200 words for forum

100 words for respond to the student (the image from attachment is the one u should reply)

200 words for forum

100 words for respond to the student (the image from attachment is the one u should reply)

Assignment Instructions

This week we turn our attention to the future of work in the 21st century “knowledge economy.”

Read:

1. Future Work Skills 2020 – The University of Phoenix Institute (2011).

2. The Future of Work. Lynda Bratton (Business Strategy Review, 2010). –

 

Both readings describe major forces driving change in the economy and prescribe the competencies workers will need in order to have successful careers.

3. Sen, Amartya.  How to Judge Globalisation

4. Satell, Gregg.  How Technology is Changing the Way Organizations Learn

5. Rotman, David. How Technology is Destroying Jobs

6. Autor, David, and Dorn, David.  How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class

7. Microchips for Employees? One Company Says Yes, NYTimes

Forum:

1. Choose one of the two readings on the future of work.  What are the driving forces of change and the requisite competencies for the modern workplace?  Do you agree or disagree with the author of the reading you chose with the driving forces the competencies she identifies?  Explain and provide your own analysis supported by outside evidence not just your opinion.

2. What skills and competencies do you think are the most important in the modern workplace?  Why?

 
Be sure to look over the scoring checklist (on the class slides) so that you know what is expected in your responses.

Forum assignments are to be completed in the [Forums] tab. Do not submit your responses in the [Assignments] tab or anywhere else on Sakai (you will not get credit if your posts are not submitted in the right place, even if you happen to submit them on time). Click on your group number in the [Forums] section and complete your assignments by clicking on [Post Reply]. Please do not submit your responses as an attachment.

FIRST POST (50 points)

 

· Choose one of the two readings on the future of work.  What are the driving forces of change and the requisite competencies for the modern workplace?  Do you agree or disagree with the author of the reading you chose with the driving forces the competencies she identifies?  Explain and provide your own analysis supported by outside evidence not just your opinion. [35 points]

 

Objective

Possible Points

Total Points

Choose one of the readings and identify what the article says are the driving forces of change and the competencies that workers in the modern workplace will need in order to have successful careers.

10

2 bonus points if they provided definitions

 

Identify whether you agree or disagree with the author of the article you chose

5

 

Explain and provide your analysis.  In other words, explain why you think the author is right or wrong about the driving forces of change and competencies s/he identifies.

10

 

Use and cite outside sources to support your argument

10

 

· What skills and competencies do you think are the most important in the modern workplace?  Why? [15 points]

 

Objective

Possible Points

Total Points

Identifying skills and competencies

5

 

Explanation

10

 

 

SECOND POST (50 points)

 

Objective

Possible Points

Total Points

Identifying your reaction (agreement, disagreement, etc.)

10

 

Focusing on a group member or members or the group as a whole

10

 

Providing a substantive response

10

 

Providing evidence or anecdotal evidence

10

 

Quality of the writing

10

 

The American Prospect ,Volume 13, Issue 1. January 1, 2002 – January 14, 2002.

How to Judge Globalism
Amartya Sen

Globalization is often seen as global Westernization. On this point, there is substantial
agreement among many proponents and opponents. Those who take an upbeat view of
globalization see it as a marvelous contribution of Western civilization to the world.
There is a nicely stylized history in which the great developments happened in
Europe: First came the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution, and these led to a massive increase in living standards in the West. And
now the great achievements of the West are spreading to the world. In this view,
globalization is not only good, it is also a gift from the West to the world. The
champions of this reading of history tend to feel upset not just because this great
benefaction is seen as a curse but also because it is undervalued and castigated by an
ungrateful world.

From the opposite perspective, Western dominance–sometimes seen as a continuation
of Western imperialism–is the devil of the piece. In this view, contemporary
capitalism, driven and led by greedy and grabby Western countries in Europe and
North America, has established rules of trade and business relations that do not serve
the interests of the poorer people in the world. The celebration of various non-
Western identities–defined by religion (as in Islamic fundamentalism), region (as in
the championing of Asian values), or culture (as in the glorification of Confucian
ethics)–can add fuel to the fire of confrontation with the West.

Is globalization really a new Western curse? It is, in fact, neither new nor necessarily
Western; and it is not a curse. Over thousands of years, globalization has contributed
to the progress of the world through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural
influences, and dissemination of knowledge and understanding (including that of
science and technology). These global interrelations have often been very productive
in the advancement of different countries. They have not necessarily taken the form of
increased Western influence. Indeed, the active agents of globalization have often
been located far from the West.

