Economics of Technology – Page 3

Idyllic Golden-Age Hunter-Gatherers

(p. A8) Before he was killed by an isolated tribe on a remote Indian Ocean island, John Allen Chau, a young American on a self-propelled mission to spread Christianity, revealed two things: that he was willing to die, and that he was scared.
. . .
He tried to give gifts. A boy shot an arrow at him. He expressed fear, fatalism, frustration and some humor.
The people Mr. Chau chose for his mission are among the most impenetrable communities in the world, known for their intense hostility to outsiders. They have killed or tried to kill many outsiders who attempted to step on their rugged island 700 miles off India’s mainland, where they are one of the last undiluted hunter and gatherer societies.
. . .
Mr. Chau was trying to accomplish the impossible. The people on North Sentinel have not accepted anyone outside their society. Anthropologists, filmmakers and government officials have tried to approach them. Just about all have been driven back by bows and arrows.
. . .
The fishermen said he had told them to give the letter to a friend, in case he did not come back.
In one passage, he asked God if North Sentinel was “Satan’s last stronghold.” In another: “What makes them become this defensive and hostile?”
“It’s weird — actually no, it’s natural: I’m scared,” Mr. Chau wrote. “There, I said it. Also frustrated and uncertain — is it worth me going a foot to meet them?”
He added, “I don’t want to die!”
Still, he went back.
On the afternoon of Nov. 16, the fishermen told police officers, Mr. Chau reassured them that he would be fine staying on the island overnight and that the fishermen could go. They motored out, leaving Mr. Chau alone for the first time.
When they passed by the island the next morning, they saw the islanders dragging his body on the beach with a rope.
No one knows what exactly happened. Police officials said the islanders most likely killed him with bows and arrows.
Mr. Chau’s body is still on the island, but several police officers said they were worried about retrieving it, lest the same thing happen to them.

For the full story, see:
Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar and Kai Schultz. “American’s Last Letter Before Being Killed by Tribe on a Remote Indian Island.” The New York Times (Saturday, Nov. 24, 2018): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 23, 2018, and has the title “A Man’s Last Letter Before Being Killed on a Forbidden Island.”)

Humans Turn Raw Data into Fuel for A.I.

(p. B1) Some of the most critical work in advancing China’s technology goals takes place in a former cement factory in the middle of the country’s heartland, far from the aspiring Silicon Valleys of Beijing and Shenzhen. An idled concrete mixer still stands in the middle of the courtyard. Boxes of melamine dinnerware are stacked in a warehouse next door.
Inside, Hou Xiameng runs a company that helps artificial intelligence make sense of the world. Two dozen young people go through photos and videos, labeling just about everything they see. That’s a car. That’s a traffic light. That’s bread, that’s milk, that’s chocolate. That’s what it looks like when a person walks.
“I used to think the machines are geniuses,” Ms. Hou, 24, said. “Now I know we’re the reason for their genius.”
In China, long the world’s factory floor, a new generation of low-wage workers is assembling the foundations of the future. Start-ups in smaller, cheaper cities have sprung up to apply labels to China’s huge trove of images and surveillance footage. If China is the Saudi Arabia of data, as one expert says, these businesses are the refineries, turning raw data into the fuel that can power China’s A.I. ambitions.

For the full story, see:
Li Yuan. “THE NEW NEW WORLD; Doing Time on the A.I. Assembly Line.”) The New York Times (Monday, Nov. 26 2018): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 25, 2018, and has the title “THE NEW NEW WORLD; How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions.”)

Robots Help Montoya Fulfill His Father’s Wish for Him to Avoid Manual Labor

(p. A15) SALINAS, Calif. — As a boy, Abel Montoya remembers his father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, the picture of exhaustion, mud caked knee-high on his trousers. “Dad wanted me to stay away from manual labor. He was keen for me to stick to the books,” Mr. Montoya said. So he did, and went to college.
Yet Mr. Montoya, a 28-year-old immigrant’s son, recently took a job at a lettuce-packing facility, where it is wet, loud, freezing — and much of the work is physically taxing, even mind-numbing.
Now, though, he can delegate some of the worst work to robots.
Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor.
The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.
Enlisting robots made sound economic sense, Taylor Farms officials said, for a company seeking to capitalize on Americans’ insatiable appetite for healthy fare at a time when it cannot recruit enough people to work in the fields or the factory.

