Robot economy and technological unemployment

The latest from Robot Economy (yes, that's a real thing. check it out here) takes an interesting look back on the dawn of the information age, going as far back as the computer's birth:

On March 28, 1955, Time magazine reported on a new generation of machinery called computers. The cover featured a drawing of IBM’s Thomas Watson, Jr. in front of a cartoonish robot drawn by Boris Artzybasheff, over a headline that read, “Clink. Clank. Think.” 

Time equated the IBM computer with the advance of civilization. “The prospects for mankind are truly dazzling,” the article said. “Automation of industry will mean new reaches of leisure, new wealth, new dignity for the laboring man.”

The original reporting of the computer isn't all too different from John Maynard Keynes' Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. That essay from Keynes spawned the theory of technological unemployment, the notion that unemployment is produced due to our discover of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. 

There are two sides of the coin in this argument. 

1) Technology automates tasks and responsibilities otherwise fulfilled by human resources, and this results in job outsourcing. 

The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports 200 million unemployed people worldwide in 2014. Robot Economy makes a soft argument that the bulk of jobs employed are coming from banks, insurance companies, travel agents, and retail. And most of these service industries rely heavily on software automation to run repetitive tasks. 

2) The productivity output gained from technology actually opens up working hours to be filled by information workers, resulting in more job opportunities.

In defense of the second argument are the 76 companies that have implemented robots and also increased employees by over 294,000 over the last 3 years. In this stat pointed out by Robot Economy. robots are defined as a mechanical hardware and software device that incorporates movement/action. Folks like Amazon have multiplied employees by a factor of four over the past three years, though I'm sure not all jobs created at the company can be directly attributed to robotics, with needs in other areas of the company. 

Bottom Line (at least, according to RobotEconomics): software eats jobs; robotics creates jobs. 

Not that this is new or groundbreaking, but in terms of skillsets desired, accessing a high level of creativity is more valuable than ever and robot-proof, so to speak.  

 

 

 

Diana Nyad's Fifth Swim

Last week's New Yorker featured a profile of famous swimmer Diana Nyad.

The quick background is that she first gained national fame in 1975 when she failed an attempt to swim around Manhattan  after eight hours of swimming and a stream of incoherent half-conscious mumbled words signified a contracted virus from the East River. On Nyad's second try she broke the record by nearly an hour, finishing the swim in seven hours and fifty-seven minutes. 

The profile outlines this story and continues to shade color on who Nyad was and is, how she grew to love these feats of outstanding accomplishment. Throughout the seven page feature we also hear the story of Nyad's attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. That's a "hundred and eleven miles, the equivalent of five English Channel crossings, and the longest open-ocean swim in history." The next longest open ocean swim is Lake Michigan at a paltry sixty miles. 

The part of the story that caught my eye (and fascination) was this amazing line:

Nyad has always believed that a champion is a person who doesn't give up. (In high school, she hung a poster on her wall that read, "A diamond is a lump of coal that stuck with it.") But another kind of person who doesn't give up is a lunatic. "I sort of thought, Oh, she's crazy - and she is on some level crazy," Nyad's friend Karen Sauvigne told [The New Yorker]. 

Nyad's story is impressive for so many reasons - combatting jellyfish for four days in the ocean, swimming in a cage to thwart sharks, vomiting in the water, and more. But here's the real kicker: she failed the swim four times in a row and reached near death each attempt. By the time Nyad saddled up for her fifth swim, she was 62 years old with two memoirs behind her and a number of other accomplishments like a career in sports broadcasting (she raked in a $300K+ salary as an announcer on Wide World of Sports). In other words, she already had a pool of life events to draw from.

But it was on that fifth swim that she crossed the shore of Key West. 

Nyad's example resonates with the Millennial generation (read: me) because she quite literally achieved a dream defied by odds. Four failed attempts is enough statistical significance to draw a conclusion around the feasibility of a Cuba to Florida swim and yet despite that, Nyad felt so convinced that she had it in her. 

Going into that fifth swim can be heroic. Or, as Ariel Levy's article highlighted, it an also be down right stupid, depending on how you look at it. From everyone else's point of view, Nyad looked foolish. From her own, Nyad believed in herself and in doing so exhibited every aspect of heroism we're taught to believe in as children. Had the outcome been otherwise (had she not made it out of the water after the fifth attempt) Nyad would likely have been painted in history as unwise and injudicious. 

When I think about the goals I want to accomplish and the experiences I want to have, I find myself rubbing up against this tension. What exactly is realistic? And how much of that realism is a reflection of my willingness to submit myself to conventional wisdom?

In an era where we see 21-year-olds develop companies at an $800M valuation, 55-year-olds in the Olympics, and athletes swim over a hundred miles through sharks, jellyfish, and a crowd full of doubt, one has to ask themselves: Am I betting on myself enough? Or am I giving in on the fourth swim?