Tag Archives: economy

More points to [re]ponder

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  • Technology disrupts former profit models, closing businesses and increasing unemployment, but provides no equal replacements for jobs/profitability
  • Technology creates high-stimulus, addictive leisure activities that are easily available (cheap, abundant, etc.), making instantly-gratifying tasks like searching the Internet and gaming more appealing than delayed-gratification tasks like studying for high-skill jobs
  • Technology creates demand for high-skill jobs but large workforce not interested/motivated for high-skill job training
  • Local skill gap in job requirements for businesses seeking expansion, as well as national governmental barriers to entry/competition for eligible, highly-skilled, internationally-mobile workforce, contributes to regional high unemployment

When do local people, en masse, say “no more!” to higher education and highly-technical skill sets, creating viable subcultures that revert back to lower skill needs?  How do they remain competitive enough to be profitable and stay in business as owners/employees?

Does a technology-based socioeconomic system, in general, have a fixed lifespan like a classic technology lifecycle?

Yes, these are repetitive thoughts but ones I want to grasp onto for myself and understand their implications for the future in this parallel universe of a blog.

Either we admit that our model of nations is out-of-sync and possibly obsolete or we open up the floodgates and let subcultures compete against each other at full blast, with subcultures, like species and languages, going extinct at a faster rate than before.

If the latter, will your subculture withstand the onslaught?

Would…

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Would Congress let the U.S. economy go back into recession by not negotiating a bipartisan deal on pending tax increases if Obama is re-elected but would negotiate a bipartisan deal if Romney is elected?

That seems to be what this CEO implies as a major warning to eligible/potential/likely U.S. voters.

More for me to think about the rest of this day.

Time to read a book and get away from the computer.

Do Nice Guys, Who Finish, Last?

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The countdown shows 13,722 days to go.

I had promised myself not to care, to let my minions, given assignments in 1000-day increments, carry out their tasks, coordinate with each other and find a way to make the dream come true, with or without me.

I keep my head in the game, watching what they do, quietly making suggestions without seeming to insert myself into their conscious thought process.

I visit local establishments, saying thanks to people like Mathew at North Alabama Computer Associates, James at Radio Shack, Ricky at Chili’s, Honey at Best Buy Mobile, John Carroll at Walmart, Dominique at Beauregard’s, Caitlin at Carson’s Grille, and Mock Electronics.

What I find, when I order online, is the absence of connecting with people face-to-face.

Even so, I set up a chatbot to answer the phone for me and talk with “Rachel from Card Services” that (who?) is not related to another robocaller which (who?) says, “Do not hang up the phone!”

My chatbot switches languages word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase to test the intelligence of the chatbot on the other end of the line.

You didn’t know there was a silent chatbot war going on, did you?

You just thought you were receiving annoying calls from telephone solicitors, didn’t you?

Well, it’s like that.

See, I’m a nice guy.  I go with the flow most of the time.

However, and there’s always a however (or ‘owever (or “but…”)), years of refining the exteriour personality, being a nice, easygoing guy, letting my wife blame me for a variety of issues that are of marginal importance to me, but sufficient for me to keep track (dancing skills, yardwork, house repair, etc. — see the comic strip “Dagwood” for further examples), appearances are deceiving.

I’m not always a nice guy.  I can be, am, deceptive, downright mean, ornery, angry.

My job is to slowly replace members of our species with robots, androids, chatbots, cyborgs, etc., to maximise the efficiency of the system that will allow me to achieve the major milestone I only appear to not be reaching 13,722 days from now.

Some of my minions are self-aware enough to realise what they’re being asked to do, make themselves expendable, no sequels in their future.

The rest of you?  I don’t know.  You tell me.

I can put you to work creating new organisms that will establish beachheads on other planetoids, if you wish.

Or, to satisfy some members of the Committee, I can set the chess game of a war in motion, eliminating hundreds of millions of you, causing a setback in my timetable.

I prefer the former — it preserves the option of wars on other planets for our offspring to spring on each other.

