Innovation = Unemployment
We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.
John Maynard Keynes 1930
I just read the book Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson&McAfee (only 77 pages of easy reading) and they mention a story about the power of compounding . From the book:
The second concept relevant for understanding recent computing advances is closely related to Moore’s Law. It comes from an ancient story about math made relevant to the present age by the innovator and futurist Ray Kurzweil. In one version of the story, the inventor of the game of chess shows his creation to his country’s ruler. The emperor is so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The clever man asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so on, with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous.
The emperor agrees, thinking that this reward was too small. He eventually sees, however, that the constant doubling results in tremendously large numbers. The inventor winds up with 264 -1 grains of rice, or a pile bigger than Mount Everest. In some versions of the story the emperor is so displeased at being outsmarted that he beheads the inventor.
In his 2000 book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil notes that the pile of rice is not that exceptional on the first half of the chessboard:
After thirty-two squares, the emperor had given the inventor about 4 billion grains of rice. That’s a reasonable quantity—about one large field’s worth—and the emperor did start to take notice.
But the emperor could still remain an emperor. And the inventor could still retain his
head. It was as they headed into the second half of the chessboard that at least one of
them got into trouble.
Well we might be getting on the second half of the chess board. I see the machines replacing man in almost all tasks with a big advantage. They don't strike, they don't get bored and they accumulate thousands of years of experience & knowledge. Man on the other hand takes 20 years of studying just to get up to date to what is already known of basic knowledge. I see machines doing much better medical diagnosis, etc...
what to do? invest in the machine factory and study programming
more on the same subject
http://thoughtmeme.blogspot.pt/2013/11/just-execution-unemployment.html
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