azeem

Five Must-Read Pieces on Automation and Inequality

This week’s selection involves research into demographics, cities, social services, and “raising” better bots

I dedicated this week’s issue of my newsletter, Exponential View, to the ongoing and necessary conversations about inequality and bias in automation processes. Here are five pieces I recommend you read on the topic this week:

1. Research on demographics, automation & inequality

Bain, a consultancy, published results of their research into demographics, automation and inequality, warning of increasing volatility. Interesting and challenging times ahead: “faced with market imbalances and growth-stifling levels of inequality, many societies may reset the government’s role in the marketplace.” EXCELLENT

Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality

2. How inequality is evolving, and why

The Path to the Artisan Economy

By azeem

The value of human imperfection, plus the power of new technologies are inspiring a return of the artisan economy

Last year, I gave a presentation on the rising importance of artisanship in a world of perfect machines, and followed it with an article about the one thing computers will never beat us at. I wrote:

In the world of the future, automated perfection is going to be common. Machines will bake perfect cakes, perfectly schedule appointments and keep an eye on your house. What is going to be scarce is human imperfection.

We are still early in the early days of these developments, but we’re already seeing an uptake in artisanship. As Economist’s Ryan Avent writes, the trend offers clues about the future economy:

Craft is, in general, far less well-paid than professional work. Yet the benefits it offers — the satisfaction of controlling one’s own destiny, acquiring a range of skills, creating beautiful and delicious things, forming friendships with suppliers and customers — make up for the reduced incomes and ensure that there is a small, steady migration of professionals into the craft economy.

Noah Smith depicts craft brewing as one path forward for the middle class, that could serve as a model for other industries:

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Taming the Giants

By azeem

More people are getting vocal against the dominance of big tech—this is my selection of some of the most thoughtful pieces from the past week.

I’ve raised the questions on societal risks of the dominance of a handful of internet giants from the early days of starting my newsletter. It’s good that it is getting mainstream attention. My friends at The Economist have put together a must-read memo to the bosses of Amazon, Facebook and Google:

You are an industry that embraces acronyms, so let me explain the situation with a new one: “BAADD”. You are thought to be too big, anti-competitive, addictive and destructive to democracy.

When Fake Becomes the Benchmark for True

By azeem

Our faith in the process of science is damaged, and it could be replaced by something worse

In a desperate attempt to curb the negative wave of attention it garnered in 2017, Facebook stepped into 2018 announcing its own resolutions. The big one is backing away from news publishers, and favouring content that user’s friends and family put out. Here are a few other alarming headlines from this past week:

Fake news and distrust of science could lead to global epidemics.

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18 Predictions for 2018

By azeem

18 areas to watch attentively in the new year

Last week I wrote about the books that helped me make sense of 2017.

This is the first year I am presenting predictions for the coming year. I’ve received some incredibly helpful comments from readers via Twitter. This has encouraged me to stick my head above the parapet.

Do We Really Think An Intelligence Explosion Is Unlikely?

By azeem

My response to François Chollet’s “The Impossibility of Intelligence Explosion”

Francois Chollet argues in his recent essay that an intelligence explosion is very unlikely. So the fast progress we see today is a chimaera, more linear than we think and more likely to slow down, because:

Doing science in a given field gets exponentially harder over time — the founders of the field reap most the low-hanging fruit, and achieving comparable impact later requires exponentially more effort.

And that even the open-source networked approach to research that has driven so much recent progress has limits because:

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If We Want to Regulate Autonomous Weapons, We Must Move Past Calling Them “Killer Robots”

By azeem

We must not eliminate the most important variable in today’s systems — the humans who design, maintain and manage them.

Straight out of defense labs, autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons are already in use, but there’s no overarching agreement among key stakeholders on how to control their implementation and diffusion. Unlike nuclear or biological weapons whose proliferation have been largely controlled, autonomous weapons pose some tricky problems.

The first is the absence of an international treaty. The second is the comparative ease by which autonomous weapons can be developed. Nuclear weapons are hard. The nine countries with nuclear weapons have achieved this with multi-decade projects backed substantially by state resources and administrative capacity.

All You Need to Know About China: Party Congress, Surveillance, and Becoming the Intelligent…

By azeem

I often mention China in my weekly newsletter about exponential technologies and society, but I’ve been acutely aware that this can barely do it justice. I’ve asked my friend, David Schlesinger, to shine a light on the Middle Kingdom during these times of change.

David and I first worked together at Reuters over a decade ago, at which point he had spent more than 20 years working in the region. David went on to become editor-in-chief of Reuters, the world’s top newswire, before taking up a post as Chairman of Reuters in China. Now based in London, he runs Tripod Advisors, which helps companies understand the region. He also has an Emmy Award, which I think is quite cool.

What Uber Founders Didn’t Know in 2009

By azeem

As Uber appoints its new CEO, Expedia’s Dara Khosrowshahi, it’s the right time to reminisce about the early days of the company, as a mental exercise for imagining where it could go next.

What don’t you know when you found a start-up? A lot. When people look at leviathans like Google, Facebook or Uber today, they often see the negative impact of their dominant market positions. They forget that these firms started small, and, in Uber’s case, with bad PowerPoint. Garrett Camp, the other founder of Uber, released the firm’s seed round pitch deck from 2009.

It’s a must read if you care about startups.

There Is One Thing Computers Will Never Beat Us At

By azeem

In late post-revolutionary France one man was tasked to map out the country. Gaspard de Prony, a mathematician and engineer, decided to approach the task by creating logarithmic and trigonometric tables. These tables, which would come to be known as Tables of de Prony, were destined to speed up the trigonometric calculations needed to complete these cartographic task.