MACKIE'S PLOG

Mackie's Plog is a blog that covers the political meanderings of Cecilia Mackie (me!)  Please feel free to subscribe by typing your email in the box on the top right hand corner of this page.

I worked on Wall Street for 10 years.  The President and Managing Director of the firm I spent most of those years at, are both in jail.  Because of that, for the last several years I have avidly read books on and around the subject of corruption.  In this plog I want to share my thoughts regarding some of those amazing and insightful books which cover areas such as politics and economics.  I want to give readers a simpler way of hearing about important, newly published books which have been written by leading scholars and which talk about issues that affect our lives today.

So let me get started!

A great book that I have read recently is called "The Second Machine Age."

M.I.T. professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of the best seller “Race Against The Machine,” write a follow up thesis in "The Second Machine Age" published January 2014.  “Race Against The Machine” focused on the fact that machines started doing to white collar jobs what robotics previously did to blue collar jobs.  “The Second Machine Age” takes the idea one step further and points out examples where machines have recently begun doing tasks that until now were considered uniquely human.  

When the steam engine was improved by James Watt it was a turning point in human history. Prior to Watt’s invention engines were too inefficient, harnessing only 1% of the energy released when burning coal. In 1775 Watt increased this more than three-fold which made all the difference.  This lead to the industrial revolution which allowed us to overcome the limitations of muscle power.  After that, human development and populations started to grow exponentially.  In this book the scientist's theory is that computers are now making such unprecedented advances that we are heading into a "second machine age" which will have a similar effect on humanity's mental power than the steam engine had on muscle power. 

Computers were invented long ago but new technology can take decades to deploy as businesses change their processes. Over the past few years computers have started surprising the authors. Computers have facilitated driver-less car technology and have become adept at translation and speech recognition which are areas that were expected to be dominated by humans for some time to come. 

The book tries to explain why this is happening.  Firstly they point at the fathomless nature of exponential growth.  Humans have a tendency to underestimate exponential growth or the compound doubling of a number.  Around 1970 Moore’s law was hypothesized.  It stated processing power per unit of area would double every year.  That rule has held to this day.  The cost per unit of processing power has halved every year too.  In 1996 the fastest computer in the world for that time was produced for $55 million and fit on nearly 1,600 square feet of floor space.  9 years later the same processing power was sold on shelves for $500 and was called the Sony PlayStation 3. Massive improvements also happened in other hardware such as cameras and sensors.  Secondly, the scientists say that nowadays data is vastly accessible and aggregated and that networks are highly inter-connected.  Thirdly, with every technological advance comes the potential for new combinations of technologies and with them new possibilities.  A technology made up of a combination of other technologies is called a recombinant technology.  The Internet is itself a recombinant technology made up of "the much older tcp/ip data transmission network, a markup language called HTML and a simple PC application called a browser to display the results." 

Today an unprecedented number of humans have access to an unprecedented amount of data. In 2000 there were 700 million mobile phone subscriptions. In 2012 there were more than 6 billion and over three-quarters of the people in the world now have phone access. Simple handsets can have a big impact on society. An economist Robert Jensen studied coastal villages in India and found fish prices stabilized, prices dropped and profits increased as soon as fishermen acquired mobile phones and were able to eliminate the waste that occurred, when they stopped taking their fish to markets that already had enough supply for the day.  On another note, because 70% of the phones sold worldwide in 2012 were smartphones the number of people potentially working on recombinant technology has increased enormously.  

After this the book examines the impact of these technological changes on the economy. 

Technological advances create productivity gains but around the year 1990 median wages stopped tracking productivity.  In other words, the fact that a piece of technology can be quickly accessible to vast numbers of people across the planet is great for entrepreneurs and persons with skills which can be leveraged across a million new customers but it looks like the financial advantages of new technology are not ending up in the average person's pocket.  Digitization super-charges propagation of popular content and turns today's world into a winner-take-all market creating even bigger wage spreads the higher you get on the wage scale.  The authors argue that the decoupling of median wages and productivity growth that has occurred since the nineties is due to the second machine age.  They posit a dystopia of joblessness as machines replace humans in both computational and mechanical tasks. 

However, there is hope.  Chess champion Garry Kasparov lost to the first computer in 1997 but chess teams of "human plus machine" beat even the strongest computers today. That is because machines are no good at coming up with new ideas.  We have never seen truly creative, entrepreneurial or innovative machines. "These activities have one thing in common... coming up with new ideas or concepts."  

As compelling as these thoughts are I personally don't like the way the book continues after about half way through.  The authors try to crystalize ways in which people and governments can prepare for this second machine age. The potential effects of technology seem too unpredictable to me to make any further extrapolation and concrete solution-finding possible.  I did enjoy their reference to the principal of basic income and can only imagine the up-cry that would be heard if such a policy change was attempted in the United States today.  The principal behind it is this: if androids replace workers and unemployment goes up as a result it would be bad news for the economy since unemployed people don’t create much demand for goods.  A vicious cycle can take hold.  To counteract this it is suggested the unemployed should receive a guaranteed income even if they are not working.  A surprising number of economists have supported guaranteed income for the poor.  Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther and Milton Friedman are just some of the economists mentioned to have supported the idea.  Additionally, after 1200 economists signed a letter in support of the idea in 1967 Richard Nixon tried to enact it into law. 

I could have skipped the second half of the book but I found the first half thrilling.  The idea that in the near future we will see new technology which moves beyond our wildest dreams is a spectacular thought!

Outside of this plog, I am building a tech platform which will allow people to participate in a community for political change.  The platform will have a mechanism to allow our community to enact change within the world of American politics.  Stay tuned for this exciting development!

 

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