
If I Had a Hammer - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/friedman-if-i-had-a-hammer.html
======
ChristianMarks
If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY
Times?

A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs:

 _Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing
them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have.
Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the
world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to
reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC,
platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and
Udacity._

Then Sebastian Thrun admitted that Udacity had a "lousy product" in this
interview:

[http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-
thrun-u...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-
climb)

Friedman is a cheerleader for employers. Employees are warned that average
isn't good enough. One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is
that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should
be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation,
then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.

~~~
analog31
>>> One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good
managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers
--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there
is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.

It has occurred to me that management is basically an information processing
task. Why shouldn't it be automated? I think a reason is that managers are
kept around to manage information that can't be committed to a stored record.
An example would be details of the decision making process for who gets laid
off during a downturn.

~~~
ams6110
The hardest part about management is not the rote processes of information
collection and distribution. It's all the human elements of the team that
you're managing. A good manager is a cheerleader, coach, and scorekeeper all
in one. This requires individually tailored approaches to each member of the
team and doesn't strike me as something easily automated.

------
projectileboy
I always liked Thomas Friedman's writing on foreign policy issues back in the
day, but his work on globalization and technology always sounds incomplete and
amateurish. I think Mr. Friedman would do himself a favor if he actually spent
some time learning to code and hacking on an Arduino board or something so
that he could start to develop more intuition on what can and cannot easily be
done with technology, and where globalization fits in and where it doesn't.

~~~
gahahaha
His writings on foreign policy and economics is also incompetent garbage. One
datapoint is his support for the Iraq war. But really why he still has a
column in the NYT is a mystery.

~~~
curtis
I do not want to be in the business of defending Thomas Friedman, but I think
his opinions on the Iraq might have been more nuanced than he is usually given
credit for. For example:

 _NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST THOMAS FRIEDMAN_

 _THEN: "Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been
sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960s.
Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to
predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U. S. and its
allies remove the lid. Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off
Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won, and
it will say one of two things._

 _" It could say, 'Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany--a
country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an
evil dictator, whom you've just removed.'_

 _" Or the envelope could say, 'You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia--an
artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis,
Nasserites, leftists, and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held
together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new
Saddam.'_

 _" In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the
way he is. In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is
what it is. Those are two very different problems. And we will know which
we've won only when we take off the lid. The conservatives and neocons, who
have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this
question, because they don't know, either."_

 _\--The New York Times, January 26, 2003_

(See
[http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220](http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220))

------
hooande
Automation bashing had become so boring. ”Us vs them” its a go to media
cliche. Machines, automated or otherwise, are made to help us. We want every
thing to be automated. The purpose of business and technology is to improve
lives, not to employ people. No one starts a company with the intention of
creating jobs. People want to solve problems, make money or bring useful new
ideas to life. Startup founders want to do whatever has to be done in order to
execute their vision, with humans, machines, trained animals or whatever.
Automation improves our position as species and we need to get behind it
instead of viewing it a competitive threat. As they say in pickup basketball,
”Same team!”

It's true that automation has a disproportionate effect on different levels of
society. But that's more about humans than it its about machines. There are a
lot of people working on technical solutions now and sooner or later people
will get to work on social solutions that address some of Friedman's concerns.
We're a long way from a fully automated society and we have time to prepare
for the inevitable changes.

~~~
ChristianMarks
_No one sta[r]ts a company with the intention of creating jobs._

Sure they do. Many founders would like their companies to pay them at least a
working wage.

------
hawkharris
_In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to
automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that
determine what to use that power for._

Automation is what I love most about programming. Most of the time, when you
encounter a tedious, dull process, you can come up with creative ways to make
your machine do the work.

It's one of the few occupations in which boredom represents opportunity.

~~~
to3m
[http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php](http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php)

~~~
hawkharris
That app is pretty clever, and it plays off of valid criticisms of the author.
:)

Friedman has a talent for writing as well as glueing together disparate
concepts to support his arguments. It's fair to say that in some articles, he
says very little, very well.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a
hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then
write a 3-part book series on the coming flood, the power of water, and the
wondrous new water-world awaiting all of us. A bit breathless, a bit over-
done, a bit over-cooked, and a bit over-hyped.

But he has a point. We _are_ on the verge of some new golden age. Perhaps a
new machine age. I tend to think we're seeing the beginnings of a transition
to a machine lifeform-dominated Earth. Probably take 200-400 years to fully
play out. People aren't just going to become obsolete -- they're going to
become irrelevant and non-existent. Seeing pictures of an old-fashioned plain
human like us, in another 400 years, will be as quaint to future man as seeing
pictures of neanderthals in a science magazine is to us.

The interesting thing is just how awake the average person is to the amount of
change happening. When the Industrial Age happened, there were huge factories,
great cities being built, and all sorts of physically giant things to look at
and note that yes, something new was happening. With the new age, we're
looking at changes in Silicon, machine learning, maybe robotics. There aren't
going to be giant robots leveling cities in the near future (thankfully!) or
anti-gravity machines taking us to Mars in a few hours (sadly!). Instead we're
seeing massive changes, on a tiny scale, about what it means to be human.

This article is for the cheerleaders. HN is for the cheerleaders, like us. But
I wonder if the average person is even going to notice.

