Embrace your inner bot

The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT, predicts that the future of knowledge work would be largely owned by computers. 

According to the authors, computers would be able to perform increasingly complex parts of cognitive jobs like diagnosing diseasing, picking stocks and granting parole.

Is this something we should worry about?

NYTimes columnist, David Brooks says, we should worry about the future computer displacing the "average" skill-holder, whom he describe in terms of the "middle distance runner." A "middle distance runner" is the worker who regurgitates yesterday's news in language that's comprehensive and length that's graspable, but does nothing more.

However, it's the "creative" sort whom the smart computer will not be able to displace unless the smart computer develops emotive traits and a "heart". Brooks describes the new age creativity brilliantly:

Creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.

Thomas Friedman has some acute observations on the book here, and the authors' interview is here.

What is "House Work?"

Does giving "emotional support" to a householder (from another) constitute what's defined as "house work"?

Does planning ahead of time and purchasing stuff through navigating a tight budget for the household, constitute contribution toward "house work"?

Or, is just cleaning, in the traditional sense, organizing closets and other kinds of tangible labor that goes into keeping a house as some say, are the only forms of "house work"?

The Case For Filth is a revealing piece of writing and gives lovely responses to the intellectually confounding definition of "house work."

One observation that stands out in my mind is about house work around the task of cleanliness; while cleanliness feels highly organic (my house is "clean" because I am clean"), it really is constructed, as "the relativism of hygiene over time is amazing."

The world is in ruins

This Daily Kos comic tells the story of the dark side of Thomas Friedman's premature paen to economic globalization (The World is Flat).

The man above is sitting on the ruins of a collapsed "high-rise stitching station." While the image refers to Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster ever, it could also take our mind back to what Friedman had predicted about the shifting economy in a "flattening" world.

In essence, he had assigned to the developed West the role of doing sophisticated, often hi-tech, idea-work and the ground, or grunt-work of manufacturing, stitching, putting the special crack and scratch-resistant plexiglass screen on the iphone, etc. to the developing world's endless pool of cheap labor.

Such an acute division of global labor would go on to have disastrous human and environmental consequences. Since Friedman, I believe, can't see beyond his moustaches, he couldn't have foreseen this . 

The stitch stations of Bangladesh, just like the assembly shacks of provincial China, housed cheap labor and most of the garment-stitchers were stitching clothes to satisfy the insatiable hunger for bargain clothing in the West.

The pools of cheap labor have turned into cesspools of dead bodies. 

(I just dug out this excellent essay composed by one of my business students (in 2009) in an undergraduate writing class at New York University. I am delighted to see that he had pointed out the dark underbelly of globalization).

Recently Friedman has ceased to sing one-sidedly in praise of economic globalization; he visits the "technology corridors" of otherwise unevenly developed economies like that of India less, and the ruined landscapes more.

But I feel like he still hedges a vital issue.

He reports back from the city of Taiz in Yemen, where the local population is facing extreme water shortage. Yemeni villages are fighting over, in the real sense of shooting guns and missiles.

Friedman attributes the water scarcity to "mismanagement" of various kinds, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the water in Taiz (as well as in other parts of the developing world) is being smuggled out, with the aiding and abetting of the local authorities, by mega corporations like Pepsi, for instance.

It is a known fact that the water resources in large parts of rural India is used up by corporations like Pepsi and Coca Cola.

What explains the remarkably cheap prices at which gigantic 2 litre bottles of Pepsi are sold in the United States?