Welcome To Extremistan, Please Check Your Career At The Door

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/21/welcome-to-extremistan/

by BIackSwan • 12 years ago

68 71 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

informatimago• 12 years ago

One problem that would occur if only ellite jobs remain, is how new ellite workers will emerge?

If mundate programming is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite programmer?

If mundate laywering is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite laywer?

w1ntermute• 12 years ago

This is already a big problem in journalism, since the local newspapers (where journalists often started their careers in the past) have, of course, been decimated by technology.

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

There's blogging. I know, I know, almost all of it is terrible. But it's still a place to practice writing, and the best ones (were "best" should not mean "most followers" but "actual quality", of course) could be contacted by good newspapers.

mccr8• 12 years ago

For programming, in the same way as computer science education works right now: people write programs that are useless to anybody else, but teach the person writing the program. You can see a hint of how this might work on a large scale with the current crop of massive online courses.

saryant• 12 years ago

I think the definition of "mundane" is continually shifted, at least WRT to programming.

At one point, "mundane" was Minesweeper in Win32. Now it's a Rails app with authentication, monitoring, logging, background services, queues, AJAX, etc. Or a mobile app with remote backend services. Both are well-covered by intro level MOOCs today, letting new devs cut their teeth by building a Twitter clones.

Maybe the next step for "mundane" programming is distributed computing in the form of Akka, Spark and so forth.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

"Elite" means better than your peers. They will always emerge, albeit with a different skill set.

cookiecaper• 12 years ago

The issue in the article isn't that there will be novice programmers or lawyers, it's that if you can even become a novice programmer or lawyer, you're supposedly already in "Extremistan". The premise is well-contained in the quote early on that "most people are like horses" and can't operate in fields that require primarily intellectual labor.

I'm not sure that I agree with this premise, but it means that it's not an issue of crowding out newbies, just an expression of the popular sentiment that "[insert highly-paid professional position here] are really, really smart" and that to even attempt to become a highly-paid professional x is out of the reach of most people.

Dewie5• 12 years ago

It seems that the want to keep out sufficiently bad workers is already being seen by some that employ programmers - that they would rather not have an extra programmer than to have a sub-par programmer, because the 'contribution' that that programmer brings is on the whole negative by mostly introducing bugs that others have to clean up etc. We'll see if the bar for sub-par will keep being raised...

rezendi• 12 years ago

I'm afraid you have misinterpreted. (OP here.)

hoggle3• 12 years ago

So, was Marx right all along?

probablyfiction• 12 years ago

No, he wasn't. Marx was about the state owning the means of production, and that isn't the case here. We have a handful of super rich people (oligarchs) owning the means of production.

paradoja• 12 years ago

Marx was about something else, mostly. You should probably read a bit more of (or on) him.

carlob• 12 years ago

Mmmm, maybe you need to refresh your understanding of Marx. This oligarchy was well described by Marx, what you're saying he 'was about' was his solution to said problem.

marvin3• 12 years ago

This (or, I suppose, a corollary which is that the capital owners/means of production are always in the strongest position) is what I have recently been thinking. If you are afraid of this development, invest heavily in the stock market. That way, you have a big hedge in the form of capital ownership in case your career gets automated away: Automation benefits capital owners. You would of course have to do this before this development goes too far, or capital in the successful part of the economy will already be too expensive.

jjoonathan3• 12 years ago

Most people are already aware that being wealthy is a good way to make capitalism work in your favor and that saving money is a good way to become wealthy over time.

It's not a coincidence that most people aren't in a position to save enough to live off their capital.

scotchmi_st• 12 years ago

Assuming you're referring to Karl Marx, much of what he said of capitalism is very much true- it's a game of winners and losers. What he didn't give is what many historians would refer to as a 'viable alternative'.

jjoonathan3• 12 years ago

Marx's solutions were crap but his criticism of capitalism was spot on. That's hardly surprising: in the social sciences it's usually easier to find problems than to fix them.

rthomas63• 12 years ago

It seems likely that, considered as a whole, Extremistan is far more creative and productive than Mediocristan. But while its economic pie may be much larger, it is also much more unequally distributed.

Consider what would happen if the pie was 1000 times larger and was distributed 100 times more unequally than now. Is this ideal? No, but the worst off would be 10 times better off than right now. This is something very important to consider when we think about increasing industrial efficiency. To bring out an old argument, the freezer eliminated the entire ice industry and put lots of people out of jobs, yet everyone was better off for it.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

"distributed 100 times more unequally" doesn't mean anything, certainly not anything that implies anything about "the worst off". You need to characterize what happens to that specific part of the distribution if you want to estimate the impact.

