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    Will this all end with a bang or a whimper? - Part II

    By David Seaton on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 3:15pm |

    I'm afraid Dave

    There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them. Karl Marx

    I have chosen the death of HAL - 9000, the homicidal, super-computer in Stanley Kubrick's, monumental, "2001 - Space Odyssey" as a perfect match to the quote from Marx. The killer tool can only be disarmed by an expert familiar with its inner secrets, by definition, someone who has worked in close collaboration with the tool that he now has to disable in order to survive. That, I believe will be the true "revolution"... The revolt of the geeks against the machines they have created and maintained, which are finally going to attempt to replace them too.

    Here is the situation as it stands today:

    New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs. We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. Douglas Rushkoff - CNN

    As Harvard's Dani Rodrik says, "Without a vibrant manufacturing base, societies tend to divide between rich and poor – those who have access to steady, well-paying jobs, and those whose jobs are less secure and lives more precarious." The new technologies are destroying the middle class, by definition, the hard working, tax paying, rule following, mediocre, salt of the earth and elevating those who design and maintain the machines that are decimating their world and impoverishing them. They are helpless in the face of this because they don't understand the technology. Helpless as aborigines facing the "white man" with bows and arrows.

    In contrast those who have degrees in mathematics, physics, computer science and the like are getting paid enormous salaries in designing the systems that are putting the less educated out of work or in designing ever more esoteric financial schemes.

    But their salad days are numbered... the supercomputer, HAL, is out of the cradle and making his first toddling steps. If Moore's Law applies to super-computation, as it does to the rest of the field, in a period of time that a supercomputer of today could already calculate, a doctorate in math or physics could get you a position changing some grumpy old man's diapers or parking cars.

    And that is when "Dave" will turn off HAL.

    If there ever is a "revolution" it will begin with the "clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered" intelligence workers and the sans culottes will follow.  When? How should I know? Ask the SGI Altix.

    Crossposted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

    Comments

    I read that the SGI Altix uses "innovative blade-based architecture." So it's not going to be as docile as Hal was when we start pulling its circuits. Be warned: there will be blood on the computer-room floor.


    by acanuck on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 3:27pm

    I, for one, embrace my computer overlords. (I hope they're listening!)


    by Verified Atheist on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 3:43pm

    SGI Altix ?

    The Altix UV architecture was developed to use industry standard technology. This results in the ability to use performance leading Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family CPUs and standard, off the shelf versions of Linux, as well as Windows Server. Altix UV runs unmodified versions of SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server as well as Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®. Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 is also supported across the product line. By using industry standard components, the application ecosystem is unrivaled, allowing for any scalable applications to take advantage of Altix UV.

    Windows Server 2008 ? I'm not to worried. I'm sure some high school nerd will hack into to it and use it to play World of Warcraft: Cataclysm or some such.

    But you are assuming that these megaliths of computing power will actually put to something useful instead of generating the next PIXAR flick or an ultra fast database for Amazon purchases.


    by cmaukonen on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 5:53pm

    Like I said in a previous post today's Altix should be compared to the Commodore 64 of the early 80s and then apply Moore's Law... with that information, a real nerd could figure out when you get to HAL


    by David Seaton on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 6:17pm

    But I cant help thin king this is more likely.


    by cmaukonen on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 7:13pm

    Comics like Bill Burr are talking about new supermarkets (in LA)where there is not only a lack of carry-outs (that was years ago) but no cashiers or baggers.

    You cart your goodies, go to check out and scan in your own groceries. Then you bag them and leave.

    Revolution for Burr is when we all gather up our goodies and head for the door. hahahahah


    by Richard Day on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 7:54pm

    We're not going to get HAL any time soon, but I think it's interesting to think about how technological advances may effect white collar jobs. I think that a more realistic analysis might address the possibility of downgrading jobs that once required higher level skills. Engineering, for example, may require less mathematics as computers take over the brute force work. Consider that train drivers are still called engineers. There used to be a good reason for that nomenclature.

    The other issue that you don't address, David, is the long-term versus the short-term. Significant productivity gains through new technology always produce employment crises. Think about what the automobile did to the legions of people responsible for the care of horses. My great-grandfather was a blacksmith who was an expert at shoeing horses. He didn't have much work when he got older.

