The Economist did a special report on the "third wave" of the information age/information revolution. It focuses more on the economic impacts (big surprise there!) but was very interesting and worth a read - I hope you can get the article without a subscription... incognito mode usually works well enough.
It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing.
This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side.
My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned.
Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting.
One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.
Yes, it's a crazy idea. Paying people out of the revenue gained by advertising to them has some fairly obvious limitations.
I don't know what the deal with those Bitcoin tips is. Personally I find it weird and creepy and never cash them - it feels like a ploy to tie user identities on multiple sites together, or something like that - but I have zero evidence to support that.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621156-first-...
It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing.
This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side.
My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned.
Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting.
One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.