Fourth Industrial Revolution  

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

The world is moving toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which mobile communications, social media and sensors are blurring the boundaries between people, the internet and the physical world.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, the digital, and the biological.

Previous economic revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different.

It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translates languages for us almost automatically. Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.

Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, 3D printing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.

While the next economic revolution offers a lot of promise, economists like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, especially in its potential to disrupt labor markets. With automation replacing labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines means the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor are diverging rapidly.

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Potentially though, the displacement of workers by technology may result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs overall.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, may not only change not only what we do but also who we essentially are.

It could affect our very human identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation.

As with so many predictions about the future, the possibilities are only limited by our imagination.

SOURCE  World Economic Forum

By  33rd Square	Embed

Artificial Intelligence  

Dr Micheal Harre has been thinking alot about how our workplaces will involve incorporating artificial intelligence. His use of the technology in exploring the emergence of economic bubbles is already heavily reliant on AI to provide detailed analysis. 

Dr. Michael Harré an artificial  intelligence enthusiast and lecturer in Complex Systems at the University of Sydney, believes living and working with AI will force the world to reassess basic assumptions about our sense of self.

"What will it be like to regularly confront an AI, or a robot with an AI in it, that behaves like a human?"

"What will it be like to regularly confront an AI, or a robot with an AI in it, that behaves like a human?" Harré asks. "The fact that we will be interacting with the appearance of consciousness in things that are clearly not biological will be enough for us to at least unconsciously revise what we think consciousness is."

Today, AI systems and people have very different decision-making processes. Humans rely strongly on intuition, while AIs calculate all possible options and deduce the most likely answer. All this data-crunching comes at a cost: the vast computational power that's needed limits the number of tasks AI can do.

According to Harré, AI is a very different discipline from robotics. Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that mimics the natural learning process of the human brain by creating what are called artificial neural networks. A popular technique used today is reinforcement learning. In such systems, each correct answer reinforces the AI's neural pathways, so it actually learns from experience. The software isn't specifically coded – rather the program evolves its own algorithms and uses feedback to refine the results.

This form of machine learning is very good at dealing with big data, and makes them invaluable for services such as fraud detection and security surveillance. Working with these huge inputs of information makes AI a power-hungry beast that devours huge computational resources.

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AI has been moving into various industries since the 1990s – from finance to communications, heavy industry and even toys – constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Over the last two years alone, there has been dramatic evolution of artificial intelligence. Energy-efficient computers and microchips based on the neural structure of the brain are driving the surge in AI advancement. Digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, movie recommendation services and online customer support are all examples of artificial intelligence in services that we increasingly take for granted.

Harré is part of a new wave of researchers exploring the relationship between human thinking, artificial intelligence and economics. He believes that understanding human cognition will drive AI advancement – and vice versa. "The stronger the connection we can draw between economics, psychology and neuroscience – three very different fields studying humans at very different scales – the better our understanding will be in all three areas."

"We are not well equipped, cognitively speaking, to deal with the complexity of the systems that have come to dominate our world: financial and economic systems, climatic systems and even our social interactions and how information is spread," states Harré. "Everything depends on everything else, often leading to the impression that chaos and disorder dominate, and that trying to understand such systems is a lost cause. But if we scratch the surface, there are often some basic underlying principles. Understanding these is the biggest challenge we face today, and this is what my work aims to do."

"I look at the mathematics reflected in complex systems. This can give us a better understanding of how relatively small variations in human behaviour can lead to quite significant and sometimes sudden system-level consequences - such as the behaviours of individual buyers and sellers leading to a financial market crash."

To that end, Harré and his colleagues are developing simple AIs called agent-based models that simulate the Australian housing market and identify if it is at risk of collapse. Millions of households are modelled by these AIs, which interact with each other to buy and sell houses. The project will allow them to look at different suburbs, cities and regions across Australia to identify the factors that might lead to a system-wide collapse.

"We want to know what drives bubbles, whether those drivers are in the current Australian market, and how we deflate the problem of a potential crash by helping inform policy," Harré says.
For Harré, it's not just the computational power of AI that is useful, it's the potential of a future in which we will work with and interact daily with AI personalities – and he is excited about the diversity of viewpoints this implies. AI, by its nature, will have opinions.

