Cyreenik Says
This thought was inspired by this 21 Nov 14 WSJ article, Automation Makes Us Dumb Human intelligence is withering as computers do more, but there’s a solution. by Nicholas Carr, in which Mr. Carr opines that automation is dumbing us down.
From the article, "Dazzled by our brilliant new machines, we’ve been rushing to hand them all sorts of sophisticated jobs that we used to do ourselves.
But our growing reliance on computer automation may be exacting a high price. Worrisome evidence suggests that our own intelligence is withering as we become more dependent on the artificial variety. Rather than lifting us up, smart software seems to be dumbing us down."
I would argue that this sentiment dates back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites, master weavers who were violently resisting their replacement by mechanical looms in England back in the early 1800's, looked down upon the operators of those mechanical looms, seeing them as unskilled laborers.
What is true is that in Industrial Age times (what we are living in) the nature of what humans do that is considered productive changes constantly. As the tools available to do work change, the skills needed to take advantage of the tools change as well, and in constantly surprising ways. Prior to the mass production of automobiles and trucks, no one foresaw that motor vehicle driving and repairing would replace horse driving and tending as the must-have skills for being in the delivery business.
Are drivers dumber than teamsters? The teamsters losing their jobs certainly thought so!
The challenge is that it is really hard to forecast what will be hot skills in the future. Which technologies turn out to be "killer apps" ten and twenty years in the future is always surprising, which means the skills that will be in high demand ten and twenty years in the future is always also surprising.
What won't be surprising is that many workers in the declining industries will feel these upstart workers in these future booming industries are unskilled compared to them.
This 17 Nov 14 WSJ article, The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It Tech’s Open Range Is Losing Out to Walled Gardens by Christopher Mims, made me think again of what interesting times the start of personal computers and The Web were back in the mid and late 1970's.
From the article, "The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble that constitutes the Internet—is dying. And the way it’s dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.
Think about your mobile phone. All those little chiclets on your screen are apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the Web does."
What is being described by Mims in this article sounds like the "software fortresses" of the minicomputer era that pre-dated personal computers.
What made personal computers different was the early adapters were hobbyists, and they both knew how these new devices worked and they tinkered with them extensively. In that environment common standards and open architecture were big selling points. Apple thrived because it told customers what was going on inside the Apple II so they and aspiring daughter board suppliers could customize what they were using it for. It lost its lead when it wouldn't say what was going on inside the Apple ///, or the Lisa, or the Macintosh. IBM thrived when it made the bus structure on the first IBM PCs an open standard, and Microsoft thrived when MSDOS became a standard on the IBM and those many similar hardware platforms that quickly followed. This "Wintel" combination blew past Apple in popularity in the 1980's and 1990's.
Likewise, the web thrived when HTML became an open standard and the early academic users and networking hobbyists could build their own web pages. This "open standards business" was heresy in the well-established mini computer world of that day, and this had a lot to do with mini computer companies and networks getting pushed by the wayside as PC and Internet use boomed.
But now, the apps world, as described by this article, is harking back to those 1960's minicomputer practices. The apps companies can get away with this because few app users are app programmers, so the pioneering customers don't push hard for open standards.
In sum, this transformation is a reminder of how distinctive the personal computer and web origins were, and how important that distinctiveness was to the culture and industry development.
November's news includes articles about three big changes happening in Russia.
First was this 11 Nov 14 WSJ article, Ruble Proves Real Sanction for Russia The Currency Could Come Under Further Pressure if Sanctions Persist by Richard Barley, about how the Russian ruble still declining fast and furiously. It's under a lot of pressure.
From the article, "The Russian ruble isn’t out of the woods yet.
The currency fell nearly 8% against the dollar last week and is now down 29.4% year-to-date, a move that has started to raise concerns about financial stability. That is despite the Central Bank of Russia raising interest rates by four percentage points this year to 9.5% and spending around $30 billion in October alone on attempting to prop up the currency. Geopolitics, sanctions and a gloomy outlook for the Russian economy have all played their part."
The second and third articles are about a fast and furious uptick in Russian government deal making with other countries.
This 11 Nov 14 WSJ article, China Gets Cozier With Russian Gas Russia-China Gas Deal Would Be Bad for High-Cost Australian Producers by Abheek Bhattacharya, talks about a second major pipeline deal made with China just six months after an even bigger deal was signed. This one is about carrying western Siberian natural gas.
From the article, "China and Russia are adding fuel to their natural-gas fire. It’s a potential deal that could burn the oxygen out of the room for other gas producers.
Six months after Russia secured a final agreement to sell $400 billion of natural gas to China for 30 years through eastern Siberia, state-run Gazprom and its counterpart China National Petroleum Corporation are discussing another pact, this time for gas from western Siberia.
It’s a sign of Moscow’s desperation to secure new energy sales. After foreign-policy forays heightened risks in Gazprom’s traditional market in Europe, cheap oil has squeezed Russian revenues."
And the third is that Russia is now wheeling and dealing in building nuclear power plants in Iran. This 11 Nov 14 WSJ article, Russia Signs Nuclear Reactor Deal With Iran Deal Includes Contract to Build Two More Reactor Units At the Russian-Built Bushehr Plant by Alexander Kolyandr and Jay Solomon, talks about this deal.
From the article, "MOSCOW--Russia said it signed a deal Tuesday to build two new nuclear-reactor units in Iran, possibly to be followed by six more.
The agreements were signed by nuclear officials from both countries in Moscow, Russian state nuclear giant Rosatom said in a statement. Among them was a contract to build two more reactor units at the Russian-built Bushehr plant in Iran.
Another deal signed Tuesday envisions possibly building another two units at Bushehr sometime in the future, as well as four more at another location to be determined later, Rosatom said.
“This is a turning point in relations between Russia and Iran,” the Tass news agency quoted Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi as saying at the ceremony. Rosatom Chief Executive Sergei Kiriyenko said, “the building of eight reactor blocks in Iran is a big project expanding our cooperation for decades to come.”"
All this activity is a sign that Putin Mania in Russia is evolving. It remains to be seen if Putin's leadership can evolve into something stable and constructive, but this kind of activity is sure a lot better for the world than sneakily moving around soldiers and military hardware.
Update: This 22 Nov 14 Economist article, A wounded economy It is closer to crisis than the West or Vladimir Putin realise, talks more about how Russia's economy under Putin's leadership is "cruisin for a bruisin" using slang from my army days.
From the article, "In fact, a crisis could happen a lot sooner. Russia’s defences are weaker than they first appear and they could be tested by any one of a succession of possibilities —- another dip in the oil price, a bungled debt rescheduling by Russian firms, further Western sanctions. When economies are on an unsustainable course, international finance often acts as a fast-forward button, pushing countries over the edge more quickly than politicians or investors expect."
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