Ray,
At 03:22 28/10/2011, you wrote:
Classical Greece changed the world in a little
over 100 years because they had slaves who did
the grunt work and they could do real work on the human mind.
But all Mediterranean 'nations', 'civilizations'
and large cities at that time (around 750BC and
onwards) had slaves. The big difference between
Greece (Athens to start with) and the rest was
that its slaves could become full-blown citizens
-- e.g. Aesop was one of many. Also, the Greeks
were the first to invent coinage and also
division of labour. (For example, Athenian
sandals were made by four or five specialized
workers and were cheaper and better than any
others.) So it was no wonder that the Greeks
dominated trade in the Mediterranean for hundreds
of years and developed a large aristocratic class
who had the leisure to educate themselves, to
philosophize and to develop the arts and sciences.
We have slave machines and lament not being
able to do grunt work. What is wrong
here? What is it about the modern age that
so demeans the body and human
potential? Americans, and Canadians, can
barely smell much less taste. Two out of
seven sensual worlds are basically lost to the
whole continent. The internal Kinesthetic
world is so strange to them that they think
they are depressed when they have a
stomachache. They love to watch dance,
commit serious aural forms to the taste of the
upper 1% and barely ever touch each
other. But they do math. Objective
science means visual. Aural forms or orders
in time are frightening, especially when some
dictator uses them on unsophisticated folks and
they lose their visual objectivity. Oh yes
and to these folks everything IS sex. The
whole sensorium is just one big wish for an
orgy unrequited. Is it any wonder that they just sit and grunt for pay?
I don't know about all this. What I see is a
gradual necking-in of the job structure
hourglass, an intensification of what started to
occur in the 19th and 20th centuries. I see an
upper lobe of the very rich, together with their
supportive highly educated technical and
professional classes, together with a rising
scientific class. Sustainers of the arts and
steadily becoming culturally distinct from the
motley. Mostly with interesting jobs, too. And a
larger lower lobe that is increasingly becoming
involved with re-cycling money and jobs between
themselves with no exportable value. Increasingly
shedding more retired folk into deplorable
conditions in cruel 'nursery' homes and
preventing young people from any of the steadily
declining reasonably-paid jobs that they still
have. Increasingly, a growing number of advanced
country populations are treated as badly as
slaves ever were. All made worse by seeing the
antics of the upper lobians on television.
Come to think of it, it's all remarkably similar
to ancient Greece! Before too long, however,
large chunks of the advanced countries will be
much more similar to what we see going on in modern Greece.
Keith
REH
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 8:34 PM
To: [email protected];
'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] [Ottawadissenters]
More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
Well said and worth repeating.
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 3:38 PM
To: [email protected];
'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Ottawadissenters] More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
Something I posted a couple of weeks ago may warrant repeating:
Ah yes, the milkman or milklady. When I was a
kid in Calgary or wherever I used to hear the
milkman's (or woman's) horse come clop-clopping
down the street early in the morning, then the
clank of empty milk bottles being replaced by
full ones. Then, as a young adult, I remember
not having enough money to pay the parking
attendant. He was a good guy so he let me
go. Then as a civil servant, I remember giving
one of the stenos in the typing pool hell
because when I dictated Super Constellation (the
name of an airliner in case you don't remember),
she typed Stupor Constipation! And one of the
messengers, the guys who ran the mail around,
lost one of the memos that was supposed to go to
the Deputy Minister and bad things
happened. All those people doing all those
jobs! Wonder where they are now? Maybe some of
them have joined the sit-in on Wall Street in
the US or on Bay Street here in Canada. Maybe
many of them -- the younger ones -- are part of
the huge crowds that have gathered in our
colleges and universities because they have nothing better to do.
The milk is no longer delivered, the guys in the
parking lots have become machines, the stenos
and messengers have become computers, and our
colleges and universities have become places to
store young people who have little to do anymore.
I think I'll aim my horse westward and ride away.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Arthur Cordell
To:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
;
<mailto:[email protected]>'RE-DESIGNING
WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 9:07 AM
Subject: [Ottawadissenters] More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
October 23, 2011 NY Times
More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/steve_lohr/index.html?inline=nyt-per>STEVE
LOHR
A faltering economy explains much of the job
shortage in America, but advancing technology
has sharply magnified the effect, more so than
is generally understood, according to two
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The automation of more and more work once done
by humans is the central theme of
<http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1319384892&sr=8-2>Race
Against the Machine, an e-book to be published on Monday.