"I think we're going to end up with a very dynamic workforce," he says. "The key thing for the future is going to be people who are more willing to be agile within the jobs they take."

SOURCE  PhysOrg

By  33rd Square	Embed

Economics  

The gig economy is a term with a range of meanings, involving peer-to-peer based sharing of access to goods and services, and is becoming a growing trend in the contemporary economy. While offering the people a lifestyle choice, the shareconomy does not come without a big potential downside though.

The sharing economy or gig economy, is supported by the higher end startups - companies like TaskRabbit, Zipcar, Ecomodo, Airbnb, Uber, ZenDrive, Pillow, Uber as well as scores of other me-too copycats. The sharing economy is an umbrella term, also known as the access economy, peer economy, shareconomy and collaborative consumption.

The peer economy allows an individual to share their possessions or services like renting equipment and tools, renting dresses, ride sharing or renting rooms or apartments. It allows the independent person or business to connect with freelancers for a short period of time. This system brings a lot more flexibility to ones job but fails to provide the benefits that the traditional full time job offers, like the retirement plan or medicare plan.

The United States presidential candidate, Hilary Clinton in her campaign called the peer economy as a gig economy. In a speech, Clinton said that the shareconomy is creating innovation, but raises questions about the workplace protection and how the future of the job will look like.

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The gig economy

A gig economy is just an environment where the independent workers work under a specific job profile in an organization for a short period of time. Short term jobs are gaining more popularity in this digital world because they require minimal overhead. Often a person with a smartphones is all that is needed for a worker to perform a task anytime, anywhere.

So, freelancers have the option of selecting the best projects and temporary jobs around the marketplace and the employers can choose the best person to perform a specific task from a pool of candidates. Digitization, on the other hand, has created a void in the employment sector because there is increasingly smart software available that completes the job in no time and is ultra efficient. The other factor is the financial pressure faced by the businesses dealing with millennials, and their new attitudes regarding work.

In this generation, people keep moving from one job to another in their entire career period, this sharing economy can be viewed as an evolutionary one. The main factor is that it saves businesses a lot of resources, like training, office space and other benefits; and it also helps in dealing with a professional individual who might be viewed as too high profile to maintain as a permanent employee. According to the freelancer’s perspective, this access economy can help in maintaining a balance between professional and personal life, rather than the traditional one, where they are compelled to remain in a particular job.

Sharing economy – Pool of opportunity

There were oDesk and ELance, in the marketplace before the rise of the gig economy where computer designers and programmers could earn their living with a short term job. But in these networks not only created a new channel for freelancers, but also introduced a wide range of unique economic activity to the model. Hence, one could identify that there are many property owners who are able to rent their property for a temporary stay through the rental platforms like HomeAway, onefinestay, Love Home swap and Airbnb and there were many jewelry makers, accessory makers and dress designers benefited through the online marketplace like Etsy and others.

The Wealth of Nations, a book written by the economist, Adam Smith described a market economy in which the individuals engage themselves in commerce with one another. Similarly, the gig economy makes us wonder whether we are moving back to the 18th century economy.

Over the past two centuries, the evolution of mass production and distribution gave way to the 20th century's salaried employees. The main reason behind the peer to peer exchange is because of the digital and technological revolution. Around ninety percent of the services in the sharing economy are based on the population that is equipped with the GPS enabled computers or smartphones. And the digitization of the social network media like LinkedIn and Facebook helps in gaining the trust among the anonymous peer.

Moving towards the textbook definition of a market economy

Companies like the ZenDrive, TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Uber and Etsy in the access economy are different from the companies like Walmart, Apple or BP, because they are not buying an item made by Etsy, renting an apartment or riding their own vehicle. Their only work is to connect directly the customers with the sellers who have a virtual store, owner of the rental place or the driver of the car. However, these networks are not individual trades, but they are facilitated by a community building and are trained to provide services with hospitality. The businesses under this marketplace offer good quality user experience, customer generated feedback that is similar to that of an organization trying to build and develop their brand.

This collaboration consumption seems to be a unique invention, such that the digital powered combination between the economic activities that takes place inside and outside the organization. The main advantage of this network is that, it brings in the expertise on-demand, and offers brand and trust. The necessity of specializing in a particular field before qualifying as a provider is decreased. Now, any artisan can become a retailer through the online marketplace, Etsy and anyone who wishes to rent their property can connect through Airbnb or a person who owns a car can become an independent partner with BlaBlaCar or Uber.

