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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Cowen
Read between
October 28 - November 12, 2022
These trends stem from some fairly basic and hard-to-reverse forces: the increasing productivity of intelligent machines, economic globalization, and the split of modern economies into both very stagnant sectors and some very dynamic sectors.
The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer? Are computers helping people in China and India compete against you?
journalism.
And this is probably before GPT etxc.
If a laborer can augment the value of a major tech improvement by even a small bit, she will likely earn well. That means humans with strong math and analytic skills, humans who are comfortable working with computers because they understand their operation, and humans who intuitively grasp how computers can be used for marketing and for other non-techie tasks.
making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future.
until another good manager is hired, there is no point in employing another assistant. It’s the manager who is the scarce input, and that is one way to think about why managerial salaries have been going up so much.
It’s not just that the bad workers are lazy or maybe destructive. It’s that low quality workers spread bad morale to many others in the building.
women are on average more conscientious than men. They are more likely to follow instructions and orders with exactness and without resentment.
As workers are displaced by smart machines in manufacturing and other areas, more individuals will be employed as personal trainers,
The middle of the distribution is thinning out and this process appears to have a long ways to run. And to be blunt—while I know I can’t prove this—I wonder how much of the middle class consists of people in government or protected service-sector jobs who don’t actually produce nearly as much as their pay.
If we look at the last ten years and divide the population up by education, there is only one group that has come out ahead with higher wages: individuals with advanced postgraduate degrees. If you had a PhD, on average your earnings went up a little over 5 percent,
The world is demanding more in the way of credentials, more in the way of ability, and it is passing along most of the higher rewards to a relatively small cognitive elite.
over 40 percent of adult, non-senior Americans don’t consider it worthwhile to have a job.
Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected federal disability benefit; now the number is up to 8.2 million, at a direct dollar cost of $115 billion a year—over $1,500 for every American household. Yet the American workplace, as measured by deaths and accidents, has never been safer.
big gains for the cognitive elite,
The way humans are playing chess with computers now is, I propose, a model that high earners will be emulating in years and decades to come.
Chess grandmasters have coined a phrase—“that’s a computer move”—to describe those ugly, counterintuitive decisions made by computers, the moves that surely appear wrong.
Those ratings would not make them formidable local club players, much less regional champions. But they were the best when it came to aggregating the inputs from different computers.
the person working with the computer doesn’t have to be a doctor or even a medical expert. She has to be good at understanding and correcting the computer’s mistakes, which is a very different skill.
I doubt “education” is the answer, because it’s superfluous. An employee that can use a smart phone effectively can use a modern industrial computer.
troubleshooting isn’t really something you learn in college. However, you learn it just fine customizing your latest iPhone.
1. Human–computer teams are the best teams. 2. The person working the smart machine doesn’t have to be expert in the task at hand. 3. Below some critical level of skill, adding a man to the machine will make the team less effective than the machine working alone. 4. Knowing one’s own limits is more important than it used to be.
a conservative is, on average, more willing to email a profile listed as politically liberal than vice versa.
A player is least likely to make a major error when the game is tight, and if anything, players do their absolute best when they are faced with a slight disadvantage in their position. When players are decisively up or down, they don’t seem to think or concentrate with the same facility. Again, this is a sign of human rationality, at least if there is some need for a conservation of effort.
to get male chess players to take even greater risks, you simply have to pair them against an attractive female opponent.
GPS can too easily take you into unacceptably dangerous territories—politically speaking, that is.
Chess ratings predict player performance remarkably well, with the exception of strong young prodigies who are improving their skills rapidly, or individuals with sudden health problems.
most professionals, especially at the top end of the market, will be graded by teams of skilled workers cooperating with smart machines.
The better lawyers will open up their courtroom performances, their win–loss records, their contract analyses, and their written briefs to computer analyses for more accurate evaluations of professional quality.
it will sometimes be harder to get a good doctor or lawyer on the cheap.
If you are a doctor in the bottom third, you will have to lower your prices and that will help poor people,
the poor will be big winners from these performance ratings.
doctors will rate patients too,
How many doctors will want to treat the patients who do not follow up on instructions and take their medications?
“patient quality adjusted” doctor ratings,
the natural assumption will be that “failure to disclose” is a signal of irresponsible behavior
If my bot likes your bot I might like you too, a bit like how park encounters are sometimes mediated by how well the dogs of the two parties get along.
Perhaps a lot of the effect of therapy was a kind of placebo anyway, but will it be equally satisfying to know that a computer is commiserating with you and telling you that many other people share your problem? It’s easy enough to imagine unethical therapists who log on first as a person and then turn over the talking to their bot.
Here are two examples, one by a human artist and the other by a robot (the left is created by a machine and the right by a human).
When I first saw those two images, I had no idea which one was the product of machine intelligence.
symbiotic relationship with modern search.
if you wish to be a high earner, learning from other well-educated people, geographic proximity is growing in importance,
(We can even look forward to the day where essay questions are graded by artificial intelligence, and indeed some examples of this already are succeeding.)
recent research by Jonathan Wai, Martha Putallaz, and Matthew C. Makel on prodigies does indicate that indeed the smart are getting smarter and at younger ages too.
Most other parts of the world had genuinely backward chess scenes. But now you can put yourself on the path to top skills from almost anywhere.
Online education can thus be extremely egalitarian, but it is egalitarian in a funny way. It can catapult the smart, motivated, but nonelite individuals over the members of elite communities. It does not, however, push the uninterested student to the head of the pack.
The professor, to survive, will have to become a motivator and coach in essence and not just accidentally or in his or her spare time.
At a good teaching school, a professor is expected to run the class and, sometimes, have a small group of students over to his house for dinner. As the former function becomes less important, due to competition from online content, the latter function will predominate.
Let’s judge them on that basis. Let’s treat professors more like athletics coaches, personal therapists, and preachers, because that is what they will evolve to be.
we might put the world’s very best education online, for free, or for the costs of a few apps, and that most of the world—the undereducated most of all—wouldn’t really care very much.
