George Rebane
The systemic and growing unemployment in these pre-Singularity years is an ongoing topic on RR, and a stringently ignored social phenomenon by our political elites of all stripes. A graphic that illustrates this unemployment growth is the graphic below showing how manufacturing activity varies over time along with employment in the sector.
Note how the normal cyclicity of business activity in manufacturing ratchets down the number employed. Workers are laid off in recessions during which manufacturers implement labor and other cost saving methods for survival. When better times return, the productivity changes are in place and few, if any, new hires are needed to continue business growth. And this phenomenon is not restricted only to manufacturing, but repeated in almost every other sector of business. The only sectors that seem to be immune are those requiring expertise in STEM areas.
So the real problem is still how can we help the rapidly growing cohort of (non-STEM) unemployables. Even as the employer of last resort, the government can’t hire all of them and force a diminishing fraction of the population to pay for it all. It would invite a bloody revolution in a new age in which technology will no longer create as many jobs as it destroys (more here).
Nevertheless, there are several technological advances available that look promising for delaying the day of reckoning, at least until some newer technology comes along to delay it even more. I want to discuss three and summarize how I think they would help us in the near term. These are 1) body worn multi-media input/output (I/O) devices connecting us to the cloud; 2) online education that bypasses the atrocious public schools which are beyond timely repair; and 3) computing/storage implants that connect directly to our neuro-system.
The multi-media I/O devices were conceived on then-classified DOD programs like the early 1970s RUWS (Remote Underwater Work System) in which the shipborne system operator wore small-screen 3D video monitors in a headset whose pointing directions were sensed and transmitted to the RUWS platform working thousands of feet below on the seafloor. When the operator turned his head, the twin cameras on the platform followed his head movements. He also had his hands in special manipulanda, one with force feedback, that allowed him to operate the powered arms on the platform. However these were not body-mounted, but contributed to the launch of today’s remote manipulating systems that either reduce big human movements to a microscale, or amplify them to large macroscales. Here we’re interested in the body-mounted stuff.
Twenty years later, after having developed some maintenance training system for the DOD, I had the chance to wear a set of retinal projection glasses during a confidential demonstration at a big aerospace company. A low-powered red laser refreshed high resolution images on my retina that consisted of various schematics and text. The concept we were working on was a maintenance/repair system for the B-1 that would be carried on the aircraft. Special interactive maintenance and repair manuals would be stored on CDs. The aircraft could then land at an airfield of opportunity and the system would allow a crew member, who was not a trained maintenance specialist, to maintain and/or repair certain critical aircraft subsystems.
The objective here was to use the human as the computer’s sensors and manipulanda (eyes, ears, hands) subsystem. The information and data presented through the retinal projection glasses (and controlled by a wireless handset) would lead the crew member through a diagnostic and repair routine by taking him through a kind of a decision tree – look here, do this, if response is so, do that – while presenting all the needed visuals in a constrained (crawl?) space where the work had to be done. In effect, the smarts in the computer fixed the airplane with the help of a compliant (and ‘low level’ intelligent) set of eyes, ears, arms, and legs.
Both computer smarts and body-mounted I/O hardware have come a long way during the last 20 years, and now we have systems like the one shown in the figure (more info here). So how does this work into the big problem facing the country. The answer is that these gizmos worn by a wide variety of more or less untrained people can provide them with the realtime in situ smarts to do all kinds of tasks that require only a willing and co-operative set of sensors (eyes, ears, nose, …) and effectors (arms and legs). To be sure, such human workers will eventually be replaced by more capable robots that can see, hear, manipulate, and move better than we can. But until such machines (beings?) come along, body-mounted I/O equipment will enable millions of under-educated people to work productively and earn a living.
Online Education Alternatives
As long covered on RR, advances in automated and online educational technologies are already available to augment and/or replace the millennia-old paradigm of a teacher lecturing to an assembled group of students. Now many schools are beginning to turn the ‘teacher teaching a class, and student going off alone to practice’ methodology on its head. Students are today given assignments to learn on their own using resources like the Kahn Academy, edX, and online courses from established institutions. They then return to a group setting with the teacher and do their ‘homework’ with the teacher there to act as a resource, and deliver remedial lecture snippets on common areas where students are perceived to have a problem.
Many online learning programs now have very sophisticated AI-based remediation algorithms that detect when a student may experience a difficulty and then branch into a more detailed exposition, or shunt the student onto a remediation branch before returning him to the ‘main sequence’ of instruction. Such programs also have the ability to include a detailed report on the student’s learning experience, and make it available to his human teacher before they again meet.