The participants of the gig economy need not work for a full day; instead they can easily manage their personal life with a highly flexible professional career. For instance, a person can look after their personal responsibilities and then pickup their scheduled ride as a driver by registering under any ride sharing company.

You are the boss of your job

When you are the boss of your job, you might be at ease while working and achieve great success and develop the professional life. But there are also some elements empowering in the traditional work, like the benefits offered by the company, standard payments and steady working hours. Because it is quite difficult to plan the future without knowing the amount of money a person is going to make the next year. And starting a new business has a significant amount of risk; however one can become an entrepreneur by trial and error method and has the chances of unleashing the innovations in the marketplace.

Economists suggest that the key driver of the inequality in the economy for the past two centuries was the concentration of the wealth producing capital. The ideal sharing economy means that the economy is based on the millions of micro entrepreneurs who have their own business, rather than the small cabal of giant organizations. Even the digitalized generation that has skilled worker network raises the specter of inequality in the economy.

With the help of the mobile apps, the customers can get their groceries from Instacart, get their drinks through Drizly or get a ride in a luxurious car. But the sharing economy does not come without risk. Critics point out that the gig economy has become just another way to deliver more expensively priced conveniences to those with enough money to pay.

Farhad Manjoo also points out that a great number of sharing economy start-ups have failed. "The lesson so far in the on-demand world is that Uber is the exception, not the norm. Uber, but for Uber — and not much else," he writes in the New York Times.

In many countries the main aspect of the social safety net is allied with the traditional full time job with a government or a large company. Though the main aspects of the sharing economy are not distinct, we must consider the overall welfare provisions in a society that is decoupling from the traditional jobs-based economy.

By Anand Rajendran

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About the Author -  Anand Rajendran is CEO and Co-Founder of Dectar, best PHP scripts development company located in India. Dectar is a part of Casperon Technologies a leading social and mobile development company which is Developing Uber for X apps like Couriero - On Demand Delivery Services App for the past 3 years. Anand's a Tech geek, Digital marketing expert, Entrepreneur, and Atheist who loves to write everything about PHP Scripts and mobile application development.

Futurology  

For Robin Hanson history is important and interesting to study, but the future is also important – plausibly, more important, because we can actually do something about the future. He takes his varied background studying physics, philosophy, artificial intelligence and social science to the study of the potential future of brain emulations in his new book, "The Age of Em."

“What happens when a first-rate economist applies his rigor, breadth, and curiosity to the sci-fi topic of whole brain emulations?" asks Andrew McAfee, co-author of the Race Against the Machine. The answer for McAfee is Robin Hanson's new book, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.

Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Hanson also has master’s degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, nine years’ experience in artificial intelligence research at Lockheed and NASA, a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology. He has long been writing on his blog, Overcoming Bias, as well.

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"The Age of Em" is Hanson's in-depth analysis of the idea that uploaded brains will be able to multiply exponentially, and will dramatically shape the future. Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

 Hanson defines an em as, the result of taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections. "A good enough em has close to the same overall input-output signal behavior as the original human. One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs," he writes.

Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. Also, Hanson projects that ems will be able to run much faster than human speeds. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.

A brain emulation, or “em,” results from taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals in the same way. Ems will probably be feasible within about a hundred years. They are psychologically
quite human, and could displace humans in most jobs. If fully utilized, ems could have a monumental impact on all areas of life on Earth.

"A good enough em has close to the same overall input-output signal behavior as the original human. One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs."

The Age of Em shows you just how strange our electronic descendants may be. Read about changes in computer architecture, energy use, mind speeds, body sizes, security strategies, virtual reality, labor market organization, management focus, job training, career paths, wage competition, identity, status relations, co-worker and friend relations, aging, retirement, death, life cycles, reproduction, mating, conversation habits, wealth inequality, city sizes, cooling infrastructure, growth rates, coalition politics, governance, law, and war.

Hanson says, "like a circus side show, my book lets readers see something strange yet familiar in great detail, so they can gawk at what else changes and how when familiar things change. My book is a dwarf, sword swallower, and bearded lady, writ large."

Ambitious and encyclopedic in scope, The Age of Em offers a completely unique window into our future. A must read for those curious about the technological destiny of our planet.