To illustrate, consider the world at the beginning of the last millennium rather than at
its end. Around 1000 A.D., global reach of science, technology, and mathematics was
changing the nature of the old world, but the dissemination then was, to a great extent,
in the opposite direction of what we see today. The high technology in the world of
1000 A.D. included paper, the printing press, the crossbow, gunpowder, the iron-
chain suspension bridge, the kite, the magnetic compass, the wheelbarrow, and the
rotary fan. A millennium ago, these items were used extensively in China–and were
practically unknown elsewhere. Globalization spread them across the world, including
Europe.

A similar movement occurred in the Eastern influence on Western mathematics. The
decimal system emerged and became well developed in India between the second and
sixth centuries; it was used by Arab mathematicians soon thereafter. These
mathematical innovations reached Europe mainly in the last quarter of the tenth

century and began having an impact in the early years of the last millennium, playing
an important part in the scientific revolution that helped to transform Europe. The
agents of globalization are neither European nor exclusively Western, nor are they
necessarily linked to Western dominance. Indeed, Europe would have been a lot
poorer–economically, culturally, and scientifically–had it resisted the globalization of
mathematics, science, and technology at that time. And today, the same principle
applies, though in the reverse direction (from West to East). To reject the
globalization of science and technology because it represents Western influence and
imperialism would not only amount to overlooking global contributions–drawn from
many different parts of the world–that lie solidly behind so-called Western science
and technology, but would also be quite a daft practical decision, given the extent to
which the whole world can benefit from the process.

A Global Heritage

In resisting the diagnosis of globalization as a phenomenon of quintessentially
Western origin, we have to be suspicious not only of the anti-Western rhetoric but
also of the pro-Western chauvinism in many contemporary writings. Certainly, the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution were great
achievements–and they occurred mainly in Europe and, later, in America. Yet many
of these developments drew on the experience of the rest of the world, rather than
being confined within the boundaries of a discrete Western civilization.

Our global civilization is a world heritage–not just a collection of disparate local
cultures. When a modern mathematician in Boston invokes an algorithm to solve a
difficult computational problem, she may not be aware that she is helping to
commemorate the Arab mathematician Mohammad Ibn Musa-al-Khwarizmi, who
flourished in the first half of the ninth century. (The word algorithm is derived from
the name al-Khwarizmi.) There is a chain of intellectual relations that link Western
mathematics and science to a collection of distinctly non-Western practitioners, of
whom al-Khwarizmi was one. (The term algebra is derived from the title of his
famous book Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah.) Indeed, al-Khwarizmi is one of many non-
Western contributors whose works influenced the European Renaissance and, later,
the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The West must get full credit for the
remarkable achievements that occurred in Europe and Europeanized America, but the
idea of an immaculate Western conception is an imaginative fantasy.

Not only is the progress of global science and technology not an exclusively West- led
phenomenon, but there were major global developments in which the West was not
even involved. The printing of the world’s first book was a marvelously globalized
event. The technology of printing was, of course, entirely an achievement of the
Chinese. But the content came from elsewhere. The first printed book was an Indian
Sanskrit treatise, translated into Chinese by a half- Turk. The book, Vajracchedika
Prajnaparamitasutra (sometimes referred to as “The Diamond Sutra”), is an old
treatise on Buddhism; it was translated into Chinese from Sanskrit in the fifth century
by Kumarajiva, a half-Indian and half- Turkish scholar who lived in a part of eastern
Turkistan called Kucha but later migrated to China. It was printed fo ur centuries later,
in 868 a.d. All this involving China, Turkey, and India is globalization, all right, but
the West is not even in sight.

Global Interdependences and Movements

The misdiagnosis that globalization of ideas and practices has to be resisted because it
entails dreaded Westernization has played quite a regressive part in the colonial and
postcolonial world. This assumption incites parochial tendencies and undermines the
possibility of objectivity in science and knowledge. It is not only counterproductive in
itself; given the global interactions throughout history, it can also cause non-Western
societies to shoot themselves in the foot–even in their precious cultural foot.

