The First Machine Age - Industrial Revolution. The Second Machine Age - Computers/Automation.

[pampango]

The First Machine Age, they argue, was the Industrial Revolution that was born along with the steam engine in the late 1700s. This period was “all about power systems to augment human muscle,” explained McAfee in an interview, “and each successive invention in that age delivered more and more power. But they all required humans to make decisions about them.” Therefore, the inventions of this era actually made human control and labor “more valuable and important.” Labor and machines were complementary.

In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. In many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans.” So humans and software-driven machines may increasingly be substitutes, not complements. What’s making this possible, the authors argue, are three huge technological advances that just reached their tipping points, advances they describe as “exponential, digital and combinatorial.”

Unlike the steam engine, which was physical and doubled in performance every 70 years, computers “get better, faster than anything else, ever,” says Brynjolfsson. Now that we’re in the second half of the digital chessboard, you see cars that drive themselves in traffic, Jeopardy-champion supercomputers, flexible factory robots and pocket smartphones that are the equivalent of a supercomputer of just a generation ago.

Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability. They suggest that we consider lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital labor, that we reinvent education so more people can “race with machines” not against them, that we do much more to foster the entrepreneurship that invents new industries and jobs, and even consider guaranteeing every American a basic income. We’ve got a lot of rethinking to do, they argue, because we’re not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We’re in a technological hurricane reshaping the workplace — and it just keeps doubling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/friedman-if-i-had-a-hammer.html

[bemildred]

1. Oy. nt

[Moliere]

2. Friedman just keeps getting more clueless

Didn't think it was possible

[pampango]

3. How so? n/t

[HughBeaumont]

7. He giggles with glee . . . .

. . . knowing he's not at all affected by his all-over-the-place, ham-fisted screeds of labor depreciation conducted by tech-savvy libertarian power drunks.

Never mind that Friedman always tends to ignore the giant-elephant factors of wage stagnation, astronomical college costs, unrealistic expectations of Corporate America, unrealistic odds of "Horatio Alger" type success and just plain-and-simple bad luck in his columns.

Now he grinningly envisions an automated, actual-intelligence SkyNet world where the likely outcome involves leaving us newly-useless meatsack plebes to figure out how to keep a consumption-based Capitalist economy going with millions and millions of people that suddenly find themselves on the brink of threadbare survival, much less have the ability to consume.

I'd like to hear how he plans on resolving that . . . because his "guaranteed minimum income" (a weird suggestion from a blatant corporate cheerleader) has as realistic a chance of passing a 2014 DuhMerican Government as I do in becoming the next center of the Los Angeles Lakers.

[Blue_Tires]

4. The THIRD Machine Age will of course be lifelike robotic "companions"

for emotional/sexual needs...

And the future can't get here soon enough

[Fumesucker]

9. Be careful what you wish for

That's the moral of every Genie story I've ever heard, unintended consequences can be... well you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Bottle

[FSogol]

10. Or Biochemical or nano-technological machines. Impossible to predict. n/t

[Orrex]

5. Ah, yes. The Libertarian mantra:

because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity

Of course, that's only really true if you're living off of someone else's labor and dignity.

[Fumesucker]

6. Eh, once the machines "wake up" all bets are off, what happens after that is impossible to predict

Could be heaven on earth, could be hell on earth. Guessing the motivations and actions of intelligences greater than your own isn't a particularly fruitful endeavor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

[NuclearDem]

8. CREATOR SMITH, THIS UNIT HAS AN INQUIRY

What is it Unit 364?

DOES THIS UNIT HAVE A SOUL?

[ananda]

11. Mechanism is the defining meme of our age.

It began with Descartes' infatuation with the new hydraulic statues, inspiring
him to tout the idea of the beast-machine, then expanded over the next
century and a half to include humans with the work of Julian Offray de la
Mettrie. It was then embodied by the Industrial Revolution and practiced
by all factories and schools, eventually expanding to medicine and psychiatry.

It has pervaded the collective consciousness of all industrialized countries,
and is now expanding across the globe as western countries take over meme
building elsewhere.

It also represents our own self-destruction because organic beings are not
machines. They are holistic entities connected to all that lives and exists
in the universe. The loss of holism means destruction and chaos on a wide
scale, and that is exactly what is happening and what we are seeing.

[musiclawyer]

12. The notion of an assured income is legitimate

There are millions of adults and children now and in the future who will never work for a variety of reasons new and old. Virtually every penny would come back to the economy because it would be spent. If millions have no income security then despair mayhem and crime ensue. The money spent should not be a token amount. It has to be an amount sufficient to live in a decent home and pay the utilities and food. A societal readjustment is coming. Or it better be. Because an America without a check coming in is basically the third world. The social contract can demand that whatever skills exist of the beneficiaries are offered. But not discussing the issue is irresponsible.