For the full story, see:
Miriam Jordan. “Farms Turn to Robots as Labor Pool Shrinks.”The New York Times (Saturday, Nov. 24, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 20, 2018, and has the title “As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots Replace Humans.”)

With High Minimum Wages and Living Costs, S.F. Restaurants Cannot Afford, or Even Find, Servers

(p. D1) SAN FRANCISCO — Souvla, a Greek restaurant with a devoted following, serves spit-fired meat two ways: in a photogenic sandwich, or on a photogenic salad, either available with a glass of Greek wine. The garnishes are thoughtful: pea shoots, harissa-spiked yogurt, mizithra cheese.
The small menu is so appealing and the place itself so charming that you almost forget, as a diner, that you have to do much of the work of dining out yourself. You scout your own table. You fetch and fill your own water glass. And if you’d like another glass of wine, you go back to the counter.
Runners will bring your order to the table, but there are no servers to wait on you here, or at the two other San Francisco locations that Souvla has added — or, increasingly, at other popular restaurants that have opened in the last two years: RT Rotisserie, which is roasting cauliflower a few blocks away; Barzotto, a bistro serving hand-rolled pasta in the Mission district; and Media Noche, a Cuban sandwich spot with eye-catching custom tilework.
Inside these restaurants, it’s evident that the forces making this one of the most expensive cities in America are subtly altering the economics of everything. Commer-(p. D6)cial rents have gone up. Labor costs have soared. And restaurant workers, many of them priced out by the expense of housing, have been moving away.
Restaurateurs who say they can no longer find or afford servers are figuring out how to do without them. And so in this city of staggering wealth, you can eat like a gourmand, with real stemware and ceramic plates. But first you’ll have to go get your own silverware.
. . .
On July 1 [2018], the minimum wage in San Francisco will hit $15 an hour, following incremental raises from $10.74 in 2014. The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave.
Despite those benefits, many workers say they can’t afford to live here, or to stay in the industry. And partly as a result of those benefits, restaurateurs say they can’t afford the workers who remain. A dishwasher can now make $18 or $19 an hour. And because of California labor laws, even tipped workers like servers earn at least the full minimum wage, unlike their peers in most other states.
Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that when housing prices rise by 10 percent, the price of local services, including restaurants, rises by about 6 percent. (The median home price in San Francisco has doubled since 2012.)

For the full commentary, see:
Emily Badger. “Hi! You’ll Be Your Server Tonight.” The New York Times (Wednesday, June 27, 2018): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 25, 2018, and has the title “THE UPSHOT; San Francisco Restaurants Can’t Afford Waiters. So They’re Putting Diners to Work.”)

The published version of the Moretti paper, mentioned above, is:
Moretti, Enrico. “Real Wage Inequality.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 65-103.

False Fears of Killer Robots Distract Us from Real Benefits of Collaborative A.I.

(p. A27) If we spend all of our time looking over our shoulders for killer robots, that means we are not looking ahead to discern the outcomes we might actually want.
. . .
The most successful A.I. systems out there today are dependent on teams of humans, just as the humans depend on those systems to provide insights and perform tasks beyond their own abilities. Image-processing A.I. can outperform human radiologists at spotting tumors in X-rays, if medical personnel get patients in front of the right machine and ask the right questions. But teams of human doctors will be vital to marrying technology and empathy for the effective treatment of complex diseases.

For the full commentary, see:
Ed Finn. “Don’t Fear the Killer Robots.” The New York Times (Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018): A27.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 15, 2018, and has the title “A Smarter Way to Think About Intelligent Machines.”)

Tyler Cowen Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

What are the benefits of innovative dynamism? Arthur Diamond lays out the clearest positive case to date for innovation in this highly readable and historically comprehensive work.

Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; Director of Mercatus Center; “Economic Scene” columnist for the New York Times; blogger for Marginal Revolution. Author of In Praise of Commercial Culture, Creative Destruction, The Great Stagnation, The Complacent Class, and many other works

Cowen’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Jason Potts Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

What explains innovative dynamism? Art Diamond has written a fantastic book exploring how strong property rights, not innovation systems, should be the basis of modern innovation policy. He has done a great job in setting out the case for a classical liberal approach to innovation and technology policy, and carefully counters many of the common arguments supporting interventionist policy models. The book is full of lucid and compelling case studies and will be popular among innovation scholars and policy-makers.

Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Director of Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT. Author of The New Evolutionary Economics, and other works.

Potts’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Scarcity of Workers Increases Use of Robots

(p. B1) PRAGUE — When Zbynek Frolik needed new employees to handle surging orders at his cavernous factories in central Bohemia, he fanned advertisements across the Czech Republic. But in a prosperous economy where nearly everyone had work, there were few takers.
Raising wages didn’t help. Nor did offers to subsidize housing.
So he turned to the robots.
“We can’t find enough humans,” said Mr. Frolik, whose company, Linet, makes state-of-the art hospital beds sold in over 100 countries. “We’re trying to replace people with machines wherever we can.”
Such talk usually conjures visions of a future where employees are no longer needed. In many major economies, companies are experimenting with replacing factory workers, truck drivers and even lawyers with artificial intelligence, raising the specter of a mass displacement of jobs.
But in Eastern Europe, robots are being enlisted as the solution for a shortage of workers. Often they are helping to create new types of jobs as businesses in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland try to stay agile and competitive. Growth in these countries, which became low-cost manufacturing hubs for Europe after the fall of Communism, has averaged 5 percent in recent years, buoyed by the global recovery..

For the full story, see:
Alderman, Liz. “Humans Wanted, But Robots Work.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 17, 2018): B1 & B8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 16, 2018, and has the title “Robots Ride to the Rescue Where Workers Can’t Be Found.”)

Inventor of Fiber Optics “Didn’t Believe What Experts Said”

(p. A9) In the 1960s, Charles Kao often annoyed his wife, Gwen, by coming home late for dinner.
Dr. Kao, a refugee from the Chinese Communist revolution, told her his research for a British subsidiary of International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. could change the world one day.
. . .
In a 1966 paper written with George Hockham, he outlined the potential for using pulses of light to carry huge volumes of voice and data signals long distances through strands of glass that became known as optical fibers. Few took him seriously until several years later, when Corning Glass Works found ways to do just that.
. . .
Dr. Kao was once asked how long fiber optics would be used. Nothing better was likely to come along for 1,000 years, he said. “But don’t believe what I say,” he added, “because I didn’t believe what experts said either.”

For the full obituary, see:
James R. Hagerty. “‘Early Bet on Optical Fibers Yielded Pipes for Internet.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 29, 2018): A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 28, 2018, and has the title “‘Chinese Refugee Developed Fiber-Optic Technology That Made the Internet Possible.”)

In 10 Years after iPhone, Apple Added Almost 100,000 Jobs

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO–Since Apple Inc. launched the iPhone in June 2007, the smartphone revolution it unleashed has changed the way people work and socialize while reshaping industries from music to hotels.
It also has transformed the company in ways that co-founder Steve Jobs could hardly have foreseen.
Ten years later, the iPhone is one of the best-selling products in history, with about 1.3 billion sold, generating more than $800 billion in revenue. It skyrocketed Apple into the business stratosphere, unlocking new markets, spawning an enormous services business and helping turn Apple into the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
. . .
(p. B8) . . . , Apple didn’t open the device to application developers until 2008, when it added the App Store and began taking 30% of each app purchase.
Since then, app sales have generated roughly $100 billion in gross revenue as Apple has registered more than 16 million app developers world-wide.
. . .
As sales surged, Apple staffed up. The company hired about 100,000 people in the 10-year span, bringing its global workforce to 116,000 from 18,000 in 2006. New workers were brought on to manage relationships with cellphone carriers, double the number of retail stores and maintain an increasingly complex supply chain.

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

For the full story, see:
Tripp Mickle. “‘How iPhone Decade Reshaped Apple.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 21, 2017): B1 & B8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 20, 2017, and has the title “Among the iPhone’s Biggest Transformations: Apple Itself.”)