Consider the resistance in India to the use of Western ideas and concepts in science
and mathematics. In the nineteenth century, this debate fitted into a broader
controversy about Western education versus indigenous Indian education. The
“Westernizers,” such as the redoubtable Thomas Babington Macaulay, saw no merit
whatsoever in Indian tradition. “I have never found one among them [advocates of
Indian tradition] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was
worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” he declared. Partly in
retaliation, the advocates of native education resisted Western imports altogether.
Both sides, however, accepted too readily the foundational dichotomy between two
disparate civilizations.

European mathematics, with its use of such concepts as sine, was viewed as a purely
“Western” import into India. In fact, the fifth-century Indian mathematician
Aryabhata had discussed the concept of sine in his classic work on astronomy and
mathematics in 499 a.d., calling it by its Sanskrit name, jya-ardha (literally, “half-
chord”). This word, first shortened to jya in Sanskrit, eventually became the Arabic
jiba and, later, jaib, which means “a cove or a bay.” In his history of mathematics,
Howard Eves explains that around 1150 a.d., Gherardo of Cremona, in his translations
from the Arabic, rendered jaib as the Latin sinus, the corresponding word for a cove
or a bay. And this is the source of the modern word sine. The concept had traveled
full circle–from India, and then back.

To see globalization as merely Western imperialism of ideas and beliefs (as the
rhetoric often suggests) would be a serious and costly error, in the same way that any
European resistance to Eastern influence would have been at the beginning of the last
millennium. Of course, there are issues related to globalization that do connect with
imperialism (the history of conquests, colonialism, and alien rule remains relevant
today in many ways), and a postcolonial understanding of the world has its merits.
But it would be a great mistake to see globalization primarily as a feature of
imperialism. It is much bigger– much greater–than that.

The issue of the distribution of economic gains and losses from globalization remains
an entirely separate question, and it must be addressed as a further–and extremely
relevant–issue. There is extensive evidence that the global economy has brought
prosperity to many different areas of the globe. Pervasive poverty dominated the
world a few centuries ago; there were only a few rare pockets of affluence. In
overcoming that penury, extensive economic interrelations and modern technology
have been and remain influential. What has happened in Europe, America, Japan, and
East Asia has important messages for all other regions, and we cannot go very far into
understanding the nature of globalization today without first acknowledging the
positive fruits of global economic contacts.

Indeed, we cannot reverse the economic predicament of the poor across the world by
withholding from them the great advantages of contemporary technology, the well-
established efficiency of international trade and exchange, and the social as well as
economic merits of living in an open society. Rather, the main issue is how to make
good use of the remarkable benefits of economic intercourse and technological
progress in a way that pays adequate attention to the interests of the deprived and the
underdog. That is, I would argue, the constructive question that emerges from the so-
called antiglobalization movements.

Are the Poor Getting Poorer?

The principal challenge relates to inequality–international as well as intranational.
The troubling inequalities include disparities in affluence and also gross asymmetries
in political, social, and economic opportunities and power.

A crucial question concerns the sharing of the potential gains from globalization–
between rich and poor countries and among different groups within a country. It is not
sufficient to understand that the poor of the world need globalization as much as the
rich do; it is also important to make sure that they actually get what they need. This
may require extensive institutional reform, even as globalization is defended.

There is also a need for more clarity in formulating the distributional questions. For
example, it is often argued that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. But this
is by no means uniformly so, even though there are cases in which this has happened.
Much depends on the region or the group chosen and what indicators of economic
prosperity are used. But the attempt to base the castigation of economic globalization
on this rather thin ice produces a peculiarly fragile critique.

On the other side, the apologists of globalization point to their belief that the poor
who participate in trade and exchange are mostly getting richer. Ergo–the argument
runs–globalization is not unfair to the poor: they too benefit. If the central relevance
of this question is accepted, then the whole debate turns on determining which side is
correct in this empirical dispute. But is this the right battleground in the first place? I
would argue that it is not.

Global Justice and the Bargaining Problem

Even if the poor were to get just a little richer, this would not necessarily imply that
the poor were getting a fair share of the potentially vast benefits of global economic
interrelations. It is not adequate to ask whether international inequality is getting
marginally larger or smaller. In order to rebel against the appalling poverty and the
staggering inequalities that characterize the contemporary world–or to protest against
the unfair sharing of benefits of global cooperation–it is not necessary to show that
the massive inequality or distributional unfairness is also getting marginally larger.
This is a separate issue altogether.