In particular it is possible to reduce the shares of the top N%, and the bottom N%, increasing the share of the middle, and have many measures of inequality go down.

lukasm3• 12 years ago

Exactly. Inequality is not a problem - poverty is. I'd much rather be in a place where I'm a millionaire between trillionaires, than having little and be between millionaires.

Sadly, envy and need for the social status are very strong.

james1071• 12 years ago

No, you wouldn't.

withdavidli2• 12 years ago

Missing how economics work here. Prices will be adjusted to what the market can bare. There's still a 10^3 difference. That's being work like being worth $1,000 when everyone else is a millionaire.

Edit: sorry, was calculating for billion. it's a 10^6 difference. $1 vs $1,000,000

Someone• 12 years ago

What makes you think your envy and need for social status are that much lower than average?

acgourley• 12 years ago

Sounds like an interesting primate study - Group A: 100 bananas a day vs 10 bananas a day. Group B: 6 bananas a day vs 4 bananas a day, etc.

legutierr• 12 years ago

To echo what asgard1024 wrote: inequality is a problem if you are concerned with your own ability to make decisions for yourself. We see that today in our political system: money buys access, and concentrated wealth breeds concentrated power.

Envy and social status are not the primary reasons people fear inequality; instead, it is the fear that someone else has control over your destiny, and you are powerless to stop it. And this is what we see every day, even as entrepreneurs--regulatory capture by entrenched interests (and government corruption generally) prevents innovation and real competition, keeping too much wealth in the undeserving hands of those who have rigged the game in their own favor.

Furthermore, it is also quite possible that levels of inequality that we are seeing in the United States drag down economic growth, at least to the point that the material status of the poor is decreasing in absolute, objective terms. This makes perfect sense when you consider how important individual freedom is for broad economic growth--if economic inequality makes people less able to pursue their own objectives and best interests, all but the rich and politically connected will find themselves unable to contribute the best of themselves to society and to the markets.

It's entirely conjecture to attempt to assert that high levels of inequality are an inevitable result of sustained economic growth, and that high levels of inequality are necessary to sustain growth. However, it makes it very easy to hold conservative views in opposition to redistributive policies if you also believe that redistributive policies hurt growth--even when there is no actual evidence backing that belief.

Again, there is no evidence that redistributive policies as such harm growth. However, there may be evidence of a "goldilocks zone", an ideal level of inequality that spurs growth most effectively--where the opposite extremes of communism and the modern "gilded age"--and their well-documented drawbacks--are both avoided. To me this seems like common sense.

mladenkovacevic• 12 years ago

Wait, what can robots do to increase the size of the pie as it were. The size of the pie represents the market. And the size of the global market is fed by the population of the earth. So while the population may be growing at some steady pace, it has nothing to do with automation except in cases where demand currently.overshadows supply. "Currently" is the key word here.

No, automation is simply a tool for those who can afford it to cut out a large expense from their manufacturing process and increase profit. Not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's just you have to consider if nobody is left working and earning a decent living for themselves, then the size of the market starts to shrink.

colomon• 12 years ago

Are you implying that the only reason we appear to be more wealthy than, say, 18th century folks is because there are more people now?!?

rthomas63• 12 years ago

When a competitive industry cuts a large expense out of their manufacturing process, they increase profit and make cheaper goods. That's why Amazon is so successful, because they used technology to trim costs. Amazon also has small profit margins; they make up for small profit margins with high volume, which they get because of their low prices and convenience.

To assume the size of the market is fed by the size of the population is to assume that human appetites for goods and services are finite. That is most definitely NOT the case. Some people want 100 fancy cars that they put in a garage or other ridiculous things. The size of the pie is what is available for consumption that people happen to want. Robots increase the size of the pie by making goods cheaper and more plentiful. That means people can consume more with the same amount of money... their money is worth more, so they're richer in real terms. For instance, if fancy cars were $10 each, you would be richer even though you have the same amount of money.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

This completely ignores fact that "be better off" also includes control of one's environment (also called freedom). Considering that, in your example, most people would be worse off. They would all have higher material standards, but if you consider amount of wealth equal to "voting rights" about their environment, then they got a cut.

To say this less abstractly: Rich and poor are not a separate phenomena. Most people who are rich are so because they have power which they exercise over the poor.

zo13• 12 years ago

"Most people who are rich are so because they have power which they exercise over the poor."

