Sunday, January 26, 2014

Long-term thinking about the politics of robotics, and artificial intelligence, as those engineering disciplines impact capital and the workforce, nationally and world wide.

Start with the David Atkins post on Digby's Hullabaloo, from Friday, Jan 24; here. It gives a single link, worth following, and mentions The Economist and an Oxfam item. Readers are left to track down the latter by web search.

Worth reader bookmarking as favorites,

The Economist homepage.

The Economist, recent issues.

The issue referenced in the Atkins item is online here.

I do not recall whether it was a 60 Minutes segment, or other TV, or an online item, but I recall the gist as an MIT robotics professor noting that while the world's manufacturing has migrated to China as a current hub, with low labor pricing a key factor, capital investment in the US in robotics/automation could be, right now, cost competitive, if that were to be an adopted national policy of bipartisan long-term support.

It makes one wonder, the austerity doldrums the US and European workforce has experienced for years, since the lame duck time of the Bush presidency, was it engineered by the invisible hand [Davos?] to condition prosperous populations to a post-robotics economy? (Presume for the thought experiment that Davos = the 1%).