S20 RESET Meeting 8: Technology, automation, and labor
Wednesday, March 4, 2:00 PM in Folsom Library Conference Room (2nd-floor)
Topics
Last meeting:
- Privacy concerns in messaging apps, browsers, and operating systems
- Incentive structures that make mainstream apps and software likely to have predatory data harvesting
- Potential for different incentive systems to create less predatory systems like Firefox, Signal, Linux, etc.
- Getting people to care about privacy and devote time and energy to protecting themselves
- The onus this puts on individuals when it's up to the structures to represent the best interest of people
- The speculative bubble around selling data
- Fighting nihilism about the futility of fighting against large structures that harvest data
- Is the problem technology? Capitalism? How technology props up capitalism and vice versa?
- What it means to be autonomous. Can we be autonomous in a world dependent on manipulative tech?
This meeting:
- What does the pace of automation look like? Past experts predicted that nearly all labor would be automated by now and current experts have made similar predictions for 2030, 2050, etc. What's a more realistic way of looking at automation?
- What kind of jobs will be impacted? Manual labor comes to mind but what about creative and professional work? Wouldn't an automated doctor with access to millions of medical records that it can scan be better than a human doctor? Wouldn't a neural network that can go through millions of generations of songs produce better music?
- What will happen to manual labor? The transportation industry is the second largest employer in the United States. Self-driving cars could affect millions of drivers.
- What about office work? Will a larger proportion of office workers' time be spent training programs to do their jobs?
- What would the economy look like if most American citizens are unemployable? How do we need to change our attitudes and societal structures to accommodate mass unemployment?
- Who benefits from automation? The workers or the owners?
- What role does technology play in automation versus the economic system propelling automation?
Articles and links
- Great video. A few years old but, so far, not dated: Humans Need Not Apply
- Best summary article I could find: The Relentless Pace of Automation
- Article about basic income and its limits: Basic Income
- Robot poets on the rise: Neural Poetry