Many workers, in short, are losing the race
against the machine, the authors write.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of
the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and
Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and
principal research scientist at the center, are
two of the nations leading experts on
technology and productivity. The tone of alarm
in their book is a departure for the pair, whose
previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.
Indeed, they were originally going to write a
book titled, The Digital Frontier, about the
cornucopia of innovation that is going on, Mr.
McAfee said. Yet as the employment picture
failed to brighten in the last two years, the
two changed course to examine technologys role in the jobless recovery.
The authors are not the only ones recently to
point to the job fallout from technology. In the
current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W.
Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa
Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly
taking over service jobs, following the waves of
automation of farm and factory work. This last
repository of jobs is shrinking fewer of us in
the future may have white-collar business
process jobs and we have a problem, Mr. Arthur writes.
The M.I.T. authors claim that automation is
accelerating is not shared by some economists.
Prominent among them are Robert J. Gordon of
Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason
University, who contend that productivity
improvement owing to technological innovation
rose from 1995 to 2004, but has trailed off
since. Mr. Cowen emphasized that point in an
e-book,
<http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS>The
Great Stagnation, published this year.
Technology has always displaced some work and
jobs. Over the years, many experts have warned
mistakenly that machines were gaining the
upper hand. In 1930, the economist John Maynard
Keynes warned of a new disease that he termed
technological unemployment, the inability of
the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.
But Mr. Brynjolfsson and Mr. McAfee argue that
the pace of automation has picked up in recent
years because of a combination of technologies
including robotics, numerically controlled
machines, computerized inventory control, voice
recognition and online commerce.
Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly
clever software, the authors say, are giving
machines capabilities that were once thought to
be distinctively human, like understanding
speech, translating from one language to another
and recognizing patterns. So automation is
rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call
centers, marketing and sales parts of the
services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy.
During the last recession, the authors write,
one in 12 people in sales lost their jobs, for
example. And the downturn prompted many
businesses to look harder at substituting
technology for people, if possible. Since the
end of the recession in June 2009, they note,
corporate spending on equipment and software has
increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.
Corporations are doing fine. The companies in
the Standard & Poors 500-stock index are
expected to report record profits this year, a
total $927 billion, estimates FactSet Research.
And the authors point out that corporate profit
as a share of the economy is at a 50-year high.
Productivity growth in the last decade, at more
than 2.5 percent, they observe, is higher than
the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s.
Still the economy, they write, did not add to
its total job count, the first time that has
happened over a decade since the Depression.
The skills of machines, the authors write, will
only improve. In 2004, two leading economists,
Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, published
<http://www.amazon.com/New-Division-Labor-Computers-Creating/dp/0691124027/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319409677&sr=1-1-fkmr0>The
New Division of Labor, which analyzed the
capabilities of computers and human workers.
Truck driving was cited as an example of the
kind of work computers could not handle,
recognizing and reacting to moving objects in real time.
But last fall, Google announced that its
robot-driven cars
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1319387802-nu3SGR8HFvctMORJfQXbtg>had
logged thousands of miles on American roads with
only an occasional assist from human back-seat
drivers. The Google cars, Mr. Brynjolfsson said,
are but one sign of the times.
As others have, he pointed to I.B.M.s
Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Computer%20Wins%20On%20%27Jeopardy%21%27:%20Trivial,%20It%27s%20Not%20&st=cse>which
in February beat a pair of human Jeopardy
champions; and Apples new personal assistant
software, Siri,
<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/will-siri-bring-back-the-iphones-wow-factor/>which
responds to voice commands.
This technology can do things now that only a
few years ago were thought to be beyond the
reach of computers, Mr. Brynjolfsson said.
Yet computers, the authors say, tend to be
narrow and literal-minded, good at assigned
tasks but at a loss when a solution requires
intuition and creativity human traits. A
partnership, they assert, is the path to job creation in the future.
In medicine, law, finance, retailing,
manufacturing and even scientific discovery,
they write, the key to winning the race is not
to compete against machines but to compete with machines.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/technology/economists-see-more-jobs-for-machines-not-people.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/technology/economists-see-more-jobs-for-machines-not-people.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
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