
A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tech-driven-boom-is-coming-please-be-patient-1514390400
======
Wildgoose
"A third of the rise in the S&P 500 stock market index this year is
attributable to Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc.,
Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp."

And yet don't those companies directly employ only around 150,000 workers in
total?

Yes, Apple off-shores employment to Foxconn but they are open about their
plans to automate their factories and replace all the workers.

This isn't a matter of patience, it's waiting on the never-never.

~~~
hliyan
That's really not the author's point. I think this quote illustrates his point
better:

"Online shopping came along in the 1990s but retailers struggled to adapt
business processes to the internet. They needed to build complementary
infrastructure such as fulfillment centers, and, the authors note, customers
had to adapt their habits, as well."

The lag between commercialization and widespread adoption is wider than we
think.

~~~
heisenbergs
Lag is probably the wrong word. It's a misconception that adoption should be
instant. It took a good 50 years for the electric motor to supplant the steam
engine, despite it being superior in virtually every way. Tech adoption takes
time, given that many things need to be re-learnt/engineered.

It's why i'm positive that there won't be swathes of unemployeed people due to
tech. It will happen gradually, as it has always been, and people will have to
be shifted into different and more productive employment types. It has always
happened this way, and will likely continue to do so.

~~~
marcosdumay
As long as there are more productive employment types available.

Anyway, I disagree. I think the sheer speed of the change will create a
disaster much sooner than automation quality will make humans obsolete. It
took more than a century for the steam engine to replace animal engines around
the world, then the electric engine replaced it in half a century. Things are
accelerating, and are already much faster than by that time.

~~~
Chathamization
Productivity growth has actually been relatively low recently[1]. There
doesn't seem to be a trend towards acceleration.

[1]
[https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm](https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm)

------
vannevar
Income for the top 1% of the population is up over 400% over the past 30
years, while remaining largely flat for the rest of the workforce. The tech
boom is well underway, it's just that only a tiny fraction of the population
is capturing the vast majority of the benefits. The boom is not just about
efficiencies, it's also about centralization and winner-take-all market
dynamics.

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Global absolute poverty has plummeted from 40% in 1985 to less than 10% in
2015:

[https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-
poverty/#/declining-...](https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-
poverty/#/declining-world-poverty-1820-2015-step2)

~~~
yomly
I see this fact touted around a lot, often in the context of
stagnating/eroding wages.

It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for
celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people
should not be ignored.

If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has
concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-
wealthy has merely been redistributed. Indeed, this is intuitive if you
consider the trend of moving your labour to a cheaper country.

Having travelled to many developing nations, it also (admittedly anecdotally)
feels evident that most the wealth reaching developing nations is
concentrating with the already wealthy / those in power.

So what it feels to me is like that local inequality is increasing while
global inequality is decreasing - the rich are getting richer everywhere while
the working and middle classes are slowly converging everywhere.

Unfortunately, as history has so far told, the notion that the erosion of the
quality of life has led to improvements of life to someone very far away is a
hard sell.

~~~
pm90
I don't think we have seen anything like this in history before, and it will
be interesting, to say the least, at how all the millions of people elevated
from destitution will contribute to the world and change it.

~~~
vannevar
Don't get too excited. The chart only shows that fewer people fall below the
$2/day line. They could all be living on $2.01/day now and it would still be
valid.

------
inciampati
I have frequently wondered if the lag in productivity is partly due to the
distracting power of the internet and social media. This isn't really
paralleled by the other technical advances that the authors of the study this
piece summarizes were examining.

Also, AI? We don't have anything even approaching AI in play now nor on the
immediate horizon. The energy costs it would have are still enormous, even if
we really could implement it. Maybe that's a revolution that's yet to begin.
We got really good at problems that can be mapped into single precision matrix
algebra, where the inputs and outputs are relatively small. It's a big jump to
hard AI from there.

