by: Bill Davidow
Call it the post-employee economy: The digital revolution is creating billions of dollars of wealth in a second world without people
When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months), analysts tripped over themselves looking for an explanation. Of course, jobs numbers are bound to vary, but in my view the long-term trend calls for more jobs to disappear, and the reason is clear as day: the exploding Second Economy.
The Second Economy -- a term the economist Brian Arthur uses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy -- is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It's growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades.
Unfortunately, the Second Economy will not create many jobs.
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by: Gus Lubin and Michael Kelley
Gas prices may finally be cutting into American sprawl, as cities have started growing faster than suburbs and people are driving less than they used to.
So what happens if gas prices keep going higher?
You can't live in a cities like Merriam, Kansas without driving everywhere, as Maggie Koerth-Baker observes in Before the Lights Go Out.
We looked at the cities that spend the most at the gas pump, with 2010 data from consumer data site Bundle. You can imagine what will happen in these places if prices double, triple or worse.
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by: Micheal Snider
The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told. Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work? No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs! According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be "officially" unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either. The federal government considers those Americans to be "not in the labor force" so they are not included in the unemployment rate. In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers. The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined. Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe. The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago. It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now. So don't believe the hype that things are getting much better. If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon.
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by: Steve Lohr
A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.
“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology. More...
by: Tony Cartalucci
US Army General Martin Dempsey delivered an April 2012 speech at Harvard University where he addressed what he calls the “security paradox,” where he stated, “although geopolitical trends are ushering in greater levels of peace and stability worldwide, destructive technologies are available to a wider and more disparate pool of adversaries.” Dempsey related his greatest fear – that these technologies were proliferating “horizontally across advanced militaries in the world,” and “vertically, down to nonstate actors, especially insurgents, terrorist groups and even transnational organized crime.”
While in many ways such concerns are sensible, and any responsible military charged with the defense of a nation would consider and prepare for not only new technologies but adapting appropriately to socioeconomic paradigm shifts, they hardly constitute the greatest threat America faces protecting its borders. The real threat General Dempsey and the Joint Chiefs of Staff fear is the shifting balance of power and the reduction of the vast disparity that once allowed the United States and the West in general to pursue its goals beyond its borders with impunity.
Dempsey notes in his speech that nuclear weapons were a “game-changing capability that was in the hands of the United States initially.” Of course, students of history remember exactly what the US did with these weapons when the balance of power was so radically tipped in its favor – bomb Japan with atomic bombs, twice. Dempsey continues by stating that although the Russians and others began acquiring the weapons “membership was limited by the high cost of entry.”
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by: Matin Ford
Like most people, I have been giving a lot of thought to the economic situation as the most serious crisis since the Great Depression has continued to unfold. Since I develop software and run a high tech business, I also spend a great deal of time thinking about computer technology, and so I began to focus on how economics and technology intertwine. The current crisis has been perceived as primarily financial in origin, but is it possible that ever advancing technology is an unseen force that has contributed significantly to the severity of the downturn? More importantly, what economic impact will technological acceleration have as we anticipate recovery from the current crisis—and in the years and decades ahead? What will the economy of the future look like?
Among people who work in the field of computer technology, it is fairly routine to speculate about the likelihood that computers will someday approach, or possibly even exceed, human beings in general capability and intelligence. Speaking at an industry conference in 2007, Google co-founder Larry Page said, "We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. It's not as far off as people think." Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor, author and futurist, states quite categorically that he expects computers to become at least as intelligent as humans by the year 2029. While other experts are far more conservative about the prospect for machines that can achieve genuine intelligence, there can be little doubt that computers and robots are going to become dramatically more capable and flexible in the coming years and decades.
What is the likely economic impact of machines or computers that begin to catch up with—and maybe even surpass—the average person's capability to do a typical job? Clearly, the employment market would be one of the first areas to feel that influence. Put yourself in the position of a business owner and think of all the problems that are associated with human employees: vacation, safety rules, sick time, payroll taxes, poor performance…maternity leave. If an affordable machine can do nearly any routine job as well as a human worker, then what business manager in his or her right mind would hire a worker? More...
by: Faul Brothers