{"id":22173,"date":"2013-09-19T07:41:50","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T12:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22173"},"modified":"2013-09-19T07:41:50","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T12:41:50","slug":"after-smartphones-genius-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/19\/after-smartphones-genius-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"After smartphones, genius machines?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the <em>Daily Beast<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2013\/09\/17\/welcome-to-tyler-cowen-s-future-of-genius-machines.html\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Herritt<\/a> reviews the latest book by Tyler Cowen, <em>Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation<\/em>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Cowen\u2019s main background assumption is that in the not-too-distant future various kinds of \u201cgenius machines\u201d will be everywhere. In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions \u201cwill be recorded, processed, and analyzed [and] &#8230; [e]ach party to the communications might receive a real-time report on when the other people are likely lying &#8230;\u201d At the supermarket, \u201c[y]our shopping cart will use GPS to track your moves through the store, including which aisles you visit most often.\u201d As for our personal lives, \u201c[a] woman might consult a pocket device in the ladies\u2019 room during a date that tells her how much she really likes the guy. The machine could register her pulse, breathing, tone of voice &#8230; or whichever biological features prove to have predictive power.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even a few years ago, this forecast would have sounded silly, but that was before many of us trusted <em>Match.com<\/em> algorithms to suggest potential spouses and smartphones came with fingerprint scanners. Cowen\u2019s not talking about flying cars (that futurist mainstay that always seems both just out of reach and comically unnecessary), but rather slightly more sophisticated versions of the technologies that many of us already use.<\/p>\n<p>The bad news, he tells us, is that the rise of the machines will only worsen the wage polarization we are seeing today. Cowen predicts a situation where 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans are \u201cextremely wealthy\u201d with \u201cfantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.\u201d Most of the rest will see stagnant or falling wages but will benefit from plenty of \u201ccheap fun and also cheap education.\u201d For those wondering, this vanishing middle ground is where the book gets its catch-phrase title.<\/p>\n<p>What will determine whether you end up a high earner or a low-wage left-behind will be, in large part, your answer to some variation on the following questions: \u201cAre you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Daily Beast, Robert Herritt reviews the latest book by Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. Cowen\u2019s main background assumption is that in the not-too-distant future various kinds of \u201cgenius machines\u201d will be everywhere. In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions \u201cwill be recorded, processed, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,28,15],"tags":[109,686,95,547],"class_list":["post-22173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-media","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-futurism","tag-jobs","tag-smartphones"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5LD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22174,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22173\/revisions\/22174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}