While we’re on the subject, are you one of those who, when competing against one another, call each other schoolyard names that are unacceptable in polite company?  I watch Australians make mountains out of molehills with such a scenario and wonder what else we primates are capable of when competing for the highest social positions in the land…

Time for the next set of actions to stir the pot of the national political election season!

But how do we give part-time workers a sustainable/living wage?

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Are workweek expectations raising unemployment? What in this proposed model is missing?

How do capitalist/communist/socialist systems achieve full[er] employment?

Where are hundreds of millions of un/underemployed going to find/define high/normal quality/standard of living?

What of a whole generation now entering their workforce years? How does this compare to previous generations of displaced/unused youth?

What if part of what we’re seeing is nations cutting back their debt load/rate/share in foreign hands in order to lower their interdependence?

What are the longterm consequences of both?

Why should I care when populating other celestial bodies is my primary goal?

An Uncharted Desert Isle!

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“Both sides of the political isle (should) signal that they are willing to compromise and that they’re willing to get this done … that could help lower the level of uncertainty that is affecting U.S. investors and consumers,” IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

In the old days…

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In the old days, I would have put together a system like this:

You know, a touchscreen computer monitor with a plugin interface for a smartphone which acts as the portable PC with local, physical, wireless keyboard and other HID as needed for desktop use.

But then, gesture control got in the way.

I’m not one to talk with my hands and arms.

I’ve been typing on keyboards for about as long as I’ve written short stories.

I am not like the kids of today who barely know what a computer mouse is, let alone a physical keyboard.

Watching kids in the classroom manipulate their way through their coursework with a tablet PC makes we worry for no particular reason.

How many of them are more comfortable working with a game controller, including accelerometer/gyroscope/etc. than with a keyboard/mouse combination?

And what about the next set of students more comfortable with natural gesture control, where their indoor environments are wired to respond to them like living beings and augmented reality makes their outdoor environments feel more connected, their senses more stimulated by information [over]load?

What about this worries me?

The digital divide.

Environmental impact.

Collapsing world economy.

What is the sustainable version of these images?

We are not crying “Wolf” here, simply recognising the support structure needed to maintain and enhance these technological achievements for decades more without interruption by global war.

Back to the Committee meeting where we need full cooperation by those willing to reach consensus on a few important issues not yet discussed in this public forum…

Where drone-sized minimissile defense systems line national borders using UWB/mesh network technology to intercept and destroy rogue UAVs, killing a few kites (yes, birds) as collateral in the process.  See the latest cartoon films starring Iron Man for a moving example.  Detente is a terrible deterrent to waste, like al dente is a terrible burden on the waist.

A Battle in the Trenches

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To finish recording events surrounding the death of my next-door neighbour…

A few days ago, my wife and I met Alice Battle and her daughter, Wendy.

Alice repeated what the building contractor had told us, that she planned to use the house and grounds, after major house foundation refortification, as a weekend retreat.

Without provocation, she stated, “I have nothing to hide,” adding more conversation to verbalise a defense of unspoken thoughts against her.

I seem to remember a few people in my past making that statement and later finding out for myself that if a person cannot sense a situation of unethical behaviour, that person will engage in activities that are unintentionally unethical, assuming it’s normal, until that person is called out by another.

Ignorance of the law, ignorance of other persons’ perception of your ethical lapses — ignorance is ignorance, plain and simple.

I’ll leave this up to our neighbour on down the street to pursue the matter further, if she so chooses.

For now, I accept what our new neighbour says, and let her actions speak louder than words.

After all, I am a businessman myself, and know many a time when closing a deal meant leaving myself open to interpretation of ethical behaviour by others.

I know many a business person in our neighbourhood who could be accused of ethical misconduct.

At the end of the day, a few of us are responsible for creating a society where we can manage the lives of others, staying within the spirit of ethicality (or theatricality, according to the spellchecker), whilst we give the majority a belief that a whole socioeconomic system can operate fully under the law and within business ethics, when we know better.

My business associates/colleagues understand what I’m saying.  We know that many of us are born without a conscience, having no moral compass, and cannot be trained to believe otherwise.  Who are we to deny them their right to live the way they choose?

