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We're All Luddites Now

This article is more than 10 years old.

Contestant Ken Jennings competes against 'Watson' (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Mike Tyson liked to say that everybody has a plan until they get hit and he was right.  Plans are easy.  We prepare for a future that we can manage, but life often has other ideas.

So it’s understandable, in a quaint way, how the Luddite movement arose in the early 19th century.  They were tradesman, whose skills were handed down from father to son for generations.  They had formed guilds of association to create and enforce standards, keep quality high and promote ethics.

When the Industrial Revolution came upon them, they smashed the machines in protest.  Eventually, hard physical work gave way to automation, service and knowledge work. Wages, along with quality of life, increased and all seemed well.  The Luddites adjusted and their descendants now shop at the mall just like the rest of us.

History, however, has a way of repeating itself.  As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have recently pointed out in their book, Race Against the Machines and in a 60 minutes profile, we’re all Luddites now.  Even those of us who’ve prepared for the future, through years of higher education, corporate training and entire careers spent learning high-level skills, we’re all in danger of being replaced by machines.

Here are just a few of the unlikely areas being disrupted:

Law:  Big cases mean truckloads of documents and corporations spend millions of dollars for whip-smart ivy-leaguers to go through them all, looking for the small, but crucial thread that can unravel the case.

Today, new e-Discovery firms such as Blackstone, Clearwell and Autonomy can do the same work at a fraction of the time and cost, with much greater accuracy.  More than mere keyword searches, the algorithms can understand concepts and identify anomalies such as changes in tone and mode of communication.

Medicine: There is probably no profession held in higher regard than doctors, who not only train for years in medical school, but then undergo a tortuous internship and residency.

Now, IBM is sending their Watson computer to medical school and major healthcare companies like Wellpoint plan to begin deploying the technology to suggest diagnosis and treatment to doctors.  As electronic health records become standard and other data intensive technologies such as genomics mature, we can expect computers to take an even larger role.

Already, a recent study found that computers can greatly decrease the false negative rate of mammogram screenings while reducing costs by obviating the need for two human evaluations.

Arts and Culture:  There is probably no realm that is so distinctly human as creativity.  Art, music and storytelling are so central to the human experience that we can find no society, no matter how primitive or ancient, that doesn’t have them.  However, even here, we’re seeing computers take over.

Record labels use Music Xray to evaluate new music before they decide if it’s ready for release and movie studios use similar software from Epagogix to evaluate screenplays.  A company called Narrative Science now offers a service that can turn raw data into journalism without human involvement and Philip M Parker, a professor at INSEAD, developed an algorithm that has published over 100,000 books, you can buy them on Amazon (too many, of course, for a book shop).  Music scholar and composer David Cope has built a machine which creates music of such profound artistic quality that it can even fool the experts.

The rise of the machines has become so pervasive that many are proclaiming a new industrial revolution, the main difference, of course, being that now even highly educated knowledge workers are getting displaced.  In ten years, our technology will be 100 times more powerful and the displacement will only increase.  So what, besides smashing the machines, are we to do?

My take is this:  We’re going to have to learn to fly by wire.  Much like pilots no longer fly planes in the sense that they no longer have any direct connection to the airplane’s mechanism, we’re going to have to learn to focus on the destination rather than the mechanics of how we get there.

The value of human labor will be replaced by the value of human intent.

 

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