| ROBOT JOBS, AI ARRIVES, MASTER PLAN, SPACE LIBERATION, MINIMOOG Robot Jobs Wanted Everybody's afraid that robots are going to take all of our jobs. But what if the problem is that robots aren't taking enough of them? That's the idea explored in an interview with Robert Gordon which explains that automation and rising productivity are opposite sides of the same coin. "[A]fter the productivity of American workers grew by an impressive 2.9 percent per year between 1995 and 2005, it grew by just 1.3 percent between 2005 and 2015. "That's far slower than the productivity of American workers grew, on average, during the 20th century. And slow rate of progress is a major reason that middle-class wages have been stagnant over the last decade.... "For all the hype about robots taking peoples' jobs, there's been hardly any progress automating labor-intensive industries like retail, medicine, or construction over the past few decades. "That might seem like a positive development if you're worried about losing your job to a robot. But it's a cause for worry if you're hoping for bigger paychecks over the next decade or two." Or as I have argued, "All economic progress eliminates jobs. That is its purpose." --- Artificial Intelligence Comes to Earth If we need more robots to take over our jobs, the good news is that Silicon Valley is on it, with many companies starting to make a big shift toward building various kinds of robotic devices and programming the "artificial intelligence" to run them. In fact, there's a good case to be made that AI has already become mainstream. "When I woke up this morning, I asked my assistant a simple question: 'Siri, is it going to rain today?' "Siri understood my intent, pulled the local weather data via an API and answered me in less than two seconds: 'There's no rain in the forecast for today.' "In the not-too-distant past, this kind of human-computer interaction would have blown away technologists and delighted consumers--but in 2016, it's nothing special. Conversations with Siri are commonplace, just like they are with Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa. "Machine learning (ML) and narrow forms of artificial intelligence (AI) have officially reached the mainstream." Several of today's other links on our main page explain exactly what this means in terms of technology actually becoming available to businesses. --- There's plenty more at our main page, including an analysis of Elon Musk's new "Master Plan" for Tesla and a RealClearFuture article on how export regulations are holding back the private U.S. space industry.
Tesla's Master Plan Is Not Really Anything New
Google Says New Tools Will Bring AI to Mere Mortals
Companies Are Benefiting from "Lite" AI
Google Has Found Business Model for Artificial Intelligence
Minecraft Testing Human-AI Collaboration
Self-Driving Cars May Not Kill Congestion
Airplane Speeds Have Stagnated for 40 Years
U.S. Lead in Space Exploration Is Not Guaranteed
Check it all out. --- Zeerust Sometimes what people in the past thought would be the future is superseded by the actual future and ends up looking even more like the past. It helps to be reminded of this whenever we become too mesmerized with how futuristic our latest inventions seem. So I've added a new category at the bottom of the left column on our main page: "Zeerust." It's based on the definition invented by Douglas Adams: "The particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic." Our first item? The news that the Minimoog--the cheesy early synthesizer literally responsible for much of the soundtrack of the 1970s and 80s--is back. --Rob Tracinski
Editor, RealClearFuture Follow @RealClearFuture on Twitter. Like us on Facebook. Send comments, recommendations, and submissions to rob@realclearfuture.com. | 
