For an example of an AI taking over to save mankind, there's "The Forbin Project". And "With Folded Hands", by Silverberg. There's also "The Day the Earth Stood Still", the original version.<p>More recently, there's "After On", in which the system behind something like Facebook becomes sentient. This is well thought out.<p>As for optimism, that's what fuels YCombinator. Most of the people who apply will be rejected. Most of the people accepted will fail. Only the investors and management of YC have a reasonable expectation of a return on their investment.
That's nice, but investors don't invest in creativity. They invest in a project that might make money, roughly isomorphic to one run by people who are tenacious, connected, and reliable. They want to see a track record of success. They want to see someone who's thrived in ordinary businesses - they want to see someone with high emotional intelligence.<p>But how often are <i>really creative</i> people like that? Most of the brilliant, creative people I know are outcasts, misfits, with very uneven records of success in more mundane roles. They are hard to get a long with and, overall, not very successful in life. Would a VC (let alone a bank) even look twice at such a one? Absolutely not.
I mostly agree with the author's premise: we need to take a step back from the digital (Internet, social media) and return to the chemical/material/physical world to drive future productivity growth. That's what drew me to research advances in the embedded industry - working with companies that fuse physical and digital in safety-critical/industrial products every day.<p>His 2 calls to action:<p>(1) for the readers of his blog to spend more time thinking about industrial problems (how to build an aircraft, run a cargo ship logistics company, "meditate on the importance of steel in the economy")<p>(2) for VCs and investors to fund morale-boosting celebrations of industry, such as world fairs and more movies like "The Martian".<p>I think #1 is unrealistic - a lot of highly-trained people get paid to do this already, and as productivity growth slows, the need for efficiency in these industrial processes has only increased. That's why the ML implications of IoT are so heavily touted by all major players across automotive, A&D, industrial automation, energy & utilities, transportation, logistics, etc. I don't think it would help much for everyone to go about their day thinking about how HVDC electricity grids work, or how gasoline is synthesized from petroleum.<p>I think #2 would be helpful right now given the current political/media climate, but needs to be done extremely carefully. If done quickly/wrong many would be angry - look at the latest SV and QE-funded propaganda, so out of touch with the 99% of people in the rest of the country, can't solve pressing social and economic issues so they are making up some fantasy-land "world fair" to celebrate companies and people that stand for what the majority of the country perceives as social and moral decay.<p>Overall I feel where the author is coming from, but I think this piece is a bit out of touch with reality - maybe hence the "optimism" bit in the title :)
The article meanders a lot without making coherent points, making a lot of false assumptions.<p>It's one of those articles that's written by a journalist for journalists in an attempt to get some sort of participation trophy, without regard for the soundness of underlying arguments or readability.<p>Also, maybe stop blaming economists in every paragraph, when you can't even get the basics right yourself:<p>"What are the factors that drive economic growth? If we pull out and dust off our econ textbooks, we’ll read that growth is a function of higher investments, spending, trade, productivity, and so on."<p>Well, Dan, here you go:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow%E2%80%93Swan_model" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow%E2%80%93Swan_model</a><p>All your mumbo-jumbo about optimism and other obscure factors that you invented while writing this JFJ piece can be summed up by the <i>A</i> parameter in the model.<p><i>The current unemployment rate in Japan is 2.8 percent. Japanese millennials get to enjoy a fairly tight labor market, which means they ought to have their pick of company to work for.</i><p>Low unemployment rate does not automatically mean better bargaining power for labor.<p>I'd consider asking for a refund on those economics classes you took.
As an aside, the term "Human Capital" really rubs me the wrong way. It makes me seem like just an investment, a thing obtained to generate wealth and nothing else. I've never worked for an organization with a Human Capital department that wasn't overly corporate.