After reading Jerry Kaplan’s book (reviewed in my previous post), I dived into The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. While sharing some of the same
concerns as Kaplan, particularly the problem of widening spread between haves
and have-nots, this book is significantly more optimistic. The book is
subtitled “Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant of
Technologies”. Their conclusion is that humans can find their niche in a Race With the Machine, as opposed to a Race
Against the Machine, the title of their earlier book. The niche is in ideation
and novelty, generating new good ideas and finding novel recombinations of
existing ideas while leveraging technology. The last few chapters of the book
also include suggestions for individuals, corporations and governments.
The problem of spread may be at a critical juncture. The
authors build up the case first using Moore’s Law, followed by mass
digitization, the exponentially widening payout gap between the number one
product and second-best, thus leading to an economical stratification based on
superstars and everyone else. Instead of something closer to a normal (or
Gaussian) distribution where the mean and median are close to the same, the exponential
speed of technology has moved us into a power law distribution. But now the
median is much lower than the mean, and the majority will have (far) below
average wealth.
In their policy recommendations, they argue for a
correlation between a strong education program for all that keeps up with
technology to keep economic inequality at bay. A study is cited whereby
improved test scores (using PISA for example) is strongly correlated with
economic growth. Technology seems to be the savior in this regard, and the
usual arguments for how technology-enhanced education will be a positive
feedback loop towards superior learning are presented without much detailed
analysis. The authors call for a “Grand Bargain” – having higher teacher
salaries and more accountability. I’m all for higher teacher salaries, but I
think many of the present efforts at accountability are wrong-headed. Here’s an
optimistic summary from the authors.
“We have little doubt that improving education will boost
the bounty by providing more of the complementary skills our economy needs to
make effective use of new technologies. We’re also hopeful that it can help
reduce the spread, especially insofar as it’s caused by skill-biased technical
change. That’s largely a matter of supply and demand. Reducing the supply of
unskilled workers will relieve some of the downward pressure on their wages,
while increasing the supply of educated workers diminishes the shortages in
those areas. We also think creativity can be fostered by the right educational
settings, boosting the prospects not only of the students but also society as a
whole.”
I’m in agreement with the last sentence, and I’ve been
working on coming up with some creative principles to foster, not just in my
classes, but perhaps one that changes the culture around me too! That’s a
subject for another post. Today I’d like to ponder something a little crazier.
Is our system of networked computers “alive”? I suppose it
depends on how you define life. If asked to define life, most folks will think
about some of the characteristics of extant life from a biological point of
view. Wikipedia has a nice summary of these seven characteristics. However,
there are difficulties with such definitions, as there always seem to be odd
exceptions to the rule that pop up. For example a mule is sterile and unable to
reproduce but we would certainly consider it to be alive. Are viruses alive?
More generally, are parasites alive?
The ability to adapt and evolve seems to be important, as is
a metabolic system of some sort that transduces energy. From a thermodynamic
point of view, perhaps life is a system that more efficiently disperses energy
over both space and time. Certainly one could connect the dots that early
cellular evolution was concerned with improving energy transduction. The better
an organism was at collecting and using energy, the better its odds of survival
in a changing environment as food or energy sources change. One could even
paint a narrative connecting the rise of multi-cellularity to climax ecosystems
as a story of energy use and dispersal. Human beings might be the ultimate
organisms to transduce energy with transformative leaps as the steam energy is
invented, or electricity is harnessed. Computers were once humans. Now they are
machines, networked together for increasing interconnectivity, transducing more
energy in the process. If James Lovelock’s Gaia is a living organismic system,
perhaps so are our networked computational clouds.
Sure, we could pull the plug and stop the electrical juice
from powering our computers and they would be “dead”. But if the sun went dark,
so would we and most other living things on earth unless we could find a
different source. Perhaps we’d have sufficient technology to form the
underground city of Zion (from the Matrix)
and make use of geothermal energy – although we would be much reduced in
numbers and would need to invent machines to effectively transduce this energy
source for our use to survive. Are all computer programs like viruses? When
shut down, they go dormant. But when turned on and connected, behold they
alive! We have backup systems that copy our files just in case our computer
“dies”.
Perhaps “artificial life” isn’t so artificial after all.
Maybe we could distinguish inorganic and organic life, just like the chemists
of old distinguished organic and inorganic chemistry. But we chemists know that
there is no hard and fast distinction, and in fact much of the interesting
chemistry takes place at the edges of these two fields. As we become cyborgian,
tethered to the computing systems that have become a natural extension of
ourselves, perhaps that’s where all the action is. Certainly that’s where
venture capitalists are putting their money and where we have seen the most
gains in economic wealth, for good or ill. Here we are in the Second Machine
Age. Will we Race against, Rage against, Race with, or become a joined Race
with the machine?
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