When there are gains from cooperation, there can be many possible arrangements. As
the game theorist and mathematician John Nash discussed more than half a century
ago (in “The Bargaining Problem,” published in Econometrica in 1950, which was

cited, among othe r writings, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when Nash
was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics), the central issue in general is not
whether a particular arrangement is better for everyone than no cooperation at all
would be, but whether that is a fair division of the benefits. One cannot rebut the
criticism that a distributional arrangement is unfair simply by noting that all the
parties are better off than they would be in the absence of cooperation; the real
exercise is the choice between these alternatives.

An Analogy with the Family

By analogy, to argue that a particularly unequal and sexist family arrangement is
unfair, one does not have to show that women would have done comparatively better
had there been no families at all, but only that the sharing of the benefits is seriously
unequal in that particular arrangement. Before the issue of gender justice became an
explicitly recognized concern (as it has in recent decades), there were attempts to
dismiss the issue of unfair arrangements within the family by suggesting that women
did not need to live in families if they found the arrangements so unjust. It was also
argued that since women as well as men benefit from living in families, the existing
arrangements could not be unfair. But even when it is accepted that both men and
women may typically gain from living in a family, the question of distributional
fairness remains. Many different family arrangements–when compared with the
absence of any family system–would satisfy the condition of being beneficial to both
men and women. The real issue concerns how fairly benefits associated with these
respective arrangements are distributed.

Likewise, one cannot rebut the charge that the global system is unfair by showing that
even the poor gain something from global contacts and are not necessarily made
poorer. That answer may or may not be wrong, but the question certainly is. The
critical issue is not whether the poor are getting marginally poorer or richer. Nor is it
whether they are better off than they would be had they excluded themselves from
globalized interactions.

Again, the real issue is the distribution of globalization’s benefits. Indeed, this is why
many of the antiglobalization protesters, who seek a better deal for the underdogs of
the world economy, are not–contrary to their own rhetoric and to the views attributed
to them by others–really “antiglobalization.” It is also why there is no real
contradiction in the fact that the so-called antiglobalization protests have become
among the most globalized events in the contemporary world.

Altering Global Arrangements

However, can those less-well-off groups get a better deal from globalized economic
and social relations without dispensing with the market economy itself? They
certainly can. The use of the market economy is consistent with many different
ownership patterns, resource availabilities, social opportunities, and rules of operation
(such as patent laws and antitrust regulations). And depending on these conditions, the
market economy would generate different prices, terms of trade, income distribution,
and, more generally, diverse overall outcomes. The arrangements for social security
and other public interventions can make further modifications to the outcomes of the

market processes, and together they can yield varying levels of inequality and
poverty.

The central question is not whether to use the market economy. That shallow question
is easy to answer, because it is hard to achieve economic prosperity without making
extensive use of the opportunities of exchange and specialization that market relations
offer. Even though the operation of a given market economy can be significantly
defective, there is no way of dispensing with the institution of markets in general as a
powerful engine of economic progress.

But this recognition does not end the discussion about globalized market relations.
The market economy does not work by itself in global relations–indeed, it cannot
operate alone even within a given country. It is not only the case that a
marketinclusive system can generate very distinct results depending on various
enabling conditions (such as how physical resources are distributed, how human
resources are developed, what rules of business relations prevail, what social-security
arrangements are in place, and so on). These enabling conditions themselves depend
critically on economic, social, and political institutions that operate nationally and
globally.

The crucial role of the markets does not make the other institut ions insignificant, even
in terms of the results that the market economy can produce. As has been amply
established in empirical studies, market outcomes are massively influenced by public
policies in education, epidemiology, land reform, microcredit facilities, appropriate
legal protections, et cetera; and in each of these fields, there is work to be done
through public action that can radically alter the outcome of local and global
economic relations.

Institutions and Inequality

Globalization has much to offer; but even as we defend it, we must also, without any
contradiction, see the legitimacy of many questions that the antiglobalization
protesters ask. There may be a misdiagnosis about where the main problems lie (they
do not lie in globalization, as such), but the ethical and human concerns that yield
these questions call for serious reassessments of the adequacy of the national and
global institutional arrangements that characterize the contemporary world and shape
globalized economic and social relations.

