Brave New Machines

In the recent economist article, "The Age of Smart Machines", they spotlight two management theorists (Is that even a thing? Is this real? Is that like a consultant for consultants? Because this is getting real meta real fast, and I don't know if I feel comfortable with that. Just sayin'.) from MIT Sloan who are apparently real gung-ho about the possibility of humans making themselves obsolete.

They call them "smart machines", and they really are all around us-- I mean Google's making a car that drives itself, my phone tells me when to wake up and what I have to do every day, every search engine in the world can suggest things for me to buy based on what other things I've bought in the past, and there's wristbands that you can wear to tell you how fast (or slow) you're losing weight. Is this the brave new world that we'd always hoped for?

Apparently these consultant consultants both agree that "knowledge workers" (yup, that's a term now-- it really just means "people who are white collar workers" or "people who are in the service industry" on a very fundamental level but it doesn't make them feel degraded) are on their way out. Backed up by the McKinsey Global Institute (they also go by the cool acronym MGI to feel more like super spies), they point to machine learning, voice recognition and nantotechnology as the drivers that are making this new universe possible. MGI, on a more uplifting note, argues that this evolution is a good thing-- by being spared relatively undemanding tasks, knowledge workers can focus on the more complex ones, making them ultimately more productive. The downside, championed by (Erik Brynjolfson and Andrew McAfee from MIT Sloan-- the consultant consultants), is a little bleaker, and foresees that modern technologies will widen inequality, increase social exclusion and provoke a backlash.

I don't want to be a Luddite or anything, but I want everyone just to hold on to their pants for one quick second. Just because things are modernizing doesn't mean that we're all going to lose our minds and miraculously leap into this new world and allow robots to take over my house (though, if they do the laundry then I'll consider it). What I'm saying is that things will probably be gradual (first of all). Second of all, even after adoption occurs, a tool is really only as good as the person using it. I mean, in a super tangential example, we really could use all of the guns in the world as really small planters if we wanted. (Hey, I'm not saying that we're super efficient in this hypothetical alter universe, I'm just saying we have options.) So although this article is interesting, I feel like taking sides this early in the game is a little premature. We don't know what's going to happen because we don't know how these new changes are going to be adopted in our society. Would we have a different world if we had a network of self-driving cars where special preference was given to emergency vehicles? How would that compare if we these self-driving cars were priced at $180,000 each? What if we created it to fill in the gaps that public transportation left behind? What would P2P car sharing look like then? All I'm saying is that, in this big land of unknowns, let's not start pointing directional fingers until we know how much stuff costs. Or at least if it's going to do my laundry.