Average Is Over Quotes

“The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“It’s harder to get outside your own head than you think.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“If you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, even if you don’t work well with computers yourself, the contemporary world will make you rich.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“The world—not to mention the American Medical Association—is pretty far from accepting this fact, but 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. This will involve some knowledge of medicine, brain scans, or whatever, but it is a less comprehensive medical knowledge than what a prestigious MD would have. It may well involve more knowledge of smart machines, how they work, and what their failings are likely to be.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Consider the top man–machine medical diagnosticians, circa 2035. They will make life-and-death decisions for patients, hospitals, and other doctors. But what in a malpractice case should count as persuasive evidence of a medical mistake? The judgment of either “man alone” or “machine alone” won’t do the trick, because neither is up to judging the team. Sometimes it will be possible to ascertain that a top human team member was in fact a fraud, but more typically the joint human–cyber diagnostic decisions themselves will be our highest standards for what is best. Having one team dispute the choice of another may indicate a mistake, but it will hardly show malfeasance. When”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“There has been an enduring misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up. Turing’s core message was never “If a machine can imitate a man, the machine must be intelligent.” Rather, it was “Inability to imitate does not rule out intelligence.” In his classic essay on the Turing test, Turing encouraged his readers to take a broader perspective on intelligence and conceive of it more universally and indeed more ethically. He was concerned with the possibility of unusual forms of intelligence, our inability to recognize those intelligences, and the limitations of the concept of indistinguishability as a standard for defining what is intelligence and what is not. In section two of the paper, Turing asks directly whether imitation should be the standard of intelligence. He considers whether a man can imitate a machine rather than vice versa. Of course the answer is no, especially in matters of arithmetic, yet obviously a man thinks and can think computationally (in terms of chess problems, for example). We are warned that imitation cannot be the fundamental standard or marker of intelligence. Reflecting on Turing’s life can change one’s perspective on what the Turing test really means. Turing was gay. He was persecuted for this difference in a manner that included chemical castration and led to his suicide. In the mainstream British society of that time, he proved unable to consistently “pass” for straight. Interestingly, the second paragraph of Turing’s famous paper starts with the question of whether a male or female can pass for a member of the other gender in a typed conversation. The notion of “passing” was of direct personal concern to Turing and in more personal settings Turing probably did not view “passing” as synonymous with actually being a particular way.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Personal qualities of character such as self-motivation and conscientiousness will reap a lot of gains in the new world to come.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“This kind of machine-based learning is driven by a hunger for knowledge, not by a desire to show off your talent or to “signal” as we economists say.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“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?”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“A particular personality trait that doesn’t come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore the ongoing appearance of stressful situations.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Today most of the debate on the cutting edge in macroeconomics would not call itself “Keynesian” or “monetarist” or any other label relating to a school of thought. The data are considered the ruling principle, and it is considered suspect to have too strong a loyalty to any particular model about the underlying structure of the economy.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“The more extreme conservatives will embrace religion and nationalism to a higher degree.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“We’ll end up with a society where the people with decent self-control win back a lot of the lost health gains by better behavior.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“El Paso is parasitic off of Juarez rather than vice versa.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“That’s understandable, but it also shows we are a bit intolerant of alien intelligences.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“three-quarters of today’s youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are unfit to serve for one reason or another.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“The fourth and final step is that the human isn’t needed much at all because the program on its own is so strong.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“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.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“There is a sense of rationality and order to human error.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation