A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

I have frequently wondered if the lag in productivity is partly due to the distracting power of the internet and social media. This isn't really paralleled by the other technical advances that the authors of the study this piece summarizes were examining.

Also, AI? We don't have anything even approaching AI in play now nor on the immediate horizon. The energy costs it would have are still enormous, even if we really could implement it. Maybe that's a revolution that's yet to begin. We got really good at problems that can be mapped into single precision matrix algebra, where the inputs and outputs are relatively small. It's a big jump to hard AI from there.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#9

Post by Wildgoose » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 9:51 AM UTC

"A third of the rise in the S&P 500 stock market index this year is attributable to Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp."

And yet don't those companies directly employ only around 150,000 workers in total?

Yes, Apple off-shores employment to Foxconn but they are open about their plans to automate their factories and replace all the workers.

This isn't a matter of patience, it's waiting on the never-never.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#10

Post by rectang » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 9:53 AM UTC

inciampati wrote: post #8

I have frequently wondered if the lag in productivity is partly due to the distracting power of the internet and social media. This isn't really paralleled by the other technical advances that the authors of the study this piece summarizes were examining. Also, AI? We don't have anything even approaching AI in play now nor on the immediate horizon. The energy costs it would have are still enormous, even if we really…

> We got really good at problems that can be mapped into single precision matrix algebra, where the inputs and outputs are relatively small.

General AI is a "wave of the future -- always has been, always will be" technology. Only when a piece gets broken out from general AI do we get practical benefits. The benefits from applying all that matrix algebra aren't small, though!