The third great wave
economist.com
The third great wave
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: The third great wave
#2The one thing a magazine like The Economist won't dwell on is the wars that these sorts of disruptions have triggered in the past.
Wars like the French and American revolutions were fueled by an upheaval in weaponry and technology that rendered arrangements like feudalism obsolete. Primitive phalanx and cavalry style engagements could not suppress ordinary commoners anymore, if they had enough muskets and gun powder.
With wars like the American Civil War and both World Wars, we saw total war emerge. Mass production, mechanized logistics and air power were added to the mix and effectively destroyed all traces of overt slavery and royalist monarchy, wherever heavy weapons technologies saw wide implementation.
So what's next? Full Spectrum War sounds ominous, but even that seem like it's probably just Total War's pocket watch dressed up as a calculator wrist watch...
Re: The third great wave
#3The basic premise of the article (that there are three distinct industrial revolutions with "fallow" periods dividing them) seems to me to be very easy to poke holes in. It's not as if some fundamental force of innovation switched on in 1760 and then faded away in 1830, only to reappear forty years later, as the graph in the article implies. Historians of globalization have been thinking about this stuff in a different way for quite some time now (for instance, Jan de Vries and his concept of a 17th and early 18th century "Industrious Revolution" is quite influential and has a lot of merit in my opinion).
It also isn't clear to me why the author(s) consider the automation of the 19th and 20th centuries, which they allow to have demolished entire industries and ways of life, to have been less threatening than the present wave of automation. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that the people who write and read the Economist were those who benefited from the disruptions of the 19th and 20th centuries--and are now in a position to rationalize away their negatives--than with any qualitative shift in how innovation or automation is taking place.
Re: The third great wave
#4This is a poor article about an important subject. A more useful way to look at it is to make lists of jobs humans can do, and those which machines can do better. Over time, the second column grows. The first column, not so much.
What's different this time is that computers are so general purpose, and so cheap. If a computer can do it at all, it can do it more cheaply than a human.
Re: The third great wave
#5Humanity used to be optimistic about this moment, didn't it?
In 1900 people hoped their work would be replaced by robots. Today people fear their work will be replaced by robots.
Hmm.
Re: The third great wave
#6Humanity used to be optimistic about this moment, didn't it? In 1900 people hoped their work would be replaced by robots. Today people fear their work will be replaced by robots. Hmm.
In fairness, even prior to 1900, quite a lot of people were upset at these sorts of changes, at least when it was their particular livelihood on the line; consider the historical Luddites, for example. Or the subculture behind the tale of John Henry.
Re: The third great wave
#7Humanity used to be optimistic about this moment, didn't it? In 1900 people hoped their work would be replaced by robots. Today people fear their work will be replaced by robots. Hmm.
People have been afraid of machines taking their jobs since well before 1900.
Re: The third great wave
#8The one thing a magazine like The Economist won't dwell on is the wars that these sorts of disruptions have triggered in the past. Wars like the French and American revolutions were fueled by an upheaval in weaponry and technology that rendered arrangements like feudalism obsolete. Primitive phalanx and cavalry style engagements could not suppress ordinary commoners anymore, if they had enough muskets and gun powder.…
What's next? Drones. No matter how strong one's industrial base, warfare has always been limited by the number of boots on the ground. Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.
There will be no flag-draped coffins to discourage a nation with a fully automated army. War will become a purely financial drain. As technology advances and drives drone costs to the price of raw materials, the drain will lessen while destructive capabilities grow.
These factors could drastically increase the amount of warfare in the world. I'm not sure how probable this scenario is, but it worries me.
Re: The third great wave
#9At some point you get a small amount of very rich people with a large pile of very cheap stuff that they cannot sell as nobody else has any money and even if they did, the marginal cost of producing the stuff is less than the cost of running a market to sell it in.
Re: The third great wave
#10At some point you get a small amount of very rich people with a large pile of very cheap stuff that they cannot sell as nobody else has any money and even if they did, the marginal cost of producing the stuff is less than the cost of running a market to sell it in.
This is around when they start giving it away, in the hope that the enhanced livelihoods they generate frees the next generation of entrepreneurs to create even better uses for their capital.
At some point we get The Culture. Or so the hopeful prognosis goes...