    The question is whether the new technologies open new jobs in the long-term. One concern raised by Tyler Cowan's The Great Stagnation is that recent technological advances have been better mousetraps. Unlike the automobile, which created a huge manufacturing and maintenance industry, the internet has not significantly expanded economic production and created jobs (not that I entirely agree with Cowan).


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 8:50pm

    Our last Administrative Assistant retired today. She won't be replaced. No one at our firm needs someone else to type letters, memos or specifications anymore.

    But Greer had an interesting blog today, and sees it going the other way:

    Our machine fetish, as I’ve discussed here more than once in the past, could only be indulged in so long as the extravagant use of fossil fuels made mechanical labor cheaper than human labor. That’s already started to reverse—there are good reasons, after all, why most of the world’s manufacturing is now done in Third World countries using cheap human labor rather than in the industrial world with expensive automated machines—but the cult of the machine retains much of its grip on our collective imagination. Even among those who recognize that the age of cheap energy is ending, the most common first reaction is to try to find some way to keep some favorite type of machine running—automobiles, the internet, the space program, you name it.

     


    by Donal on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 9:13pm

    I feel the need to be blunt here. That blog post is just plain stupid.

    1. The third world laborers are not replacing first world machines. They are replacing first world laborers. American manufacturing certainly aren't outsourcing abroad because the energy costs for the robots are too high. They're outsourcing because the human costs are cheaper in third world countries.

    2. The greatest energy consumption associated with durable goods, particularly the oil consumption, is not in the manufacturing. It's in the transportation--from shipping all those bits and pieces and products around the world. So if energy prices ever surpass the human costs of manufacturing, then all those factories will come back home where companies don't have to pay so much to move their shit around.


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 10:50pm

    Actually they're replacing first world laborers, running advanced machines under OSHA in comfortable, air-conditioned buildings with third world laborers, running primitive machines in sweatshops. The greatest percentage of energy consumption in this country, around 40%, is for buildings - largely because they are mechanically ventilated and cooled. Transportation as a whole is expensive because of personal cars and JIT delivery, but shipping by sea is a relative bargain.

    So businesses are paying for shipping to save a great deal on wages, benefits, and working conditions. So actually either the costs of shipping have to surpass the costs of doing business in the US, or the costs of doing business in the US have to drop much closer to the level of the third world - which will mean fewer unions, less enforcement of regulations, and fewer creature comforts on the job.

    You may right about #2, but if the costs of shipping become prohibitive, the costs of air-conditioning a US factory will have already become prohibitive, and the reliability of the electric power in that third world country will probably have devolved to the levels Pakistan is seeing right now.


    by Donal on Fri, 09/16/2011 - 9:26am

    "We're not going to get HAL any time soon"

    My train of thought on this came while talking with a friend about his first boyhood computer, an 8-bit, Commodore 64 from the early 1980s and that got me thinking about "Moore's Law" and the incredible, unthinkable changes we have witnessed in computation since then. It was simple to project that curve into the future.

    Seen under that prism, the idea of a computer that in a foreseeable time frame could do most of the work that today's post grads can do is not that farfetched... IMHO.

    At this point people will become much more redundant then your great-grandfather did. The recycling of a blacksmith into a skilled tool and dye maker is not that difficult. But we can now imagine a future where humans are only needed to clean rich people's bottoms or as sex objects.... or even (shudder) a "Soylent Green" scenario.

    That is why I am coming to think that the only "revolutionary vanguard" possible will be the geeks.

    They are the only ones who could effectively attack the inhuman system they have done so much to create. They will need a "mass" of lesser mortals behind them to carry the day... building that relationship will be the truly revolutionary act.... we see the germs of it in today's "hacktivists".


    by David Seaton on Fri, 09/16/2011 - 2:45am

    Look, up in that buggy seat, it's Luddite Man to the rescue!  We're all Lois Lanes now, waiting for the mighty non-tech Luddites to join forces with the disillusioned-with-technology geeks to foment the revolution that will save us all from our angry bird playing, facebook shmoozing, iPod listening selves ...  hmmm ...


    by MrSmith1 on Fri, 09/16/2011 - 1:09pm

    Not sure about HAL, but D:Wave is already here.  I wonder if the name is intentionally punny.

    World's first commercial quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin | VentureBeat: "The world’s first commercially available quantum computer, which uses principles of quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics, was sold to aerospace, defense and security company Lockheed Martin."

    'via Blog this'


    by EmmaZahn on Fri, 09/16/2011 - 8:11am

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