|
These articles always exaggerate the disruptive potential of technology, the pace of change and the consequences, particularly ignoring the concept of wealth creation (the reference to Piketty was telling). For example: I've been to China and Japan countless times in the last decade. On my last trip to both, I finally had Google Translate on my phone. The difference it made in communication - particularly in Japan - was phenomenal. Both ways - both in scanning local characters with the camera and getting an instant translation (you lose the fun of the restaurant roulette, but you no longer end up with mapo tofu by accident), and in communicating with the other side by typing your English meaning and showing the translation. I had a 20 minute conversation near Chengdu with our hotel manager, she would type her side into Translate, wait for the slow internet to send it over, we'd read, reply... we both wrote each other a long thank you letter before leaving! What is relevant about this example: the job of "translator for tourist" has been created, not automated. Before I had Translate, I made do with sign language and the few words hastily scribbled or learnt before a trip. I didn't hire a local to walk me around and talk to everybody. Conversely, I take the MRT in Singapore because it's 80 cents a trip. If an automated taxi comes along for $2, I might take it, but doing the same trip for $10 is not something I'm interested in. This is added productivity for me, just as the flying shuttle enormously increased the quality of life of hundreds of thousands of housewives in the 18th century, instead of creating the "mass domestic unrest from idleness" allegedly feared by the ruling class. Another point missing from the conversation is manager laziness. In my experience as a DBA/data person, most companies do not care about automating away their reporting function (amongst other things). I've seen people doing "manual joins" (yes, that's a manual lookup then copy paste each value one by one) as late as last year, in both tiny "modern" tech startups and enormous corporations with several hundred thousand employees; for the latter, 50MB files were "big data". Today, you can run a DWH for a fairly large business with an employee working part time, provided he knows what he's doing - with AWS and modern tools like Postgres, it's incredibly easy to be high level - but few companies do it. Maybe it's today's relatively permissive high capital low opportunity environment, which tolerates very low IRR. |