philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

15Apr/14Off

CAUTIOUSLY WELCOMING OUR NEW COMPUTER OVERLORDS

[Philip Lelyveld note: if it is anything like their previous book, this should be an interesting and insightful read.]

Last Friday, M.I.T.’s Initiative on the Digital Economy hosted a conference, in the basement of the Times building, on “The Second Machine Age,” a book by a pair of M.I.T. business-school professors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. In the book, the authors argue that knowledge workers—people who analyze information for a living—will gradually be replaced by smart machines and that inequality could deepen as a result. (Their previous work had a better title: “Race Against the Machine.”)

Think of the world of work as divided between “power systems” and “control systems,” Brynjolfsson suggested. The power systems (people, forklifts, airplanes) help move things around; the control systems (plant managers, business plans, engineering diagrams) explain where it needs to move. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the engines, factories, and other technologies of the industrial revolution automated and enhanced the world’s power systems. After a period of dislocation, workers successfully adapted: they took over the control systems, becoming engineers and managers. But now machines are taking over the control systems, too, and it isn’t clear what workers can do next.

(The company behind SCHAFT, the top-performing robot so far, was recently acquired by Google.) “We need to adapt our economy and society to keep up with this accelerating technology,” Brynjolfsson said.

One woman cited a suggestion from Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s book: create prizes to reward innovation that complements human intelligence rather than replacing it.

Read the complete story here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/04/cautiously-welcoming-our-new-computer-overlords.html?curator=MediaREDEF

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