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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Cowen
Read between
January 18 - January 27, 2016
Average is over
Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?
What is happening is an increase in the ability of machines to substitute for intelligent human labor,
the wave that will lift you or that will dump you.
Race Against the Machine
There is now a joke that “a modern textile mill employs only a man and a dog—the man to feed the dog, and the dog to keep the man away from the machines.”
The machine doesn’t have to reach perfection or even come close, it just has to do better than you.
Still, very often entrepreneurs and scientists can do the work behind smarter machines, and develop usable products, without needing much special permission from the powers that be.
Technological progress slows down when there are too many people who have the right to say no, but software in general gets around a lot of the traditional veto points. The key work is done in the individual mind and with relatively small teams and in computer code, and it’s hard to hold back the innovations by law or custom.
In today’s global economy here is what is scarce: 1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills Here is what is not scarce these days: 1. Unskilled labor, as more countries join the global economy 2. Money in the bank or held in government securities, which you can think of as simple capital, not attached to any special ownership rights (we know there is a lot of it because it has been earning zero or negative real rates of return)
The current array
of scarce and plentiful resources now means high wages or capital gains to talented and inventive workers, and pretty low returns on ordinary labor and ordinary savings.
As intelligent-analysis machines become more powerful and more commonplace, the most obvious and direct beneficiaries will be the humans who are adept at working with computers and with related devices for communications and information processing.
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. It’s not just about programming skills; it is also often about developing the hardware connected with software, understanding what kind of internet ads connect with their human viewers, or understanding what shape and color makes an ...
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The ability to mix technical knowledge with solving real-world problems is the key,
sheer number-crunching or programming for its own sake. Number-crunching skills will be turned over to the machines
sooner or...
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marketing as the seminal sector for our future economy.
The entertainment sector is about marketing, especially as the internet makes the array of available cultural products ever more crowded.
These masseuses fit the basic model that favors people who can blend computer expertise with an understanding of how to communicate with other people.
blending the cognitive strengths of humans and computers.
“creating the customer experience.”
They are working at marketing.
It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future. At some point it is hard to sell more physical stuff to high earners, yet there is usually just a bit more room to make them feel better. Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved. The growing importance of marketing integrates two seemingly unrelated features of the modern world: income inequality and increasing pressures on our attention. The more that earnings rise at the upper end of the
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All will appeal to our vanity and promise us a splendid customer experience of some kind or another.
getting attention will continue to be a critical function in the new world of work and is likely to require ever-greater effort and sophistication.
The better the world is at measuring value, the more demanding a lot of career paths will become. That is why I say “Welcome to the hyper-meritocracy”
Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision.
teamwork required to divide up a larger project into pieces requiring different skills in order to produce a better result
The growing value of conscientiousness in the workplace helps women do better than men at work and in colleges and universities.
The premium is on conscientiousness,
Morale is extremely important
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? by William Poundstone.
It is easier to destroy than create,
exclusion, no integrity without exclusion, and no corporate culture without exclusion.
people had to choose in a tighter and more focused way than in earlier years.
harbinger
“petty entrepreneurship”
Alan Turing
decision theory.
When it comes to technology, progress is usually good, but gradual progress is usually better.
game theory
microeconomic
El Paso
Occupy Wall Street
Tea Party
altruism,
Aplia
Arab Spring,
