Attention Economy


Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Labor, Capital and Ideas


In the July/August 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence have an interesting piece entitled “New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy”. They note:
“Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. As they replicate themselves, they are also creating more capital. This means that the real winners of the future will not be the providers of cheap labor or the owners of ordinary capital, both of whom will be increasingly squeezed by automation. Fortune will instead favor a third group: those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.”


Related,

Recent NYTIMES piece observes:
“The American work force has been growing polarized for decades. On one end, there are highly skilled jobs like writing software or performing surgery, and on the other are service jobs like child care and cutting hair. The jobs in the middle, meanwhile, such as factory work, sales and bookkeeping, are shrinking — one of the reasons for the economy’s slow climb out of the recession.
Where did those jobs go? Part of the answer lies in Silicon Valley. It is no coincidence that many of those jobs entail the same repetitive tasks that computers, robots and other machines are uniquely suited to perform, from robots loading conveyor belts in factories to Kayak.com selling airline tickets.”



WIRED magazine piece on Google Brain