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Tyler Cowen reviews Geoff Calvin's new book Humans are Underrated in an article at the Washington Post:
"Humans Are Underrated" serves up two different books in one, each interesting in its own right. The first offers an overview of recent developments in smart software and artificial intelligence. The reader learns about the bright future of driverless cars; IBM's Watson and its skills at "Jeopardy" and medical diagnosis; and the software of Narrative Science, which can write up stories and, in some cases, cover events as well as a human journalist. The overall message is a sobering one: The machines are now able to copy or even improve on a lot of human skills, and thus they are encroaching on jobs. We won't all have to join the bread line, but not everyone will prosper in this new world. That material is well argued, and those stories are becoming increasingly familiar ground.
The second and more original message is a take on which human abilities will remain important in light of growing computer efficacy. In a nutshell, those abilities are empathy, interpersonal skills and who we are rather than what we do. This is ultimately a book about how human beings can make a difference and how that capability will never go away. It's both a description of the likely future and a prescription for how you or your children will be able to stand out in the world to come.
Here is another bit from the review:
My favorite parts of the book are about the military, an area where most other popular authors on automation and smart software have hesitated to tread. In this book you can read about how much of America's military prowess comes from superior human performance and not just from technology. Future gains will result from how combat participants are trained, motivated, and taught to work together and trust each other, and from better after-action performance reviews. Militaries are inevitably hierarchical, but when they process and admit their mistakes, they can become rapidly more efficient.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday August 15 2015, @10:35PM
The overall message is a sobering one: The machines are now able to copy or even improve on a lot of human skills, and thus they are encroaching on jobs. We won't all have to join the bread line, but not everyone will prosper in this new world. That material is well argued, and those stories are becoming increasingly familiar ground.
The overall message has been the same for centuries. The machines encroach on jobs. The reality has also remained the same over that time. If you allow and encourage new job and business creation, then it really doesn't matter that the machines are replacing other jobs. That's why most of us are employed, despite having 95% or more of our jobs obsoleted over the past 500 years.
I think it's time we stop confusing bad social policy with the claim that machines are taking our jobs away. If you strongly encourage businesses to automate or employ cheaper workers elsewhere in the world, then you get angsty intellectuals talking about the machine revolution. It's not magic.