Links for 28/7/2017

Posted on by

  1. In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Marketers. Tyler Cowen talking sense about robotics. The impact won’t be devastating in the way doomsayers think. But some of the stuff humans will be doing (like marketing) may not be all that rewarding either. Covers some of the same ground as David Autor’s article.

  2. The Agony and the Anxiety of The New York Times. Vanity Fair piece evincing a certain amount of glee at the transition-pains of the New York Times as it loses many of its backroom editors and squeezes office space to reduce costs. But the paper is also hiring 100 more journalists and having the time of its life. Trump is a gift that now keeps on giving.

  3. Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism. Thoughtful essay by the leader of the Scottish Conservatives. I don’t think any member of the current Cabinet could have written anything half as interesting. Reminded me of David Sainsbury’s book Progressive Capitalism: How To Achieve Economic Growth, Liberty and Social Justice.

  4. Emily Bell and Taylor Owen, The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley reengineered journalism. Useful report on how Tech platforms have become publishers in a short space of time, leaving news organisations confused about their own future. That’s if they have one. It was always a crazy idea to think that putting your stuff on Facebook would give you a long-term future as a publisher. Think of it as going for a swim with a crocodile.

Quote of the Day

Posted on by

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands”.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

If at first you don’t succeed…

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

There were just two problems with Glass. The first is that it made you look like a dork. Although Google teamed up with the company that made Ray-Bans, among other things, if you were wearing Glass then you became the contemporary version of those 1950s engineers who always had several pens and a propelling pencil in their top jacket pockets. The second problem was the killer one: Glass made everyone around you feel uneasy. They thought the technology was creepy, intrusive and privacy-destroying. Bouncers wouldn’t let wearers – whom they called “Glassholes” – into clubs. The maître d’ would discover that the table you thought you had booked was suddenly unavailable. And so on.

In the end, Google bit the bullet and withdrew the product in January 2015. Privacy advocates and fashionistas alike cheered. Technology had been put in its place. But if, like this columnist, you believe that technology has the potential to improve human lives, then your feelings were mixed…

Read on

Links for 19/7/2017

Posted on by

  1. The Digital Tow-bar. Lovely idea by Quentin Stafford-Fraser. A realistic application for self-driving vehicles.

  2. Roger Sollenberger: How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans. Or how SEO meets politics.

  3. Andrew Rawnsley: Theresa May could still have a future – as a human sponge. Nice historical parallel: William Petty (2nd Earl of Shelburne) was the Prime Minister who had to mop up after Lord North lost the American colonies. Petty had to negotiate with the victors. Theresa May reminds Rawnsley of the hapless Petty. Me too.

  4. Tom Russell: How to talk to your teen about colluding with Russia. Useful advice for a naive president.

Links for 17/7/2017

Posted on by

  1. As a Guru, Ayn Rand May Have Limits. Ask Travis Kalanick. The obsession of Silicon Valley types (and Donald Trump’s crowd) with Rand passeth all understanding.

  2. David Brooks: Moral Vacuum in the House of Trump. “It took a few generations of the House of Trump to produce Donald Jr.”

  3. New law would force Facebook and Google to give police access to encrypted messages. The Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has whatsApp and other encrypted messaging systems in his sights. It’s insisting that the companies have to give it warranted access. But how? After all, WhatsApp doesn’t have the keys. Charles Arthur has an interesting idea. “This isn’t totally absurd”, he writes. “The clue is in Turnbull’s quote about “updates on your phone” and Brandis’s “obligation.. to provide appropriate assistance”. What’s likely to happen is that targeted individuals will receive SIM updates which let the authorities spy on them. Simple as that. If you read the above (and the story) in that light, it becomes feasible – sensible, even. If you think they want to have access to everyone’s encrypted messages all the time, you’re overthinking it.”

  4. Scholars Cry Foul at Their Inclusion on List of Academics Paid by Google. Looks as though that scoop by an advocacy group may be unravelling.

Automation is more about tasks than ‘jobs’

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

We are currently going through one of those periodic phases of “automation anxiety” when we become convinced that the robots are coming for our jobs. These fears are routinely pooh-poohed by historians and economists. The historians point out that machines have been taking away jobs since the days of Elizabeth I – who refused to grant William Lee a patent on his stocking frame on the grounds that it would take work away from those who knitted by hand. And while the economists concede that machines do indeed destroy some jobs, they point out that the increased productivity that they enable has generally created more new jobs (and industries) than they displaced.

Faced with this professional scepticism, tech evangelists and doom-mongers fall back on the same generic responses: that historical scepticism is based on the complacent assumption that the past is a reliable guide to the future; and that “this time is different”. And whereas in the past it was lower-skilled work that was displaced, the jobs that will be lost in the coming wave of smart machines are ones that we traditionally regard as “white-collar” or middle-class. And that would be a very big deal, because if there’s no middle class the prospects for the survival of democracy are poor.

What’s striking about this fruitless, ongoing debate is how few participants seem to be interested in the work that people actually do…

Read on

Links for 13/7/2017

Posted on by

  1. David Runciman: How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous. Doubts about the science are being replaced by doubts about the motives of scientists and their political supporters. Once this kind of cynicism takes hold, is there any hope for the truth?

  2. APnews: Survey: 4 in 10 US adults have experienced online harassment. This is a summary of a sobering PEW Report on online harassment.

  3. WSJ: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign. Article (sadly, behind a paywall) claims that Google paid anywhere from $5,000 to $400,000 for research supporting business practices that face regulatory scrutiny; a ‘wish list’ of topics. Other tech firms doubtless do the same.

  4. Frank Pasquale: When antitrust becomes pro-trust: the digital deformation of US Competition policy. As bracing as you’d expect from Frank. Great paper.

Can neoliberals learn from history?

Posted on by

Just came on this.

“I can’t help thinking of the Venetian republic in their last half-century. Like us, they had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident. They had acquired immense political skill, just as we have. A good many of them were tough-minded, realistic, patriotic men. They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had been crystallised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.”

The Two Cultures, 1959.

Links for 12/7/2017

Posted on by

  1. Peter Turchin: What Economics Models Really Say. A Review of Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik (Norton, 2015). Really useful review — by a mathematical biologist!

  2. David Edgerton on ‘Digital Transformation’. Guaranteed to infuriate tech determinists. 20 minutes, but worth it. Make some coffee first.

  3. What Did North Korea’s Missile Test Really Change? – The Atlantic. Useful reminder that the people most at risk from Kim Jong Un are not Americans, but South Koreans.

  4. Vili Lehdonvirta: The online gig economy grew 26% over the past year. Useful empirical research. And the gig economy isn’t just about Deliveroo, btw.