From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Mon Mar 27 2000 - 12:49:15 PST
On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Dave Long wrote:
> Hanson may have hit the nail on the head (for want of a nail?):
> >From _Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence_
After reading his paper, I think he misses the importance of the fact
that machines are in the passing lane, and aren't gonna stop when they
can shoe a horse. His emphasis is on when machines replace a job or
task, not when machines replace the _human_. He fails to deal with the
endgame in his model that i try to address in my unfinished essay, but
he got the rapidly falling wages right. Guess he's a humanist and
assumes anything showing intelligence will get unplugged or hit with a
club.
> Beberg asks:
> > Someone wanna explain to me how you're supposed to make money being a
> > middleman [which the market considers damage] selling stuff below cost
> > anyway?
>
> You make money being a middleman by providing added value.
Yes, in theory, but Earn/share = -1.43 so they aren't making money, they
just suckered some investors.
But my emphasis was on the damage part. In the last couple weeks several
major industries have launched "screw you Mr Middleman" B2B and B2C
portals. The big 3 automakers decided to just get together and do all
purchasing directly from the partmakers, lowering costs dramaticly.
Aerospace announced something similar today - and others are getting the
picture. - http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20000327/2075203s.htm
Technology not only replaces the workers but allows the removal of the
innefficiency of the _role_ the worker played. The net is making
historical footnotes out of middlemen.
- Adam L. Beberg
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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