Define "power"? What does it mean to you? More so, what do you mean when you claim that the rich exercise power over the poor?

rthomas63• 12 years ago

Like I said, that much wealth inequality is not ideal. I just think that considering what maximizes the mean/median of world prosperity is as important, if not somewhat more important, than considering how wide the standard deviation of wealth distribution is. We should consider both things.

JamesArgo4• 12 years ago

One of my first comments on this site pertained to this issue:

As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.

My opinions haven't changed much since. Though years off yet, we are heading into uncharted territory here. Sure, the labouring classes survived, actually thrived, after the economic obsolescence of their muscles; I doubt we will do well after the obsolescence of our minds. If a body's worth a penny a day, a mind a nickel, and it costs a quarter to eat - we will not survive even if the lump of labour fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.

rphlx2• 12 years ago

It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.

Perhaps on an individual basis, but not in large groups. An economic and social system in which most humans are starving will rapidly collapse, and be replaced - if necessary, through violent revolution - by a system that at least keeps most people fed, assuming there's still sufficient real resources to produce and transport the food.

Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.

gerbal• 12 years ago

Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.

someone needs to cc that memo to the right wing American Oligarchs.

icebraining5• 12 years ago

But if food costs more than most people can afford, it'll have to drop prices - after all, the 0.1% richest aren't enough to sustain the market. You can say that one quarter is already the cost, so it can't drop more, but that just poses the same situation for the suppliers instead. In the end, there's no absolute floor for prices, they'll have to drop until there are enough buyers.

Of course, that doesn't mean the new equilibrium will be good compared to current western standards.

JamesArgo4• 12 years ago

You're assuming there's not a more economically efficient use for farmland than feeding really, really, really poor people. The floor for the price will be the opportunity cost of using the land to grow food rather than, say, covering it with solar panels and exporting computation or whatever else can be dreamed up. At some point, it costs more to feed people than their economic worth over their lifetimes. I think in the long term, computers and robotics will be ridiculously efficient replacements for labour.

I don't really expect everyone to starve to death - and to be honest I think there are more-worrying implications of AI than this: http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drive...

I do, however, want to point out that's there no economic law preventing the majority from being far worse off.

Dewie5• 12 years ago

Maybe it will turn out that the big middle class of the latter 20th century was just an intermediate state between the exploited workers during the early Industrial Revolution, and the mediocre-humans obsolescence of the later 21th century.

rphlx2• 12 years ago

The predicted outcome is probably correct but technology is not its root cause. The primary cause is the animal preference for hierarchical social structures where the top have the largest possible amount of power and control over those at the bottom. These structures have existed throughout human history - certainly long before the industrial revolution.

Modern communications technologies are simply increasing their reach and extent.

mwsherman• 12 years ago

If (e.g.) doctors are automated out of a job, it will mean that health care has become dramatically cheaper, which is a widely distributed rise in living standards. This is more egalitarian, not less.

Thousands of doctors lose and millions of humans win.

Remember, economics is not about the distribution of money, it’s about the distribution of valuable things. In this example, health care is the valuable thing and its distribution seems greatly improved.

Spooky232• 12 years ago

Not necessarily.

It means that a combination of machines and lesser trained people will be providing care. If your condition falls outside of the protocols said robots and PAs can treat, hope there is an expensive doctor around!

wallflower• 12 years ago

The best companies hire the best engineers, who, by definition, are a minority; the best engineers work at, or launch, the best companies; technology increasingly allows the best companies to dominate their markets like never before. Extrapolate that twenty years into the future, and what do you get?

I have to disagree with this statement. Even if the best engineers were all working at a small number of companies, you still don't need the best (global maximum). It is hard to be the best. And that is why the consulting product of companies like Thoughtworks have suffered as they've scaled (they can't continue their rate of hiring at the same quality they had in the previous past).

Yes, there is a power law distribution in programming ability because you cannot rate programming ability on a 1-10 scale (it is an exponential scale). Where 10 is Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and 1 is someone who does not appear to harbor any thoughts of logical thought.

If you work to become better and what you do - and contribute back to the ecosystem with open-source code, talking at user groups small (local user groups) and large (conferences), teaching the next generation (from mentoring junior developers to teaching), I believe you will receive more than monetary compensation, you will be helping to move the field and community forward.

mcv• 12 years ago

I see a lot of this lately. The problem isn't the automation, it's that the benefits of that automation primarily benefits the wealthy few. We need a different economic system where those benefits are more equally spread around.

Basic Income + a (progressive?) wealth tax, for example.

Welcome To Extremistan, Please Check Your Career At The Door

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