Begin quote Chapter 2: "race Against the machine"
---computers have started making inroads into some unexpected areas. This fact helps us to better understand the past few turbulent years and the true impact of digital technologies on jobs.
a good illustration of how much recent technology advances have taken us by surprise comes form comparing a carefully reserached book published in 2004 with an announcement made in 2010.The book is "The New Division of Labor" by economists Frank Levy and Richard Mrnane.
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In the book's second chapter, "Why People still matter," the authors present a spectrum of information-processing tasks. At one end are straightforward applications of existing rules. These tasks, such as performing arithmetic can easily be automated. After all computers are good at following rules.
At the other end of the complexity spectrum are pattern-recognition tasks where the rules can't be inferred. "The New Division of Labor" gives driving in traffic as an example of this type of task, and asserts that it is not atuomatable:
The ... truck driver is processing a constant stream of (visual, aural, and tactile) information form his environment... To program this behavior we could begin with a video camera and other sensors to capture the sensory input. But executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involes so many factors that it is hard to imagine discovering that set of rules that can replicate a driver's behavior...
Articulating (human)
knowledge and embedding it in software for all but highly structured situations are at present enormously difficult tasks... computers cannot easily substitute for humans in (jobs like truck driving).
skip forwards a few paragraphs:
Just six years later, however, real-world driving went form being an example of a task that couldn't be automated to an example of one that had. In October of 2010, Google announced on its official blog that it had modified a fleet of Toyota Priuses to the point that they were fully autonomous cars, ones that had driven more than 1,000 miles on American roads without human involvement at all, and more than 140,000 miles with only minor inputs from the person behind the wheel.
End quote from Chapter 2 of "Race against the Machine"
My thought is that changes to technology like this will now increase exponentially. Why is this?
The reason change becomes ever more exponential on into a "Singularity" is that computers are also used to design the software and the technology to accomplish these feats. So, thousands of man hours are eliminated thereby to accomplish new feats like this. And furthermore, every new feat will drive hundreds more just like it.
For example, software designs of a Robot that one can now buy for 20 to 25 thousands dollars allow for someone to physically train the robot by holding it's hands to do almost any task more quickly and efficiently than any human ever could. And not only that it can do it non- stop for days or weeks at a time 24 hours a day only stopping for robotic maintenance when needed for three years straight and it can be retrained at any point to do another task without changing it's software.
So, very quickly one by one almost every rule set down regarding robots is being broken mostly without the knowledge of the general public.
And maybe this last statement could be the most problematic. If things are moving so fast that the general public doesn't even know about these changes, what happens if malevolent people use those changes against an unsuspecting public and create a true (1984) situation without the general public understanding that one exists?
So, "if any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" let us remember that there is good magic, there is bad magic and there is neutral magic. To not understand this might be the undoing of the very existence of the human race here on earth. Or it could mean the end of civilization and the return of the cave man and the cave woman. (one or the other or even a completely unexpected outcome we have not foreseen yet).
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