~~~
rectang
> _We got really good at problems that can be mapped into single precision
> matrix algebra, where the inputs and outputs are relatively small._

General AI is a "wave of the future -- always has been, always will be"
technology. Only when a piece gets broken out from general AI do we get
practical benefits. The benefits from applying all that matrix algebra aren't
small, though!

~~~
eggie
So we are breaking off small pieces of a bigger thing. If that thing is AI,
does it already have a form and an older name in the world?

Would agree that in this article AI is a stand-in for what used to be called
Math, Statistics, and Computer Science?

Our scientific output is an artifice, and it is "intelligent" in its ability
to guide our action. To me it isn't then strange to think of the sciences as
the "general AI".

~~~
garmaine
As soon as you solve a problem in AI, people start labeling that problem as
“just” math, statistics, or computer science. It is no longer considered AI.
Shifting goal posts mean “real AI” is always in the future.

~~~
mamon
People are trained by Hollywood to envision AI as robots. When presented an
actual AI algorithm/model they see it as boring math, totaly unlike C-3PO, or
Terminator, or whatever your favourite movie robot is.

------
monksy
When people talk about AI and Robotics, I don't believe there is na
understanding about how complex those topics are and how difficult it is.

AI: There's a lot of active research, and there has been a lot of aggressive
pushes to be buzzword compliance there. I think this has a lot of potential to
make improvements, but with AI you have to understand what you're doing there.
(To be effective) I think there would be a lot of value in having research
institutions on AI (and a consultancy).

Robotics: We've seen a lot of improvements on this, but I'm not getting the
feeling that it's a mature technology. We're still having difficulty getting
this to be easier to implement and working with it. The algorithms behind
navigation, and motor control are intense and have taken a lot of research.

------
atarian
Non-paywall link: [http://archive.is/XwCtU](http://archive.is/XwCtU)

~~~
r3bl
Side-question: Are they activating the paywall 24 hours after the story gets
posted or something?

------
zengid
[meta question] Are most HN readers subscribers of wsj? I never see anybody
mark these posts as pay-walled.. Either way I'm considering buying a
subscription.

------
graycat
Automation is usually deflationary. Deflation is the easiest problem in the
world to solve -- just print money. So, print it and pass it out.

As people spend the money, we don't have to give raises to the robots. If a
few rich people end up with nearly all the money, then tax it back and pass it
out again.

------
DeonPenny
I'm hoping it's bioengineering .

------
godzillabrennus
If you want to avoid the paywall:
[http://archive.is/XwCtU](http://archive.is/XwCtU)

------
swarup182
Hasn't it been coming like every 4/5 years after internet (web) happened.

------
jessaustin
Maybe this was because I read TFA outside the paywall, but I find the included
chart obnoxious in that it just has a vertical scale from 100 to 300, with no
indication as to what that scale represents. Is it sales? Productivity? Number
of press releases? Who knows?

------
evolighting
YES, "Tech-driven", but FOR PROFILE. SO it is none of ordinary people's
business.

It is economy, not people's wages.

~~~
dang
Would you please stop using uppercase for emphasis in HN comments? This is
basically yelling, and it's against the site guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
studioego
hmm

------
sigmonsays
other folks have mentioned it, its not desirable to receive pay-wall articles.
Don't post them, its not polite.

For everyone else, Non-paywall link:
[http://archive.is/XwCtU](http://archive.is/XwCtU)

------
lightblade
[https://apple.news/AtfflfmCvRzublEC6RnuxmQ](https://apple.news/AtfflfmCvRzublEC6RnuxmQ)

Apple News link bypasses the paywall

------
lafar6502
tech-driven kaboom? oh no, not again

------
true_tuna
Don’t post paywalled articles. Do you want a paywalled internet? Because
that’s how you get a paywalled internet.

------
Jedi72
The suit is back!

------
jgalt212
The boom will come when the monopolies are broken up and the excess profits
filter through the rest of the economy.

------
petegordon
Anyone else questioning this, “The integrated circuit was commercialized in
the 1960s yet 25 years later computers still represented just 5% of the value
of all business equipment”? ICs are everywhere around us (in our phones, cars,
refrigerators, coffee makers, weight scales, HVAC, etc.) and are rightfully
invisible to us. Let alone all the major business equipment. Or, am I missing
something?

~~~
empath75
25 years later was in the late 1980s

~~~
petegordon
Good point. Thanks.

