The Race Against The Machine (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
This little monograph / pamphlet / ebook does not start in a very promising way. It lists a bunch of ways computers have “raced” ahead of us humans: they now beat us in chess, they beat is in Jeopardy, they can translate documents, they fly our planes, they can do a passable job of driving a car. Moreover, the authors argue, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The machines are only getting started. Moore’s law, which states that computers will get twice as fast every (fill in the blank with a number between 12 and 18) months means that, now they have caught up with us, they are about to leave us in their dust.A very tired analogy is made with the guy who won from the king a grain of rice/wheat/cereal of his choice for the first square in the chessboard, 2 for the second, 4 for the third etc. Apparently, while you are still in the first half of the chessboard the amount he won was large but still deliverable, but get to the second part of the chessboard and then the exponential growth that was going unnoticed up to 2^32 really kicks in. So watch out everyone. Computers can already beat us in chess, but they are about to start beating us in… yeah, no idea. Call me when they can play beer pong.At that point I was thinking to myself “good thing this is just 76 pages.” Computers have always beaten me in chess, I never considered myself in any type of race. And I read somewhere that we’re actually approaching the physical limits of how small we can make the parts, i.e. how fast they can compute. So, as far as I’m concerned, the main point here is not just horribly corny, it’s both irrelevant to me and perhaps about to stop being true. Maybe the chessboard stops at 35. How do these guys know? Honestly.But I persevered with the book and I was handsomely rewarded.The authors make a very brave call. This book being so short they don’t go into terribly much detail, but the story here goes as follows: forget what you read about the mortgage debacle, the debt crisis, the freezing of credit flow, Lehman, Goldman and AIG, forget about insufficient demand, the need for government to stimulate, forget about business uncertainty, healthcare costs, labor market hysteresis, the Euro straightjacket, Chinese oversupply, the global glut of savings, forget it all. All that’s happened to our economy is in 1982 IBM launched a thing called the personal computer.In year 1800 largely all Americans worked in agriculture but the gasoline-powered tractor and phosphate-based fertilizers were introduced a hundred years ago, freeing the hands of 98% of Americans to do other things. This did not come for free. An entire generation of people was lost, namely people who brought agriculture skills to the 1930’s. They were surplus to requirements and they suffered the Great Depression, dragging everybody else with them, since they could not afford the goods and services everybody else provided. The next generation, their children (also known as the baby boomers) did A-OK and now run the world, pretty much.Similarly, in year 1980 all Americans outside of NASA worked in a computer-free job environment. With pretty much exactly the same time lag, those who don’t know how to run with the computer are now living the Great Recession. Those who do are the infamous 1%.I so buy it, I’m next going to read the authors’ sequel.And in the interest of not writing a review that’s longer than the book I’ll leave the rest of the story alone. Let me just mention that there’s a cheerful prediction (there will be a massive need for people to shepherd the machine) as well as a set of 19 not terribly well developed recommendations (#1 is Education, yawn) to complement the inevitable dire predictions for the future of those (like anybody involved in scribbling on a blackboard, for example) who don’t yet run with the machine.The authors are terribly apologetic about their main idea and they insist that it was not what they set out to write about. I think it's genius. It was a fine book. I guess one can't expect more fine numbers to be worked out.The description of how the economy is increasingly becoming one of new forms of organization is nice.However, the prescriptions and recommendations section is dull, conservative and probably shouldn't have been included. They ultimately amount to a temporary salve as we await automation of the entrepreneurial tasks the authors endorse. For the authors believe we should strive to find ways for people to work in the economy, not really accepting that these entrepreneurial tasks will also fall to the machines. Further, strengthening education to nurture more highly skilled workers who can find ways to use machines to compete is a slow process. Not to mention how we're going to grade teachers on performance (via wage-manipulation) while decoupling education from 'signalling' (i.e. testing). I was disappointed to see these recommendations after descriptions of some interesting alternatives.
What do You think about The Race Against The Machine (2000)?
Concise overview of why digital technology will cause a lot of unemployment.
—JennaLin
