Tag Archives: technology

Robots for the people

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In between Lionel Davidson’s cracking 1994 thriller – recently reissued – [amazon_link id=”0571324215″ target=”_blank” ]Kolymsky Heights[/amazon_link] and Colum McCann’s moving novel [amazon_link id=”0812973992″ target=”_blank” ]Let the Great World Spin[/amazon_link], I read (at last) Martin Ford’s [amazon_link id=”0465059996″ target=”_blank” ]Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future[/amazon_link]. It’s good to see it made the FT Business Book Prize long list, amid terrific company.

[amazon_image id=”0465059996″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future[/amazon_image]

As one of the economists Ford has a go at in the book, I don’t believe the challenge is one of the total number of jobs jobs. These periodic waves of concern about where all the jobs are going to come from tend to prefigure a wave of job creation. It happened in the 1960s, following publication in 1964 of the ‘Triple Revolution’ report in the US, and it happened again in the 1990s after the [amazon_link id=”0812928504″ target=”_blank” ]’Downsizing of America'[/amazon_link] report in 1992. This time might be different, as Ford and so many others argue, but repeatedly over 250 years capitalist economies have shown their capacity for creating new forms of work when old forms become redundant for technological or other reasons.

Indeed, at present in the US and UK there is little sign of any direct impact of automation at all. Employment rates are high, and low labour and total factor productivity signal the absence of a significant technological impact on growth and jobs. We have too few robots, not too many. There are some significant data issues here, but that includes the question of measuring jobs in the digital economy – as often noted, Google has far fewer employees than GM, but Mike Mandel has pointed out that the statistics are not counting the extent of job creation in smaller businesses.

That’s not to say there are no challenges from robotisation. Almost as often as they have adapted, capitalist economies have proven themselves bad at the process of transition. The huge wave of automation in manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s, the deindustrialisation and globalisation, destroyed communities and left successive generations out of work, in poverty, and scarred by the nexus of social problems experienced by so many former mill or mining towns. There is also the question of income distribution. As Ford points out, [amazon_link id=”B00I2WNYJW” target=”_blank” ]Thomas Piketty’s tome[/amazon_link] on inequality hardly mentioned technology amid its quotations from [amazon_link id=”0192835696″ target=”_blank” ]Balzac[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”0747549079″ target=”_blank” ]Austen[/amazon_link], but it did plant this issue firmly at the centre of policy debates. Tony Atkinson’s impressive book [amazon_link id=”0674504763″ target=”_blank” ]Inequality[/amazon_link] had a detailed list of policy responses. The winners from technology will need to share the benefits if our societies are to thrive.

So I certainly don’t dismiss techno-fears, but I do think “we’re all going to be unemployed” is the wrong way to frame the problems. Having said that, [amazon_link id=”1480574732″ target=”_blank” ]Rise of the Robots[/amazon_link] is a thorough review of the impact of digital technologies on a number of areas. It covers the likely breakthroughs such as AI and driverless vehicles, going over the exponential pattern as Brynjolfsson and McAfee do in their book [amazon_link id=”B00D97HPQI” target=”_blank” ]The Second Machine Age[/amazon_link]. Ford has chapters on industries such as health and higher education, where the impact of digital disruption has yet to be experienced.

He raises some interesting questions. For example: “Should the population at large have some sort of claim on [the] accumulated technological balance?” Meaning the vast social and public investment in research and innovation, on which the new digital fortunes are piggybacking. The answer to that is surely yes. There is also the implication of the machines’ greater ability to know what we know: no human an be aware of all research, past or present, but something like IBM Watson can be.

There is a great example in the book of two almost simultaneous cases of patients presenting themselves at different hospitals with mysterious diseases. One almost died during a heart operation, the doctors puzzled as to the diagnosis. Another was correctly diagnosed and treated because the doctor happened to have seen the same mystery symptoms on the TV series House. A smart enough computer would have known without having to have serendipitously watched the right TV programme. Ford seems to see this as a threat, but surely there is only benefit in this ability to pool past human knowledge? And I’m not persuaded that computers are yet anywhere near creating new knowledge however magical they are at collating and making sense of past knowledge. They are standing on the shoulders of human giants, absorbing humanity’s existing intellectual assets.

Well, maybe I’m delusionally optimistic. Ford ends the book with figures from the BLS. Between 1998 and 2013, there was a 42% real increase in US GDP, but no increase in the total hours worked. He thinks that’s a bad thing. I think it’s a good one – with the huge proviso that the benefits of growth must be widely shared. They haven’t been. We don’t have the people’s robots. That’s the real problem.

Read more (e-)books!

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There were some new figures from the Association of American Publishers that seemed to indicate e-book sales growth picked up in 2014 after a dip but the trend has slowed; and that paperback sales growth was strong while sales at retail stores increased modestly after some years of decline. Total sales revenues were up about 4.5% and unit sales 3.5%.

I’ve often written about how innovative publishers have been in their response to digital, compared to the music industry – okay, not a high hurdle, but still. It has certainly been a tough environment for the business but how encouraging it is to see more words (and pictures) being read in more formats than ever.