Global capitalism is much more concerned with expanding the domain of market
relations than with, say, establishing democracy, expanding elementary education, or
enhancing the social opportunities of society’s underdogs. Since globalization of
markets is, on its own, a very inadequate approach to world prosperity, there is a need
to go beyond the priorities that find expression in the chosen focus of global
capitalism. As George Soros has pointed out, international business concerns often
have a strong preference for working in orderly and highly organized autocracies
rather than in activist and less-regimented democracies, and this can be a regressive
influence on equitable development. Further, multinational firms can exert their
influence on the priorities of public expenditure in less secure third-world countries
by giving preference to the safety and convenience of the managerial classes and of
privileged workers over the removal of widespread illiteracy, medical deprivation,

and other adversities of the poor. These possibilities do not, of course, impose any
insurmountable barrier to development, but it is important to make sure that the
surmountable barriers are actually surmounted.

Omissions and Commissions

The injustices that characterize the world are closely related to various omissions that
need to be addressed, particularly in institutional arrangements. I have tried to identify
some of the main problems in my book Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999).
Global policies have a role here in helping the development of national institutions
(for example, through defending democracy and supporting schooling and health
facilities), but there is also a need to re-examine the adequacy of global institutional
arrangements themselves. The distribution of the benefits in the global economy
depends, among other things, on a variety of global institutional arrangements,
including those for fair trade, medical initiatives, educational exchanges, facilities for
technological dissemination, ecological and environmental restraints, and fair
treatment of accumulated debts that were often incurred by irresponsible military
rulers of the past. In addition to the momentous omissions that need to be rectified,
there are also serious problems of commission that must be addressed for even
elementary global ethics. These include not only inefficient and inequitable trade
restrictions that repress exports from poor countries, but also patent laws that inhibit
the use of lifesaving drugs—for diseases like AIDS–and that give inadequate
incentive for medical research aimed at developing nonrepeating medicines (such as
vaccines). These issues have been much discussed on their own, but we must also
note how they fit into a general pattern of unhelpful arrangements that undermine
what globalization could offer.

Another–somewhat less discussed–global “commission” that causes intense misery
as well as lasting deprivation relates to the involvement of the world powers in
globalized arms trade. This is a field in which a new global initiative is urgently
required, going beyond the need–the very important need–to curb terrorism, on
which the focus is so heavily concentrated right now. Local wars and military
conflicts, which have very destructive consequences (not least on the economic
prospects of poor countries), draw not only on regional tensions but also on global
trade in arms and weapons. The world establishment is firmly entrenched in this
business: the Permanent Members of the Security Council of the United Natio ns were
together responsible for 81 percent of world arms exports from 1996 through 2000.
Indeed, the world leaders who express deep frustration at the “irresponsibility” of
antiglobalization protesters lead the countries that make the most money in this
terrible trade. The G-8 countries sold 87 percent of the total supply of arms exported
in the entire world. The U.S. share alone has just gone up to almost 50 percent of the
total sales in the world. Furthermore, as much as 68 percent of the American arms
exports went to developing countries.

The arms are used with bloody results–and with devastating effects on the economy,
the polity, and the society. In some ways, this is a continuation of the unhelpful role
of world powers in the genesis and flowering of political militarism in Africa from the
1960s to the 1980s, when the Cold War was fought over Africa. During these
decades, when military overlords–Mobuto Sese Seko or Jonas Savimbi or whoever–
busted social and political arrangements (and, ultimately, economic order as well) in

Africa, they could rely on support either from the United States and its allies or from
the Soviet Union, depending on their military alliances. The world powers bear an
awesome responsibility for helping in the subversion of democracy in Africa and for
all the far-reaching negative consequences of that subversion. The pursuit of arms
“pushing” gives them a continuing role in the escalation of military conflicts today–in
Africa and elsewhere. The U.S. refusal to agree to a joint crackdown even on illicit
sales of small arms (as proposed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan) illustrates the
difficulties involved.

Fair Sharing of Global Opportunities

To conclude, the confounding of globalization with Westernization is not only
ahistorical, it also distracts attention from the many potential benefits of global
integration. Globalization is a historical process that has offered an abundance of
opportunities and rewards in the past and continues to do so today. The very existence
of potentially large benefits makes the question of fairness in sharing the benefits of
globalization so critically important.