Today it is hard to predict how all this ‘automated teaching’ technology will be integrated into the formal course of a young person’s education. All we can say for sure is that such technology will become a standard component in tomorrow’s educational systems. And here I am also talking about its perhaps heaviest use in the retraining and upgrading of workers already in the workforce. Private corporations have been pioneers in the development and use of such ‘training tools’, driven by the reinforcing factors of rapidly accelerating technologies in the workplace and the deterioration of public education.
Machine Augmented Man (MAM)
We are in the early stage of a sea change in how humans will become “super-abled” through the donning and implanting of devices which will enhance the functions of orthopedics (mobility, manipulability), sensing (vision, hearing, touch, …), and mental augmentation. The so-called ‘bionic man’ is standing on the threshold of our everyday lives through becoming a part of each of us individually.
Author Daniel Wilson in Bionic Brains and Beyond gives a good survey of how we are hooking up to a laundry list of gizmos, each of which promises to increase our abilities that originally came from our double helix.
Decision Support Enterprises (DSE)
But before we get our MAM implants, there is one little known area of employment that could potentially employ a significant number (millions?) of lowly trained (non-STEM) workers. This is in the development and operation of myriads of computerized experts and decision aids. It turns out that fairly simple computer algorithms, that involve factors observable from everyday life and available datasets, routinely outperform human experts, analysts, and other habitually recognized pundits in tasks that involve prediction, diagnostics, and prescriptive measures. (And don't forget that we already have legions of Bayes and soon causal nets - here and here - capturing expertise and reliably delivering it to workers everywhere.)
How many times during the course of the day do we hear that ‘economists and analysts were surprised’ with the release of data on the economy, or stock markets, or the environment, or healthcare costs, or medical diagnoses, or the effectiveness of education policy, or which roads would need to be repaired first, or the price of beer in China, or …?
Such expert algorithms work by combining (say, as a weighted sum of) factors such as consumer mood, the upkeep of suburban yards, the cleanliness of streets, the recent effect of weather on traffic flow, the severity of gastric distress after consuming X, the sufficiency of savings accounts, etc. The problem with such algorithms is that the factors need to be assessed numerically (say, a value from 1 to 10), and they need to be assessed independently from the other factors that go into the mix from which a prediction, diagnosis, or prescription is obtained.
Many psychologists and systems scientists have demonstrated the improved performance of such computerized algorithms over currently recognized human experts. Daniel Kahneman has also described and documented this phenomenon in his recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow. If we take these research results and look at how they may be commercialized, a method immediately suggests itself – set up decision support enterprises (DSEs) that employ ‘factor assessors’. Such decision support systems would be specific to any of a countless number of areas of human activity that includes commerce, entertainment, law, medicine, marketing, law enforcement, investment, public policy, … - you can think of such systems as man augmented machines.
Each DSE would employ many factor assessors who would regularly communicate their assessments via the web to be integrated and served by the DSEs to their subscribing customers. Each factor assessor (FA) could serve several DSEs providing services in different areas. The FAs would not even need to know what DSEs their assessments serve, the other factors integrated by the DSE, and most certainly not the form of the algorithms which use their inputs. In fact, such a DSE industry may best be served by one or more ‘factors clearinghouses’ that commission and actually hire FAs. Such clearinghouses would sell their factor assessment data to the numerous online DSEs.
Conclusion
What I have attempted to communicate here is that there are opportunities to employ legions of uneducated and mis-educated workers in useful, interesting, and challenging tasks that are commercially viable when combined with new technologies here today and coming tomorrow. To be sure, these approaches are a stopgap for an unknown number of years until the inevitable AIs arrive to displace even these jobs. But I believe that, for the near future, this kind of approaches are the ONLY ones available to us that will continue to improve the quality of life for the excess number of humans who cannot profitably sell their labor in today’s markets, and whose only hope is to work for government to increase the inevitable frictions and inefficiencies from which we now suffer.
George, online training in enterprise wide procedures and policies is one thing, but I've yet to see any evidence that good books and effective study are in danger of being supplanted for serious study of academic subjects, They're good for imparting facts, which is important and necessary but not sufficient.
The Kahn Academy pieces are wonderful in the context of a state run educational system that has been deprecating direct instruction techniques in California for 25 years, and it isn't just California.
Posted by: Gregory | 26 June 2012 at 03:29 PM
Last year I helped facilitate Kahn Academy sessions w/ 3rd and 4th grade math students in the computer lab at Grass Valley Charter and it was very enlightening. I thought it was a much better teaching process than just having the teacher write stuff on a blackboard and expect all of the students to be able to follow along.
