Bill Gates views on the economic condition almost miss larger social changes on the horizon
(Click the title to see a follow-up comment to this post)
“Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century caused a stir this summer. It’s a major contribution to the study of inequality—but it has some important flaws too. http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capital-in-21st-Century-Review ” – Bill Gates
I’ll probably never read this book. Bill Gates review is adequate for my level of economic understanding. It is an interesting topic, just outside of my current scope of reading which tends more toward fantasy and science fiction.
But, in his review and commentary on inequality, Bill Gates almost inadvertently mentions a social issue that I suspect can disrupt society more than any class or philosophical difference to date. He briefly mentions the impact of technology on current income tax models.
“I agree that taxation should shift away from taxing labor…It will make even less sense in the coming years, as robots and other forms of automation come to perform more and more of the skills that human laborers do today.”
Antiquated federal and state funding models are just one, albeit broad, result of automation. My evolving view is that technology advances, in particular, AI(1) , the diffusion of data communications via”Internet of Things”, and exponential growth of raw data processing power will have an escalating impact on each individual’s lifestyle including their livelihood and access to traditional means of income, privacy, personal freedoms, access to unbiased information, healthcare and environmental conditions, to name a few.
I’m not a luddite and am not supporting a return to the pre-industrial age. I am cautious about building systems without an apparent negative feedback control which will too easily slip into a chaotic condition where funding of social programs will be a minor sideshow to the other, broad sweeping changes to our civilization. Ones first thought might be that, these tools will be put to use by people of unethical or immoral persuasions to further entrench power and extract wealth. This may be the early downside and is likely to be offset by the forces of good with the same tools. The real threat is likely to not come from the human owners but the technology itself, or rather it’s inherent complexity. I’m not sure that humans have the capacity to manage such complexity. My experience with even simple software systems is that unexpected consequences can occur. If the resolution of errors in complex systems is managed by the self same defective system, we have the conditions for chaos.
An feeble human minds are no help in this situation. This requires more thinking and tinkering before it goes live…if we can control even that.
1. AI, variously decoded as artificial/advanced/augmented/accelerated intelligence. One perspective can be found at: http://yudkowsky.net/ – “Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly – on a historical scale, that is – we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.”
After posting this page, I read the article by David Brooks entitled “Our Machine Age” (http://nyti.ms/1wi0pi7), in which he references a related article by Kevin Kelly in Wired magazine entitled “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World” (http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/) . Both David and Kevin, while acknowledging the risks, take a more sanguine view of rampant technology advancement than I.
David asserts that “A.I. will redefine what it means to be human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other animals can’t do” and then goes on to say that machines will do these things better than humans, leaving humans the time and attention span to explore more important issues such as “personal and moral faculties: being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote ones that duplicate it.”
Again, this sidesteps the reality that the broader society (including those that don’t read the New York Times) is a very diverse collection of personalities and traits and dependencies and histories and cultures. They won’t all benefit from the introduction of technology to replace their mental drudgery. Some will be displaced. Others will receive no direct benefit at all. They will pay for it in lost opportunities, lack of access, widening skills and knowledge gap, etc. I cannot see the smaller African nations exploiting this technology based on my experience in Malawi. Given the recent outbreaks of Ebola virus which is killing thousands of people and infecting tens of thousands without any sign of abatement in some countries, primarily due to lack of sophistication of their healthcare systems, I wonder, why don’t they just write an AI algorithm to identify the next case based on all the transactional data collected in pharmacies and census data, run it on their national computing infrastructure and then go isolate that person.(actually, they probably have better mobile phone data due to the lack of alternative communication infrastructure and limited privacy constraints on the government run telephone monopoly) Where this could potentially lead is a Darwinian cleansing of the have-nots.
This is just one example of why short articles on the wonders of technology are misleading, but not really my primary concern as I stated in the original post.