Top Image HABITAT by Till Nowak 

By 33rd Square

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Technological Unemployment  

While we can’t predict the future, we can imagine a world without work – one where those who own the tech get rich from it and everyone else ekes out a living, propped up by an increasingly fragile state. Meet Alice, holder of the last recognisable job on Earth, trying to make sense of her role in an automated world.

In “the last job on Earth” animation (embedded below), the worker Alice gets frustrated when the machine refuses to dispense her medicine. As society becomes increasingly automated we may well reach a point where real time epidemiology will use sensors to assess our health and tell our worker: you’re likely to get sick tonight, we put some medicine into the AC system of your home.

Frey and Osborne predicted in 2013 that 47% of US jobs were susceptible to automation by 2050, in a study that set off alarm bells all over the world..

As Paul Mason warns,

The automation revolution is possible, but without a radical change in the social conventions surrounding work it will not happen. The real dystopia is that, fearing the mass unemployment and psychological aimlessness it might bring, we stall the third industrial revolution. Instead we end up creating millions of low skilled jobs that do not need to exist.

Mason explains, low-work society is only a dystopia if the social system is geared to distributing rewards via work. In the early 19th century, the Utopian Socialists tried not only to imagine an alternative but to implement it, in slightly crazy closed communities inspired by the writings of philosopher Charles Fourier.

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"The automation revolution is possible, but without a radical change in the social conventions surrounding work it will not happen."

Fourier predicted work could become play – its qualities could absorb the qualities of aimlessness, humour, even eroticism. We would flit from one kind of work to another, oblivious of its productive function.

Utopias of the future based on work, such as Marxism, are now challenged by the possibility of its disappearance in the form of technological unemployment.

Now, as Mason writes, "the best you can say about the play versus work debate is: it’s complicated. Many of us work through a single handheld device which, on top of our contacts, emails, screenplays and so on contains much of our externalised self."

SOURCE  The Guardian

By 33rd Square

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Robotics  

Facing ever-increasing global competition and a fight to control costs, Chinese assembly lines are implementing more and more robotic systems.  The newest facilities being constructed are 'smart factories' with virtually no human labor.

The rise of the robots is not just a phenomenon in the western industrialized countries. In South China's Guangdong industrial hub, the city's first factory that will have virtually no human labor on the shop floor is being built. It's a push to address labor shortages and rising employee costs.  The move demonstrates the rise of "smart factories" worldwide is an indication of things to come.

"It is necessary to replace human workers with robots, given the severe labor shortage and mounting labor costs."

The realization that as the cost of Chinese labor continues to go up, the appeal of manufacturing there will diminish, the move to automate production is a natural economic direction.  For instance, in June 2011, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou announced plans to deploy one million robots across factory assembly lines.

"New technologies will likely cause the same hollowing out of China’s manufacturing industry over the next two decades that the U.S experienced over the past twenty years," according to Vivek Wadhwa.

The days are numbered for the huge human-powered assembly lines in China

Dongguan-based private company Everwin Precision Technology Ltd is pushing toward putting 1,000 robots in use in its first phase of the zero-labor project, China National Radio has reported. It said the company has already put first hundred robots on the assembly line.

"The 'zero-labor factory' does not mean we will not employ any humans, but what it means is that we will scale down the [amount] of workers by up to 90 percent," said Chen Qixing, the company's board chairman.

Manufacturers in the Pearl River Delta region have been hit by a shortage of an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 workers, according to data released by Chinese authorities.

Tens of thousands of migrant workers have reportedly gone back home inland for holidays and decided to stay because the cost of living is much less than the coastal cities and to be nearer to their families.

The country also faces the problem of an increasing number of aging migrant workers.

Although the number of migrant workers in China continued to grow in 2014, the rate of increase for the group has fallen consecutively for four years, and their average age is on the rise, according to a report released by the National Bureau of StatistiChina's contracting workforce may be a characteristic outcome of demographic patterns, but at the same time its presumable the aftereffect of globalization.

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As the white collar class develops in China, so too do increasing compensation desires and the longing for occupations off the assembly lines. Because of these factors, China's business analysts are pushing for innovation overhauls and the utilization of smart robots.

