Tag: Technology

DO YOU THINK WE RUN THE RISK OF “TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT” WHERE MACHINES TAKE ALL OF OUR JOBS?

HAWKING: The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Source: Highlights from Stephen Hawking’s Reddit AMA: ‘Women’ are the most intriguing ‘mystery’ – The Washington Post

I’m not a fan of Stephen Hawking, he just seems to be a guy who dreams up stuff that is impossible to verify. Just because you can’t be proven wrong doesn’t make what you say right.  But his words above are insightful but not unique to Mr. Hawking.  I recently read a book entitled Machines of Loving Grace – The Quest For Common Ground. It is about automation and the two completely different approaches  to it. I will be getting into the book and quotes from it soon but wanted to mention it during this post.

There weren’t any blogs or 24/7 reporting during the first industrial revolution but if there were I’m sure many would be lamenting how all the farm jobs were disappearing and how fearful they were about the future. Change, especially sudden change is a very traumatic thing to many of us then and now.

Replacing humans with robots started more than fifty years ago and it now expanding at an exponential rate.  It will soon be that any job that simply requires repetition will be done by robotic means. This phenomenon started out with physical activity and is now quickly moving into the intellectual area.  From blue-collar to white-collar with no end in sight. Where there was once a good paying job in industries such as auto, and office work they are now replaced by robots  and computers who work twenty-four hours a day with no breaks.

I personally think that eventually this will be a good thing. Humans will be rid of the mind numbing work of the past and can then move on to more creative and productive endeavors. This revolution could also cause the family unit to be stronger than it has been in a century. Recently we have farmed out the care giving and moral education of our children to others so that both parents could work at providing income for the family.  Now with robotics doing much of the day-to-day work there will be no need for double income so a permanent care-giver can once again be the norm.  Another possibility is for a 30 hour work week.

Of course this all hinges on how the gains due to robotics are distributed.  Will it go to the stake holder or the remaining workers.  Right now the top 1% are getting a very inordinate share but that doesn’t have to be the case. Unfettered capitalism naturally favors them but if proper regulations are put in place things could quickly change to even out the distribution of the gains.

I have high hopes that, even though I won’t be around, things will be much better in the future than they are now. We will be more educated, informed, and diligent citizens. We will reign it the capitalistic greed that is inherent to our current system.  Yes, I am a dreamer…. and if you are going to dream why not dream big positive things… 🙂

U.S. consumers on Thursday will have a new way to protect themselves against cybercrime. Instead of the familiar magnetic stripe, their armor will take the form of credit and debit cards with a built-in chip, which retailers must be able to read as of October 1….

Experts say the slow rollout could be due to the cost of new card-reading equipment. Merchants must weigh the expense of buying new payment systems and training employees on that gear against the unknown hit from fraudulent charges. Some may even consider their new liabilities the cost of doing business.

Source: New credit cards aim to protect consumers and banks from hackers – CNET

One of my personal credit cards just got hit with a fraudulent charge from someplace over in Africa I think, so that one had to be cancelled and replaced by a new number. This is the second time in the past year that it has happened but to different cards. The credit card companies are getting pretty good at spotting these guys early so no great damage is done. It is hard to say how they got my number, maybe it was from a list sold to them?

The new chip cards as cited above does a good job of preventing this from happening. Every time the card is used it generates a one-time number. Some algorithm generates these new numbers so they are pretty much impossible to duplicate.  Like so much else it seems these days, the chip cards have been in use in much of the rest of the world for a several years now and are finally being implemented here.  When we took our month long trip to Canada in 2011 there were some businesses that hesitated even taking our cards with magnetic strips. We are the inventors of much of this type technology but seem to be the last implementors. Strange….

I know this article said that retailers must be able to read the chip cards by October 1 but I still find the majority of them unable to do so. Those that don’t are not mom & pop places but national chains. According to the list I put out last week we are, believe it or not, pretty far down the list of even cell phone usage. Credit card fraud is on an exponential rise due to all the hackers out there stealing numbers in vast quantities. It will only get progressively worse as time goes by. Canada and Europe has been using the chip cards for almost a decade now and therefore are for the most part immune to this hacking. Why does it seem to be  that we in the U.S. have to go to the  brink on almost anything before we take action? While I love my country that is one area I just can’t understand…

We’re still pretending that we’re inventing a brain when all we’ve come up with is a giant mash-up of real brains. We don’t yet understand how brains work, so we can’t build one.

