Do you wonder if he actually spelled his name properly?
Yes, I see his point, just like I wouldn't disagree with Keith's
position on the topic. I just don't like the direction Harnden's taking
this.
To me, it's extremely desperate and divisive. Though he has more or less
confined his argument to jobs future, he seems to be limited in his
vision of a practical future for the planet.
Should Harnden care to engage readers into pressuring governments to
invest in renewable energies and sustainable industry, his resignation
might take a positive and productive turn.
Maintaining this path of fear ensures that there will be a vast gap.
He's buying into the multinationals' vision of future scarcity and the
panic to pit oneself against the rest. This is not even close to a
realistic future because we have to change now in order for life to go
on--even for his special 15%. But given that the changes have to take
place anyway, and once acceptance spreads, a better future for most will
be a working reality. Yes, knowing computers will facilitate many ends,
but is hardly essential for healthy, happy and prosperous survival.
Has should check out Germany's success with the renewable jobs market,
in which most of the 300,000 jobs created are rather average, and fairly
well paying.
*Natalia*
On 29/09/2013 8:56 AM, Keith Hudson wrote:
The following is part of an article in today' s Sunday Times
*The average are done for. You don't need to be*.
Toby Harnden
Do you want your child to have a job in 2033. If so, according to a
book that is gripping policy makers in Washington, they had better
start deferring to computers. Society i about to be divided into Big
Earners and Big Losers and those who rage against the machine are
destined for the scrap heap.
Tyler Cowen, an economics profesor at George Mason University in
Virginia, delivers the bad news cheerfully. Inequality is on the
rise, he argues, and the middle class will soon be seen as a quaint
feature of a bygone era.
Over the next two deccades, he predicts, society will become a
"hyper-meritocracy" in which 15% will be richly rewarded for thir
adeptness in harnessing technology and the remaining 85% will be
consigned to a fragile existence in which wages freeze or fall and few
get a second chance at success.
His book, */Average is Over/*, concludes that we are about to enter
"the age of genius machines, and it will be the people who work with
them that will rise". For the rest, life will be decidedly tough and
although the fracturing of society is "not inevitable in a
metaphysical sense", he told the Sunday Times, he had little optimism
that governments would do the things necessary to make the situation
better.
An engaging and eclectic thinker, Cowen, 51, was chess champion of New
Jersey at 15, has written a guide to ethnic dining and is a prolific
blogger. The */Los Angeles Times/* has described him as a [polymath].
Last year he was invited to Downing Street to deliver a seminar on
industrial policy and warned against Britain embracing the politics of
envy.
Cowen emphasises the important of humility in accepting that computers
usually know best and has reflected this in his own life. He met his
wife 10 year ago via Match.com, a medium that forced them "out of our
usual intuitions and to our mutual benefit". He is enthused by the
advances in chess brought about by computers and accepts that he might
not have succeeded as a young player using software "because I'm not
sure how humble I was back then."
The key, he says, is to realise that, as in "freestyle chess", in
which players can consult competer programs, "the human and the
computer together are strpnger than just the computer and certainly
gronger than just the human".
Being the best at chess -- or anything in life -- is no longer good
enough. "The humans who are best at freestyle chess are not the
grandmasters but people who are smart and know something about chess
but also know whento defer to the computer and when your isdom
actually counts for something." Computer algorithms, he argues, are
becoming better at knowing what we want than we do -- and successful
people will just go along with this. Reading Amazon or Yelp revview
leads to better choices -- as does walking away from a business deal
because a software pro9gram tells you it's too risky, even if your gut
is telling you to hang in there.
The downside is that employers will also usee computers with
"oppressive precision" to measuere output, weed out slackers and spot
those who have not always been steady and conscientious. Making a
fresh start will become next to impossible.
How do we nhelp ourchildren in this brave, somewhat scary new world --
to be part of the 15% Cowen says that the future is too unpredictable
to produce lists of jobs to gravitate towards or to avoid. But he
does advise avoiding excessive specialisation: ""Do what you enjoy,
learn general skills and learn how to retrain yourself."
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