"It is necessary to replace human workers with robots, given the severe labor shortage and mounting labor costs," said Di Suoling, head of Dongguan-based Taiwan Business Association.

Quality and competitiveness are also factors.

"You don't have to be an expert see the (quality) gap between Chinese cars and those made by companies like Audi and Volkswagen," said Li Shaohui, who oversees automatic control engineering for Great Wall Motors. "To beat those competitors we have no choice but to use a higher level of equipment and technology."

To that end, the nearby government in Guangdong will invest $152-billion to supplant people with robots inside three years. The push is on for application of robots in 1,950 companies across the province and plans to build two advanced industrial bases for robot production by the end of 2017.

Of course another huge factor propelling the move to robots in China and other developing economies is the rapid adoption of the technology in the more developed countries.  Robots like Rethink Robotics' Baxter and Amazon's use of Kiva robots in their distribution centers are only a few of the examples of how automation is both eliminating jobs and allowing companies to compete. China really has no alternative in this environment but to adapt too.

What the future means in terms of this change remains up for debate.


SOURCE  China Daily

By 33rd Square

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 Exponential Technologies  

At the recent DLD Conference, economist Andrew McAfee used the example of the second half of the chessboard as it relates to the power of exponential technologies, and what the future may bring.

From time to time, we still get asked, "Why do you call the website 33rd Square?"  Contrary to some opinions, it is not based on some esoteric Masonic symbolism or the Knights Templar. The 33rd square on a chessboard represents the beginning of what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson call, "the second half of the chessboard."

As McAfee tells in the video above, recorded at the recent Digital-Life-Design (DLD) Conference in Munich, Germany, the second half of the chessboard relates to the parable of the invention of the game chess.  As the legend goes, the inventor of chess introduced his game to the emperor of India, who was so pleased that he offered the inventor any reward he named.  Giving the impression of being humble, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on.

Image Source: www.etereaestudios.com

Soon after the piles of rice entered the second half of the chessboard, the emperor figured out what was going on, and as some versions of the story go, the inventor lost his head as a result.

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What the story relates, as we know, is the power of exponential growth, which in technological terms is synonymous with Moore's Law.  As McAfee continues, citing Ray Kuzweil, "things only get crazy in the second half of the chessboard."  Our human intuition can't cope with the constant doubling after the 32nd square of the board.

In their book,The Second Machine Age, McAfee and Brynjolfsson calculated that if Moore's Law started in 1958, and the doubling period was every 18 months, "by that calculation, we entered the second half of the chessboard with digital progress in about 2006."

"That really helps me to understand why we are seeing smartphones and self-driving cars, and automatic translation and powerful artificial intelligence and this amazing parade of technologies. I think of them as second half of the chessboard technologies."

"For me that really helps me to understand why we are seeing smartphones and self-driving cars, and automatic translation and powerful artificial intelligence and this amazing parade of technologies," he says.  "I think of them as second half of the chessboard technologies."

If this calculated date of 2006 is reasonable, the clear implication McAfee points out is that we are only at the beginning of this.  We are still in the early part of the second half of the chessboard.

McAfee is also concerned about the dark side of the rise of technology.  One of these is the increase of winner-take-all dynamics in the new digital age.

Essentially optimistic, McAfee says that, "the pie is getting bigger."  He suggests that the new situation is creating a distribution problem above all else.

When asked a question from the audience that suggests recent economic data does not match with his predictions, McAfee clarifies that unemployment numbers are artificially high as so many workers have simply stopped looking for jobs. "Some of my colleagues are really worried about the Singularity and really worried about when we have super powerful artificial intelligence—let me tell you something: if things continue on the same trajectory they are now, the people are going to rise up way before the machines do."


SOURCE  DLD Conference

By 33rd Square

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 Future of Work  

With technological unemployment increasingly a factor in almost every profession and job, what will the future of work be like, and how can you succeed?

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson call it the superstar economy, where globalization and technologies align to create winner-take-all scenarios.  In a world where 85 people are as wealthy as half of the world's population, and automation is increasingly taking over all jobs, both manual and mental, what does the future of work look like for the other 7,174,875,801* of us?

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With professions and middle-income positions now also the target of artificial intelligence, machine learning and even robotics, the reality of technological unemployment is already a fact for many.

As Oxford researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne found, about 47 percent of the total US employment is at risk. They concluded that, "as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization –i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills."