The other facilitators and I were able to identify those who were struggling and push them along very easily, since they were already working in an individual fashion.
I think Kahn Academy-like learning is a great supplement to "good books and effective study."
Posted by: Michael Anderson | 26 June 2012 at 05:40 PM
I am guilty of doing everything within my power not to take on additional employees. I downsized during this great recession and I have no intentions of every using human labor (w-2 wages) to grow my businesses again. Those that celebrate "May Day" don't understand that their aggression destroys more jobs than it has/will ever save/create. The quickest way for an employER to lose their rights is to hire em employEE.
Our household loves Khan.
Posted by: THEMIKEYMCD | 26 June 2012 at 05:59 PM
This is a great opener for what I've experienced over the last few days. I'd been pondering the collection of the gen I'd gathered - did it have a connection? Remember Google's big hoo-ha where-in they would gift a community with ultra high speed connectivity? After NC citizens spent a great deal of time and money touting the wonders of our fair burg: http://95959google.com/ it transpired that Google never had any intention of going with any California town. As left wing and green as they are, they wanted to get something done in our lifetime and they knew that the California govts' anti-progress attitude would mean 20 years of paperwork and lawsuits.
http://www.nevadacountyconnected.com/2011/10/why-calif-was-never-considered-for-googles-fiber-to-the-home/
OK, what next? I had a meeting with a man that did work in highway construction and heavy equipment operation. He related tales of folks (locally) caught in a tangle of trying to access their land and/or trying to clear their land of brush for purposes of fire suppression. What used to be a matter of common sense had been replaced with a morass of paperwork, permits and running the gamut of neighbors that can complain and leave your land worthless because they don't want govt agents snooping around their un-permitted houses and pot farms, or just generally don't want anyone to develop what they feel is their own personal park.
Next? How about a story in Oakland concerning a conference of good folks trying to co-ordinate govt, NGOs and law enforcement for the purpose of eradicating the child sex slave trade? Stay with me here - it all connects. It turns out that Occupy Oakland pitched a fit (literally) because everyone has the right to do what ever with their own body. Cue the rioting and smashed glass and scuffles with security at the conference.
OK - I have the right to do what ever with my body. It's mine? right? Well, that's the fascinating part because I always thought that applied to what ever I would do with my time and my body. Such as employment. Why the left believes it only applies to the sex trade is baffling. Here's a thought. Why not have a contract between myself and someone else be of no business to the govt? Why not have the govt have to prove (just as they would my guilt) that I'm doing something wrong rather than I having to prove my innocence beforehand? Question to the good lefties out there; Why should the govt stick their snoots into a private contract between two consenting adult parties? Why should govt vex and confound private citizens to the point of simply not wanting to go forward with a legitimate enterprise?
You lefties got what you wanted, and it doesn't work. If you want folks employed, then let the free market work. If someone wants to live in a tar paper shack and get 2 dollars an hour - isn't that better than no work at all and having them live in some govt run project hell-hole? Enterprise and progress and productivity will follow freedom, not govt run and managed markets. Technology has always had a bleeding edge. Always. But the number of good folk that want to work and have freedom doesn't always follow the same path. I appreciate George's post, but I can relate something far more mundane that illustrates the same principle on a far more mundane (tech-wise) level. I believe it was around the late 80's. I had given a friend a lift to a Sacramento Ford dealership. While waiting, I chanced on a "technician" servicing a car. He was doing nothing more than what George related, but was getting instructions from a B/W CRT instead of a retinal display. Not trying to put the guy down - he might be a crackerjack mechanic. But his job was nothing more than following instructions and he needed only to be trained to a very low level. So it's been in daily operation for over 2 decades. It's not new. And it won't be the salvation or boost in employment in any way, shape or form. It's just another way to be employed. I read a lot of old books and magazines about the mechanical trades and the old timers are constantly bemoaning the lack of training
and basic understanding of the trade in question by the newbies. Tech is not the answer to unemployment. The employed will use whatever tech is available and the most successfully employed will simply use the available tech most efficiently. Unemployment will solved by a free, motivated citizenry that endeavors to make themselves useful to a free society. Or we can have full employment ala Moscow circa 1963 - go sweep the streets with a broom while the large black limos whisk past (Obama and his buddies) and maybe we'll let you live a few more years in a cold drab room with barely enough to eat. It's our choice.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 26 June 2012 at 09:40 PM
Nice rant, Scott. Full points.