Instead, let us hold to the belief that everyone is important and has a place in our society, even when that place contradicts our own beliefs and actions.

Plan ahead, that’s our motto.

You already know our new slogan: “Business. Science. Competition.”

Create a law that stealing is a crime.  Then use those who steal to accomplish business and science goals for you, arresting and convicting them later on, giving those who believe in prison rehabilitation methods the opportunity to experiment on the conscience-less, keeping them both occupied and feeling wanted, one way or another.

Never underestimate the power of those who believe in magic that doesn’t exist, whatever labels they use to describe magical powers.

The First Wave?

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So, now that the first wave has crashed upon us, with robots taking over people jobs, what do we do with people who can’t compete against robot-level “thinking,” be it repetitive factory assembly work, warehouse stocking/delivery, data analysis, automotive driving, lab tech work, house vacuuming, aerial bombardment, video surveillance, traffic control, virtual newspaper front page creation, social networking, stock market trades, technical support (via smart FAQs, chatbots), etc.?

Not only must we compare against each other for jobs in the global marketplace, where only the local job is [somewhat] secure — barber/hairstylist, restaurant worker, medical specialist, carpenter, plumber — we must now also compete against our electromechanical creations.

What do we do with the humans who do not have the mental training or motivation to compete against machines?

We talk about global trade and illegal immigration having a downward push on average worker wages, and thus takehome pay/disposable income, but we don’t often talk about the animatronic elephant in the room.

The future is now.

We are feeding the network that films like “Terminator” slyly joked about.

How dystopian you see our current future is up to you, depending on your place in the socioeconomic system we define as if there were hard-and-fast rules about a direct correlation between wages/housing/employment status and happiness.

If a robot replaces you and you are dismissed (fired/laid off) from your job, are you going to redefine your level of happiness?

Isn’t that the goal of a robotic world that was given to us many decades ago?  A new leisure class that no longer had to work because robots were going to “work” while we chose activities that we enjoyed, whatever we want to say we enjoy, including for some, work?

When our human-computer interface ratchets up the level of expectations/sensations/stimuli in the moment, like a natural high for which we grow numb after repeated achievement, seeking the next level of a natural high after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another…sorry, I just couldn’t stop, you know how it is…where in all that are the products we can afford to buy when a large number of us no longer have jobs to pay for our place in this leisure class where “getting high” has so many new legal forms?

In other words, we are back to the definition of barbarians at the gate staring in wonder at a society which has vastly redefined the meaning of a job.

We are asking the barbarians (and I include myself here) to retrain ourselves to program the machines that are taking over the jobs we have to keep retraining ourselves past the point of enjoying ourselves to lose and rebid the jobs we make ever more complex for the sake of a system that is becoming more and more autonomous, pushing more and more of us out of the way.

It is an argument worth reminding ourselves to make during our rush to automate tasks that once gave us a good standard of living.

Buggy whip manufacturers and Luddites are the classic examples here, of course.

Inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the system  (e.g., medical doctors spending more time on complicated laptop computer programs than with their patients) create room for jobs but who’s minding the system that has grown bigger than any one of us or all of us combined?

When will a stock trading system, a factory and a distribution warehouse start producing profit for itself alone, no longer needing humans-in-the-loop for product sales to/for itself?

Can a robot in a factory predict its failure rate, order parts from another factory (we’ll leave off the thought of it using a local 3D printer to produce its own parts (which would, similar to the rest of this example, require a system to acquire/order raw material for the printer)), the factory receiving the order, fulfilling it, shipping it and installing it without a single one of us involved in the process?

Isn’t that the system we’re creating, the Second Wave, if you will?

Won’t some of the lessons we learn from remote-controlled drones and planetary rovers lead us to this scenario?

Haven’t automated crop management systems reached a similar point, ordering seeds, planting/maintaining/harvesting the crops and delivering the product to a market, where automated futures trading makes a profit for itself, which is shared with us?

Bottom line: where are many of us in the future?