
Pointer from Peter Diamindis’ Abundance Insider email list, which I recommend.
I really like the robotic avatar idea.
8 billion individuals, so each face is one of them — this is an easier problem than “what did he say?”
Well, yes. Faces are mostly created by biology. Language is created by culture. Culture evolves faster and in more complex ways than biology. It is harder for computers to learn culture than to learn biology.