Pinboard (jerryking)
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recent bookmarks from jerrykingThe Economic Impact of AI2023-04-03T17:38:44+00:00
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/45120795/goldfarb-the-disruptive-economics-of-ai?tab=transcript
jerrykingartificial_intelligence Blockbuster books ChatGPT decision_making GPS information_gaps lag_time machine_learning orphan_drugs personalization podcasts predictions probabilities Rotman rules-based science_fiction skeuomorphs steam_engine Thomas_Edison up-skill Verafin Winner's_Waste workflow Avi_Goldfarb point_solutions systemic_solutions economic_impact Colossushttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:121a19d3493d/Letter: Harking back to the good old days of productivity2022-11-11T17:34:00+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/ec0a9dbe-dd4c-413a-be14-2737ae9a71ce
jerryking>complex task<< than laying the first railway lines.
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During the period of intense productivity mentioned in the letter, Britain was extremely rich through pillaging much of the rest of the world. This made it somewhat easier to build expensive infrastructure and fund R&D at home.
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Much of the infrastructure was built with Irish labour - cheap labour driven to England by poverty and starvation. Also the capital employed didn’t just magic itself into being - sugar / slavery and exploitation of India were significant factors. It takes more than just engineers to get things built.
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Ultimately, a favourable window of time,[i.e. = "contingency"/"luck"/"windows of opportunity"] not a genie that can be summoned by a state.
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]]>Crossrail engineering epidemics history letters_to_the_editor London national_initiatives productivity shipbuilding tunnels United_Kingdom Victorian warfare Westminster steam_engine industrial_age industrial_revolution railways contingency luck windows_of_opportunity complex_taskshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4ed0a2966ac6/Wealth Is Knowledge - WSJ2022-02-07T02:52:42+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wealth-is-knowledge-information-economics-industry-computers-george-gilder-capitalism-musk-zuckerberg-11644175297?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s
jerrykingAndy_Kessler capitalism George_Gilder productivity wealth_creation Industrial_Revolution societal_wealth steam_engine time_is_your_most_valuable_asset productivity_payoffshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:eee0b9e7138b/Tim Harford: can the pandemic help us fix our technology problem?2020-06-13T16:15:20+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/70cace2c-1bec-4c02-a23c-9d55884b21ac
jerryking>history of technology<< teach us about the pandemic?....
** Get the incentives right
In 1795, the French government, under Napoleon Bonaparte, offered a prize of 12,000 francs for inventing a method of preserving food.[i.e. = "food preservation"].....innovation prizes [i.e. = "bounties"] , are a policy tool that have waxed and waned over the years. The most famous was the 1714 Longitude Prize, for solving the problem of how far east or west a ship was. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the RSA, also awarded prizes on a frequent basis, often for safety measures that were regarded as unprofitable but socially valuable. Anton Howes, author of Arts and Minds, a history of the RSA, reckons that the society awarded more than 2,000 innovation prizes between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s. Some were “bounties”, ad hoc recognition for good ideas; many, however, were classic innovation prizes like that awarded to Appert, which pose an important problem and promise to reward the person who solves it.......Nowadays such prizes are out of fashion. Governments tend to favour a combination of direct support for researchers and the award of an intellectual monopoly, in the form of a patent, to those who develop original ideas........ a group of the world’s leading economists believes that if we are to maximise the chances of producing that vital coronavirus vaccine at the speed and scale that is required, we need to bring innovation prizes back in a big way.......The problem is that most vaccine research programmes do not produce successful vaccines, and so companies — understandably — try to keep a lid on their spending until one is proven to work......“Companies that have the skill to be able to do it are not going to just sit around and have a warm facility, ready to go for when you need it,”
** Don’t overlook what seems simple
in 1945, Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the USSR, received a large, hand-carved ceremonial seal of the United States of America as as a gift-- charming gesture of friendship. It hid a listening device which went undetected for years because the device was so simple, as to have proved almost undetectable......Inside it was little more than an antenna attached to a cavity with a silver diaphragm over it, serving as a microphone..... It was activated by radio waves beamed at the US embassy by the Soviets, at which point it would broadcast back, using the energy of the incoming signal. Switch off that signal, and it would go silent....The US agents who examined the Thing for bugs did not understand its potential to do them harm. It seemed too simple, too primitive, to matter. And I worry that we often make the same mistake. When we think about technology, we think of the flashy, sophisticated stuff. We overlook the cheap and the simple. **We celebrate the printing press that produced the Gutenberg Bibles, but not the paper that many of those Bibles were printed on.** Alongside paper and the RFID tag, place the brick, the postage stamp and, for that matter, the humble tin can: inventions that are transformative not because they are complicated but because they are simple.......We should remember the same lesson when it comes to the innovations that fuel public health. The simplest technologies — such as soap and gloves, and, it seems increasingly likely, cloth masks — have proved invaluable, and are much-missed when in short supply... it is too easy to dismiss the potential of truly cheap and simple testing. ......Highly sophisticated is good, but being cheap has a sophistication of its own......Contact tracing is another simple but vital approach......Then there are the everyday logistical miracles made possible by other simple inventions, the barcode and the shipping container. Nobody cares about logistics until things go wrong...
** Manufacturing matters too
There is more to innovation than a good idea. The food-preserving “Appertisation” technology did not stay in France for long — it migrated across the Channel to seek London’s entrepreneurialism and venture capital, allowing production to scale up. (This was a time when the British were, evidently, not too proud to borrow a good idea from the French.) ......Ideas matter, but factories matter too.... if your life depends on a letter being delivered on time, send multiple copies of the letter **by as many methods as you can find**.[i.e.= "diversity of approaches"/"multiple approaches"].
** Disruption can help.
Consider the history of electrification [i.e. = "electric power"] in American factories. In the 1890s, the potential for electricity seemed clear. Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan independently invented usable lightbulbs in the late 1870s. In 1881, Edison built electricity-generating stations at Pearl Street in Manhattan and Holborn in London. Things moved quickly: within a year, he was selling electricity as a commodity; a year later, the first electric motors were used to drive manufacturing machinery. Yet by 1900, less than 5 % of mechanical drive power in US factories was coming from electric motors. Most factories were still in the age of steam. This was because when manufacturers replaced large steam engines with large electric motors [i.e. = "point solutions"] , they were disappointed with the results.....it wasn’t enough merely to replace steam engines with electric motors. The capabilities of those new motors could only be used fully if the factories were redesigned [i.e. = there was a ">>lag time<<" between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon via ">>process innovation<<" in a >>workflow<< >>reorganization<< as a >>"systemic_solution"<<].....the redesign was catalyzed by a crisis.
After 1914, workers became more expensive thanks to a series of new laws that limited immigration into the US from a war-torn Europe. Manufacturing wages soared and hiring workers became more about quality, and less about quantity. It was worth investing in training — and better trained workers were better placed to use the autonomy that electricity gave them. The recruitment problem sparked by the immigration restrictions helped to spark new thinking about the design of the American factory floor.....We have had email, internet and affordable computers for years — and more recently, video-conferencing. Yet until the crisis hit, we had been slow to explore online education, virtual meetings or telemedicine. 3D printing and other agile manufacturing techniques have moved from being curiosities to life-saving ways to meet the new demand for medical equipment. We are quickly learning new ways to work from a distance because suddenly we have had no choice. And we are learning about resilience.
There is no guarantee that a crisis always brings >>fresh ideas<<; sometimes a >>catastrophe<< is just a catastrophe. Still, there is no shortage of examples for when necessity proved the mother of invention, sometimes many times over......One crisis may lead to many creative responses. The same may be true of this pandemic. Disruptions — even calamitous ones — have a way of bulldozing vested interests and tearing up cosy assumptions, jolting people and organisations out of the status quo. It is just possible that future generations will point to 2020 as the year the innovation slowdown ended.
]]>bounties contact_tracing contests COVID-19 crisis disruption entrenched_interests history ideas incentives innovation inventions manufacturers multiple_targets Napoleon_Bonaparte pandemics patents prizes problem_solving productivity simplicity technology vaccines process_innovation Tim_Harford online_education telemedicine innovation_vacuums steam_engine listening_devices cheap_revolution lag_time electric_power bar_codes shipping_containers food_preservation reorganizations point_solutions systemic_solutions workflow Johan_Gutenberg history_of_technology diversity_of_approaches multiple_approaches catastrophes fresh_ideashttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:acf7b034fabd/An equation to ensure America survives the age of AI2019-04-11T14:36:43+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/96c6f690-5a17-11e9-840c-530737425559
jerryking>low-skilled<< suffer declining pay and hours. McKinsey estimates that 60 per cent of occupations are at risk of partial or total >>automation<<. Workers spy disaster. Whether the middle class shrinks in the age of >>artificial intelligence<< depends less on >>machine learning<< than on human learning. Historical precedents help, especially...... the Hamilton-Mann-Perkins equation: innovation plus education, plus a social safety net, equals the sum of prosperity.
(1) Alexander Hamilton.
US founding father Alexander Hamilton was first to understand the relationship between: (a) the US's founding coincided with the industrial revolution and the need to grapple with technological disruption (In 1776, James Watts sold his first steam engine when the ink was still wet on the Declaration of Independence)-- Steam remade the world economically; and (b), America’s decolonisation remade the world politically......Hamilton believed that Fledgling countries needed robust economies. New technologies gave them an edge. Hamilton noted that England owed its progress to the mechanization of textile production.......Thomas Jefferson,on the other hand, argued that the US should remain pastoral: a free, virtuous nation exchanged raw materials for foreign goods. Farmers were “the chosen people”; factories promoted dependence and vice.....Hamilton disagreed. He thought colonies shouldn’t overpay foreigners for things they could produce themselves. Government should incentivise innovation, said his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures. Otherwise citizens would resist change even when jobs ceased to provide sufficient income, deterred from making a “spontaneous transition to new pursuits”(i.e. "change signals").......the U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to grant patents to anyone with a qualified application. America became a nation of tinkerers...Cyrus McCormick, son of a farmer, patented a mechanical reaper in 1834 that reduced the hands needed in farming. The US soared to become the world’s largest economy by 1890. Hamilton’s constant: nurture innovation.
(2) Horace Mann
America’s success gave rise to the idea that a free country needed free schools. The reformer Horace Mann, who never had more than six weeks of schooling in a year, started the Common School Movement, calling public schools “the greatest discovery made by man”.....Grammar schools spread across the US between the 1830s and 1880s. Reading, writing and arithmetic were the tools for success in industrialising economies.[i.e. = "industrial age"] Towns offered children a no-cost education.......Americans achieved the world’s highest per capita income just as they became the world’s best-educated people. Mann’s constant: prioritise education.
(3) Frances Perkins
Jefferson was correct that industrial economies made people more interdependent. By 1920, more Americans lived in towns earning wages than on farms growing their own food. When the Great Depression drove unemployment to 25 per cent, the state took a third role....FDR recruited Frances Perkins, the longest serving labour secretary in US history, to rescue workers. Perkins led campaigns that established a minimum wage and maximum workweek. Most importantly, she chaired the committee that wrote the 1935 Social Security Act, creating a federal pension system and state unemployment insurance. Her achievements did not end the depression, but helped democracy weather it. Perkins’s constant: knit a safety net.
The world has ridden three swells of industrialisation occasioned by the harnessing of steam, electricity and computers. The next wave, brought to us by AI, towers over us. History shows that innovation, education and safety nets point the ship of state into the wave.
Progress is a variable. Hamilton, Mann and Perkins would each urge us to mind the constants in the historical equation.
]]>adaptability Alexander_Hamilton artificial_intelligence automation disruption downward_mobility education Founding_Fathers gig_economy historical_precedents hollowing_out Industrial_Revolution innovation James_Watts job_destruction job_displacement job_loss life_long_learning low-skilled McKinsey middle_class priorities public_schools safety_nets slavery Thomas_Jefferson steam_engine constitutions Frances_Perkins Horace_Mann public_education FDR productivity the_Great_Depression tinkerers innovation_policies change_signals incentives industrial_age Social_Security machine_learninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bbe84e71aa82/The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World2018-08-19T14:57:00+00:00
https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Created-Modern/dp/0062652559
jerrykingengineering history Industrial_Revolution books United_Kingdom inventors patent_law patents inventions ideas industrial_age precision Simon_Winchester steam_engine James_Wattshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:493be241dfd0/We Survived Spreadsheets, and We’ll Survive AI2017-08-03T08:12:29+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wesurvived-spreadsheets-and-well-survive-ai-1501688765
jerryking>Avi Goldfarb<<, who teach at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “Prediction about uncertain states of the world is an input into decision making,” they wrote in a recent paper. .....Unlike spreadsheets, machine learning doesn’t yield exact answers. But it reduces the uncertainty around different risks. For example, AI makes mammograms more accurate, the authors note, so doctors can better judge when to conduct invasive biopsies. That makes the doctor’s judgment more valuable......Machine learning is statistics on steroids: It uses powerful algorithms and computers to analyze far more inputs, such as the millions of pixels in a digital picture, and not just numbers but images and sounds. It turns combinations of variables into yet more variables, until it maximizes its success on questions such as “is this a picture of a dog” or at tasks such as “persuade the viewer to click on this link.”.....Yet as AI gets cheaper, so its potential applications will grow. Just as better weather forecasting makes us more willing to go out without an umbrella, Mr. Manzi says, AI emboldens companies to test more products, strategies and hunches: “Theories become lightweight and disposable. [i.e. = "winner's waste"]. ”They need people who know how to use it, and how to act on the results.]]>artificial_intelligence Greg_Ip spreadsheets machine_learning predictions paradoxes Jim_Manzi experimentation testing massive_data_sets judgment uncertainty economists algorithms MIT Gilder's_Law speed operational_tempo Jevons_paradox decision_making steam_engine William_Jevons winner's_waste Avi_Goldfarbhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8792f247ce2d/Take the Subway - NYTimes.com2012-03-05T08:00:01+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/friedman-take-the-subway.html?src=me&ref=general
jerryking>resource efficiency<< — because rising populations, with growing appetites, will lead to both increasing scarcity of resources and dangerously high pollution, waste and climate change.
This will force us to decouple consumption from economic growth.
Amory Lovins, the physicist who is chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, begins in his new book, “Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era,” which is summarized in the current Foreign Affairs. The Rocky Mountain Institute and its business collaborators show how private enterprise — motivated by profit, supported by smart policy — can lead America off both oil and coal by 2050, saving $5 trillion, through innovation emphasizing design and strategy.
“You don’t have to believe in climate change to solve it,” says Lovins. “Everything we do to raise energy efficiency will make money, improve security and health, and stabilize climate.” ]]>Tom_Friedman climate_change Moscow books Amory_Lovins sustainability pollution scarcity constraints waste resource_efficiency energy_efficiency physicists steam_engine water_power economic_growth electric_power energy electrification mass_productionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5d240380090e/Book Review - The Most Powerful Idea In the World - William Rosen - NYTimes.com2010-12-30T07:25:36+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Schwartz-t.html
jerrykingbook_reviews Industrial_Revolution steam_engine James_Wattshttps://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4e76561d30fd/The Most Powerful Idea in the World2010-12-30T05:24:37+00:00
http://www.mostpowerfulidea.com/
jerrykingbook_reviews Industrial_Revolution United_Kingdom inventors patent_law patents books ideas inventions industrial_age steam_engine James_Watts 18th_centuryhttps://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1dc1c303e424/Thinkers And Tinkerers2010-07-05T12:23:44+00:00
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/thinkers-and-tinkerers
jerryking>Industrial Revolution<< is the >>inflection point<< of >>economic history>>. During all the millennia before that revolution, incomes were static and humans were poor—often hungry, inadequately clothed, ill-housed. But somehow, in the 2.5 centuries since humanity learned to mass produce, a large number of ordinary people have acquired more material comfort than even the wealthiest magnates of the pre-industrial era....Joel Mokyr (The Lever of Riches) a distinguished economic historian, explores England’s early industrial age. Mokyr's overarching thesis is about the power of ideas. His grand idea is that the practical, avaricious inventors of the industrial revolution owed much to the academic, but worldly, philosophers of the Enlightenment.
]]>Industrial_Revolution history book_reviews the_Enlightenment Joel_Mokyr industrial_age precision ideas inventors books mass_production United_Kingdom steam_engine tinkerers inflection_points economic_history England financial_history James_Wattshttps://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c729a7abadae/