~~~
ojbyrne
A bit of a hack? I find that this article has "self-irony" if there's such a
thing - the fact that the writer works for the preeminent American newspaper
completely refutes the premise of the article. Mediocrity will forever have a
place in this world, if Thomas Friedman still has a job.

------
bambax
> _Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he’d prepare for a
> chess match against a computer, like I.B.M.’s Deep Blue. Donner replied: “I
> would bring a hammer.”_

Okay, but why not bring a gun to a chess match against a human? That would be
an excellent winning strategy (cf. the Gordian Knot).

~~~
ritchiea
I think a hammer would be sufficient in that case as well, unless of course
your opponent brings the gun.

------
VLM
I read the article and skimmed the comments and all of the economic comments
almost intentionally avoided discussing monetary velocity as a concept. Oh
they'd dance around it but never directly discuss it. Its not terribly
controversial, so I don't see why. The modern numbers are utterly dismal,
maybe thats why? Too much of a downer?

During an economic depression, a growing fraction of the population is removed
from the "real" economic system and market, they start to use Tide detergent,
lotto tickets, drugs, cases of cola as their new economic system and currency.

In a similar way, as the fraction of the population still involved in the
interchange of information decreases, despite all the article hand wringing,
its pretty simple, they'll just drop out. Hard/impossible to say what the new
system and currency will be. People will just stop. The future of the
"knowledge worker" looks a lot like ... travel agent.

So, put it together, and in a post-knowledge worker economy, they'll always be
a small number of elite knowledge workers, and always be some jobs that are
not financially viable to automate away (not many, of course), but overall
society will just wander on over to something else and look at knowledge work
/ service work as something from the past... thats what grandpa used to do
before all of them got downsized, or whatever.

The article is much ado about nothing, in the long run. Currently there exists
a service / knowledge economy, at least for a small segment of the population,
and its going away, just like every other segment eventually mostly goes away.
OK.

That and watching the political ax grinding was moderately entertaining. "If
we all just held our hands around the campfire and sang, then ..."

------
lvs
Golly gee, things are changing too fast for Thomas Friedman and his readers!

------
EliRivers
_because employers now have so much easier, cheaper access to above-average
software_

Yet they consistently don't choose it. Much as in the following case...

 _All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns,
instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve
what isn’t working — whether it is eye surgery techniques..._

That's an excellent example of another thing that won't happen, mainly because
it already doesn't happen; medicine is a field where there are many, many
examples of hard-data demonstrating better techniques, well-known, that
nonetheless don't spread. Atul Gawande discusses it, amongst other interesting
things, in his book "Better"; I namechecked that book mainly because, as well
as discussing this, it's quite a fun read and a good starting point for
principles that carry across all fields, but it's by no means the only source.

------
Guthur
> ...labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal
> stability

> ...lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital
> labor

> ...guaranteeing every American a basic income

What all these say to me is a an unwillingness to actually advance the social
dynamic that has been in place for 100s of the years. The hierarchy of
serfdom.

Why when you have the possibility of removing drudge like work with automation
would you actually want to actively retain it.

Why when a society of plenty is possible would you want to limit it's benefits
for a few and give only a basic income to the rest.

Why would you try to define someone with a menial task when you could aim to
help them bring more worth to society and themselves with a more fulfilling
and beneficial activity.

Not saying there are easy answers to any these questions but trying to
maintain the status quo is not an approach that benefits everyone.

------
cowsandmilk
I often wonder when the tipping point for white-collar specialists being
replaced by machines will occur. Watson replacing doctors in making diagnoses
has received a lot of attention, but there are many other fields. The big one
for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers?
We already have moved to replacing lawyers with computers for discovery, I
would be even more pleased in negotiations to only have to change items
flagged by machines than the sometimes incompetent lawyers I've had to deal
with.

~~~
VLM
I was recently informed by an acquaintance that "lawyer work" decades ago was
mostly about being a low to mid level manager over a herd of paralegals who
did all the work by hand. As the market has collapsed, lawyers do all their
own electronic searching and often data entry by themselves... The market has
crushed the profession.

Most likely that will eventually play out with doctors, probably economically
enforced. Sure, doc, do whatever your medical judgement thinks best, if you
want to work for free... but we're only paying on claims if your medical
judgment matches "watson". So overproduce new docs for awhile to crater
salaries, only pay claims if their work matches a computer model, and what we
used to call a "nurse" will be the new "doctor". This also helps with doc-in-
a-box facilities, which could now literally be a doc-in-a-box instead of a
nurse-in-a-box or PA as implemented now.

Eventually, being a "pharmacist" will mean being the minimum wage drone who
stocks a semi-smart vending machine, or maybe it'll mean being the minimum
wage drone answering the 800-number support line outsourced to the
Philippines.

I could see the same thing happening with accountants and HR and perhaps
marketing.

~~~
grey-area
I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really
unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists,
accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers
themselves?

If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by
experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will
tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate.

I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and
take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next
century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will
be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour,
farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd
require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come
close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes,
why is that?