The central issue of contention is not globalization itself, nor is it the use of the
market as an institution, but the inequity in the overall balance of institutional
arrangements–which produces very unequal sharing of the benefits of globalization.
The question is not just whether the poor, too, gain something from globalization, but
whether they get a fair share and a fair opportunity. There is an urgent need for
reforming institutional arrangements–in addition to national ones–in order to
overcome both the errors of omission and those of commission that tend to give the
poor across the world such limited opportunities. Globalization deserves a reasoned
defense, but it also needs reform.

Preferred Citation: Amartya Sen, “How to Judge Globalism,” The American Prospect
vol. 13 no. 1, January 1, 2002

Greg Satell Contributor

6/08/2013 @ 8:11AM

How Technology Is Changing The Way
Organizations Learn

People used to be valued for knowing a trade. Then came the industrial revolution and
those skills became devalued. Machines took over physical labor and most people
either did simple, repetitive tasks or managed those who did.

By the late 20th century, a knowledge economy began to take hold. Workers became
valued not for their labor, but for specialized knowledge, much of which was inscrutable
to their superiors. Successful enterprises became learning organizations.

Now, we are entering a new industrial revolution and machines are starting to take over
cognitive tasks as well. Therefore, much like in the first industrial revolution, the role of
humans is again being rapidly redefined. Organizations will have to change the way that
they learn and managers’ primary task will be to design the curricula.

First Principles vs. Experience
Knowledge, strangely enough, has been a source of fierce debate for over two thousand years, beginning with a
disagreement between Plato and his most famous student, Aristotle.

Plato believed in ideal forms. To him, true knowledge consisted of familiarity with those forms and virtue (which, in a
modern terms would have been closer to ability than to morality) was a matter of actualizing those forms in everyday
life. Plato would have felt comfortable as a factory manager whose workers carried out instructions to the tee.

Aristotle, on the other hand, believed in empirical knowledge, which you gain from experience. In contrast to Plato,
we can imagine Aristotle as a Six Sigma black belt, constantly analyzing data in order to come up with a better way
of doing things.

Both methods, the indoctrination of principles and the collection of data have played a role in learning organizations.
The difference now is that much of the learning is being taken over by machines.

How Machines Are Learning To Take Over
Not so long ago, we depended on human knowledge for many things, such as setting up travel itineraries, trading
financial instruments and buying media that are highly automated today. As we progress, new areas, such as
making medical diagnoses, legal discovery and even creative output are becoming mediated by computers.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the algorithms blend Platonic and Aristotelian approaches just like humans do. Initially,
their thinking is driven by time honored principles supplied by human experts (sometimes called “God parameters”).
Then, as more information comes in, the computer begins to learn from its own mistakes, getting better and better at
its task.

This process continues at accelerating speeds. Much like the rise of the knowledge economy empowered
knowledge workers, because they had expertise that their bosses didn’t, computers are now coming up with
answers that knowledge workers themselves can’t understand. That will prove incredibly disruptive in the years to
come.

It also presents a particularly thorny problem: How can organizations empower employees whose skills are being
outsourced to the cloud?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization

The New Industrial Revolution

http://www.digitaltonto.com/2013/how-the-machines-are-learning-to-take-over/

How The Machines Are Learning To Take Over

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism

Creative Intelligence

The New, New Economy of Accelerating Returns

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/02/will_computers_eventually_make_scientific_discoveries_we_can_t_comprehend.2.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/02/will_computers_eventually_make_scientific_discoveries_we_can_t_comprehend.2.html

http://www.forbes.com/

Consequences of An Algorithmic Age
Just as the first industrial revolution transformed business and society, this new algorithmic age will bring not just
efficiency, but significant, cultural changes. While the future is uncertain, some of the shifts are already becoming
apparent:

Bayesian Strategy: The knowledge economy coincided with the rising influence of business strategists. Highly
trained executives would analyze business conditions and devise intricate plans for the future. Managerial
performance, therefore, was widely evaluated as a function of their ability to “execute the plan.”

However, good strategy is becoming less visionary and more Bayesian. Strategic plans will play a similar role to
“God parameters” that will be honed through an evolutionary process of simulation and feedback. Strategists, to a
great extent, will become hackers rather than planners.

Brands as Open API’s: One little noted consequence of the knowledge economy is the rise of intangible value,
which often far exceeds tangible assets in corporations. Brands, therefore, became tightly controlled assets that
were nurtured and protected.

That’s beginning to change as brands are becoming platforms for collaboration rather than assets to be leveraged.
Marketers who used to jealously guard their brands are now aggressively courting outside developers with
Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and Software Development Kits (SDK’s). Our economy is increasingly
becoming a semantic economy.