Increasingly calls for drastic measures like a guaranteed income, wealth redistribution and other social engineering measures are being called for.  "As the rich and their robots start vacuuming up the world's jobs, it's social innovation we need now, far more than any technological gain," writes Vice's Brian Merchant.

Image Source -  Congressional Research Service (CRS) based according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the Current Employment Statistics program

"Until the age of Abundance, the economy is almost certainly going to be very turbulent and the ways we work will change dramatically."

Others, like Peter Diamandis point to the great abundance exponential technology will bring.  Genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence and perhaps especially nanotechnology offer a potential future where wants are met on demand by anyone, and jobs, work and money itself may be unnecessary.  What, for instance, will a diamond be worth to anyone if we can 3D print perfect diamonds on demand?  The question of why we work will increasingly be relevant.

However, until the age of Abundance, the economy is almost certainly going to be very turbulent and the ways we work will change dramatically.

Sara Horowitz, founder and CEO of Freelancers Union, writes that as of 2005, 30% of the workforce has participated in this “freelance economy,” and entrepreneurial activity has reached an all time high in 2010. According to her the jobless future is already here. "This transition is nothing less than a revolution," she writes.

Certainly gone is the notion that skills have a long shelf-life.  Continuous upgrading and re-education will be the norm.  Increasingly the way we acquire skills will change too.  Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is only one way that technology is opening up the field of education, especially as university and college tuition rates continue to expand.

Ray Williams writes "Today, people need to gain “employability” rather than “secure employment.” To survive in a multi-career employees need to have multiple intelligences, resilience and employability—essentially survival tools. Jobs now are defined by expertise, multiple skills, not just uniform experience. Employees who continue to practice their skills repetitively without improvement or flexibility run the risk of making themselves obsolete. In that sense, static job mastery is a liability both for the individual and the organization."

He offers the following advice for future and current workers:

1. Take responsibility for managing your own career. Don’t wait until you’re fired, laid off, burned out or fed up to revitalize your career. Manage your career on an ongoing basis, particularly through the good times. This includes becoming your own benefits manager;
2. Realize that the old social contract—employee work in return from employer loyalty and job security-- is dead. Even if you work for someone else, think of yourself as an entrepreneur;
3. Become comfortable with change. It’s likely you’ll be in several careers during your lifetime, sometimes as a result of changes outside your control;
4. Establish and develop a strong social network. Connecting with people on an ongoing basis will strengthen your capacity to manage your career;
5. Create and develop your own personal brand. To be marketable in the workplace, you need more than experience and an education. You are more than your job, and being able to see and promote who you are in totality, makes you more marketable;
6. Establish and develop your professional reputation. It’s portable, and hugely affected by social media. A positive reputation can make or break individuals or organizations;
7. Accept that you are more than your job. Whether you love or hate your job, making it your identity is a big mistake. Reflect on what legacy you want to leave in life, and be happy with your definition of personal success.

Essentially what Williams is arguing is that each of us have to become futurists.  We have to imaging the future that we want, and chart our own path to attain it.  The traditional career is all but dead.

By 33rd Square

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 Technological Unemployment  

Andrew McAfee spoke recently at the New America Foundation on capitalism and what people and governments need to do this century to adjust to the new paradigm of technological unemployment.

Andrew McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, spoke recently on capitalism and what people and governments need to do this century to adjust to the new paradigm of technological unemployment.  The talk took place at the New America Foundation.

The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.

McAfee talks about what the book, written with Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age covers mainly in it's conclusion.

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"It feels to me like we are in a little bit of Charles Dickens world these days," says McAfee. "It's simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times."

The best of times have to do with the extraordinary exponential technological progress in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing and medicine. "We've got computer systems now that can beat any human at chess, Jeopardy!, and soon I believe medical diagnostics," he claims.  McAfee attests that the key technical innovators he deals with tell him that these developments are all just the warm-up act for what is to come.

"I don't think we are heading into a science fiction world," he says.  "I think we are heading into a world that leaves science fiction behind. Keep in mind, George Jetson drove his vehicle to work."

"It feels to me like we are in a little bit of Charles Dickens world these days. It's simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times."