~~~
VLM
"why you can't replace programmers"

Oh I'd disagree with that... If you'd like an example, note how "Excel" is the
industry wide corporate standard database management system. Its buzzword
compliant, being NoSQL, and scales to tens of thousands of records, which
despite claims to the contrary is almost always enough for most real world
problems. The world of the future is not having a DBA and CRUD developer
cooperate to write your shopping list, its one untrained dude with a
spreadsheet.

Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by
one marketing guy with photoshop. Its already happened. Its not bravado but
observation.

Rows and rows of desks of junior accountants replaced by one accountant with
quickbooks. Another observation, not bravado.

And what, exactly, are pharmacists doing 99% of the time beyond being a very
high item value / high risk vending machine? Realizing my mom worked as a
pharm-tech part time when I was a kid, so you're not going to fool me... Very
highly priced customer service and team lead and thats about it.

The mechanical steam shovel never quite eliminated the use or sales of hand
shovels. Its just that "digging ditches" isn't a viable career path anymore
for almost anyone, anymore. Or "manual metal lathe operator" or any number of
other tasks. I'm not saying there will never be another accountant hired or
dr. or lawyer. Just a whole heck of a lot less of them. At least one, two,
maybe three orders of magnitude fewer.

Much like the first industrial revolution... there's people right now, out
there, being paid to use a hand shovel... the story is, its now probably
hundreds of people right at this moment, not 5% of the population or whatever
like in 1850.

~~~
grey-area
_" Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system_

Excel is not a database (I don't mean that as a trivial correction, it's quite
distinct); many of the jobs done with it could conceivably have been done with
databases but were not, so in a way it's opened up a whole market to store and
manipulate more data than ever before on a small scale in businesses, and I
suppose you could conceivably replace dbs with it in some cases. However I
don't see it replacing databases in the businesses I work with — in my
experience at least I see more data moving _from_ excel _over to_ databases
and apps (with internal dbs) as it becomes complex or people want to share it
than I see it moving the other way. For example imagine a CRM built in excel,
scaling up to 1000s of customers and several users — eventually there comes a
point where it is far easier to use a db and front-end than to try to manage
that sort of data in excel by hand and share amongst several people.

Data manipulation is an excellent example of the complex changes wrought by
technical progress — there is an argument for saying that as technology
progresses, we discover more work we can do with it, and data and analysis
become more complex, not less — more jobs are created which simply didn't
exist before. Automation doesn't always lead to jobs becoming simpler or
humans becoming redundant, quite the reverse in our recent experience.

 _Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced
by one marketing guy with photoshop._

Answer, zero. Graphic artists have become quicker, can do more work, and can
produce work of higher quality in terms of resolution, type etc than before,
but it's still quite a distinct job from marketing. One related example of a
profession which has gone is typesetter though — they've been entirely
supplanted by technology. Just to be clear I'm not saying technology never
supplants anyone, but that the professions you listed are the farthest away
from being supplanted and are not even on the horizon in most cases.

Customer service is still really important in many jobs, interfacing with
humans is extremely hard, and expert systems are not an adequate replacement
for most humans yet, esp. in creative or customer facing roles — that will
require a _qualitative_ change in the nature of our software. Perhaps that
will happen eventually (in some ways I hope it will), but we simply haven't
made that leap yet.

~~~
VLM
"Excel is not a database"

It most certainly is used as one in the corporate world. That doesn't mean its
a very good one, in the sense that a hammer isn't a very good substitute for a
screwdriver.

None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple
hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database.

I agree I LOL when I see people my hand doing the equivalent of an SQL JOIN.
To some extent, the older I get, the more I see people using computers as a
somewhat different form of manual labor, rather than a replacement for manual
labor. Rather than typing this form by hand on the manual typewriter, you use
Word and call it progress.

~~~
grey-area
_None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple
hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a
database._

In 1970 the businessman would probably have used a rather more old fashioned
method - a piece of paper and an assistant to write down the figures on a page
which looked very like an excel spreadsheet!

------
coldcode
The flaw in this argument is that although the power of the machines is making
advances appear faster to make humans less important, the power of humans to
use the advances for no good is increasing at the same rate. Thus Google knows
when you are going on a trip but someone hacks Target for millions of credit
cards in a way no one notices for weeks. Technology is a two edged sword.

~~~
allochthon
I don't think this point contradicts anything Friedman said:

 _Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our
generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any
before ..._

------
allochthon
I think he makes some interesting points. I do not think they are that
amateurish. Like it or not, we're rapidly sliding into an era where human
productivity is going off the charts. Unintended consequences are unavoidable.
Nobody really knows what to do about it.

------
davidf18
Over 60 years ago Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the "man being replaced by
machine" problem in his __* 1952 __* novel, "Player Piano."

~~~
dobbsbob
The quote from Erik Brynjolfsson in this article is also right out of the
Unabomber manifesto on the dystopian future where machines make our decisions
for us, and the masses are ruled by a handful of elites who have access to the
control of these systems.

