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More Information, Please: Government Needs to Get Up to Speed on Tech Advances
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson—who has appeared frequently in this blog, including here and here—has coauthored a book-length paper on the IT revolution and how government is unprepared to deal with it. From the FT:
An information vacuum about the sweeping impact of robotics and artificial intelligence has left governments badly positioned to respond to the coming upheaval in employment, say two US professors who have been co-ordinating a broad study on the subject. The warning, in a paper published in Nature on Thursday, calls for a new partnership with digital companies such as Uber and LinkedIn, which are quickly becoming repositories of the information needed to understand how work is changing. “Given the pace of change in the economy, we’re really flying blind,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the report.
And here is great summary of the paper, via Twitter:
One interesting recommendation is for the creation of various technology indexes to track the spread of tech advances through the economy. Sort of like a consumer price index, but for AI.
Thank god. The last thing we need is for the government to begin to anticipate where unemployment will appear and try to deal with it. The economy can and will deal with it if the government gets out of the way, stops doing the things that slow adjustment, that have frozen education in the past centuries. The government is not capable of fostering adjustment because the interests that are big enough and old enough to have influence are precisely the interests challenged by new technologies whose goal is to slow adjustment. And the emerging economy and adjustment and new technology will always take place out of the government’s sight. By the time the government collects enough information and enough political support to deal with something the information, which is incomplete with most content averaged out to begin with, is already obsolete.
If I read the articles, can you promise me that I’ll find out what metric they propose to use to quantify this “spread”?
I prefer the government not out on the bleeding edge of technology. Its expensive, its less reliable, less secure and because its so new has a smaller pool of qualified consultants who can work with it. (making abuse by cronies even more likely than it is now)
Also a government that is current with technology trends, might also feel more confident in its ability to regulate earlier in the development cycle. I really dont want to see government reps on the IEEE 802.11 “Working Group on WLAN Standards” for example. That would strangle one of the few growth sectors left in the working economy. (Government is another growth sector – but its growth is a burden)
I can only imagine the horror such indices would be. The CPI (and other price indices) are already a horrendous kludge, and, like other aggregate statistics, measure nothing real. That these chimeras drive policy is bad enough without inventing more of them.
That the government should (try to) manage the economy and the future is pure Progressivism, and should be stricken from modern political thought.
And a new index that requires a government-business partnership would be the evil stepmother of all indexes.