The Future Is Boring
J.G. Ballard | Diversity Training Doesn’t Work | All We Don’t Know About AI | Cities v Distressed Americana | The Future Four Decades Ago | Unaffordable Paradise
Thirty years on, the future will still be boring. I see an endless suburbanization, interrupted by notes of totally unpredictable violence: the sniper outside the supermarket, the bomb outside suburban hypermarket, the madman with the Kalashnikov in McDonald’s. But this random violence is totally without connection to people’s everyday lives. This will lead to a feeling that the world is arbitrary and illogical, insane even. That’s a frightening kind of landscape.
| J.G. Ballard
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This was originally posted 2013-04-16. A flashback. Is the future boring now, 12 years later? I’m principally posting this so I can refer to it, going forward.
DEI
Does Diversity Training Work the Way It’s Supposed To? | Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman, Laura J. Zarrow, Kasandra Brabaw, Dena M. Gromet, Reb Rebele, Cade Massey, Angela L. Duckworth, and Adam Grant looked into that, and?
No, it doesn’t.
We found very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overall — the two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions.
There were some other surprises, but the obvious approach — train those most likely to be biased against minorities and women — simply does not change things. The authors suggest a variety of half measures and the recommendation to experiment, but the stark results of the research are fairly negative.
All We Don’t Know About AI
David Rotman Is my kind of guy, based on his summer reading list. He starts with a collection of papers on AI that ‘highlights all that we do not know’ about AI and its impacts:
It’s probably not your idea of beach reading, but The Economics of Artificial Intelligence, a recently published collection of papers delivered at a 2017 NBER conference in Toronto, is an essential look at how AI is changing jobs and increasing inequality, while at the same time providing opportunities for future growth and prosperity.
Much of the research will be familiar to close readers of fwd: Economy. How AI is failing to produce great jumps in productivity (pdf), its potential to reinvent how we discover new materials and molecules, and just how automation is affecting jobs are all included. But the value of the collection as a whole is that it’s an accurate picture of our state of knowledge, which frankly isn’t great.
One problem is that we still have no good ways to define and track the deployment of AI. Sure, we can count industrial robots, but that is hardly sufficient. As the editors, Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, write in the intro, “perhaps more than anything, this volume highlights all that we do not know.”
Rotman also profiles the recent McKinsey report:
Last night, the McKinsey Global Institute released The Future of Work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow. It’s an exhaustive analysis of 3,000 US counties and 315 cities looking at 40 variables, including economic performance, industry mix, and innovation. What emerges are 13 archetypes of different local economies, ranging from megacities to trailing cities to struggling rural areas it calls “distressed Americana” (the latter being a fair chunk of the map).
The results are pretty devastating. More than two thirds of the jobs created since 2007 were in 25 megacities and other high-growth hubs that hold just 30% of the population. Meanwhile, slow-growth areas, with about 24% of the population, have 360,000 fewer jobs in 2017 than 2007.
The “next wave of automation” will further exacerbate the differences, says McKinsey. The numbers again are grim. Sixty percent of job growth by 2030 will be in 25 cities, while several groups of workers will be particularly vulnerable, including young workers, those over age 50 (roughly 11.5 million of them could be “displaced” from their jobs), and those with a high school diploma or less.
You don’t need to read the report in detail: its power is in the maps. It’s shocking how different the future of work — and the prospects of a healthy livelihood and secure financial future — looks in different parts of the country.
Rotman is the best curator around.
The future began four decades ago
Steve LeVine takes a close look at Carl Frey’s new book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, and suggest that the AI optimists — who say AI will create more jobs than it destroys — should reconsider:
If you’re an optimist about the robotic future, you likely hear talk that we’re all going to lose our jobs or suffer a big pay cut, and tell friends to relax — the new technology revolution is going to turn out like all the others since the dawn of the Industrial Age.
But if history is your best hope, you should probably think again: The pessimists have a strong case.
The big picture: For the last half-dozen years and longer, one of the most hotly debated questions on the planet has been the fate of employment in a future age of AI and robots. It is a central issue in current U.S. and European political campaigns — and was a core factor in President Trump’s 2016 election victory.
But Carl Frey, author of “The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation,” suggests that the “future” is already here — and has been for three decades. The only question is how much longer it will last.
- Since 1979, 6.6 million people have lost their middle-income jobs in U.S. manufacturing, a third of the total number in the sector, on top of work eliminated in other skilled and semi-skilled professions.
- Many took pay cuts, other lower-paid work, or simply left the labor force.
- These factors, resulting in blight, a hollowing out of the middle class, and politically destabilizing anger, replicate the early Industrial Age.
“If we extrapolate from the past, we shouldn’t be assured,” Frey tells Axios.
Looking back to the ‘classic’ industrial age, we may have three more decades of sluggish or flat wage growth, and we may be confronted by Luddite mobs smashing the machines. [I have been predicting the Human Spring for 2023 for years, where people across the industrialized world rise up against the economic system, climate change, and the destruction of work by AI and robots.]
Frey argues that we are at severe risk of a new technology trap. Already, the entire post-war Western system is in jeopardy because “governments chose to overlook the costs of globalization and focus on the benefits.”
“Governments must avoid making the same mistake with automation.”
Elsewhere
The Unaffordable Urban Paradise | Richard Florida details how tech start-ups have moved from the suburbs into city centers, and it’s ruining them:
For years, economists, mayors, and urbanists believed that high-tech development was an unalloyed good thing, and that more high-tech startups and more venture capital investment would “lift all boats.” But the reality is that high-tech development has ushered in a new phase of what I call winner-take-all urbanism, where a relatively small number of metro areas, and a small number of neighborhoods within them, capture most of the benefits.
Middle-class neighborhoods have been hollowed out in the process. In 1970, roughly two-thirds of Americans lived in middle-class neighborhoods; today less than 40 percent of us do. The middle-class share of the population shrank in a whopping 203 out of 229 U.S. metro areas between 2000 and 2014. And places where the middle class is smallest include such superstar cities and tech hubs as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington, D.C.
Despite all this, it wouldn’t make any sense to put the brakes on high-tech development. Doing so would only cut off a huge source of innovation and economic development. High-tech industry remains a major driver of economic progress and jobs, and it provides much-needed tax revenues that cities can use to address and mitigate the problems that come with financial success.
The tech startup boom has brought billions of dollars of venture capital into urban areas like San Francisco. It’s also driven out the middle class and caused a wave of resentment.
But if high-tech development causes problems, and stopping it doesn’t solve those problems, what comes next?
What, indeed? Florida has some answers, but it involves increasing density of cities, better public transport, and paying low-paid workers enough to support families. Sounds like a political platform.