Despite this new wonderful technology, the economic trends point out the Dickensian worst of times for many.  The historically large middle class in America is disappearing, and this process parallels the advancement of technology. Job growth is not getting the country out of the Great Recession at any appreciable rate.

He writes on his blog, "Automation and deindustrialization might be creating a ‘silicon ceiling’ on growth — a situation in which even low wages are no longer an attractive alternative to technology. If so, the global shift away from labor and toward capital will only accelerate."

This impression, states McAfee is correct and it helps him understand broad indicators of disenfranchisement like the Occupy movement and the Tea Party.  McAfee warns about extreme moves to the left or right of the political spectrum to remedy the situation.

"What we need to do is return to two things," he says: innovation and inclusion.  Apart from technical innovation, McAfee suggests that innovation in complementary areas are needed.  Regulations and laws seem to protect the status quo instead of propelling people forward.  For instance, he tells about how in three states it is now illegal to purchase a Tesla vehicle from their showrooms.

"We need to tax differently too," says McAfee, complaining about the barriers that taxes on employment create.  The barriers also exist for new immigrants as well.

In the area of education, he says, "We used to be the world leader at this.  Now it feels like we are doing a pretty good job of turning out the employees we really needed just about a century ago in the era of assembly lines."

McAfee is the associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studying the ways information technology affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete, and at a higher level, how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

What do you think?  What kind of innovation do we really need in the coming years?


SOURCE  New America Foundation

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 Technological Unemployment  

Will you soon lose your job to a robot, or even an algorithm? Dr Carl Frey and Dr Michael Osborne's recent working paper, "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?", found that nearly half of US jobs could be susceptible to technological unemployment over the next two decades.

Earlier this year, Dr Carl Frey, James Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology and Dr Michael Osborne, University Lecturer in Machine Learning, University of Oxford presented their research in the economics of technological unemployment at the university (video above).

Frey and Osborne's recent paper, "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerization?", concluded that nearly half of US jobs could be susceptible to computerization over the next two decades.

"Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization – i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence."

Like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the pair found that more than just routing tasks are falling under the order of automation.  Algorithms for Big Data are more and more entering domains reliant upon pattern recognition and can readily substitute for labor in a wide range of non-routine cognitive tasks.  For instance, in the presentation, they discuss how Google's self-driving car is using Big Data to perform navigation and how the legal profession is becoming computerized at a great rate.

During the lecture, Frey and Osborne frequently cite The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market where authors Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The authors merge stories of working people with insights from cognitive science, computer science, and economics to show how computers are enhancing productivity in many jobs even as they eliminate other jobs--both directly and by sending work offshore. At greatest risk are jobs that can be expressed in programmable rules--blue collar, clerical, and similar work that requires moderate skills and used to pay middle-class wages.

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According to the authors, the loss of these jobs leaves a growing division between those who can and cannot earn a good living in the computerized economy. Left unchecked, the division threatens the nation's democratic institutions.

Frey and Osborne echo Levy and Murnane that the focus for the new economy has to be on jobs involving extensive problem solving and interpersonal communication, areas they feel are less susceptible to computerization. "Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization – i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence," they conclude.

Also, Moravec's Paradox is mentioned in the discussion.  The paradox is the finding by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to common-sense assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensor and motor skills require enormous computational resources.

The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec wrote in Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."

In their paper, Frey and Osborne were surprised find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations are highly susceptible to computerization.  This is despite the fact that this sector is where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades. Additional support for this finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots and the gradually fading of the comparative advantage of human labor in tasks involving mobility and dexterity as robotics improves.

What do you think, will improving social and creative skills be enough to counter the robotic revolution, or will more drastic measures be required?

Image Source: The Economist, Jan. 18, 2014

Will society find itself, in the not-to-distant future in a position where staggering innovation gains continue exponentially, but widen the income inequality even more?At the end of the lecture, Frey presents what he considers lessons from the past.  He cites the chart above which statistically hints that wages now might follow the trajectory they did during the industrial revolution in Britain.In another interesting historical examples of today's Detroit versus New York.  According to Frey, both cities were in the same dismal economic situation in the mid-Twentieth century, but they took dramatically different paths.  Detroit invested in infrastructure; while New York invested in people claims Frey and the outcomes speak for themselves.  He does mention that the effects in New York have a significant price in terms of economic inequality.  

SOURCE  21school

By 33rd Square

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