Posted by: Michael Anderson | 26 June 2012 at 10:15 PM
There's nothing revolutionary about elementary and secondary mathematics procedures being described by an adult competent in the subject, but a problem in K-12 has been a general lack of competence. A number (in this case, 3) of CSU math professors I know, fellow veterans of the Math Wars, have described their elementary math education classes as taking students with a 4th grade knowledge and bring them up to a 7th grade level in the quarter. Meaning, many college students at the CSU who intend to become elementary teachers arrive at the class that is supposed to teach them how to teach K-7 math find it is instead a remedial effort to get them to understand K-7 math.
Kahn is fine, but it still needs to mesh with the given curriculum to be effective. Having parents with a clue to help kids with it is certainly reasonable, during class time or during homework sessions, but a good text can be used by a child to learn it themselves and learning how to learn from a book is perhaps one of the greatest skills that can be acquired.
MA, what is the math program being used by the charter school?
Posted by: Gregory | 27 June 2012 at 07:39 AM
Scott, you may have misunderstood the function of the CRT driving that automotive tech; let me use an aviation story to illustrate that I recall from an article on taking passengers on general aviation flights... a supposedly true anecdote. A woman who had been on a handful of small airplane flights with a few different pilots confided to a professional pilot that they were uncomfortable with pilot B. Asked why (the pro being an instructor concerned about safety), she confided that pilot B had to read the instructions every time, while A and C remembered how to fly.
Of course, she then was reassured by the pro that those weren't instructions, that was a checklist, all pilots, private and commercial, were expected to use them and it was pilots A and C that she should be concerned about.
Automated checklists are a powerful tool, and the shop may well have found that defects in the service were greatly reduced. Being able to operate with a wider range of mechanic skills was just one benefit.
Posted by: Gregory | 27 June 2012 at 07:54 AM
Re Gregory's 754am - To substitute a computer driven CRT for a cardboard checklist seems a bit far-fetched for private enterprise. I have yet to see one of those used in such a limited manner. My experience, when looking over the mechanic's shoulder, has always been to see a system that not only displayed the car's status, but also led the mechanic through a branched interactive diagnostic, and then displayed one or more sets of corrective/repair procedures depending on the final diagnosis.
As BF Skinner showed in his classic introductory text on programmed learning, it is possible to put the entire set of branched diagnostics (including checklists) and repair procedures into a stapled sheaf of paper. Of course, the state of the car would have to be presented on other instruments. The dedicated interactive system in today's modern shop obviates all that, and can indeed walk an experienced or apprentice mechanic through the whole maintenance process.
Posted by: George Rebane | 27 June 2012 at 08:49 AM
Harcourt School Publishers Math California.
Posted by: Michael Anderson | 27 June 2012 at 09:01 AM
Thanks for the R&D George. You've given me a couple of ideas for my line of work, which in the past I've described as "Service Science."
The gist of your piece, which I take seriously, is that we have no work for the spot welder anymore. So his/her options seems to be:
1) Work for the government, which despite some may think, is a finite employer
2) Do nothing, collect entitlements
3) Do nothing, collect entitlements and protest out in front of Bank of America
4) Use human augmenting technologies [kinda Star Trekkie] to fill in the skills gap. Eye gear, decision support systems (that's what we call them), etc.
What did I miss?
Posted by: Ryan Mount | 27 June 2012 at 09:44 AM
re: Greg's and George's last posts. I have seen the type of check list programs Greg refers to, both professionally and in repair manuals sold for automotive, aviation and electronics, etc aimed the DIY audience. I was watching what George described - an interactive program drilling down through all possible options and scenarios. At least, those known to the computer program. The point I was trying to make was that the technician himself was making almost no decisions of his own. And this was 20 years ago. Modern tech has brought the display or info transmitting device itself down to something very tiny and inexpensive. And the computer programs' knowledge base is vast compared to what was available just 5 years ago. Fewer and fewer mechanics and "old timers" can out do that newer and bigger data base. I'm not a luddite - modern tech in cars is a good thing, but it's just the new way to work, not a salvation from high unemployment. Right now, I see govt education as being the biggest laggard in employing new tech.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 27 June 2012 at 09:46 AM
Regular readers here know what I believe to be the employment situation in the developed world during the coming years. My estimate is north of 70M un/der-employed by 2020 in the US if we do nothing differently than now. The first chart in the post tells the story of how we are getting there. IMHO only new approaches like non-profit public service corporations, and those involving new technologies will provide (temporary) solutions.
The bottom line is still that there will be too many of us needed to create the necessities of living. So the distribution of the wealth to pay for those necessities will be the big problem - through revolution or reason.
Posted by: George Rebane | 27 June 2012 at 10:24 AM