Firms ranging from Microsoft to Nike to The New York Times have also created accelerator programs, where young
companies get financial, managerial and technical support to come up with new innovations (and potentially,
enhance the business of their benefactors).

The Human Touch: While much of the discussion about the rising tide of technology focuses on cognitive skills,
Richard Florida argues that social skills will be just as important. Many of the fastest growing professions are those
which emphasize personal contact.

As computers take over more of the work, the role of humans will increasingly focus on caring for other humans.

Flying By Wire
Pilots don’t fly planes anymore, not really. Whereas they used to have direct control over the aircraft, now they fly by
wire. Today, their instruments connect not to the airplane’s mechanism, but to computers which carry out their
commands, modulated by the collective intelligence gained from millions of similar flights.

In essense, pilots perform three roles: they direct intent (where to go, how fast, when to change course), manage
knowledge and (rarely) take over during emergencies. Professionals in other industries will have to learn to perform
their jobs in a similar way.

The function of organizations in the industrial age was to direct work. The function of organizations in the algorithmic
age will be to focus passion and purpose.

Managers, rather than focusing on building skills to recognize patterns and take action, will need to focus on
designing the curricula, to direct which patterns computers should focus on learning and to what ends their actions
should serve.

Bayesian Strategy

The Simulation Economy

The Hacker Way

7 Principles of Marketing

The Brand’s New Open Architecture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_kit

The Semantic Economy

http://www.15inno.com/2013/03/21/kinect-2/

http://nikeinc.com/news/nike-accelerator-companies-announced

http://www.nytimes.com/timespace/

http://chronicle.com/article/Robots-Arent-the-Problem-/138007/

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_103.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire

The Evolution of Intelligence

The Passion Economy

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class

By DAVID H. AUTOR AND DAVID DORN

August 24, 2013 2:35 pm

Robot arms welded a vehicle on the assembly line at a General Motors plant in Lansing, Mich., in 2010.Credit Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the productivity of American workers — those

lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs than

before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion

of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.

This job drought has spurred pundits to wonder whether a profound employment sickness has overtaken us.

And from there, it’s only a short leap to ask whether that illness isn’t productivity itself. Have we mechanized

and computerized ourselves into obsolescence?

Are we in danger of losing the “race against the machine,” as the M.I.T. scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew

McAfee argue in a recent book? Are we becoming enslaved to our “robot overlords,” as the journalist Kevin

Drum warned in Mother Jones? Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists

Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year? Have we reached “the end of labor,” as

Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/david-h-autor-and-david-dorn/

http://digital.mit.edu/erik/

http://andrewmcafee.org/

http://andrewmcafee.org/

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18629

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end-of-labor-how-to-protect-workers-from-the-rise-of-robots/267135/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?module=BlogMain&action=Click&region=Header&pgtype=Blogs&version=Blog%20Post&contentCollection=Opinion

Of course, anxiety, and even hysteria, about the adverse effects of technological change on employment have a

venerable history. In the early 19th century a group of English textile artisans calling themselves the Luddites

staged a machine-trashing rebellion. Their brashness earned them a place (rarely positive) in the lexicon, but

they had legitimate reasons for concern.

Economists have historically rejected what we call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the supposition that an increase

in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While

intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false. In 1900, for example, 41 percent of the United States work

force was in agriculture. By 2000, that share had fallen to 2 percent, after the Green Revolution transformed

crop yields. But the employment-to-population ratio rose over the 20th century as women moved from home to

market, and the unemployment rate fluctuated cyclically, with no long-term increase.

Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the

gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise

national income and increase the overall demand for labor. In 1900, no one could foresee that a century later,

health care, finance, information technology, consumer electronics, hospitality, leisure and entertainment would

employ far more workers than agriculture. Of course, as societies grow more prosperous, citizens often choose

to work shorter days, take longer vacations and retire earlier — but that too is progress.

So if technological advances don’t threaten employment, does that mean workers have nothing to fear from

“smart machines”? Actually, no — and here’s where the Luddites had a point. Although many 19th-century

Britons benefited from the introduction of newer and better automated looms — unskilled laborers were hired

as loom operators, and a growing middle class could now afford mass-produced fabrics — it’s unlikely that

skilled textile workers benefited on the whole.