Another of my perennial themes is that people assume new technologies or formats are pure substitutes for pre-existing ones. Often with communications technologies (although not always – bye-bye fax machines and telegrams) they are complements, or start out as substitutes but the older technology then finds a stable and complementary niche.

Of course there is a binding constraint that ensures some substitutions have to occur, and that is time to spend on the various leisure pursuits. Looking on the bright side, if the robots do all the work, we’ll all have more time for reading.

Lovelace & Babbage

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I’ve loved reading [amazon_link id=”0141981512″ target=”_blank” ]The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage[/amazon_link] by Sydney Padua.

[amazon_image id=”0141981512″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer[/amazon_image]

It’s funny, and full of nuggets of information. I never knew Babbage had written a book, [amazon_link id=”B004TS7610″ target=”_blank” ]On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures[/amazon_link]. That’s on order now! (Browsing around, he seems to have written quite a bit on economics eg there is also [amazon_link id=”B00X61XRDM” target=”_blank” ]Thoughts on the principles of taxation, with reference to a property tax, and its exceptions[/amazon_link]; and [amazon_link id=”0217545602″ target=”_blank” ]Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives[/amazon_link].) I didn’t know Herschel had originally named Uranus ‘George’. I didn’t know Boole had tried to prove money doesn’t by happiness in a literal utilitarian calculus. I *did* know about W.S.Jevons’ Logic Piano because once I saw it in the Science Museum:

Jevons' Logic Piano

Jevons’ Logic Piano

Doron Swade’s [amazon_link id=”0349112398″ target=”_blank” ]The Cogwheel Brain[/amazon_link], which I read some years ago, is a less amusing intro to Babbage. [amazon_link id=”0571172431″ target=”_blank” ]Cultural Babbage[/amazon_link] edited by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow is wonderful. Sydney Padua writes that her favourite book on Babbage is [amazon_link id=”0136047297″ target=”_blank” ]Mr Babbage’s Secret: Tale of Cypher and APL[/amazon_link] by  Ole Franksen.

[amazon_image id=”0349112398″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Cogwheel Brain[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0571172431″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention[/amazon_image]

Recent robot round-up

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I’m looking forward to reading Martin Ford’s [amazon_link id=”0465059996″ target=”_blank” ]The Rise of the Robots[/amazon_link] – it gets a good review in the FT today. Edward Luce calls it “well researched and disturbingly persuasive.”

[amazon_image id=”0465059996″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future[/amazon_image]

I’m still a robo-sceptic in the sense of thinking there is nothing inevitable about the employment and income distribution outcomes of skill-biased automation. It’s technological determinism to think otherwise, as the underlying technological waves are channelled through economic and political institutions. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be concerned. After all, there was a wave of automation in manufacturing in the late 1970s/early 1980s and the social consequences of that were devastating – the institutions handled the transition very badly.

There is an interesting recent (free) e-book collection of essays (including one of mine) from the IPPR, Technology, Globalization and the Future of Work. Also this recent paper, Robots at Work, by Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels. They find in a panel of data across industry in 17 countries, robotization increased total factor productivity and wages, although with some adverse effects on hours worked by low-skilled workers.

A challenge to techno-euphoria

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After plucking it off the shelf for yesterday’s post on the ebb and flow of economic power in the long sweep of history (or – what I did on my holidays), Angus Maddison’s [amazon_link id=”9264022619″ target=”_blank” ]The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective [/amazon_link] (read it online here) absorbed me. He identifies three forces driving long term growth: conquest and settlement; trade (specialisation and the division of labour); and technological innovation. On the last of these, he writes:

“It is clear that technological progress has slowed down. It was a good deal faster from 1913 to 1973 than it has been since. The slowdown in the last quarter century [ie. to 1999] is one of the reasons for the deceleration of world economic growth. ‘New economy’ pundits find the notion of decelerating technological progress unacceptable and cite anecdotal or microeconomic evidence to argue otherwise. However, the impact of their technological revolution has not been apparent in the macroeconomic statistics until very recently, and I do not share their euphoric expectations.”

I would really challenge the implication here that macroeconomic statistics are facts and microeconomic evidence just anecdote. SInce Maddison wrote this, we have had the early 2000s boom and then the financial crisis and its aftermath. It will be a while before the macro data can make sense of it all.

It’s quite clear though that there are some innovations that have not improved productivity or welfare – see Thomas Philippon’s marvellous paper Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? (Answ: Yes) The Maddison challenge is a good one to those of us who do think there is important technological innovation occurring – just as when Solow made his famous comment about computers, there is a question about why it doesn’t show in macro data. One answer might be that GDP data don’t capture the welfare gain due to new technologies (see my [amazon_link id=”B00M0H5PGU” target=”_blank” ]GDP[/amazon_link] for more). Another might be that the technologies are doing more for growth outside the OECD countries – think mobiles in Africa, South Asia or Latin America. But if Maddison is right, the interesting question then is why this wave of technology uniquely has not translated into faster growth and social welfare?