through h4x0r3d's eyes

The creators of the Water-Scraper believe that the effects of climate change mean it’s “only a natural progression that we will populate the seas someday,” so they designed this livable, sustainable structure for humans to occupy. The Water-Scraper uses wave, wind and solar power, and its bioluminescent tentacles provide sea fauna a place to live while collecting energy through kinetic movements. This floating structure even generates its own food through farming, aquaculture and hydroponics. A small forest is nestled on the top of the Water-Scraper, along with wind turbines, a garden and livestock, and the living areas are located just below sea level where natural light is best. Check out these other innovative ways we could live on water.

 How The 1% and the Machines May Come To Rule Us All

That’s my own sensational title, but it’s very fitting. This article, from the Atlantic and part of a 3 segment excerpt from a new book, is basically the article (and book?) I’ve been waiting 4 years to read! And also very timely with OWS, which is an awesome bonus.

As RCS followers know, I’m a major tech lover. That said, tech innovation also scares the pants off of me. There are for a few reasons, with the terminator-apocalypse low on the list. More realistically, a major concern of mine has been how technology will put people out of work. Because while technology can empower the average citizen (e.g. 3DP), it can also decimate fields of work, even destroying businesses. (Just think of how badly the US Postal Service is doing due to email, or how self-driving cars will effect taxi-drivers and truckers.)

This is a serious problem. A very serious problem, and one which I’ve been thinking about for some time. What will we do when robots can replace us? And don’t think it’s just simple, menial labor. It might almost be the opposite. There’s a lot of research into machines and programs for augmenting (read: decimating) and replacing (you read that right) even highly skilled positions like doctors (e.g. here, here, and here) and, say, stock-traders. Cause sure, there may still be a few positions left for humans even after machines mostly take control (e.g. one security guard monitoring 10 security cameras), but even cutting half of the positions for a field will produce an avalanche of problems. For instance, already now with unemployment at 9% [!], we’re seeing many students dropping out of college b/c the cost of tuition is extremely high and there’s no job security; thus, less incentive to go especially with the risk of heavy debt weighing down on a graduate’s shoulders.

And it’s a bit odd: On the one hand, robotic labor seems to open up the possibility of a more Utopian world where people needn’t work much (or at all?) to live; however, unless some big changes happen to the planet, the more likely scenario is that a few extremely wealthy people will simply own the robots that can do everything. And what will we do when there’s little-to-no work for us to do?

I don’t know. Like I said, it scares the pants off me. This article doesn’t suggest a solution (though it does emphasize the greater need for higher education, and perhaps we should work to include that in the public schooling system). And I’d really like to hear one.

Seriously, if you have any ideas, let me know!

(Hat tip to emergentfutures for the link.)

• RCS Highlights:

At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811, workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated…. However.. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress... [T]echnological progress is not a rising tide that automatically raises all incomes. Even as overall wealth increases, there can be, and usually will be, winners and losers. And the losers are not necessarily some small segment of the labor force like buggy whip manufacturers. In principle, they can be a majority or even 90% or more of the population… If wages can freely adjust… [then] at some point, the equilibrium wages for workers might fall below the level needed for subsistence. A rational human would see no point in taking a job at a wage that low, so the worker would go unemployed and the work would be done by a machine instead… As technology continues to advance in the second half of the chessboard [nice Kurzweil reference - Ari], taking on jobs and tasks that used to belong only to human workers, one can imagine a time in the future when more and more jobs are more cheaply done by machines than humans. And indeed, the wages of unskilled workers have trended downward for over 30 years, at least in the United States. …lower pay only postpones the day of reckoning. Moore’s Law is not a one-time blip but an accelerating exponential trend… We’ll start with skill-biased technical change… A lot of factory automation falls into this category, as routine drudgery is turned over to machines…

It’s clear … that wage divergence accelerated in the digital era. As documented in careful studies..  the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor is closely correlated with advances in technology, particularly digital technologies. Hence, the moniker “skill-biased technical change,” or SBTC…. Ever-greater investments in education, dramatically increasing the average educational level of the American workforce, helped prevent inequality from soaring as technology automated more and more unskilled work… A key aspect of SBTC was not just the skills of those working with computers, but more importantly the broader changes in work organization that were made possible by information technology. The most productive firms reinvented and reorganized.. to get the most from the technology… The second division is between superstars and everyone else. Many industries are winner-take-all or winner-take-most competitions, in which a few individuals get the lion’s share of the rewards… The superstars in each field can now earn much larger rewards than they did in earlier decades. The effects are evident at the top of the income distribution. The top 10% of the wage distribution has done much better than the rest of the labor force, but even within this group there has been growing inequality. Income has grown faster for the top 1% than the rest of the top decile. In turn, the top 0.1% and top 0.01% have seen their income grow even faster. This is not run-of-the-mill skill-biased technical change but rather reflects the unique rewards of superstardom... If technology exists for a single seller to cheaply replicate his or her services, then the top-quality provider can capture most—or all—of the market. The next-best provider might be almost as good yet get only a tiny fraction of the revenue. Technology can convert an ordinary market into one that is characterized by superstars. Before the era of recorded music, the very best singer might have filled a large concert hall but at most would only be able to reach thousands of listeners over the course of a year… Once music could be recorded and distributed at a very low marginal cost, however, a small number of top performers could capture the majority of revenues in every market, from classical music’s Yo-Yo Ma to pop’s Lady Gaga… According to economist Emmanuel Saez, the top 1% of U.S. households got 65% of all the growth in the economy since 2002. In fact, Saez reports that the top 0.01% of households in the United States—that is, the 14,588 families with income above $11,477,000—saw their share of national income double from 3% to 6% between 1995 and 2007… The third division is between capital and labor. Most types of production require both machinery and human labor… If the technology decreases the relative importance of human labor in a particular production process, the owners of capital equipment will be able to capture a bigger share of income from the goods and services produced... According to the recently updated data from the U.S. Commerce Department, recent corporate profits accounted for 23.8% of total domestic corporate income, a record high share that is more than 1 full percentage point above the previous record. Similarly, corporate profits as a share of GDP are at 50-year highs. Meanwhile, compensation to labor in all forms, including wages and benefits, is at a 50-year low. Capital is getting a bigger share of the pie, relative to labor.

Hungry? Soon you may be able to print out your dinner Scientists at Cornell are developing a 3-D printer that can print meals using raw food “ink.” Using raw-food inks set up in syringes, a specialized printer creates cookies, pie and other treats. The food list is currently limited to ingredients that can be extracted from a syringe, and researchers have had success with chocolate, cake and cookies. But they think the machine could be developed to create customized menus for “fussy” customers — or that the world’s great chefs could share their patented recipes for download.