Fast-forward to the present. The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created

enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.

These rapid advances — which confront us daily as we check in at airports, order books online, pay bills on our

banks’ Web sites or consult our smartphones for driving directions — have reawakened fears that workers will

be displaced by machinery. Will this time be different?

A starting point for discussion is the observation that although computers are ubiquitous, they cannot do

everything. A computer’s ability to accomplish a task quickly and cheaply depends upon a human

programmer’s ability to write procedures or rules that direct the machine to take the correct steps at each

contingency. Computers excel at “routine” tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information,

or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in

middle-skill jobs like bookkeeping, clerical work and repetitive production and quality-assurance jobs.

Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it has boosted demand for workers who

perform “nonroutine” tasks that complement the automated activities. Those tasks happen to lie on opposite

ends of the occupational skill distribution.

At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity. These

tasks are characteristic of professional, managerial, technical and creative occupations, like law, medicine,

science, engineering, advertising and design. People in these jobs typically have high levels of education and

analytical capability, and they benefit from computers that facilitate the transmission, organization and

processing of information.

On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language

recognition, and in-person interaction. Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel

room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers. But they are straightforward for humans,

requiring primarily innate abilities like dexterity, sightedness and language recognition, as well as modest

training. These workers can’t be replaced by robots, but their skills are not scarce, so they usually make low

wages.

Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the

highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined. Surprisingly, overall employment

rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization. Rather, as employment

in routine jobs has ebbed, employment has risen both in high-wage managerial, professional and technical

occupations and in low-wage, in-person service occupations.

So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather degrading the quality of jobs for a significant

subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of

the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging. Workers without college education

therefore concentrate in manual task-intensive jobs — like food services, cleaning and security — which are

numerous but offer low wages, precarious job security and few prospects for upward mobility. This bifurcation

of job opportunities has contributed to the historic rise in income inequality.

HOW can we help workers ride the wave of technological change rather than be swamped by it? One common

recommendation is that citizens should invest more in their education. Spurred by growing demand for workers

performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable

price tag, higher education has perhaps never been a better investment. But it is far from a comprehensive

solution to our labor market problems. Not all high school graduates — let alone displaced mid- and late-career

workers — are academically or temperamentally prepared to pursue a four-year college degree. Only 40 percent

of Americans enroll in a four-year college after graduating from high school, and more than 30 percent of those

who enroll do not complete the degree within eight years.

The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely.

While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take

advantage of human flexibility. To take one prominent example, medical paraprofessional jobs — radiology

technician, phlebotomist, nurse technician — are a rapidly growing category of relatively well-paid, middle-

skill occupations. While these paraprofessions do not typically require a four-year college degree, they do

demand some postsecondary vocational training.

These middle-skill jobs will persist, and potentially grow, because they involve tasks that cannot readily be

unbundled without a substantial drop in quality. Consider, for example, the frustration of calling a software firm

for technical support, only to discover that the technician knows nothing more than the standard answers shown

on his or her computer screen — that is, the technician is a mouthpiece reading from a script, not a problem-

solver. This is not generally a productive form of work organization because it fails to harness the

complementarities between technical and interpersonal skills. Simply put, the quality of a service within any

occupation will improve when a worker combines routine (technical) and nonroutine (flexible) tasks.

Following this logic, we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will combine routine technical tasks with

abstract and manual tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction,

adaptability and problem-solving. Along with medical paraprofessionals, this category includes numerous jobs

for people in the skilled trades and repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-

conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service representatives; and even clerical workers

who are required to do more than type and file. Indeed, even as formerly middle-skill occupations are being

“deskilled,” or stripped of their routine technical tasks (brokering stocks, for example), other formerly high-end

occupations are becoming accessible to workers with less esoteric technical mastery (for example, the work of

the nurse practitioner, who increasingly diagnoses illness and prescribes drugs in lieu of a physician). Lawrence

F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the foundational skills of

a high school education with specific vocational skills the “new artisans.”

The outlook for workers who haven’t finished college is uncertain, but not devoid of hope. There will be job

opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of

the past. Rather, we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the “new artisans”: licensed

practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen

designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support

technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal

trainers, coaches and guides. These workers will adeptly combine technical skills with interpersonal interaction,

flexibility and adaptability to offer services that are uniquely human.

David H. Autor is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David Dorn is an

assistant professor of economics at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid.