{"id":288,"date":"2014-11-02T07:11:35","date_gmt":"2014-11-02T15:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/?p=288"},"modified":"2014-11-02T22:50:25","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T06:50:25","slug":"288","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/288\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Gates views on the economic condition almost miss larger social changes on the horizon"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Click the title to see a follow-up comment to this post)<\/p>\n

“Thomas Piketty\u2019s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/em> caused a stir this summer. It\u2019s a major contribution to the study of inequality\u2014but it has some important flaws too. \u00a0<\/a><\/span>http:\/\/www.gatesnotes.com\/Books\/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capital-in-21st-Century-Review<\/a>\u00a0” – Bill Gates<\/p>\n

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\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

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I’ll probably never read this book. \u00a0Bill Gates review is adequate for my level of economic understanding. \u00a0It is an interesting topic, just outside of my\u00a0current scope of reading which tends more toward fantasy and science fiction.
\nBut, in his review and commentary on inequality, Bill Gates almost inadvertently mentions a social issue that I suspect can disrupt society more than any class or philosophical difference to date. \u00a0He briefly mentions the impact of technology on current income tax models.<\/p>\n

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“I agree that taxation should shift away from taxing labor…It will make even less sense in the\u00a0coming years, as robots and other forms of automation come to perform more and more of\u00a0the skills that human laborers do today.”<\/p>\n

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Antiquated federal and state funding models are just one, albeit broad, result of automation. \u00a0My evolving view is that technology advances, in particular, \u00a0AI(1) , \u00a0the diffusion of data communications via”Internet of Things”, and exponential growth of raw data processing power \u00a0will have an escalating impact on each individual’s lifestyle including their livelihood and access to traditional means of income, privacy, personal freedoms, access to unbiased information, healthcare and environmental conditions, to name a few.<\/p>\n

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I’m not a luddite and am not supporting a return to the pre-industrial age. I am<\/em> cautious about building systems without an apparent negative feedback control which will too easily slip into a chaotic condition where funding of social programs will be a minor sideshow to the other, broad sweeping changes to our civilization. \u00a0Ones first thought might be that, these tools will be put to use by people of unethical or immoral persuasions to further entrench power and extract wealth. \u00a0This may be the early downside and is likely to be offset by the forces of good with the same tools. \u00a0The real threat is likely to not come from the human owners but the technology itself, or rather it’s inherent complexity. \u00a0I’m not sure that humans have the capacity to manage such complexity. \u00a0My experience with even simple software systems is that unexpected consequences can occur. \u00a0If the resolution of errors in complex systems is managed by the self same defective system, we have the conditions for chaos.<\/p>\n

An feeble human minds are no help in this situation. \u00a0This requires more thinking and tinkering before it goes live…if we can control even that.<\/p>\n

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1.<\/strong>\u00a0 AI, variously decoded as artificial\/advanced\/augmented\/accelerated intelligence. \u00a0One perspective can be found at: \u00a0http:\/\/yudkowsky.net\/<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 – \u00a0“Since the rise of Homo sapiens<\/i>, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly \u2013 on a historical scale, that is \u2013 we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

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