Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

by Tyler Cowen

workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories. 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?

We’re on the verge of having computer systems that understand the entirety of human “natural language,” a problem that was considered a very tough one only a few years ago. Just talk to Siri on your iPhone and she is likely to understand your voice, give you the right answer, and help you make an appointment. Siri disappoints with its mistakes and frequently obtuse responses,

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.”

Date-matching algorithms are steering our love lives and replacing the matchmaker. Match.com recently improved its services, and as of summer 2011 more than half of the emails sent on the service originate from recommended matches, rather than from unaided individual choices. Better algorithms often are seen as the future of the sector, whether or not they really find the best person for us. Arguably the machine recommendations are a way of tricking the user into making a plausible date choice rather than cruising more profiles and postponing a decision; that possibility illustrates our willingness to defer to the machines, even when they aren’t necessarily better at the task at hand.

This will sound outrageous to many. It seems to cross a precious line of liberty and freedom. But perhaps we are not as free as we might think in the first place. Given your background, your friends, your family, the books you read, and the movies you watch, how surprising is your vote in a federal election?

Imagine a vibrating iPhone in one’s pocket transmitting signals, based on the computer analysis—a slight vibration indicating each time a lie is told. Or a message could appear in your contact lenses. But it isn’t just about the gadgetry.

Preliminary results suggest that liar profiles avoid the use of the word “I” (the opposite of liar user reviews), use lots of negation (they write “not sad” rather than “happy”), and they write shorter self-descriptions, presumably to avoid having to manage and keep all the lies consistent. Profile writers who are lying about their age or weight tend to devote more space to boasting about their personal achievements. Expect improvement in our abilities to nail the cheaters.

This in short is what the contemporary world is like, except the billionaire is the broader class of high earners and the beggars are wealthier than in India. Instead of begging, there is a large class of people trying to command our attention using modern technologies such as email, spam, AI-targeted advertisements, coupons, Groupons, direct mail, advertising supplements in your credit card bill, and flashing ads on the internet, among hundreds of other techniques.

Facebook, Google, and Zynga are now so desperate for talent that they will buy out other companies, not for their products, but rather to keep their employees.

It’s easier and cheaper to buy the companies than to try to replicate their recruiting or lure away their best employees. Often the purchased product lines are abandoned.

The ever so popular management books, which can seem so banal to outside observers, are also attempting to supply critical outside general intelligence. It’s a hard set of conceptual skills to communicate and then turn into practice, and thus the demand for consultants—including young consultants—won’t be disappearing anytime soon. The flow of business and management books will probably never end.

A lot of the new jobs, especially for the less-educated workers who make up such a large chunk of the unemployed, will be low-pay jobs that rely more on brute force or direct personal services, such as running errands for a company or taking care of an elderly person.

people to pull the product off the shelf, wrap a box around it, run a mail sticker, and carry it down to the mail room. That’s not picking cotton, but it’s still simple physical labor.

Starting your own business may seem like praiseworthy creative entrepreneurship, but often it is a sign that labor markets are not absorbing everyone at a reasonable wage.