We bolded that last sentence because it pretty much explains the predicament for AI. Until we more fundamentally understand that which we’re trying to clone, everything else is an impressive attempt up Everest that never totally summits.

This jibes with a sentiment that renowned author and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter posed earlier this year. He calls current prominent pursuits in the artificial intelligence arena “vacuous”

[IBM’s “Jeopardy!”-winning supercomputer] Watson is basically a text search algorithm connected to a database just like Google search. It doesn’t understand what it’s reading. In fact, “read” is the wrong word. It’s not reading anything because it’s not comprehending anything. Watson is finding text without having a clue as to what the text means. In that sense, there’s no intelligence there. It’s clever, it’s impressive, but it’s absolutely vacuous.

We’ve got a ways to go before machines are truly smart.

SOURCE: Why We Can’t Yet Build True Artificial Intelligence, Explained In One Sentence – Yahoo Finance.

I seem to come across a lot of talk lately about how machines will eventually rule the world and the humans will become obsolete. Having lived a big part of my life in the software development area maybe I understand a little more than most how this worry is very much unfounded. We have nothing to worry about for probably centuries. We simply can’t simulate something we really don’t even understand in the first place. Plainly speaking artificial intelligence is not even yet on technology’s radar screen.

When I first become interested in computer things back in the 1970s I purchased a TRS-80 personal computer and spent hours of my free time learning to program it. It costs a whopping $500 (that’s about $3,000 in today’s dollar). It had 16 kbytes of Ram and a 85k floppy disk (today’s computers have about a million times more memory and storage). But even this gargantuan increase is still not even close to what the human mind is capable of doing.

Even when the hardware finally comes in the neighborhood of our minds we still have to write the programs to simulate our mental processes. That is something we still don’t begin to understand.  We got a long way to go before we have to be concerned with machines becoming smarter than their inventors if that is even possible….

source:  15 technologies of today we’ll still be using in 2030 – Gadgetbox on NBCNews.com.

This is a very interesting article about what the author thinks will still be around in 18 years.  It is kind of risky making these types of predictions but since money is not on the line there isn’t much to be lost by the author. For the most part I agree with him but there are some items that I don’t think will make the cut.

But like the author, I remember going to the World’s Fair of 1960 and believing as they showed there that we would be driving levitating cars and working only four hours a day by the beginning of the 21st century. How wrong or maybe naive we were back then.  Of course many advances have been made since 1960. For instance all the computer power in the moon landing spacecrafts would now fit in a $500 iPad. And, of course all those row after row of clerical workers from the 60’s have been replaced by a couple thousand dollars worth of computers. Let’s not forget the factory workers who have been replaced by robots. So, we have made massive progress but just not in the areas we predicted.

I am going to keep these comments short to give you time to read the article. Just click on the source above to go there.

Source:  Scientists invent lightest material on Earth. What now? – latimes.com.

This is a fascinating article about a new material. The picture at the right says it all. It sits peacefully on top of a fluffy dandelion.  And proudly it was invented by a U.S. institution at CalTech.  I just hope that some U.S. firm can manage to take this concept into a usable stage. It seems that many of these types of things have to leave the country lately in order to find practical applications.

Being a retired engineer my mind leaps to see all the practical uses.

• What if the majority of the weight of our cars were the inhabitants instead of the vehicle itself? Couldn’t we make a vehicle that is so energy-efficient the we could rid ourselves of our deadly dependence on non-renewable resources.
• The basic structure of this material is much like current-day insulation. What if we could make up our living habitats out of a material that is 99.99% air?
• The article mentions that it has battery making potential. If we could make super lightweight batteries are electric cars not then a sure-thing?

The progress of technology has been an astounding thing during my life.  We have replaced thousands of square feet of computing power down into the size of less than a fingernail. We have increased our food production per acre to many times more than it was at my birth. This list could go on and on.

via Will bank branches wither away? – USATODAY.com.

In the past year, the number of bank customers who prefer to bank online has jumped sharply, according to a survey conducted in August by the American Bankers Association. Sixty-two percent of bank customers said they prefer banking online to all other methods, up from 36% in 2010. Only 20% of customers said they preferred using a branch, down from 25% last year.

I can remember as a youngster taking some of my hard earned grass mowing money to the bank to open a savings account. The lady there that handled all the money praised me for saving some of it. After that I regularly visited the lady behind her big counter to add to my account. I don’t remember how much I eventually had in the account or even what I used the money for but the bank itself made a big impression on me. It seems like local banks are going the way of many other institutions in relenting to cyberspace.

