14 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Prediction Errors for the Information Age
Perhaps the best way to describe the flawed vision of fin de siecle futurists is to say that, with few exceptions, they expected the coming of an ''immaculate'' economy -- one in which people would be largely emancipated from any grubby involvement with the physical world. The future, everyone insisted, would bring an ''information economy'' that would mainly produce intangibles. The good jobs would go to ''symbolic analysts,'' who would push icons around on computer screens; knowledge, rathe...Economists misunderstood the value of information and material goods in the information revolutions.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Workers Are Being Perpetually Displaced by Technology
The third explanation for America’s current job creation problems flips the stagnation argument on its head, seeing not too little recent technological progress, but instead too much. We’ll call this the “end of work” argument, after Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book of the same title. In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that “we are entering a new phase in world history—one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the gl...We are innovating ourselves out of jobs for everyday people.
15 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
The Instinct to Command Others is the "Devil" of History
The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it becomes even more so when, with the application of scienc...Folksonomies: government governance
Folksonomies: government governance
Governments do it in the name of common good, but it is as baneful as when individuals do it.