Category: Myths

In the last few years, the computer scientists and entrepreneurs who fuel Silicon Valley have gone through a bewildering series of transformations. Once upon a time they were ostracised nerds. Then they were the lovable geeks of the Big Bang Theory TV show, and for a short while they were superheroes. (In case you’re wondering, geeks wonder what sex in zero gravity is like; nerds wonder what sex is like.) Then it all went wrong, and now they are the tech bros; the anti-heroes in the dystopian saga of society’s descent into algorithmic rule by Big Brother, soon to be...

Giant cogs are starting to turn Western governments are finally waking up to the significance of artificial intelligence. It’s a slow process, with much further to go, and most politicians have yet to grasp the significance of AI, but the gradual setting into motion of giant cogs is to be welcomed. In the November 2017 budget the UK’s Chancellor excitedly announced expenditure of £75m on AI. In March 2018, France’s President Macron put that to shame by announcing a spend of €1.5bn by 2020, primarily to halt the brain drain of French computer scientists. The following month Germany’s Chancellor Merkel...

You’ll have noticed there is something of a backlash against the tech giants these days. In the wake of the scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s alleged unauthorised use of personal data about millions of Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg was subjected to an intensive grilling by the US Senate. (In the event, the questions were about as lacerating as candy floss because it turns out that most Senators have a pretty modest level of understanding about how social media works.) More seriously, perhaps, the share prices of the tech giants have tumbled in recent weeks, although Mr Zuckerberg’s day in Congress raised...

In a July 2015 interview with Edge, an online magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran New York Times journalist John Markoff articulated a widespread idea when he lamented the deceleration of technological progress. In fact he claimed that it has come to a halt.i He reported that Moore’s Law stopped reducing the price of computer components in 2013, and pointed to the disappointing performance of the robots entered into the DARPA Robotics Challenge in June 2015 (which we reviewed in chapter 2.3). He claimed that there has been no profound technological innovation since the invention of the smartphone in 2007, and complained...

In an article for the Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer of George Mason University becomes the latest academic to reassure us that AI and robots won’t steal our jobs. His article relies on three observations: First, Amazon is keen to automate its warehouses, but it is still hiring more humans. Second, ATMs didn’t destroy the jobs of human tellers. Third, automation has not caused widespread lasting unemployment in the past. Unfortunately, the first of these claims is true but irrelevant, the second is almost certainly false, and the third is both irrelevant and false. Amazon has automated much of what...

Last week I posted an article called “What’s wrong with UBI?” It argued that two of the three component parts of UBI are unhelpful: its universality and its basic-ness.  The article was viewed 100,000 times on LinkedIn and provoked 430-odd comments. This is too many to respond to individually, so this follow-up article is the best I can offer by way of response. Sorry about that. Fortunately, the responses cluster into five themes, which makes a collective response possible. They mostly said this: Expanding a little, they said this: You’re an idiot because UBI is communism and we know that...

One out of three ain’t good Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a fashionable policy idea comprising three elements: it is universal, it is basic, and it is an income. Unfortunately, two of these elements are unhelpful, and to paraphrase Meatloaf, one out of three ain’t good. The giant sucking sound The noted economist John Kay dealt the edifice of UBI a serious blow in May 2016 in an article (here, possibly behind a paywall) for the FT. He returned to his target a year later (here, no paywall) and pretty much demolished it. His argument is slightly technical, and it...

Bill Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots which replace human workers. He said it in an interview (here) with Quartz, a media outlet owned by The Atlantic, and staffed by journalists from The Economist, the New York Times and other publications that Dirty Donald would label as fake news. They made a nice short video (here) to promote the piece, with Gates giggling at the end about the idea of paying more taxes. It’s a neat idea, and has got a lot of people online very excited. It could help to pay for Universal Basic Income, which is...

The ATM automation meme In an engaging TED talk recorded in September 2016i, economist David Autor points out that in the 45 years since the introduction of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), the number of human bank tellers doubled from a quarter of a million to half a million. He argues that this demonstrates that automation does not cause unemployment – rather, it increases employment. He says ATMs achieved this counter-intuitive feat by making it cheaper for banks to open new branches. The number of tellers per branch dropped by a third, but the number of branches increased by 40%. The...

Industrie 4.0 Klaus Schwab is a clever man. After a rapid ascent through the ranks of German commercial life, he founded the World Economic Foundation (WEF) in 1971. The WEF is best known for organising a five-day annual meeting of the global business and political elite at the ski resort of Davos in Switzerland. He has a list of awards and honorary doctorates as long as your arm. Schwab has done much to popularise the notion that we are entering a fourth industrial revolution – not least by writing a book of that name. He didn’t invent the phrase: rather...

Economists can be surprisingly dangerous Most economists are convinced that automation will not lead to lasting unemployment. They point out – rightly – that it has not happened in the past. Instead, it has made products and services cheaper, which raises demand and creates new jobs. They say that the Luddites, who went round smashing weaving machines in the early nineteenth century, simply mis-understood what was happening, and this mis-understanding has become known as the Luddite Fallacy. But in the coming decades, automation may have a very different effect. Past rounds of automation replaced human and animal muscle power. That was...