I know personally I very seldom am in the door of our local bank. I do visit their bank machine on a regular basis but only go inside when I need to do something with my vault box.  Everything else is done electronically as I seldom even use paper checks anymore. So, I guess I am contributing to this trend. As the article state that last year 36% preferred on-line banking and now 62% do. That is a very drastic increase in a little over a year. How much longer will banks, especially locally owned ones like I bank at, be able to afford keeping tellers behind the counters if no one actually goes inside? I’m sure the local small business owners frequent the bank on a regular basis to get currency for their cash registers so I imagine there will always be someplace to accommodate them but vast majority of the tellers will likely soon disappear. I wouldn’t be surprised if they disappear faster than our local video stores.

It seems that the internet is eliminating quite a few previously well established job opportunities and I expect this trend will continue in the future. The trouble with all this is that there just doesn’t seem to be many newly developed jobs opening up to replace them.  I don’t know what percentage of middle class jobs that are disappearing are due to technology as opposed to off-shore outsourcing. That would be an interesting statistic.

Most middle class jobs today require some post high school education and the U.S. is doing poorly in that category compared to other nations. Are all the kids who have only a high school education or less (almost 1/3 of U.S. kids don’t even finish high school) doomed to working for fast food and retail stores throughout their lives? Their doesn’t seem to be any leadership around today to change these trends and that is the saddest thing about all of this.

As a senior citizen I am mostly an observer in this type of thing. They say the average person today will change jobs about ten times in his/her working life.  I guess I was very fortunate to have worked for one  employer for 30 years and managed to retire with a pension plan.

I am going to do something unusual here and do a post primarily by merging the thoughts of two posts of my fellow bloggers. I read these two blogs back to back today and could not get over how well one message meshed into the other. The first one is by Bill Birnbaum from www.adventureretirement.com entitled Senior Citizens and Technology. The second one is from Quaker friend Raye from www.quakerquaker.org entitled Time For A “Station I.D.” – When Speaking Of Personal Experience

Let’s start with the first post. As the title implies Bill was talking about how senior citizen’s deal with technology. Before I start I want to tell you that I enjoy each and every post that Bill puts out. He is on my automatic watch list. Here are some excerpts from his post:

That fellow on the airplane represents the common stereotype – that senior citizens are resistive to technology.  Seems to me though, senior citizens aren’t so much resistive to technology.  It’s simply that they insist that any new technology they might adopt serve some useful purpose.  They ask, “What can this new technology do for me?”

Bill went on with the story about how he is struggling to decide whether to move to a smartphone and also get a GPS for the car.

After I read the post I looked around my office. I am typing on a quad core desktop unit with a 22 inch flat screen display as well as a 32 inch hdtv display hooked to it. Beside that is my Samsung Moment Smartphone plugged into its charger for the night. Just to the left of that is my netbook which I have connected to yet another 20 inch flat screen. This one, when it is not being used on road tripes, is constantly running a digital slideshow of my 12,000 plus pictures (half digitized from the old film world and half taken with my Canon 12.1Mb Rebel Xsi DSLR camera that sits on the shelf behind me. Also on that shelf is my Kindle loaded with scores of books I am in the process of reading. And this is just in my study! I won’t bore you with going through the rest of the homestead. Suffice it to say that this senior is not at all resistive to technology 🙂 I embrace it just as easily as the younger generations today.

Then I read the post by Raye. Here is part of it:

Sentences that begin with “Quakers do” or “Quakers believe” or similar, and then proceed to fill in with their observations are very likely painting with too wide a brush.  Those who identify themselves as Quakers are a large and complex bunch of groups and individuals.  I understand that trying to be precise in language can be cumbersome and frustrating.  But it seems to me that going to the trouble of adding phrases such as, “in my experience,” “Quakers I have met,” “I read in an article by so-and-so,” gives more integrity to the communication.  Friends I have met who belong to certain monthly or yearly meetings don’t fit neatly together in one theological or cultural lump.

So here I sit trying to combine these two posts. Let me say that like Quakers, I believe seniors are indeed a large and complex bunch of groups and individuals. It is hard to pin us down on just about anything related to living. Some like Bill are more adventurous and some like me embrace technology as soon as it comes available. Some are like my wife who is completely happy in life with just her mystery novels (paperback versions) and her 3,000 piece puzzles spread out on her hobby room table. I know Bill will agree that sometimes we senior bloggers like our Quaker brethren paint with just too broad a brush.